Ep 129 – 5 1% shifts to enhance quality of life

All of us want to change. We all want to accomplish big things in life, suffer less, and cherish more. We have high standards of the kind of person we need to be or should be and set ourselves overwhelming goals. We are rarely satisfied and the older we get and the more we are exposed to the world around us, the loftier our expectations are from ourselves. The gap between who we are today and who we want to be keeps widening and we keep waiting for that someday to arrive when we attain near perfection and enjoy that better quality of life we desire.

What if I said this was unrealistic and that we are coming in our own way of feeling more satisfied and content with our life right here, right now? We don’t need to turn our lives around 360 degrees to enhance their quality. All it takes is some micro-efforts done consistently over a long period. Curious to know more? Tune in to the episode.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Own Your Everyday series of the Being Meraklis podcast. I’m your host and self-awareness coach Shwetha Sivaraman back with insights and micro-practices you can use in your busy lives to Own Your Everyday. In today’s episode, we will look at why having unreasonable expectations of self-transformation can be a dampener and 5 ways to make 1% shifts in our days starting today to enhance the quality of our lives.

Self-help is a multi-million-dollar industry. From books to courses to merchandise, there’s a lot of money that changes hands milking people’s aspirations for growth and improvement. While some of it is genuinely good in helping us gain perspective and improve for the better, there are many ways this obsession ruins our lives.

1. Setting unrealistic standards – We’ve all heard of billionaire morning routines which have 30 different activities. If we aspired to do all 30 of them we would end up doing only that all day but that’s what happens when we see ideals around us out of context and try to apply them to our lives without introspection and contemplation. We set tall benchmarks and then beat ourselves up when we don’t live up to them.

2. Reinforces inferiority – For some of us who lack faith in ourselves and feel that at some level we are not okay. All of this reinforces the same inferiority complex we experience within increasing the resistance to make change happen. We end up adding more obstacles between where we are today and where we’d like to be. Until we accept ourselves as we are, we cannot aspire to grow, and this is the fundamental flaw that keeps us stuck in a loop of inferiority, inadequacy, and inaction.

3.Create imbalances –If we have overwhelming expectations from ourselves and what we can do in a day – Say we want to wake up, meditate, go for a run, work 8 hours, spend quality time with family, be there for friends, read for an hour, learn for an hour, pursue a hobby, and 8 hours quality sleep. What do you think will happen? Needless to say, we will not get all of it done. Instead, we will compensate one thing with another. If we are hell-bent on reading and learning, we might sacrifice our sleep. Some others might isolate themselves and cut off from friends and family to check more boxes. All of these create imbalances and are ultimately unsustainable. This is what happens with most of our New Year resolutions.

So what can we do instead?

Lower our expectations. Instead of trying to turn our life around 360 degrees, aspire to be slightly better than we were the day before.

James Clear proposes that if you can better yourself by just 1% each day, over a year you’ll be 37.78% better than you were at the start.

Isn’t that quite a brilliant stat – to be 38% better than what we were at the start of the year? To me, this is close to the Japanese concept of Kaizen – where instead of a big end goal, you begin with small 1% improvements we can do in our daily lives to move forward one step.

The concept is simple. Massive transformations begin with undertaking small actions consciously and consistently. All three parts are important – Small Actions or Baby Steps, Consciously undertaken – they’re not random but actions chosen based on reflection and executed consistently over time. If we can do just this, day in and day out without succumbing to boredom or impatience, we can build a foundation for long-term success.

Here are 5 ways that have worked for me to achieve those 1% shifts that can help us enhance the quality of our lives.

1.Pausing – In a world where we are constantly expected to do, do, do, and continuously firefight, pausing is a revolutionary act. To simply be and observe what’s happening.

2. Journaling – Another activity that helps in deepening clarity and helping us consciously choose what we must engage in daily is journaling. Waking up each day and consciously setting intentions on what’s most important for me to accomplish today can drastically transform our lives over

3. Reflecting – A lot of life is understood only in retrospection. Taking the time to reflect and asking ourselves what we intend to do, what we end up doing, actions in-line with our beliefs and values, and what can we do better is a powerful way to take stock and do better day after day. Earlier this year I’d done an episode on 5 questions we can ask ourselves daily to make this reflection process more effective – check that out if you’d like to know what to start reflecting on daily.

4.Challenging your beliefs –As we grow up we start to become rigid with our beliefs and what we know and this limits our openness to new experiences. Every now and then we should challenge ourselves to ensure we don’t become too inflexible. We can simply ask ourselves, what if the opposite were true? and see where our reflections take us.

5.Appreciating what you already have – We fail to recognise the value of what we have until we lose it, that’s a fundamental human flaw. Taking time every day to appreciate what you already have – great relationships, a lovely home, teachers,knowledge, your life journey so far your body your health your mind – helps us be more in that energy of gratitude. Moreover, it also helps us savour life and its blessings more rather than waiting in misery for an uncertain and unknowable tomorrow.

So there’s your own your everyday tip for this week – stop setting yourself unreasonable 360-degree self-transformational goals. Instead, start today with these or any other practices that can help you make those 1% shifts. Believe me, there will come a time when you’ll find yourself unrecognisable from your persona in the past. Day after day nothing might seem to change, but over time you’ll notice everything has changed. Just stick with it, and remember the 3 aspects – Small actions, consciously undertaken, and executed consistently. That’s all you need to do.

Until we meet again, this is Shwetha Sivaraman signing off hoping you have a phenomenal week ahead.