Is It Time For A Change?
By Wendy Hearn

There are times when a major change is called for whether in your personal life, or in your work and business. It may be that this change has been creeping up on you slowly or something has happened that made you sit up sharply and take notice.

At the point of deciding to make a major change, your commitment level is probably high. Possibly you have a couple of ideas of what you can do or other people share their ideas and thoughts with you. So you start 'trying' out some of these ideas.

After all, you reason that if they worked for others then they're likely to work for you. As you start to 'try' out a couple of these ideas you may see some changes and improvements, albeit small. It's at this point that it's easy to settle for this being enough and your commitment level drops because some of the pain that caused you to choose to make changes has been eased. However, this is often only papering over the cracks and doesn't bring the change you really wanted. When you paper over the cracks, you may soon find yourself back at square one and wondering why. This is fine if you choose to do this but I encourage you to be clear that you're only choosing to make temporary changes. Many people go for this choice because it seems quick and easy. You've found a couple of things to try and this will do for now.

If however you decide that you really do want to make a major change, then you're going to need to give it some thought and develop strategies for an overall game plan that will last. It will take longer to start with, but the right strategies are more likely to give you permanent results than a quick fix. Using strategies maximises what you do rather than just doing a couple of things that may be scattered.

If you're ready to develop a game plan for the changes you want, what do you need to consider? If you know what changes you want to make, you first need to discover what the root cause of the problem is and then come up with solutions that will be more permanent.

However, let's say that you know or have a gut feeling that there need to be changes, but you're not quite sure what. I invite you to consider the following areas and as you work through them, you'll gain clarity about any changes needed.

If you've not discovered or defined these before, then that's your starting point. If you know about these, then they may need updating or you may need to connect with them at a deeper level.

• Your vision, mission and purpose
• Your values
• Your strengths, talents and abilities
• Opportunities
• The work you're drawn to doing, ideally
• Whom you want to work with and spend time with.
• Ideal, life, career or business
• Resources.

I encourage you to think about and be with all these items until you have the clarity needed to know the change you want. Making these changes will then be more natural for you because you will have connected with what you truly want.