What if you wanted to improve your memory, enhance your self esteem, increase your mindfulness, tackle your physical fitness? Or crank up your happiness? Could you take on all of these improvements at once? No way, right? It made me tired and cranky just to think about this list.
Clearly, this is the work of several years, isn’t it? Or at least, months of carefully planned and staged effort?
A study I came across from 2016 found that a small group of students who took on all these self-improvement chores, pushing themselves for five hours a day, for six weeks, made substantial improvements in all areas. What’s more, in a follow-up study six weeks later, the students were found to have maintained significant improvements in all areas without any further instruction or effort.
Could it be that I, the whole self-help industry, and possibly you, have been underestimating our ability to improve ourselves?
If it does turn out that large change at breakneck speed is the right way to go, then a whole universe of hardworking change efforts needs to be re-thought, we need to stop talking about being kind to ourselves, and we need to suck it up and get to work.
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