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The Process of Change

Growing as a person is important because it helps you reach your goals and do your best. It is a lifelong journey of learning about yourself and changing for the better. Some of the benefits of personal growth include:

 

  • Building self-knowledge,

  • Building confidence,

  • Making better and more friends,

  • Improving your financial circumstances, and

  • Find purpose and meaning in life.

 

In sum, the goal of growing as a person is to make your life happier and more meaningful. Unfortunately, as we have all discovered, changing isn’t always that easy.

Successful change requires many things of us. We must:

 

  • Recognize the need for change,

  • Realize the urgency or severity of the need,

  • Determine that the costs of change are outweighed by the benefits,

  • See the cues that tell us that now is the time,

  • Find the confidence to undertake the change,

  • Find the passion and commitment to stick through what could be a difficult journey,

  • Adequately plan for the change, and

  • Successfully execution the plan.

 

Easy peasy.

 

Vertivio’s Reset platform is designed to help you identify areas in which you need to change, and then to provide you with resources that can help. The purpose of this resource is to provide an understanding of the process of change as a guide for your journey. To do this, we will walk you through each of the steps listed above, providing you with an understanding of each along with some guidance on how to do it. If you’re ready, read on, and good luck on your journey of personal growth!

Seeing the Need

Change for the sake of change isn't of much use. For change to represent growth, you must first notice that you have a need to change. Fortunately, the warning signs are easy to spot if you look closely. They include things like:

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  • Persistent dissatisfaction with some aspect of your life,

  • A feeling of stagnation and repetition,

  • Frequent complaining by you or by others about you, and

  • Low morale.

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Below we'll talk a little about each to help you recognize it when you see it.


Persistent Dissatisfaction


Feeling restless, burned out, or unhappy means you can benefit from personal growth, even if your life seems fine on the outside. These emotions are clear signs that you're ready for a change. So, what do we mean by these terms?

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  • Restlessness usually means you feel bored and want something new.

  • Burnout means you are completely exhausted from your daily routine.

  • Unhappiness refers to the feeling of emptiness even when good things happen.

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Stagnation and Repetition

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If you keep doing the same things every day, stop learning new skills, or do worse at your job, it may be time for a change. Keeping the same routines day after day makes your brain go on autopilot. This stops you from growing and leaves you feeling stuck in an unchanging cycle. Here are some specifics to look for.

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  • Worrying about making mistakes keeps you inside a familiar comfort zone.

  • Triggers leading to automatic routines and instant rewards, reinforcing loops.

  • High stress draining your mental energy to the point that change seems beyond your reach.

  • Dwelling on past negative outcomes causes you to lose yourself in unproductive "what if" thinking. 

  • Lacking clear goals results in aimless wondering rather than moving toward clear goals.

  • Doing identical daily tasks without variety that prevents any creative problem-solving.

  • Without goals or challenges, your desire to improve vanishes.

  • Sticking to traditional methods preventing adaptation to new conditions or requirements.

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Complaining


It is probably time to change your life if you complain a lot about small things but do nothing to fix them. You should also change if the people around you-like your friends, family, coworkers, or boss-complain about you and you do not fix the problem. Signs you need to change include:

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  • You complain often about small, minor problems,

  • You do nothing to fix the things that make you frustrated or mad,

  • Other people complain about your actions or habits, or

  • You choose to ignore negative feedback from your boss, family, or friends.​

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Low Morale


It is probably time for a change if your morale is low or you feel uninterested in everything around you. Signs of boredom include:

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  • Losing interest in things you used to enjoy,

  • Feeling bored all day long during work or free time, or

  • Having no energy or excitement for new projects.

Urgency

So, you've come to believe that maybe a change would help. But, just how urgent is it? Do you need to do it now, or can it wait? Put aside your denial, engage in what's called a willing suspension of disbelief, and consider the following.

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  • Are you hurting anyone?

  • Is your mental or physical health being affected?

  • Do you feel trapped in a cycle of self-destruction?

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If you answered yes to any of these questions, read on.


Harm

We can all live with things that are not perfect. But you must take action when things start to cause real harm to yourself or others. Ask yourself if your thoughts, opinions, or actions are hurting you or the people around you. This means physical hurt, but it also means emotional and mental pain. If you are causing harm, it is time to make a change. Signs of harm include:

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  • Hurting yourself with bad habits or dangerous choices,

  • Hurting others by causing them physical pain or stress,

  • Causing mental pain like sadness, fear, or heavy worry,

  • Ignoring the damage your choices cause every day.

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Burnout

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Burnout is a state of deep physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion caused by long-term stress. Key physical signs of burnout include:

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  • Feeling tired all the time, even after a full night of rest,

  • Frequent headaches, muscle pain, or stomach issues,

  • Getting sick more often because your body is weak, or

  • Changes in your sleep or eating habits.

 

Mental and emotional signs of burnout include:

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  • Feeling numb, empty, or hopeless about your work or life,

  • Losing joy in things you normally like to do,

  • Being easily annoyed, angry, or mean toward others, and

  • Doubting your skills and feeling like a failure.

 

Behavioral signs of burnout include:

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  • Putting things off and taking much longer to finish simple tasks,

  • Pulling away from coworkers, friends, and family,

  • Making more mistakes or doing a poor job, and

  • Using food, alcohol, or drugs to cope with the stress.

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Stagnation Crisis

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Sometimes you feel trapped in a bad cycle or a toxic place with no way out. But you must realize that you can escape, and the choice starts with you. It is time to make a change. Signs of feeling trapped include:

 

  • Feeling stuck in a bad situation every day,

  • Living or working in a toxic place that hurts your spirit, and

  • Believing there is no way to fix your life.

Costs and Benefits

Personal change is never free. It takes a lot of time, hard work, and deep feelings. You also face the risk of failing. If changing were easy, everyone would do it. But growth brings great rewards, like learning new skills, making new friends, and feeling much happier with who you are. To decide if you should change, look at the pros and cons honestly. Do not make the struggles seem too big or the rewards seem too small.

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Costs

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The true costs of personal growth include emotional friction, relational shifts, and financial investments. While self-improvement builds a meaningful life, it demands trading away immediate comfort, familiar routines, and people who cannot align with your new direction.

The true costs of change include:

 

  • The time you must spend on new habits,

  • The hard work needed even when you are tired,

  • The stress and fear you will feel along the way,

  • The strain on relationships with those affected by your changes, and

  • The risk you might try your best and still fail.

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Benefits

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Personal development helps you build self-awareness, boost confidence, and improve mental well-being. By setting clear goals and learning new skills, you can grow in your career, handle stress better, and form stronger relationships with others. The true benefits of personal growth include:

 

  • Learning your true strengths, weaknesses, and core values,

  • Achieving small goals builds trust in your own abilities,

  • You bounce back faster from tough times and adapt to change,

  • Better communication and empathy lead to healthier connections, and

  • New skills and clear focus make you more valuable at work.

Building Confidence

Even though you may have decided that a change is needed, and that the time for that change is now, you still aren’t going to undertake the change unless you believe you can actually do it. To gain confidence in your ability to change, try something small, minor. Focus on small actions rather than wholistic change. Build your confidence by starting with tiny, manageable steps, tracking your progress, noting your successes, and gathering real proof that you can do it. Remember, measurable changes in attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and behaviors come before confidence grows, not the other way around. Here a few tips and reminders.

 

  • Take baby steps first, with low stress, low risk changes.

  • Keep records of your progress.

  • Establish milestones, and reward your successes.

  • Get used to stress and discomfort – nobody said this was going to be easy, but if you’re not feeling stress, then you’re not being ambitious enough.

  • Think about the ideal you – how you want to act, feel, and believe – then focus on acting like that ideal you.

  • Be realistic in your expectations – you are not perfect, and you will make mistakes, but that’s not a sign of failure, it’s a sign you’re trying, taking the risk.

Passion and Commitment

With all the highs and lows you will experience, sticking to it is going to require grit. Grit is all about passion, commitment, and determination. Below are some tips on how to gain the passion and commitment you need.

 

  • Associate the change with the values of your ideal self – this is how the person you want to be would act, speak, believe.

  • Try writing down an explanation for why you want to make this change – nothing makes you think through something better than trying to explain it.

  • Gain some quick successes by keeping the changes small and quick, then reward yourself.

  • Map out a series of small changes that together will make for a larger change, but focus on each small step, not the longer-term goal.

  • Try to anticipate obstacles, things that will trigger the old behavior or attitude, and whenever possible avoid or remove them.

  • Track your progress, successes and failures and review the record frequently so it’s always in the front of your mind.

  • Adjust your plan if something isn’t working, but do not quit.

  • Learn how to forgive yourself – self-acceptance means accepting who you are, good with the bad, and it is important.

 

Remember, we always hear that success brings self-confidence, but it also enhances passion and commitment.

Planning

A series of small changes can be vital in building self-confidence and passion, but they lead nowhere if you haven’t thought out the entire roadmap to your ideal self. Building that roadmap, how we get from who we are to who we want to be, requires honest self-reflection. A bit of feedback from friends and family helps too.

 

A good place to start is with a comparison of your self-image with your ideal self.

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Ideal Self

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Your ideal self is the person you want to be. On the broadest scale it includes strengths and weakness, attitudes and beliefs, behaviors, and beliefs. In the context of building a roadmap for personal growth, this broad ideal image can be useful, but in the context of incremental steps along the way, it is also useful to think about your ideal self in the context of the change you are currently attempting.

 

In thinking about your ideal self, there are a few things that should be kept in mind.

 

  • Do some research by reading about people you admire.

  • Be specific – saying you want to be a good person doesn’t provide much guidance; be specific about the traits, beliefs, and values you want to have.

  • Be realistic – you’re not going to become Mother Teresa or Albert Einstein and you don’t need to.

  • Think about situations that you’ve actually been in, and try to imagine what kind of person would have responded the way you wish you had.

  • Don’t be afraid to discuss this with friends and family, a trusted teacher, or mentor.

  • For each trait considered, try specifying your reason for including that trait – how it relates to the intended change.

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Self-Image

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Now more than ever honesty and self-reflection are needed. Time for denial to go. Take a look at the traits identified for your ideal self and for each one try to write down how you measure up. Do you have the values, beliefs, behaviors of the person you identified as the ideal you? This is not easy, as we all want to believe we are better than we are, or for some people, worse. Feedback from others can be helpful here, but even more helpful is to revisit the situations you imagined when creating your ideal self and remembering how we really responded.

As with your ideal self, do this on the broadest scale, bearing in mind that when building the roadmap, it will be necessary to flesh out details for each anticipated change.

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Feedback

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Not all feedback is created equal. To get useful feedback, a few things should be kept in mind.

 

  • Identify people who can be trusted to be honest, insightful, and yet kind.

  • Provide a private space where feedback will be confidential.

  • Ask specific questions, rather than general questions like am I a good person.

  • Rather than asking for feedback, ask for advice to increase the odds of getting concrete, actionable points.

  • Don’t interrupt, argue, or make excuses, just listen.

  • Watch your body language so you don’t exhibit defensiveness even when silent.

  • If you feel anger or defensiveness getting the upper hand, take a break.

  • Repeat back what you’ve been told in your own words to ensure you have correctly understood.

  • Express appreciation for the help.

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Roadmap

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When planning a route to drive from New York to California, I need to think about how far I can go without stopping, and plan my route so when I make those stops, I’m not in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, in order to find a nice motel for the night I don’t want to drive hundreds of miles out of the way. In similar fashion, planning personal growth requires more than just knowing the starting point – your self-image – and the destination – your ideal self. The steps along the way must be identified and broken down into smaller, manageable steps each of which is doable but when taken together comprise a step in the right direction. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

 

  • List the large steps and the smaller steps you’ve broken them down into.

  • Provide both timelines and metrics by which success will be judged.

  • Create a record for tracking both progress and setbacks.

  • Include regularly scheduled check-ins to assess progress.

Execution

“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry," as the poet Robert Burns told us. It means that no matter how carefully you prepare, unexpected events can ruin your goals. It is best to plan not just for everything you intend to happen, but to also try to anticipate and plan for what could go wrong.

 

Below are a few tips for when you actually execute your change plan.

 

  • Monitor your progress at regular intervals – daily, or weekly -- using a journal, spreadsheet, or tracking app.

  • Reward successes and forgive setbacks.

  • Periodically revisit your ideal self, and your motivations for the changes you’ve identified so you can stay focused on what you are trying to achieve and why, but don’t take your eye off the immediate small step you’re taking.

  • Share your intentions with, or even partner with, a friend, mentor, or support network and share your progress and setbacks; listen to and consider suggestions they make.

  • Change your approach if something does not work.

Other Resources

Below are several resources that can help you with each part of the change process.

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Seeing the Need

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How do we know when we need a new way of living? To find out, we must pay attention to what makes us unhappy. We can look for signs in our jobs or our relationships. These signs tell us when it is time to change our lives. The resources below can help you start.

 

 

Severity

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Sometimes even when we know we have a problem, we don't realize how serious it is. Here are some resources that can help evaluate the severity of the need to change.

 

 

Costs & Benefits

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When evaluating the costs and benefits of personal change, key aspects to consider include the following.

 

  • Tangible costs such as financial costs, time commitment, and physical effort.

  • Intangible costs such as discomfort, potential disruption to routines or social dynamics, and fear of failure or uncertainty.

  • Tangible benefits such as improved physical health, enhanced mental well-being, and career advancement opportunities.

  • Intangible benefits such as greater sense of personal accomplishment, improved relationships with others, and increased self-esteem 

 

Other important aspects of change that should be kept in mind include:

 

  • You should evaluate costs and benefits based on your unique circumstances and priorities.

  • You must set achievable goals and understand that change takes time.

  • You must be prepared to adjust your plan as needed based on your progress and experiences. 

 

With all this in mind, below are some resources that can help you more objectively evaluate the costs and benefits of change.

 

 

Cues

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Pay attention to the people around you to know when you need to change. Listen closely to what your friends, family, and coworkers say. Look at their body language and listen to their tone of voice. Ask questions if you do not understand what they mean. Be open to advice, and think about how your actions look to others. If you are confused by their signs, ask people you trust for direct feedback. Here are some tips that well help.

 

  • Pay close attention to facial expressions, posture, eye contact, and tone of voice as these can often convey more than words alone. 

  • Focus fully on what they are saying, not just the words, but also the underlying emotions and intentions. 

  • If something is unclear, don't be afraid to ask for further explanation to fully understand their perspective. 

  • If you're unsure about how your actions are perceived, directly ask a trusted friend or family member for honest feedback. 

  • Regularly examine your actions and interactions to identify areas where you might need to adjust. 

  • Think about the situation and the relationship dynamic when interpreting cues. 

  • Don't take feedback personally, instead view it as an opportunity for growth and improvement. 

  • Try to see things from their perspective and understand their feelings. 

 

Check out these resources for help figuring out whether there are cues and you’re just missing them.

 

 

Self-Efficacy

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Among the best ways to increase your self-confidence when it comes to change are the following.

 

  • Break the desired change into small, manageable steps.

  • Reward yourself for each successfully completed step.

  • Seek support from your friends and family.

 

For more tips and exercises you can try, try these resources for help improving your confidence in your ability to change.

 

  • happify.com

  • verywellmind.com/what-is-self-efficacy-2795954

  • positivepsychology.com/3-ways-build-self-efficacy

  • betterup.com/blog/self-efficacy

 

Grit

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Resources to improve perseverance in the face of challenges include the following.

 

 

Other resources to consider:

 

  • Online Courses: Various platforms offer courses on developing grit and resilience 

  • Mentorship: Seek guidance from individuals who demonstrate strong grit in their lives 

  • Support Groups: Connect with others who share similar goals and challenges 

  • Self-Reflection: Regularly assess your progress and identify areas for improvement

 

Planning

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Your plan to change your life needs to show what steps you will take and how you will take them. You must track your progress and find ways to keep going when things get hard. These helpful tools can help you start.

 

 

Execution

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A plan isn’t worth much if you can’t actually execute it. Here are some tips.

 

  • To change your life, break your big goals into tiny daily actions.

  • Create simple routines, track your progress, and get help from others to stay on track.

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Steps for building your plan include:

 

  • Pick just one change at a time so your brain does not get overwhelmed,

  • Change your 1-year goal into a 90-day plan with small goals for each week,

  • Build simple routines you can repeat every day instead of waiting for motivation, and

  • Write down what might go wrong and how you will fix it ahead of time.

 

Monitoring your progress includes:

 

  • Write down what you do each day on paper, in a journal, or on a phone app,

  • Spend 15 minutes every Sunday looking at what worked and what failed,

  • Treat bad days as lessons, fix your environment, and try again right away, and

  • Share your goals with a friend or coach to make sure you do not quit.

 

Here are some resources that can help.

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