Regime Change

Change Everything at Once. Then Hold Tight.

Today, I'm going to talk about regime change. Don't worry, I don't mean the depressing and somewhat overrated practice of invading someone else's country in order to force our ideals upon them and calling it “liberation”.

I'm talking about the (much nicer) internal regime change, which is identifying several (hundred?) things in your life that can be improved, and committing to take on a shit-load of them in one foul and ill-advised swoop.

I believe (irrationally, naturally) that this will be a great way to take some quantum leaps forward across several areas of my life in a very short period of time.

Now, I accept that every goal setting post you have ever read told you to change habits one at a time. If you want to stop smoking, stay fat for a while while you abstain. If you want to improve your diet, you had better not think of going for a jog – that's too much for you to accomplish all at once. If you want to earn more money, then don't think of changing to a career you love. Slow and steady wins the race. The tortoise beats the rabbit in the end. Good things come to those who...

... Ah ... sod that, it's all a bit dull and would take me a decade to see results in all the areas I want to improve. So, I've decided to act on the assumption that this is all bollocks, and in fact it can be easy and super-fun and decidedly effective to do a little bit of internal regime change. This is the belief I have installed, anyway, and I'm committed to giving it a bloody good go.

Let's see what I'm going to be doing, and then we'll see if we can do a little bit of internal regime change for you too. Gasp!

The Fundamentals of Regime Change

For my regime change, I'm looking at several areas of my life – work, health, fitness, spiritual development and personal growth. I figure that you'll probably have goals / objectives for each of these too.

Here's some of the key things I'm looking to change:

Getting up – Since I became self-employed, I've allowed myself far too much discretion in what time I arise from my slumber. This has admittedly resulted in more than a few midday starts followed by 3am finishes. This is no good for my health, sanity (what to do at 3am when you're still wired from work and caffeine?!) or sex-life. As such (and particularly because of the last reason) now I'm gonna get up as close to the crack of dawn as I can muster. I'll start getting up at 7am, and work back to even earlier when I can stomach the idea. This will give me a “normal” day and hopefully mean I get to bed sooner too.

Exercise – Over the past six months I have been (for want of a better phrase) a lazy bastard. Gone are the days when I'd look forward to the gym – replaced by a desire for takeaways, lazy weekends, booze, cigarettes and all-round slobbishness. I naturally blame the horrific UK winter for forcing me to hibernate these past months, however I shall take responsibility now and fix up my routine. Now, for no less than five days a week, I shall exercise – and this will include going to the gym, running, playing basketball, and anything else (apart from shagging) that raises my heart-rate. I'd like to claim sex counts in this list, but then I'd just try and do that and nothing else and I'm not sure if that counts as good personal development. Maybe it does. Maybe.

Productivity - Running a website has been illuminating for me - I never realised just how fantastic a procrastinator I could be until I got into this stuff. With all these traffic statistics, affiliate sales, emails to respond to and comments to post on other peoples' blogs, there's really no time left to actually write any articles of my own! Lately, whilst I've been doing all this “urgent” stuff to “get my name out”, my work rate has dropped somewhat. Therefore, I'm getting back to what I love most – writing – at least one post a day (weekdays). I'll stick to this unless the quality drops drastically and I stop wanting to read it myself. Otherwise, expect a plethora of irreverent wisdom to be cutting across your radar soon.

Breathing Actual Air - Er, this is cheating as I started on this path three weeks ago, but I've taken the rather shocking decision to stop inhaling poison into my lungs and spending a fortune for the privilege of doing so. Naturally, I'm talking about stopping smoking cigarettes - three weeks ago I was (foolishly) a confirmed smoker, and now thanks to Alan Carr's amazing hypnosis-fuelled (surely!) book, I feel completely cured and am confident I shall never smoke another cigarette again, as long as I shall live. Boom! This is perhaps the most important part of my regime change, as the increase in self-confidence and self-esteem has been dramatic already. No more cigarettes for me! I've smoked since I was 17 so this is a pretty huge deal for me.

Blagging the Universe - Ooh, this is an interesting one. I've always been big on visualization, and have just started getting into meditation, but have found it tricky to keep up a regimented routine. Now, all that has changed, as I have scheduled in one hour a day of “me time”, or more specifically “an hour to try and blag the universe to make me rich and happy using all the techniques I've nicked from other, wiser, richer people”. This will include about 20 minutes meditating, half an hour visualising, ten minutes of affirmations, and then listening to a Philosophers Note. I told you, I'm getting militant here...!

Putting Together Your Own Regime Change

Now – that's a pretty good summary of what I'm going to be up to.

To recap, I've decided not to sleep til noon, avoid exercise, smoke, procrastinate or eat loads of crap.

Instead, I will get up early (no!), exercise regularly, increase my productivity, write more, keep my lungs fresh, and use every “cheat” I know to get the universe sending me the love.

Quite a lot to keep focus of, ay? I'm presuming you're guessing that I've got some kind of master plan lined up, to help keep me in check.

You're right to assume this. I am wise and intelligent and thus I have created a genius plan to keep me on the path to abundance and success.

So, what is this wonderful and advanced plan I have created for my loyal followers?

Erm... well, it's a to do list. Here's a picture of it to show you:

I think the lesson here is that regime change can be really simple (i.e. just start doing stuff totally differently), but should only be considered if you have a pretty mad desire to make a big leap in your life.

Because I've just started working for myself and I never want to have to go back and have an office job, I have a HUGE incentive to get productive and give entrepreneurship my best shot. (Want to help? Feel free to get yourself some isochronic tones or Philosophers Notes if you want to ease my current financial “challenges” - pretty please) ;-)

This meant that today I absolutely charged through my to do list, and really enjoyed getting it all done. Running, playing basketball, press-ups and sit-ups all in one morning? Plus getting two articles written? I genuinely didn't think there was time in the day. Newsflash a la Zoolander: There is.

If you want to try some regime change of your own, I think you need to have a really empowering and motivating reason to succeed, otherwise it will probably just all get a bit much for you to keep up. It's a bit of a stretch to expect to change so much if you're slightly apathetic about your goals.

If you don't have compelling goals yet, you could try practicing building desire by forcing your brain to clarify what you want from life. Normally, our brains try to dodge this question, but keep working on it and you'll soon start to get some nuggets of info.

Next, you'll have to work on overcoming fear (“I couldn't possibly do that kind of work!! I'm not good enough!!!”) but as you do, a nice bit of regime change could give you a great big kick up the arse and the help you need.

I guess we'll see how this experiment in regime change turns out. My gut feeling is that it's gonna be big, and I'm going to prove all the “one goal at a time” haters wrong with my impressive act of “change everything in one go”. If not, I shall fail miserably and very publicly which should be fun for all involved.

Wish me luck, and give regime change a go yourself too if you so fancy. I'm excited so sod it – the worst that can happen is I'll collapse from exhaustion – in which case I'll just sleep til' noon for a couple of days to make up for it. Win / win.

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