Change One Thing

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Posted by Admin

Guerrilla Beauty has always aimed to start an online community – our New Years’ Resolution is to get a proper networking facility running. In the short term, we thought it would be fun to start an informal network. You can participate by either commenting on these entries, tweeting your progress, or by joining our LiveJournal community http://community.livejournal.com/change1thing/

Change One Thing is a community for people who want to change their lives. It doesn’t matter if you want to quit smoking, do more exercise, reduce your carbon footprint, save some cash, or lose (or gain) weight. Just set yourself an acheivable target, and post your progress at the end of the week!

At this time of year, we all make New Years’ Resolutions. They are different for everybody, but will often include improving your health, perhaps your appearance, or your impact on others (such as spending more time with your family, or being more environmentally friendly).

It doesn’t take long before our resolutions disappear into thin air and we go back to our old habits!

There are three keys to successful life changes:
1) Define a clear goal: what do you want to achieve and why? Can you visualise yourself when you achieve your goal? When do you want to acheive this by?
2) Break this goal down into small, manageable chunks that can be achieved over the course of one week. Lots of little actions add up to one big change!
3) Monitor your progress, and share it with others! There are two reasons why this works: firstly it forces you to make a commitment (instead of putting it off until some other time), and secondly you can pool knowledge and resources with others.

That’s where this community comes in. Here you can post your progress, but I also hope that we can start to share advice and support each other.

‘Change One Thing’ was a campaign that Boots stores in the UK used a couple of years ago, to help people break down their New Years’ Resolutions into manageable chunks. This community is not affiliated in any way with Boots – we just liked the idea so much that we resurrected it!

The idea for our Change One Thing community came from conventional slimming clubs. You define a goal (I want to lose 10 lb for my friend’s wedding), break your weight loss into manageable targets (I need to lose 1 lb a week for 10 weeks) and then meet up with your club each week to ‘weigh in’ and discuss your progress with the other club members. Often these meetings are very friendly and can go on for over an hour, with lots of chatting, sharing tips and recipes, and many cups of tea!

Of course, we don’t want to become too obsessed with our weight. Here’s some other ideas for goals:
- Reduce your blood pressure or cholestorol, or keep your blood sugar stable.
- Quit smoking, or some other bad habit (chocolate, alcohol).
- Have dinner or spend time with your family at least once a week.
- Reduce your carbon footprint.
- Improve your health: do more exercise, eat 5 portions of fruit and veg each day, drink more water?
- Sort your life out: get a new job, improve your looks, find a partner?
- Anything else you can think of!