Getting Real With Shadra Bruce

How often have you dreamed of change but decided it was too hard – or that you could only start working for the change on Mondays or the first of the month?

Change doesn’t happen because we think about it; it happens because we choose to take action.

It’s simply a matter of getting up.

Whether you want to lose weight, write a book, get a new job, or pay off debt, it all begins with you choosing to do more than simply think about taking action and actually taking the action.

Most people, when they think about change, get overwhelmed at the distance between where they are and where they want to end up. It’s not about arriving, though. It’s about the steps you take each day to get where you want to be.

You may want to pay off your credit cards, but the overwhelming debt may seem to be too much to face. But you can pay $5 or $10 more per month on a card and shave years and thousands of dollars off what you owe. A $10,000 credit card bill might seem like too much, but $5 a month is not overwhelming. (At 18% interest, an extra $5 per month can save you more than $20,000 in interest and cut more than 10 years off the repayment time).

Losing 50 pounds might seem like an enormous battle, but making one small change to having a salad instead of potato chips every day is manageable – and effective. Exercising 30 minutes every day might seem like more than you can do, but taking the stairs rather than the elevator, or parking as far away from the entrance as possible is not.

Change happens when we stop putting mental barriers in the path of our journey through change.

Get up.