Sometimes self-reflection creates a strange problem.
You start noticing things you hadn’t really noticed before. You realise that some of your habits don’t quite fit anymore, or that you’re carrying expectations that probably made sense years ago but don’t necessarily make sense now. Perhaps you’re always available to other people, even when you don’t really need to be. Perhaps work has gradually taken up more space than you intended. Perhaps there are things you’ve been telling yourself you’ll get around to when life settles down, even though life never seems to settle down quite enough.
And once you start seeing these things, it’s very easy to reach the wrong conclusion.
You might decide that you need to fix everything.
Your routine needs changing, your work needs changing, your health needs attention, you should spend more time with your family, exercise more, sleep better, get organised, switch off your phone and probably learn how to meditate while you’re at it.
Before long, something that started as a useful bit of self-reflection has turned into another list of things you feel you’re failing to do.
You don’t have to fix your whole life.
In fact, I think trying to fix your whole life can sometimes become another form of friction.
The more useful question might be much smaller: what is one part of my life that could work a little better?
Awareness Can Make Everything Look Wrong
There is a strange period that can happen when you begin paying more attention to your life. Things that you’ve accepted for years suddenly become visible.
You notice how often you check your phone. You realise that you’ve said yes to another commitment without really thinking about whether you wanted it. You see that you’re still working late even though nobody has actually asked you to. You recognise that the thing you’ve been meaning to make time for hasn’t appeared anywhere near the top of the list for months.
None of these things necessarily mean that your life is going badly, most of them probably developed for perfectly understandable reasons.
That’s what makes them difficult to change.
Something becomes part of your normal routine because, at some point, it was useful. You needed to be available, so you became available. Work was demanding, so you worked harder. Your family needed you, so you became the person who could always be relied upon. You had too much going on, so you learned to keep pushing things forward.
Eventually, you stop making a conscious decision about any of it.
It just becomes how you live.
I’ve experienced this myself. There have been periods where I’ve looked at my life and thought that something needed to change, only to realise that I was looking at the whole thing as one enormous problem. The more useful approach has usually been to slow down and work out what was actually creating the pressure.
Sometimes that pressure is difficult to explain because nothing particularly dramatic is happening. There isn’t necessarily a problem that needs fixing, yet you still feel tense, distracted or mentally busy. I’ve written about that before in Why You Feel Stressed When Nothing Is Actually Happening, because understanding where that feeling comes from can be the first step towards deciding whether something in your life actually needs to change.
Sometimes the problem isn’t your whole life.
Sometimes it’s one part of it that has become unnecessarily difficult.
You Don’t Need a New Life. You Might Need a Small Adjustment
We tend to think about change in fairly dramatic terms. If something isn’t working, we imagine that we need a new routine, a new job, a new approach to our health or perhaps a completely different way of living.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with making big changes, and sometimes they’re exactly what is required. But the idea that meaningful change has to be dramatic can make smaller changes seem insignificant when they may actually be much more useful.
Imagine you’ve been saying that you want to exercise more, but your mornings are already rushed. You don’t need to become a completely different person who suddenly wakes up at five in the morning and runs ten kilometres before breakfast. Perhaps you could simply put your walking shoes by the door and take a twenty-minute walk after dinner.
If your phone is constantly interrupting you, you don’t necessarily need to become someone who never looks at their phone. You might simply remove a few notifications that you don’t need.
If there is a task you’ve been carrying around in your head for weeks, perhaps you don’t need a new productivity system. You might just need to spend fifteen minutes finishing it.
These changes aren’t particularly impressive, they don’t make for very exciting social media posts either.
But they can make a noticeable difference to how your ordinary day feels …. And that matters.
This is also why I keep coming back to the idea that the future isn’t created by one big decision. It’s shaped by the things we repeatedly make easy in ordinary life. In Your Future Is Being Built By Your Ordinary Days, I explored how small behaviours, routines and defaults can quietly shape the direction we’re heading in, often without us noticing.
Change the Friction, Not Everything
This is one of the core beliefs with The Frictionless Man, we have a tendency to blame ourselves when something isn’t working.
We tell ourselves that we need more discipline, more motivation or more willpower. Sometimes that’s true, but often the behaviour isn’t actually the problem. The environment we’ve created around the behaviour is making it unnecessarily difficult.
If you want to read more but your television is on every evening and your phone is sitting beside you, perhaps you don’t have a reading problem. You have a friction problem.
If you want to exercise but your shoes are buried somewhere in the wardrobe and you never know when you’re going to fit it in, perhaps you don’t need to become more disciplined. You might need to make the first step easier.
This is something I’ve become increasingly aware of myself. I naturally like improving things. That’s probably not surprising given my background in sales, marketing and, more recently, SEO and CRO. If something isn’t working, my instinct is often to look at it, analyse it and try to find a better way.
That’s useful in some parts of life.
It isn’t necessarily useful in all of them.
Sometimes you can spend so much time trying to improve the system that you create another system to manage.
So I’ve started asking a simpler question:
What could I make easier?
That question feels very different from asking, “How can I become better at this?”
The second question puts the responsibility entirely on you. The first makes you look at the environment, the process and the assumptions surrounding the behaviour.
And sometimes the solution is sitting there.
Keep What Still Works
There’s another important part of change that I think we sometimes overlook.
When we decide that something in our life needs to change, we can easily start treating the previous version of ourselves as though it was somehow wrong.
But it probably wasn’t.
The person you became made sense in the context of the life you were living at the time. Your work ethic may have helped you build a career. Your reliability may have made you someone people could depend upon. Your willingness to help others may have strengthened your relationships. Your ambition may have pushed you further than you would otherwise have gone.
Those qualities don’t suddenly become bad because your circumstances have changed.
The question is whether you’re still using them in a way that serves the life you’re living now.
That’s something I’ve thought about quite a lot during my own career change. I spent more than twenty years working in a target-driven pharmaceutical environment, and there are plenty of things that experience taught me that I still value. Being organised, prepared, persistent and focused on outcomes served me well for a long time.
I don’t want to throw those qualities away.
But I’ve also realised that not everything needs a target.
Not every hour needs to be productive. Not every decision needs to have an obvious outcome. Not every part of life needs to be approached with the same intensity that you might bring to a sales target or a business objective.
What was useful in one environment can become unnecessary friction in another.
I’m not trying to become someone completely different. I’m trying to work out where the person I’ve already become still fits.
Change One Thing Before You Change Everything
So if you’ve started questioning some part of your life, perhaps the next step isn’t to create a plan for fixing everything.
Pick one thing.
It could be a habit that has started bothering you. It could be a commitment that you keep agreeing to even though you don’t really have the time. It could be an expectation you’ve placed on yourself that nobody else is actually asking you to meet.
Then spend a little time understanding it.
Why am I still doing this?
When did this become normal?
Was it useful once?
Does it still serve me now?
And perhaps most importantly, what would make this slightly easier?
That last question is worth sitting with.
We’re often drawn towards adding something when we’re trying to change. We add a new routine, another reminder, another app, another target or another rule.
Sometimes the better answer is subtraction.
Maybe you stop doing something.
Maybe you do it less often.
Maybe you move it.
Maybe you ask someone else to take responsibility for it.
Maybe you decide that it doesn’t need to be done at all.
That isn’t laziness.
Sometimes it’s simply recognising that a behaviour no longer deserves the amount of space you’ve been giving it.
And sometimes the best way to reduce that pressure isn’t to find another system for managing everything. It is to remove something that doesn’t need to be there in the first place. That’s something I explored in You Don’t Need to Add More: Why Doing Less Can Reduce Mental Load, where I looked at how constantly adding more can leave us carrying unnecessary mental load when what we actually need is a little more space.
You Don’t Have to Optimise Yourself
I think there’s a particular danger for people who have spent a large part of their adult lives being responsible for things.
You get used to solving problems.
If something isn’t working, you look for the answer. If something needs doing, you do it. If you’re not performing as well as you’d like, you work harder.
That mindset can take you a long way.
But eventually you can start treating yourself like another project that needs improving.
Your sleep needs optimising, your fitness needs improving, your productivity needs measuring, your finances need a better system and your career needs a five-year plan.
Even your downtime can become something you’re trying to optimise.
I’ve caught myself doing this.
When I’m working on a website or a marketing experiment, measurement and optimisation make perfect sense. I can look at the data, change something and see what happens.
Life doesn’t always give you that clean feedback loop.
Sometimes you don’t need to optimise the situation, you just need to stop making it harder than it needs to be.
There’s a difference.
One creates another project …. The other creates a little more room.
When Nothing Is Really Wrong
Perhaps that’s what makes this difficult.
If your life is falling apart, change is relatively easy to justify. Something isn’t working, so you do something about it. But what if nothing is actually wrong?
What if you have a good job, people who love you, a comfortable home and a life that, from the outside, looks perfectly fine?
You can still feel that something has changed.
Maybe you’re more tired than you used to be. Maybe you’re less interested in things that once mattered to you. Perhaps you have become so used to being responsible for everyone else that you aren’t entirely sure what you would choose if nobody needed anything from you.
That doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful.
It doesn’t mean you need to blow your life up and start again.
It might simply mean that the life you built was right for an earlier version of you, and you’re beginning to notice that some parts of it need updating.
I’ve found that distinction useful myself. There are things about my life that I’m genuinely grateful for, while at the same time recognising that I don’t want every part of my future to look exactly like my past.
You can appreciate the life you’ve built and still decide that some parts of it need to change.
Those two things aren’t contradictory.
You Are Allowed to Keep Becoming
Perhaps the biggest mistake we make is assuming that at some point we are supposed to arrive at a final version of ourselves.
By forty, fifty or sixty, surely we should know who we are, what we want and how we’re supposed to live.
But life doesn’t really work that way.
Circumstances change, children grow up, parents get older, careers take unexpected turns and relationships evolve. Things that mattered enormously ten years ago can become less important, while things you barely considered can suddenly become central.
You change because your life changes.
That doesn’t mean you made a mistake by becoming the person you were before.
It simply means you might need to update some of the decisions you made when your circumstances were different.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year thinking about what I want the next stage of my life and work to look like. At times, that has made me feel as though I need to work out an entirely new version of myself.
I’m beginning to see it differently.
I don’t need to throw everything away and I don’t need to become a completely different person. There are experiences, skills, relationships and parts of my personality that I absolutely want to carry forward.
The work is really about deciding what still belongs and then making it a little easier to live that way.
Final Thought
You can outgrow something without deciding that everything that came before it was wrong.
You can change direction without starting again. You can keep your work ethic without working yourself into the ground. You can remain reliable without being available to everyone all the time. You can still be ambitious without needing every part of your life to become a measurable project.
And you don’t have to fix your whole life to make your life feel different.
Sometimes the most useful change is much smaller.
Notice what’s creating friction. Question whether it still belongs. Keep the parts that still serve you, and experiment with changing one thing that doesn’t.
You might be surprised by how much difference one small change can make to an ordinary day.
You don’t have to fix your whole life.
You might simply need to make one part of it a little more frictionless.
The One-Thing Change Framework
When something in your life feels as though it needs changing, try resisting the urge to fix everything at once.
NOTICE
What isn’t working as well as it used to?
QUESTION
Why am I still doing this the way I’ve always done it?
KEEP
What part of this still serves me?
CHANGE
What is one small thing I could do differently?
OBSERVE
What happens when I remove some of the friction?
REPEAT
If it helps, keep going …. If it doesn’t, adjust.
The point isn’t to create another system you have to maintain.
It’s simply a way of slowing down long enough to distinguish between something that genuinely needs changing and something you’ve just become accustomed to doing.
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