Recently, I found myself saying it to someone else. Not as advice I’d read somewhere or a quote I was recycling, but as something I have had the time to think and sit with over the years, put to practice between my procrastinating cycles and actually knowing its validity. I’ve lived enough to understand what it actually means.

You cannot change your life if you change nothing. We know this, at least theoretically. But knowing and doing are different worlds. Most of us want change without changing. Want different results from the same actions, different feelings from the same thoughts, different lives from the same choices. Same old avoidance tactics and then we’re shocked when nothing shifts

“The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding.” That’s the part many people don’t want to hear. We like the idea of transformation, but we hate the actual process of transforming. It’s uncomfortable. It requires us to confront the parts of ourselves we’ve been ignoring and breaking from aged habits that have become part of us. It means doing things we don’t feel like doing, having conversations we’ve been putting off, making decisions we’ve been too scared to make. We romanticize transformation but run from the actual process of it.

But here’s the thing about actually stepping into that work: it doesn’t feel magical at first. Hell No! It feels hard, uncertain, sometimes like you’re doing it wrong. The first few times you choose differently, it’s awkward. Your body resists, your mind throws up every reason to go back to what’s familiar. Just like the Isrealites thought it best to return to Egypt — slavery. Wild right? You won’t be the first, its just the natural human response to doing what is ‘new’. But somewhere in the repetition of showing up, something shifts. Not all at once, not in some grand revelation, but quietly. You start recognizing yourself in the actions you’re taking. The gap between who you are and who you’re trying to become gets smaller, not because you’ve there yet, but because you’re actually moving.

So, worry about your life. Not in the anxious, overthinking or spiral sense, but in the take-responsibility-for-it kind of way. Your life is yours. Not anyone else’s to fix, not anyone else’s to blame for, and neither is it an extension of someone’s life to life through. Yours. And you have the power to do more than you can even imagine. More in you than you’ve let out. The problem is that you constantly shrink yourself into this mould or a certain type of conformity that has impacted your mindset and your ability to dream or couple your dreams with constant small measurable impacts. When infact you are capable of things you can’t even picture yet, so why shortchange yourself? Why stay smaller than you have to be?

If nothing changes, nothing changes. So change something.

Start today.