I see all of this talk about how to reset your life, and as a coach and a personal development junkie, I’m here to ask you to please stop doing that.

Watch here or read below.

One thing that I’ve noticed a lot of lately is this really sexy idea of “resetting our life”, of hitting the reset button and starting over.

It’s a little bit like a makeover, or a declutter process, where we feel like if we can just do all of the sweeping changes, then we can finally get to where we want to get to. I love this idea. Let me just tell you right now, I am addicted to the idea, so therefore, I too get to hold myself back from doing this because the thing is that it’s a sexy idea but it is not sustainable.

Here’s what you have to understand:

Everything that you do now and where you are now is a culmination of years, of decades of habits and patterns that you have built up over time.

When we go in and we try to make all of these sweeping changes like: we’re going to start exercising, eating right, we’re going to implement a morning routine, we’re going to… I don’t know, set up a new weekly schedule, we are going to show up on Instagram. We’re going to do all the things, oh, and still be a good wife and a good mother and a good friend…

Guess what?

It just doesn’t work.

Because your brain is running on all these patterns, what you’re trying to do is change so much at once that you create something called “mental fatigue” and you crash, you burn out. This is why we last a couple days with these reset things and then we go right back into our old habits. It’s too much work for your brain to sustain.

So, you’ll notice in the video that I’m still in this construction zone of my office because again, this is a perfect analogy for what I want you to do instead.

I want you to chip away at it.

Now, when we decided to buy this house, there were things that we wanted to do to come in and reset the home to really make it our own. We didn’t go in and try and do all the things all at once.

You know what we did? We went in and we created a giant list of all the things we wanted to do. And this is exactly what I want you to do too. So let me break it down.

Step #1 – Make a giant list

I want you to make a giant list of all the things in your life that if you could wave a magic wand and fix them all, reset them all, change them all, what would you want to do?

Make that giant list and then prioritize it.

Step #2 – ASSESS YOUR PRIORITIES

That’s the next thing that we did.

We prioritized everything from level 10 (the most important) to level 1. When we had that list of 10’s, we even prioritized those. That allowed us to go in and make changes a little bit at a time.

Step #3 – Chip Away at It

We started with what we knew was most important.

In this case, it’s paint, and then flooring and then baseboards. We put them in the right order so they’d get done in the right timing, and then we began to chip away at it.

This is the way that we sustainably reset our lives.

If you really want to reset your life, I want you to do it one step at a time so that you can sustain it because I know you’re going places, but I also know you’re never going to get there if you try to jump the staircase 10 steps at once. You know what happens when we do that? We face plant and it’s not very much fun. But if you can chip away at it one little step at a time, you will create something that sustains itself.

Now, I’m going to give you another example of how I started doing this years ago with my health.

I deal with a lot of health problems. If you’ve been around, you know that I have disabilities, autoimmune disorders, and all kinds of diagnoses (over 30 different diagnoses). And when I really wanted to get serious about turning my health around, I made a big long list of all the things that I wanted to do and then I looked for the most important thing – what was the thing that I needed to have in place first? – and I focused on that. For me it was water because I was severely dehydrated.

I’ve built that habit into me now. Once I was able to do that, I was then able to go in and look at the next step that I needed to take. Once that was integrated, it was such a part of my routines and my habits that I no longer had to think about it. It was something that just took care of itself.

You build the momentum in your habits and pretty soon they start taking care of themselves.

That’s what you’re going for. Once you have that, then you can go on and do the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing.

Yes, it will take time, but let me tell you something…

I spent a lot of time, so much time, trying to reset my life. I would create all the sweeping changes and then it would crash 3 days or maybe 3 weeks later, and then I’d create more changes, or New Years would come around or my birthday (that’s always a big one for me), or some other milestone would come along and I’d make all the changes and I’d crash again.

I spent more years trying to change everything all at once than I have spent trying to chip away one thing at a time.

It seems like it’s going to take a long time, but you will waste so much more time with the ups and the downs, the spikes and the falls, the crash and the burns than you will just choosing one area of your life.

Choose the one thing that will make the biggest difference, whether that’s in your business, your relationships, your self-care – it’s probably going to be your self-care, let’s face it.

Whatever area of life it’s in though, choose the ONE thing – the keystone habit, the cornerstone, the thing that will set you up for success in all the other things.

Focus intensely on that. Make that your nonnegotiable and then begin to implement and add in the next step, and the next step, and the next step.

WHAT ABOUT YOU, BOSS LADY?

I want to hear from you on this. Let me know in the comments below. What’s that one thing for you?

If you were to chip away at one thing that you think would make the biggest impact in changing your life, in moving your goals forward, in resetting your life, what would that one thing be? And what are 3-5 things that you can do or maybe even just one thing that you can do to start chipping away at that one thing?