Many of us have had to go through some sort of transformation in our lives. Maybe it is a personal ‘version upgrade.’ Maybe it is new career that made us grow. Maybe it is the healing of ourselves after a breakup. In any of these situations, we never just wake up and say, “Hello world! This is the new me, get used to it!”
Instead, these transformations that we go through require us to make many little decisions. It’s the ‘body of work’ of our decisions that will make up who we are resolving to become. We don’t just start eating healthy one day and lose weight. We make one decision to have a salad for lunch, then we decide to get enough sleep the next night, then we throw out all the carbonated drinks, and the string of decisions get longer. As that string of decisions gets longer and more consistent, the deeper we go through a transformation.
Inspiration
I heard Jason Surfrapp (also known as Jason Sadler) talked about this on a recent podcast I listened to and it helped spark this post. He said that we’re all faced with decisions and the decision to do anything significant with our lives requires us to make some sort of bet. We may lose, we may fail, but if we don’t make that bet we’ll never know.
He goes on to say that we all start with small bets. When we make a small bet and win it, we’re more likely to make another one, sometimes a larger one. As we get comfortable making these little bets, we’re able to put ourselves out there more and more. We’re used to that uncertainty because we’ve already been there. Sometimes we stumble, but that just means we weren’t ready or we need to go another direction. But nothing happens when we don’t pick a direction (see what I did there?) and move in it.
Decision to Act
When we’re faced with decisions, our will is tested. Sometimes the decisions start hard when we make a choice to change. Other times, when we’re hit with a pink slip or a significant other breaks our heart, its even more painful to start on the path to change. But the more we stick to this path of growth, the easier the decisions get. The more ‘little bets’ we make, the more comfortable we are with our actions and the easier it is to stick to our commitments.
Big Bets
Don’t get me wrong, some decisions are more important than others. But those decisions don’t necessarily pop up in our faces at the beginning of the journey. Seth Godin often talks about how he’s built such a following over the years because his body of work is so vast, not because he wrote a great book. And the same goes for us, it’s the ‘body of work’ in our decisions that make up who we are.
Picture this: Let’s say a person is faced with 2 job offers and one leads to more freedom, but less money. Said person has been making decisions to put their family first for months. They started clocking out at 5 to take the kids to soccer practice. They started staying home on the weekends to be with the family. They eventually left their last job, not because of money, but because of the constant pressures to be in the office aka away from their family. And now, from the outside, it looks to everyone else like this person is facing a huge decision to either make less money and have more freedom or to have more money but work even harder. It’s an easy decision for the person that has been crafting their life around their family for the past few months.
For me, a perfect example is the book I’m writing. I decided a year ago that I had it in me to write a book. That’s it, end of story, right? WRONG. People won’t see the decisions to spend early mornings writing. The decisions to spend days crafting the story and editing it to be exactly what I want. People won’t see the decisions to put in tedious research or about the decisions to interview key people for the story. All they’ll see is the finished product and talk about my decision to write the book.
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What little bets are you making? Leave a comment below or chat with me on social media about little decisions crafting our lives, I’d love to hear from you.
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Have a great week!
