Why sometimes the smallest shift brings the greatest balance
I am a firm believer in the practice and power of recalibration. In the coaching, personal development and wellness world we are all encouraged to focus on our goals and take action to achieve them. This is a logical way to help move someone on from contemplation to action by helping them focus on their bigger vision.
But sometimes the sheer magnitude of both the effort needed to do this and the thought of the energy required to make major shifts can become overwhelming and ultimately unhelpful. If change was easy, we’d all be doing it. I prefer to use a model of recalibration. Recalibration in its most basic sense is “the act or process of calibrating something again or differently” (Collins English Dictionary). As a model for coaching and personal development, recalibration is an essential framework and process of personal reflection and action planning based on the principle of the smallest changes possible.
Why is recalibration important?
Engaging in this kind of process is important because simply, life is not predictable, fully in our control or linear. What we wanted to do with our lives when we were younger, or even five years ago will change. The values we hold, the perspectives we have on the world evolve and mutate. Our expectations of partners, of ourselves flex and can radically shift as our life experience shifts. Reassessing and recalibrating helps us to be more authentic to ourselves, to be more in sync with our true self. Recalibration as an active process is a way of putting yourself into the centre of your life frame and is ultimately an act of self care. It is often easier said than done, but using the recalibration lens can really help cut through the noise of modern life and create space for true reflection and action. And crucially, recalibration acknowledges that the smallest changes, the tiniest shifts in mindset and behaviour can bring great impact.
We sometimes feel the urge to smash things down in order to ‘start again’; when we feel that urge to change and to grow we can easily fall into the trap of wanting to erase everything that has gone before. The feeling of wanting to purge things from our life, to chuck it all in, to go all or nothing. How many of us have dreamt of giving it all up and moving to a remote island to live the good life away from all our stresses and daily grind? Not that we are even sure what the good life looks like most of the time.
But if you can ride that urge, if you can sit with the acceptance that you are where you are because of choices you’ve made, things that you have accepted and the boundaries you have set you will be able to tap into the power of a recalibration mindset. This mindset is a growth mindset, which understands that recalibration can be a single act or it can be a process. By focussing on the small and by doing it consistently, positive change can be achieved and most importantly, sustained. Recalibration gives you permission to do things differently without feeling bad for how you did them in the first place. Recalibration allows you to draw lines in the sand and to rebuild thoughts, behaviours and relationships in different ways.
Four key areas of recalibration
You may already have a sense of the areas in your life where you might benefit from a little recalibration. The following areas are rich with possibilities to ask yourself how you are doing and where you might want to change. What is the smallest change you could make to move forward?
- Nourish the whole
This is the area most people gravitate to when they think of self care and recalibration — the mind body connection, physical care, working out, eating well, meditating, going on retreat, having hot baths, incense, face masks and relaxing by candlelight. These are all excellent things that can contribute to your rebalancing of body and mind. For someone who spends the majority of time in their head, getting back into the body can be powerful. On one level, these are external things that we do for ourselves — things we can control and prioritise. But on another level we see the importance of valuing and making time for ourselves.
2. Authentic self
This is where we start to go a little deeper, to recognise the importance of your authentic self — who you are at your deepest core. Not what you do for work, or what you studied at university or how you spend your money or the vacations you take. It’s not who you are to other people either. Maybe you already have a sense of this self, perhaps it has become lost over the years. Recalibration is focus on the journey of discovering who you really are. And when we start to live with authenticity, we have to be prepared to be disliked. Because for so many of us, the need to be accepted changes how we live and what we do. And that’s normal, and thats ok. But you don’t exist to please other people.
3. Boundaries
Ah, boundaries. So easy to say but so difficult to put into action. This is about asking for what you need and saying no to what you don’t. Valuing your time, your needs and your feelings is important, and when people cross our boundaries we feel it even if we don’t call them out on it. What are your non-negotiable areas; how do you feel safe and nurtured. One key recalibration area of boundaries is to ask yourself, do I feel responsible for other people’s feelings, reactions and thoughts? (Spoiler: you are not responsible for those things).
4. Connect to the world
It is so easy to spend too much time in our heads, self-isolating in a way through technology and living more in the virtual world. As we get older, it also becomes harder to make quality social connections person to person. Quality over quantity of social connections is important but how can we make meaningful connections as adults? I believe that engaging in the natural world brings positive psychological impact — they say that to plant a garden is to have hope in the future; a forward thinking action that is motivating and encouraging. You don’t have to become a gardener — but I don’t know any gardener who wouldn’t want an enthusiastic volunteer to help around the plants, with time for a chat and cuppa at the same time. What really brings you joy and how can you find other people like you. You are connected to a much bigger world than you perhaps realise.
The power of recalibration is that you don’t have to completely change everything in your life. You don’t need to become stuck in the all or nothing mindset or perfection paralysis. You can push through the fear of failure when you focus on the smallest change you can make. And small changes can have amazing results. And when you start to focus on yourself, you will see that.
