#018 - What are You Waiting For?: Lasting Change
It’s the season for reflection and for thoughtfulness. (Or maybe I should have said, “TIS the season”...)
The end of the year is a very appropriate time to think about where you’ve been and where you would like to go.
But what most people get wrong about the “New Year, New You” mentality is that they waste the other 11 months of the year by waiting until now to analyze and reflect.
Deliberate change >>> Luck
The only way to find yourself in a better future situation than you are in now is to:
Get lucky (win the lottery, accidentally make positive changes, etc.)
Make positive changes deliberately
That’s it. Just those 2.
We can hope for the first option - ‘get lucky’ - but as many have said:
“Hope is not a good plan.”
This leaves ‘making positive changes deliberately’ as the only method of improving your position over time - with any opportunity to control your situation.
The only way you get to have an effect on the outcome is if you know and control the inputs.
Are you assessing your finances? Your health? Your sleep patterns?
Are you happy with the job? Is your family happy with your job and the effect it has on you?
You can’t expect to reap the rewards of a new result - new job, new living situation, better health, more money, etc. - by doing the same things that have given you poor results in the past.
You have to make a change.
And many times, you will have to deliberately engineer it into your life.
Break the mold
Many of us in healthcare have entire family or friend networks that are over-represented with nurses, doctors, PT’s, OT’s, etc.
And because many of us have grown up in that environment, we get used to people staying in the same job for years, if not decades.
We don’t have friend, brother, mother, or uncle examples of people upgrading their situation - or at the very least, analyzing it and discussing it openly.
(It’s almost unheard of for a nurse or doctor in a metro area to have switched jobs 5 times in 15 years, whereas it would not be unusual in most office jobs.)
Wanting a better job, with more time off or more pay or a better commute, doesn’t have to be a dirty secret.
If you want different results, then you have to break the mold even if that means finding a different path than what your family or friends have done/are on.
It’s your time.
If you need to make a change. If you want for more.
Don’t wait for the new year. Do it now.
Make it happen.