Want to Change Your Life? Focus on One Thing at a Time

If you’ve spent some time thinking about what your 10/10 life actually looks like, there comes a point where thinking, reflecting and journalling has to turn into action. 

You might have looked beyond just your career and thought about the bigger picture: your finances, health, relationships, personal growth, fun and recreation, and all the other things that make up a life you actually love.

I think so many of us spend years working towards goals without ever really stopping to ask ourselves what we're trying to build in the first place.

But once you have, there’s another question to ask:

What is ONE thing I want to change next?

Not eight things. Not a complete life overhaul. One.

Maybe you've been talking about working fewer hours for the last two years. Could you finally put in the request for a four-day week?

Maybe your finances have been sitting firmly in the "I really need to sort that out" pile. Could you finally work out where your money is going, review your pension, start investing or build that emergency fund?

Maybe it's your health. Could you join the gym, actually commit to going and make a meaningful change to your health?

Maybe there's a course you've wanted to take, a business idea you keep thinking about, a conversation you've been avoiding, a hobby you've forgotten about or something else entirely.

It doesn't really matter what it is.

What matters is that it's meaningful to you.

And this is where I think we can borrow another lesson from business.

Successful businesses have no shortage of things they could do. There will always be more opportunities, more problems to solve, more projects to start and more things competing for investment.

But resources aren't unlimited.

Neither are yours.

You have a finite amount of time, energy, attention and money, which means part of having a strategy is deciding what matters most right now.

I've had to learn this myself because my natural instinct is to want to improve everything at once. I can have goals for my career, finances, business, health and family all competing for my attention, but trying to make significant progress on all of them at exactly the same time is a pretty good way of making very little progress on any of them.

Sometimes one area needs to be in growth mode while another simply needs to be maintained.

And that's okay.

So if you're struggling to choose your ONE thing, go back to your 10/10 life and ask yourself:

Which change would make the biggest difference to my life right now?

Not which one sounds most impressive.

Not which one you think you should choose.

Which one, if you looked back a few months from now and could genuinely say "I did that", would make you feel differently about the progress you've made?

That's probably where I'd start.

Once you've chosen it, we move from vision into strategy.

One of the things I've learned from creating my own life strategy is that big goals become far less intimidating when I stop staring at the end result and start working backwards.

Financial independence is a huge goal for me. It doesn't happen because I write "financial independence" in a notebook and hope for the best. I have a ten-year strategy behind it, and that strategy is broken down into much smaller decisions, milestones and actions that I can actually do something about.

Your goal doesn't need to be ten years away, but the principle is exactly the same.

So give yourself 15 minutes, grab a notebook and write your ONE thing at the top of the page.

Then work through these questions:

What specifically do I want to have changed?

Make it tangible. "Improve my finances" is vague. What would actually be different?

Where am I today?

Be honest about your starting point. You can't build a useful strategy without understanding where you're starting from.

What's stopping me?

Is it time? Money? Knowledge? Confidence? A decision you haven't made? A conversation you haven't had? Or perhaps you've simply never made this a genuine priority.

What needs to happen between now and my target date?

Work backwards. What are the two or three meaningful milestones between here and there?

What's the first action I can take this week?

Not next month. Not when work calms down. This week.

Because this is the part that matters.

Vision gives you direction. Strategy creates the route. But eventually, you have to take the first step.

If you haven't worked through what your own 10/10 life looks like yet, you can use my free Wheel of Life exercise here: Free Wheel of Life Download. It will help you zoom out and identify which areas of your life might need more attention.

But please don't come away from it with eight new goals!

Use it to help you choose the one that matters most right now.

Then decide what your ONE thing is.

What would make you really proud to look back a few months from now and say: "I changed that"?

Always with love,
Elsa x