"Changing my life is too difficult": Starting the self-development journey
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2019-12-07

A lot of what I talk about in these daily videos is my steps, my day, what I'm working on today, what is catching my attention at this point in my journey. 
But what I really want to be able to bring out and talk about and to help people with is the very beginning of the journey. 
Because that's what I find is the most difficult and crucial point, is going from not doing anything to improve your life, not expecting anything to get better, just sort of coasting along, or maybe even falling apart, and moving from that point to the point where you feel like you're actually growing and getting better. 
And then there's all the details of what that actually means, and all the different steps and the different tools and the different phases of developing and growing. 
But for me, I just found there's something so crucial about that initial shift, where I went from not trying to develop to this becoming something that I do. 
And then, once that wheel started turning, the momentum started going, and then it really took on a life of its own, and went on from there. 
I'm trying to cast my mind back to a few years ago and what helped to make that shift, and it wasn't just one magical moment of transformation. 
There were more multiple moments, over different times, when I would sort of begin a new process of change in one area, but then not in others, and then later, begin another area. 
It was four years ago that I started exercising again. 
So even though my mindset was still not good I was able to get to that point of beginning to exercise. 
And then it was about two years ago that I really started seeing myself as- I really started trying to develop a more active control of my life. 
Rather than passively drifting along, I wanted to actually consider the position of my life and make deliberate changes to improve my life. 
So that was already two years of difference. 
I had started exercising, and developing that basic- going from zero exercise, from the point where standing up and stretching felt like a workout, because I was so sedentary, to the point of then starting basic exercise. 
I mean, that was a big step. 
But even that was two years before I actually began to mentally think of myself as really trying to change the course of my life in a more fundamental way, really taking control of what I want my life to be, rather than seeing my life as just something that drifts along, something that happens to me. 
It's like a change from passive to active, of seeing life as something that happens to me to seeing my life as something that I can build. 
So that was two years ago. 
And it was really only one year ago that I really started to intensely develop self-discipline. 
So from the point of two years ago deciding that I really- you know, I'm getting into that mental shift of being ready to- of deciding that it is time to make a change and live in a new way, it was only just over a year ago that I really started even to a higher level of actually changing fundamental habits in my way of life and developing my self-discipline in a new way. 
And of course, I'm pointing out these three points of four years ago, two years ago, one year ago, as being all these points at which a wheel began to turn, at which I began to start a process that then took on momentum. 
But even this selection of these times is, of course, simplified. 
There are many times in between where there's a start and a stop. 
Things start and then they can fizzle away, or they can become distracted, or I achieve progress in one area but not another. 
And so it's all these times of just starting. 
This seems to me to be the most crucial. 
These are the crucial times. 
And I want to understand better what it's like in those moments. 
I want to know what is it that triggers that shift. 
But it seems to me like the very beginning is this moment where that is where the process starts, just deciding that it's time to start something. 
It all begins with that little shift in mindset. 
So I don't have a clear answer for what causes this. 
I would like to hear some ideas. 
I would like to figure this out and really investigate what is going on in the mind at those moments when we first turn the wheel, first get things started, from a position of doing nothing to a position of starting off in a direction. 
And it's quite an amazing moment, because in those moments when we first start to move ourselves in a new direction, it doesn't feel like anything's actually happening. 
It feels like nothing. 
It's almost like rolling a ball down a hill. 
So you just nudge the ball, and it just sort of very slowly starts rolling a little bit, and it doesn't seem very significant. 
You don't really feel any- there's no big change. 
You wake up the next day and it's still going on, life as you've been living it. 
But that ball has started rolling. [...]