Great question, but a bit of a challenge for me to answer. Primarily the reason why me, and people like me, get to have the job that we have, psychotherapists, is because people tend to spend an inordinate amount of energy avoiding change. They don’t want to recognize it when it’s happening and they certainly don’t wan to embrace it when it does happen.

The truth is that everything is in a constant state of changing. Present tense. Right now, right here as I type this blog that all 10 of you may bother to read, change is happening. That is not just a buddhist tenet, it is a fact of physics. Everything is constantly in motion and therefore constantly changing.

With that in mind I guess my income depends on my fellow humans not only avoiding change but coming to me to figure out why their avoidance of change is making a mess of their lives.

Maybe this prompt is meant to be taken more literally? 

That answer is pretty simple; everything.

Everything I do, in life, in love, in business, could be done differently. I think that is a fairly obvious question. What is a more meaningful questions is what do I need to do differently? That question unfortunately is not as easy to answer.

I have patients come to me everyday asking essentially the same question: How can improve my life. In fact my last at the office post was specifically about the patients who come in asking how they can improve their self confidence.

I tell all these patients essentially the same thing–nothing can improve without first becoming different. So where in your life can you see difference?

I think the difference between someone improving their life and someone simply rolling with the inevitable changes which occur (gray hair, job change, children/wife/husband/self growing older, the preverbal seasons changing) is simple conscious involvement in the process. 

A person who is resilient will weather the storms of their life with a degree of comfort and acceptance but just getting through the storm does not make one a better sailor. As the old saying goes, “calm seas do not great sailors make,” but what is missing from that sage advise is learning.

It doesn’t matter what part of you life you want to make better, you must first make it different, but if you are not consciously paying attention to how that difference came to be and the effects that difference has in, and on, your life, you are not going to improve. Instead of improving you may find yourself trapped in a loop of repeatedly attempting the same thing, that is putting in the same efforts, and expecting different results each time.

There is a famous myth about Thomas Edison attempting to invent his light bulb by using different material for the filament (the little bit of wire that glows actually creating the light). One story I read stated he tried over 1000 different materials including the head, mustache, and beard hair of all of the engineers who worked for him.

This exhaustive process may have never resulted in his patent for the electric light bulb had he not taken meticulous notes on each material, how it was prepared, and how it performed as a filament for his light bulb.

My point is simply this: if you want to improve an area of your life, you need to make changes to that area. That is you need to make your efforts different. Then you need to see how those differences perform and what, if any, effect those differences have on your desired outcome.

You want to be a better blogger? Make your approach, your style, the time of day you write, your subject, your platform…make something different. 

You want to be a better musician, poet, mathematician, video game designer or player for that matter–make the methods or conditions of your practice different.

Become a scientist (it is a fun crowd to be a part of) change something and then pay attention to how it effects, or does not effect, your desired outcome.

Keep the differences which impact your desired outcome in ways you like, ditch the rest.

So what can I change about me, my blog, my career, my life? everything. What do I want to change? Some of those things for sure, but not all of them. As I have said change is inevitable so even the parts of my life I do not want to change will be changing and as if that wasn’t defeatist sounding enough, not all of the areas I want to change I currently know how to change. Even worse some of them I just know I want to change but not how I want them to be changed.

So, as my first sales manager would say, I am going back to basics this year. I am going to be examining every aspect of every part of my life and ask myself a simple but powerful question: Is this something (whatever it happens to be) something that is benefiting me in the most direct and efficient way possible?

Simple because it is a yes/no question. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what the answer is the result is the same–how will I make it different and how will I know if that difference is a positive change for me?

Only time will tell how I navigate these issues, but it is an exciting year of possibilities. The old business question is, what business venture would you start if you knew you could not fail?

This prompt, for me anyway, spurred one question to emerge in me: What part of your life will you do different knowing that each change only brings improvement?

As Edison is credited as saying with each failure of his lightbulb filament, “I haven’t failed at all. I have learned another way not to make a light bulb.”

With each difference, each change, in my life I will either move closer to my desired outcome or I will learn another way not to move closer to my desired outcome. Either way I am learning. Either way I am succeeding.

Perspective is everything.