Time for a Change? Here are 3 Things You MUST Do to Ensure Your Change is Successful and Lasting

Boiled down, how to make a change successfully and permanently requires that you do just 3 things. But don’t be fooled, while these steps are simple, they aren’t always easy. 

So you want to make a change for the better? Good for you! While there are few things in this life that you can control, the truth is that you are an active participant in your life. What you do or don’t do makes a difference in what happens next.  If you want something about your life or relationship to be different, you need to be different! This is where your true power lies—in you.

As I’m sure you know, successful and lasting change is not a product of just knowing you want it, right? But what does result in change that lasts? The way we see it—3 things. (And while they may seem obvious, we encourage you to take some time with them, because the more consciousness you bring to each of these steps, the more successful you’re likely to be!)

1. Set your intention

Knowing that you want to make a change, get better at something, or be different in some way is a great starting point. It is where your intention begins, but it is not where your intention ends. When we talk about setting your intention as a part of successful and lasting change, we are talking about a powerful and conscious decision to align with and move toward what’s needed to make the change and having the clarity of your why to back it. You have to know why it is that you are beginning the journey of making a change. You have to be clear on what it is you want to achieve, to experience, to feel as a result of the change being made. You have to know both who you need to be and what you need to do in order to move forward in your intention. With this clarity of purpose in mind, you set your intention to embark upon the journey ahead of you and to continue that journey until the change has become your new way of being. We encourage you to revisit and re-set your intention regularly.

2. Pay attention

Making any change requires that you activate new, or less familiar, pathways in your nervous system. Our nervous system doesn’t particularly love that, which is why sustained change can feel hard sometimes. It takes extra energy to do something new, and it requires that we pay closer attention to what we are doing. Consider learning to tie your shoes, ride a bike, or drive a car? Do you recall how much attention you needed to pay to those activities in the beginning, where now they feel so automatic you may not even realize what you are doing!? Yeah, the same process happens for every change! Before a change has been made permanent within you, you’re going to need to bring your attention to it. 

For example, if you want to communicate better with your partner, you will have to pay more attention to your thoughts, your words, your tone, your body language, and so on. If you want to get better at being more present with your partner, you’re going to have to pay more attention to whether that’s happening. It seems obvious when you think about it, but the truth is that most of us set an intention to make a change and then, after a while, stop paying attention to it. Successful and lasting change requires ongoing conscious attention to the new thoughts, behaviors, or ways of being that we want to embody. 

3. Practice

You know why tying your shoe or driving your car has become so automatic now? It’s because those neural pathways have been traveled so frequently in your nervous system that you don’t have to think about it anymore. You’ve rewired your brain and nervous system to know how to operate without your conscious attention (which is, interestingly, how your brain and nervous system prefer to operate). This rewiring process happens through repetition—doing the same thing again and again under different circumstances and in slightly different ways until your familiarity with it has become robust, flexible, and reliable. 

That’s practice, and when it comes to things like lifting weights or learning to prepare vegan foods, we know that practice is a part of the picture. However, when it comes to things like changing how we think, how we talk to ourselves, how we react when we are upset, or how we engage with our partners, we seem to forget the necessity of practice. These are some of the most important changes we can make for improving our lives, yet they get little of our attention. And when opportunities to practice come along (like when you’re telling yourself a negative story about your partner, or when you’re in an argument with your partner), we forget this practice piece. Instead, we tend to react as if these experiences have happened to us, are impossible to change, and are evidence of how things are not, in fact, changing at all. 

Practice. Every struggle, every difficult conversation, every negative mood is an opportunity to practice something different! This is how you change! This is how you can become the person you most want to be. 

And remember, you are an active participant in your life. You can change how you think, how you feel, how you act, what happens next, and how you experience that which is happening in your world. As you learn how to make these changes successfully, you empower yourself to be a catalyst for tremendous growth, healing, and transformation in your own life. 

Want support in making a change? 

Empowering committed partners to move through this process so they can make successful and lasting changes within themselves and their relationship is the heart and soul of what we do here at PowerfuLove relationship coaching. If you’re interested in getting support in powerfully changing your life and love, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Book a Free 90-minute Relationship Empowerment Call so we can explore how we might be able to help. And follow us on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram to stay up to date on more information, ideas, and resources for consciously and powerfully showing up in your relationship.