Change is Easier with Specificity

It can be challenging to stay accountable to the change we seek. We make declarations of what we desire, we speak about improving ourselves and adopting a growth mindset. Maybe we talk about self-care or mindfulness. Whatever it is we name as that which we strive for, it’s important to first get extremely specific about how.

It’s imperative to get specific so we can make it easier for ourselves to stay accountable to it. It’s much easier to find loopholes in the general than it is in the refined. Let’s say we want to become more patient, yet patience is fairly general and broad. What would patience look like in your day to day life, broken down into even further stratified subgroups of patience? And what types of actions and behaviors do we assign to them?

Patience might be about being calm and slower paced, where it looks something like waiting longer to speak after someone finishes their sentence. It might be about contentment and presence with what is, which could look like sitting back in the seat of your car while in traffic rather than leaning forward. Maybe the patience you seek has to do with a sense of confidence and trust in an ongoing process. In this case, patience might look like refraining from immediately defending your behaviors if you feel you did something wrong and instead, giving yourself the grace of time passing in order to see more clearly where that action came from. These are our little cues, the sacred information that lives in the ordinary minutia of our everyday routines.

As we continue to engage in these everyday practices, we can begin to tune into an internal signpost rather than an external one to gauge how things are going. Our thoughts, emotions and physical sensations throughout the day can help us to get a sense of our progress. Rather than using external outcomes or comparing to others’ progress, we can source that barometer of change from within. Accountability, then, has less to do with the outdoor landscape and more to do with our inner worlds. So get specific on what you want from yourself when no one else is watching and notice what change arises from there.