We’re often asked questions along the lines of, 'what’s the single most important lifestyle change I can make that will positively impact my health / energy / focus / effectiveness / enjoyment of my life?'
If you look at, or listen to, the latest trends, they'll suggest some of the following:
Regulate your daily wake up time
Take more breaks
Take cold showers
Get moving more
Practice mindfulness
Keep a journal
Eat less red meat
Drink more water
Be grateful
All of these ideas and strategies work for many people, but which is best for you?
Which one will have the greatest impact?
Which one will generate the fastest results?
How will you fit your desired changes into your busy routine?
How do you get motivated to take action?
And how do you maintain that motivation for results that last?
To kick off 2025, here’s a really simple system to help you make quick and sustainable progress.
Follow this system and we GUARANTEE you will feel in control of your future wellbeing and performance immediately.
You'll also unlock a vital source of ongoing motivation.
STEP 1
Visualise the results you want to experience
As we’re at the beginning of a new year, it’s helpful to focus on precisely the type of person you’d like to be and the life you’d like to be living by early January 2026.
Working with a 12-month time frame can ease any pressure to take on too much too soon while also being a period of time across which you can make major improvements in all areas of your routine.
Thinking about the full year to come will also help you identify regular patterns in your life, which will help inform shorter term priorities.
For example, if you note that your exercise options get compromised in the winter, you may wish to review your pattern of activity for the other months of the year to take account of this.
If you identify regular times of the year when work is busiest you can begin framing these periods as the 'events' when you really need to be at your best. You can then 'train' for them, and 'recover' from them appropriately.
The single most important element of your visualisation is that it is super detailed.
The more time you spend on this, the more likely you are to achieve success.
Just a few moments every day of being intentional about what you want to achieve will immediately direct a whole host of effective daily decisions and interactions.
STEP 2
Pre-plan your daily attitude, energy, demeanour and results
Break this down into how you want to feel at key moments of the day. When you wake up for example, towards the end of a busy day, when you get home from work or at important points in your evenings or weekends.
Give plenty of thought to how you want to present to other people. What mindset do you want to continually achieve? What energy do you want to give off?
How do you want others to perceive you? What reputation would you like amongst family, friends and colleagues?
It's up to you who you want to be in the future so enjoy this part of the process and work on a persona that excites you.
When you plan how you want to feel, you'll make conscious and unconscious decisions that make that planning a reality.
STEP 3
Identify small adjustments you can make across your day. Every day.
Monitor your daily decisions and actions in relation to your visualisation of who and what you want to become.
The easiest way to do this is to ask yourself, is each decision or action something that will move you closer to living with your desired results and being the type of person you want to be, or are your decisions and actions slowing your progress or even blocking it completely.
Or, worse still, pushing you further away from your desired results.
A key element to focus on every day is what you can do differently to fast track your success. What can you do more of, what will you do less of and what are your top priorities for the day to follow?
STEP 4
Gather data and make decisions based on evidence
No matter how busy your schedule, it’s worth making some observations, on your phone or in a notepad, of your daily behaviours.
If you take a few minutes to do this daily, you’ll observe patterns of behaviour, recurring thoughts, triggers and responses that will help you understand why you behave the way you do, and pinpoint the most effective ways to adjust your approach day by day.
STEP 5
Model your own success strategies
Think about your personality and how you operate in other areas of your life. With work projects for example. Are you someone who prefers to work on a number of areas of a project simultaneously and nudge everything along as a whole, or do you prefer to focus on one element of a project at a time in sequence?
If you like to keep things varied you might want to identify very small positive changes that you can make each day in a number of areas directed towards the new you.
Your daily priorities could be selected from an ongoing list depending on what your schedule looks like each day. Your list might start something like the below and it should have as many options for new habits / routines as you can think of. That way you'll always be able to take at least one positive action every day.
1 extra glass of water
1 less cup of coffee
5 minutes less screen time per day
Take one additional 5-minute break per day
Include an extra 500-1000 steps each day
5 minutes of journaling
1 random act of kindness
1 extra piece of fruit
Or, if you’re someone who prefers to work on priorities in sequence, you could try focusing on a single change for a fixed period of 2-6 weeks before moving on to the next.
This way you can embed each new habit as a routine and then layer the next one on top of it. This can be a great way to achieve 10-25 solid new routines aver the year.
The final part of the process is simple.
TAKE ACTION NOW
You can begin visualising the new you immediately.
Take a moment to think about how you feel and how you look right now and check this is consistent with what you want for the future. You can also ask yourself what you need to think differently or do differently right now to ensure you're consistently moving towards achieving your chosen results?
GOOD LUCK!
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