Regular readers will be aware that from time to time on a Friday we feature a guest post from cool people changing the world one step at a time. One such person is Jill Chivers the creator of www.Imlisteningnow.com a writer on communication and a recent guest writer over on copyblogger. Jill, is our Friday Follow #FF.

Over to you Jill:

Sometimes your life changes course before your brain, heart and behaviour have a chance to catch up. This has happened to me on at least two important occasions. My life has changed, but my habits didn’t. Not for a while at least, 6 or 12 months later. And the really ironic thing is I thought I was paying attention – to my feelings, my self-talk, my state of mind, my life situation. Maybe I wasn’t really paying attention after all? Or maybe I was paying attention to the wrong things.

So I started to pay attention on a different level. And here’s what I discovered about how to make a new habit stick:

1. You gotta be you. It’s great to be inspired and gather ideas on how to change your life. Many of us need that input. What I’ve learned is that sometimes this inspiration can be overwhelming, especially if you compare yourself to others. I was reading an article about 5 habits you can learn from Gandhi. I agreed with every one of them. And I found myself feeling bad – I fell short on all of the 5 points. Especially the one about dressing simply. Gandhi was – is – an inspiration to millions and the way he lived his life every day is a testament to sound habits, applied daily. But I’m not Gandhi. And you know what? I reckon Gandhi would encourage me to be me, to be my best self. Not a poor copy of him. So, start where you are with who you are. Not only is it good enough to be you, it’s perfect. As Tallulah Bankhead quipped “Nobody can be exactly like me. Some days even I have trouble doing it”

2. Get help – but not from just anyone. No one who ever achieved anything did it solo. If you are seeking to change a habit which has you in its iron grip, don’t do it alone. When I started my year without clothes shopping, I asked a circle of about 8 or 9 friends what they thought of the idea. These are people who know, love and want the best for me. I knew I couldn’t be objective about myself, so I proxied that out to these people and used their feedback to inform my choices. The most important voice to listen to was my own, for sure. But I also knew that the support of others was going to be critical in staying on the challenge. But be careful about who you seek help from – you want people who are in your corner, not people who’ll white ant. In the words of those modern philosophical poets, Lennon and McCartney: “I get by with a little help from my friends”. Get a little help from your friends!

3. Start from where you are. If you were giving directions to a friend, you’d start with where they are now. That’s why directories in shopping centres and national parks have a big colourful arrow that says You Are Here. The map may be the most amazing cartographical masterpiece, but unless you can pinpoint your location on it, it’s useless. You can’t start from next week or 10 miles away – you can only start from today and where you are now. Don’t worry if you see other people further up the road. There’ll always be people ahead you (and there’ll always be those travelling behind you). And resist the temptation to try and jump ahead on the map. Where you are now is where you are now. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s not wrong or right. It just is. Acknowledgement is all that’s required. You Are Here.

4. Walk your own path. This is probably one of the worst mistakes we can make – comparing ourselves to others, comparing our progress to others, comparing our success, our friends, our possessions, our degree of enlightenment, our simplicity, our peace of mind, our subscription lists, our compost heaps – it doesn’t matter what you compare to others, it has the same effect. You end up feeling inferior, or superior. You play a ‘one up, one down’ game where someone’s assessed as being better than someone else. It’s addictive, and insidious, this comparison game. You can’t know what other people’s journey are like, and sometimes we can have an idealised view of how someone else is travelling – we imagine their journey to have greater comforts, better views, less challenges. No journey is ever static, so even if another person’s journey is ‘better’ than yours now, it could be ‘worse’ tomorrow. Whatever is going on in someone else’s journey, the more important point to remember is that’s their journey and you have to live your own. Your own journey will be full of adventure and challenge and joy and excitement and boredom and heartbreak and whatever else it’s going to contain. But the one thing we know for sure – it’ll be yours, and yours alone. What if your journey were the most exciting journey on the planet? It is, you know. At least, it could be, to you. Walk your own path.

5. Make up your own rules. I just made these up. They work for me. Writing this was a powerful exercise to help me discover my own truths and guides. If I wrote this 10 years ago or in 10 years time, they may be different again. Your truths and guides will be different to these. Sure, you can borrow these, but use them to jump off into your own.

Read more about Jill and her fascination with the power of listening at I’m Listening Now. You can also learn more about the challenge Jill is putting out to women everywhere to take a year without clothes shopping.