“If you make small, daily improvements you’ll start to see big results. It’s called the 1% rule”
When it came to improving my mindset I knew that I needed to make big changes but I didn’t know where to start.
Every day I felt like I was living my life under a dark cloud, not really wanting to get out of bed, not really wanting to leave the house, not really wanting to talk to anyone and I could barely even crack a smile. Things seemed very bleak and I felt like I was stuck in a trap with no way out. The worst part about it was that I barely even recognised this was happening to me.
Once I decided that things needed to change, I initially felt overwhelmed. But I soon heard a conversation on a podcast about the ‘1% rule’. And this changed everything.
The 1% rule is the theory that small, incremental changes can breed huge results. It’s an understanding that nothing is going to change in an instant, nothing is going to change for you tomorrow.
But if you can dedicate just a small amount of time each day to improving yourself, then over time the results will speak for themselves. And this is because if you do just a little bit each day, good habits will form and, in time, your greatness will shine through.
Something that really helped me was meditation, so let’s use that as an example; if you were to do just 5 minutes a day, it may not seem like a huge amount of time, but when you total this up over the course of a year, you’ll have done over 1800 minutes of mediation and you can imagine how much of a positive impact this will have on your life and mental health.
On the other hand, if you were to do something really practical like write a book – this may seem like a really daunting task as a whole but when you break it down into achieving 1% a day, you could write 250 words per day – over a year this is over 91,000 written words, which is enough for your average 200-400 page book. Not bad, eh?
Another really good example is gratitude and appreciation. If you want to have more appreciation in your life, you could start out by looking for 3 things each day to be grateful for. This could be the warm cup of tea you start your morning with, or the time to gather your thoughts in the shower each day or even that really great meeting you had at work. Again, in a day, it may not seem a lot but once you start looking for things every day, you soon create a habit of looking for those moments of appreciation in your life, which will help breed a more positive mindset.
This feeling of focussing on the small wins each day – the 1% – allows you to go through your life making daily improvements and not having that overwhelming feeling hanging over you. It allows you to move forward with your life without making drastic changes.
Remember, anything can be created with good habits and any good habits can be created over time. Use this 1% rule to start working towards the greater version of yourself and create the change that you want to see in your life.
Peace and love,
Alex