113. Meaningful Steps Spark Your Big Changes | What is my Why to Propel Progress Now?

In a world obsessed with big leaps, it’s time to rid yourself of that compulsion. For lasting midlife reinvention, radical change is not the prescription. Do not, I repeat, do not, dive into a perfectionist's pool spilling over with too many new habits. There’s nothing wrong with big dreams and desires, but there’s a lot wrong with a massive attempt to achieve them. Today you’ll hear the proven, effective way to get going on your goals now, along with the science that explains why that way is best. Listen up to get inspired, knowing that your doable path lies just ahead!

To reclaim your potential with guidance for whatever midlife-plus goal means the most to you, come work with me one-on-one! Just send an email to hello@laurieadamscoaching.com to schedule a no-pressure conversation/Q & A about individual coaching. We’ll explore the desires that have eluded you most, and the problem-solving actions that will be best, will be doable, just for you. That’s what I’m here for.

This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com.

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Hi, and welcome to the Fire Up at 55 Plus Podcast, a show about how to put yourself first in your second act of life. I'm Certified Life and Weight Loss Coach Lori Adams here to empower you to let go of guilt, take charge of your health, then find and fulfill your dreams. It's never too late, so let's get started. Today is a great day to get going on your goals in the most effective way. That also is doable, not complicated. Continuing our renewed focus on the best change process for midlife transformation, this is Lori with episode number 113 titled Meaningful Steps Spark Your Big Changes. Let's get to it. And our subtitle is What is My Why to Propel Progress Now? Because in a world obsessed with big leaps, it's time to rid yourself of that compulsion. For lasting midlife reinvention, radical change is not the prescription. Do not, I repeat, do not dive into a perfectionist's pool spilling over with too many new habits. There's nothing wrong with big dreams and desires, but there's a lot wrong with a massive attempt to achieve them without some exploration of what you really want. Today you'll hear the proven, effective way to get going on your goals now, along with the science that explains why this way is best. So listen up to get inspired, knowing that your doable path lies just ahead. So we've all heard of the great best-selling books about habit change, and they are great. By James Clear, that's a time of habits, by Charles Duhig, that's about the power of habits, and BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits. So I'm just going to really review them quickly, and they are all worth taking a look at. Especially James Clear's book because it is an international big time, big deal bestseller. So the focus of his process is your identity and the environment you're in. He encourages you to build habits that casts votes for the person you want to become. As you go along, you kind of realize what works and what doesn't work, and you take them very easily and you make obvious changes that are attractive for you, and then you learn from them, right? Charles Duhig thinks more about habits in a loop, in a progression of Q, routine, reward. He wants you to change your behavior, understanding that there's a path, a neurological habit loop that makes sense of those three things. You get a cue, you do a routine, you get a reward for that, and then maybe a new cue or a repeated cue. And BJ Fogg talks a lot about tiny anchored habits. He encourages you to start small, and there's nothing wrong with that, but anchor a new habit to something already in your routine, habit stacking. So if you say brush your teeth every night, you might want to add in some squats as you do it. So you're building in your desire to do a little bit of strength training, and you've already got the routine of brushing your teeth, so it's a little bit easier. And he also wants you to celebrate immediately for reinforcement. But these three models are behavior-focused. They help you to install habits and then stick with them. Nothing wrong with that. Their brilliance is really in showing how to lower resistance to making a big change by doing small things over time and increasing the consistency over time. However, my job now is to give you progress plus tools. I'm really diving deep into something that will take you beyond maybe the pulp culture, maybe what most people know about. Not that there's anything wrong with those things, but we want to take a step further to get you going at midlife for renewal and change. I mean, let's face it, when I think about my midlife change, I'm not looking 15 years ahead, I'm looking a year to three years ahead for what I want to create for my new life and my better life and to continue to do that. So they're not necessarily addressing the emotional experience you get of doing the habit and whether the behavior feels personally meaningful. This is the most important part. Because you want your behavior and your emotions to feed back into your personal desired identity in a nonlinear evolving way, in something that takes your feelings really into account and how you're feeling as you're making progress, as you're making change. This is where the very interesting researcher and author Teresa Amabil steps in and she goes deeper. She shows how meaningful progress shapes not just what you do, but how you feel about who you are becoming. And really you're looking for a new identity, you're looking for a new future you if you want transformation and a better life. So as Fogg says celebrate the small stuff, Amabil says make sure the small stuff actually matters to you. You're not on someone else's path. When you brush your teeth and do the squats, does that really matter to you? For significant progress. And this is what makes her work so powerful for midlife women. It reminds us that our identity isn't built through systems alone, but it's built through meaningful action that nourishes the women we're becoming now, the woman you're becoming. These meaningful actions are just for you. So in her book The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabil, I'm going to call her Teresa from now on, easier than trying to pronounce her last name. She uses research that adds heart and meaning to the mechanics of habit change. She sees this as the next layer in the things that we know about establishing habits the way we've just mentioned. She's not replacing clear, duhig, or fog, she's extending their work with a human-centered lens. So if you consider yourself initially as a habit thinker, using the processes we've talked about, the process helps you to build habits based on identity. But Teresa adds that identity must be built through meaningful work, not just reputation. Duhig, says a habit thinker, rewires the habit loop. But Theresa adds not all routines feel like personal growth. Progress must feel emotionally real. And Fogg says start small and succeed fast. But Theresa adds, tiny actions must connect to the inner motivation, not just ease or speed. So have I repeated this enough now for you to understand what the difference is? So I'm going to pick a chapter out of her book. It's number five because a lot of the book refers to team progress and a work environment, but chapter five especially centers inner work life for the individual, meaning inner work that is going to establish your meaningful identity for the future. She's investigating here the internal terrain, your emotions, your motivation, and the perceived meeting. Teresa says instead of just building the habit, build the meaningful story about your identity through the small winds. And she acknowledges the non-uniform perception of progress. So even in a shared context like a family, workplace, fitness group, your friends, everyone is going to experience progress differently based on what matters to them. So instead of standardizing success, we're going to help women notice what progress feels like for them personally. And this is incredibly freeing, especially for midlife women who are so used to comparing ourselves to others or to prioritizing others' goals. Now you can ask what counts as meaningful progress in my story? It's the experience of making progress in meaningful work that builds not only your motivation to get going, but also your belief that you can do it, that you are evolving into the identity. How great is that to feel certain? Now that's completely doable. That distinction is really important so you're not just tallying behaviors, not just marking off the habit tracker, but really taking time to think how those behaviors feel and what they mean to you. Let your identity evolve from how your progress feels inside your story, inside your path for life change. So meaningful work and making consistent progress, even if they're tiny steps, will be your most powerful driver of the positive emotion and progress that you make, okay? But I want to give you a little bit of the science and the core components of the progress principle because Teresa and her co-author Stephen Kramer analyzed nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from knowledge workers in seven companies. And the data was very clear. When people made even small progress toward their own meaningful goals, their mood improved, their engagement deepened, and their performance simply soared. Takes the doubt out of what you can achieve. The core components are these four. Small wins matter more than big breakthroughs. Grand achievements are rare. The tiny steps build self efficacy, they reinforce momentum, and they create a sustainable path forward. One you have confidence in. Two, as we said, progress must be meaningful to you. The wind doesn't have to look impressive to anyone else. What matters is that you believe it's tied to something purposeful, whether that's health, creativity, identity, freedom, whatever is most desirable to you to carry on in your new identity in your new life. three, your inner work life is affected daily, okay? It's not something that comes and goes. It's not something you can pick up and put down. Teresa coined the term inner work life to describe the mix of emotions, perceptions, and motivation we bring to each day. The small wins daily improve this eternal experience and then makes us more likely to repeat, to act again tomorrow for more progress. We're excited, we're going, we're doing it. And number four, along those lines, momentum compounds. Dopamine and confidence increase, which builds a positive spiral toward your reinvention. In midlife, this is key. We can reclaim our agency, ourselves, our identity one step at a time. And why does this resonate so strongly with midlife women? Well many midlife women in transition are high achieving, responsible, smart, and deeply invested in getting results. That's you. But they're often discouraged by the scale of transformation they envision. They're thinking that big win. They're thinking back to perfectionism, to big rules, a big path, a big plan. That's something to let go of as a smart, high achieving woman. And now recognize how the small, meaningful forward movement directly enhances your emotional well being and self trust. In this process, you're often starting over or shifting identity. You're reclaiming potential and personal goals, maybe after years of caregiving or career pressure. And along the ways, you're going to face inner doubts, the discomfort we always talk about, like is it too late? Or is this even working? But those doubts can be answered with evidence. Teresa says yes, it's working even if all you did was move one inch today. That's your inner work, your inner momentum, not just outer action, and it reinforces who you're becoming and how you're effectively doing it. This progress principle gives you permission to shrink the task without shrinking the goal, to reframe identity as someone who is already making progress, and to celebrate micro milestones without waiting for applause or finish line from the external environment. It invites you to notice and honor your daily flickers of progress, not just the fireworks. In closing, I'm gonna say, isn't this what we want at midlife? Again, to feel lit up, engaged, and proud of who we're becoming, even if we're just one drawer, one walk, or one sentence into our reinvention. It's the power of a tiny triumph, and it's what your future self is counting on. I'm gonna challenge you to write one sentence about how you want to feel next year at this time. That will help you establish that identity and know what you want, what is meaningful to you as you begin this process. It's a tiny triumph and it's a step toward becoming her. And it matters. In the next short episode, I'm going to talk about how this kind of action really actually provably rewires identity. How choosing change even in small ways starts to shift who you believe you are. Remember, this story of renewal is authored beautifully by you. Let's edit it with the best tools available now, so you will never want to put the story of you away. I can't wait to see how your twenty twenty five transformation tale unfolds with the utmost fulfillment. Again, I'm Lori Adams and I love podcasting here, but I love even more working with women like you as your own life coach to reclaim your potential and reach for whatever midlife goal means the most to you without distractions and with individual guidance, come work with me one on one. Just send an email to hello at laurieadamscoaching dot com to schedule a no pressure conversation and Q ⁇ A about individual coaching with me. We'll explore the goal, the desire that has eluded you most, including weight loss if that's the important one for you. The story of you deserves it. To keep the transformational information coming each week, please follow Fire Up at fifty five plus wherever you download your podcasts, and if on Apple, share a review and a starworthy rating. It's much appreciated.