https://www.psychologytoday.com/sg/blog/everyday-resilience/202604/how-to-start-changing-whats-not-working#:~:text=If%20you%E2%80%99re%20being,a%20positive%20impact%3F

"If you’re being honest with yourself, what is one behaviour that, if you stopped or started doing it, would make a real difference in your life?

 What would create some spaciousness for the growth and alignment you're looking for? 

Where would you get the best return on your time, energy, and effort invested? 

Or what is a "no" you are scared to say, but you know will make a positive impact?"

How to Start Changing What’s Not Working

To move toward change, choose one thing you’re ready to do differently.

Posted April 16, 2026 |  Reviewed by Margaret Foley

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THE BASICS

• What Is Motivation?
• Take our Ambition Test
• Find counselling near me

Key points

• Lasting change begins with honest self-awareness and self-compassion.
• There’s often one behaviour that, if we stopped or started doing it, would make a big difference for us.
• We can lean on behaviour change strategies and take small, intentional steps to help change stick.

If you’re like most people, you’ve tried at one point or another to change your behaviour, likely with varying degrees of success. Maybe you set out to reduce your screen time, and it worked for a week or two before you found yourself scrolling late into the night again. Or you decided to drink more water, only to forget as soon as your days got busier. Or perhaps you wanted to stick to a budget, but the moment something caught your eye, you felt that plan start to slip.

We know change is hard and that it doesn’t just happen because we want it badly enough. In a previous post, we explored why it can feel so difficult and why getting curious about your relationship with it is a great place to start.

Before we think about where change may be needed and how to approach it, my gentle invitation is to acknowledge that every habit, coping pattern, and way of moving through the world you’ve developed has served a purpose. Every behaviour, even the ones you’re ready to leave behind, has met a need at some point. Some are adaptive and move us closer to our goals, while other behaviours are maladaptive and move us further away. There’s no place for judgment or shame here. We know that doesn’t change behaviour. Yet there’s a tension that can begin to grow between where we are and where we want to go, and who we are and who we want to become when we notice that our current patterns and behaviours no longer support the life we’re trying to build.

Start With Honest Self-Awareness

People often intuitively know what’s holding them back and keeping them out of alignment with their values. Lasting change tends to begin when we turn inward and listen closely to the part of us that knows. After all, we are our own best experts.

If you’re being honest with yourself, what is one behaviour that, if you stopped or started doing it, would make a real difference in your life? What would create some spaciousness for the growth and alignment you're looking for? Where would you get the best return on your time, energy, and effort invested? Or what is a "no" you are scared to say, but you know will make a positive impact?

I invite you to keep that one behaviour, habit, or pattern top of mind as we look at some key building blocks of behaviour change and how we can begin to bridge the gap between knowing and doing.

Building Blocks of Behaviour Change

1. Find your why: Get clear on why this change is needed, because the intention behind it matters. Change tends not to last if it isn’t really something we truly want. Sometimes we change for ourselves, but doing something for the people counting on us can be powerful too.
2. Start small: One of the most common mistakes people make when approaching change is trying to do too much at once. There can be this tendency to believe that it requires this herculean overhaul. Occasionally, that works for some people. But more often, it’s the slow, consistent, and steady steps that lead to results.
3. Be honest about your go-to excuses: We all have familiar stories or points of justification we tell ourselves that make it easier to stay where we are. Maybe it’s “I’m too busy” or “I’ll start on Monday.” Or maybe we’re stuck in patterns of self-entitlement or protest behaviour that are keeping us from moving forward.
4. Set your environment up for success: We often continue with behaviours that don’t serve us because they’re easy and likely being reinforced in some way. What this means is that we have an opportunity to design our environment so the behaviour we do want feels easier to follow through on. This could look like putting the phone in another room at night, laying out shoes, workout clothes, and headphones the night before, or using visual reminders to reach a water intake goal.
5. Shift your identity: One of the most powerful tools for lasting change is how we see ourselves. We tend to act in alignment with who we believe we are. Once we’ve established that "I am a person who..." (takes a walk in the morning, doesn’t check my phone during meals, etc.), we stop negotiating with ourselves about whether to follow through, and it just becomes part of how we show up.
6. Find your support system: I believe we shouldn’t goal alone. We can let the people in our corner know what we’re working toward and how they can support us. Having someone who wants to see us succeed, who will check in and celebrate our wins, can help keep us accountable and moving forward, even when things feel hard.
7. Practice self-compassion: The change process is rarely linear. Setbacks and challenges will inevitably come up. Self-compassion here looks like setting goals that are realistic enough to actually meet, reminding ourselves that it’s not all-or-nothing, and speaking to ourselves with kindness, even when things don’t go as planned.
8. Celebrate small wins: We often wait for a big milestone before we allow ourselves to feel good about our progress, but recognizing the small, consistent efforts builds our self-efficacy, the belief we are capable of doing what we set out to do, and our motivation to keep going.

Final Thoughts

Something remarkable about the human condition is our capacity to change, grow, and adapt. We can integrate new knowledge and ways of being, learn and unlearn, and build new patterns that keep us aligned with our values and support what we’re working toward.

Sometimes our future self can feel a little bit like a stranger. The work of behaviour change is, in part, the work of befriending that person and making them feel a little less like someone far away and a little more like someone worth showing up for. When we do that, we set ourselves up not just for today, but for the life we’re trying to build.