Easy Change Strategies (3)

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And then there were three!
I hope you had fun trying some of the recommended strategies. For those, who already discarded them.....tsk tsk!! Remember that saying: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!"
Any real lasting change requires a minimum of 3 weeks (21 days that is!) of repetition or you can call it continued practice of the strategy.
Remember the time you learned to walk? Of course not, we were to busy figuring it out! But if you ever watched a toddler making her first steps....
and oops there she is on the diaper padded behind. Now there are three kinds of kids:
1) the ones who lie around and wait quietly until someone notices and comes and picks them up
2) the ones who right away let you know, this is not what they want - SCREAM is how they get some one to pick them up
3) the ones who look around, take in their environment and once they find the target of their attempt to get up and walk, they start crawling (that they already know how!).
For us adults it comes out to this: Are you a "whiner", a "waiter" or a "go getter"?
In any case, we didn't learn to walk in one try or in one week either. So if you are serious about changing the situation, relationship, career or whatever, remember that it will take some time and effort.
One particular strategy, which I have used in business, is called "X-minus-days" (at least I called it that). Say on the 20th of the month you have to deliver a report/study-paper or project.
The 20th is "X" then count how many days you have till the twentieth, that's "minus days".
Let's say there are 5 days. So you can divide the project into 5 day parts. Each day you have to accomplish 20%. WOW that was easy wasn't it? All of a sudden what looked like a mountain, is only 20%. The trick of course is to always leave a little extra time for the last day. There is always something that seems to need tweaking! Then of course you can cut the daily work into hourly objectives (possibly involving others?) And "voila" you have a plan AND a time-table!
In Neuro-Linguistic Programming it's called "chunking down".
Currently I am reading a book that was written in 1996 by Steven K. Scott, Co-Founder of
American Telecast Corporation (the ones who created infomercials with celebs like Cher etc.)
He calls it the Law of Dream Conversion: Convert dreams into goals, goals into tasks, tasks into steps! (Works even now 13 years later in the new age of i-video)
So try the down chunking and let me know how it worked for you!

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