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For Lasting Personal Changes, Use the Four “S” Steps: Slow – Small – Steady – Secret
Why do you need to go “SLOW” when making permanent, behavioral changes in your life?
Because you want to initiate changes in way that minimizes long-term negative outcomes or consequences, one of which is relapse, going back to old behavior, losing the gains you have achieved.
Changes that occur slowly create the least amount of chaos, trauma and disturbance of the status quo. This in turn helps to reduce the resistance for backlash kicked up by status quo.
Your mind, your body, your social and emotional contexts are able to store small changes introduced on a slow regular basis. When taking antibiotics, for instance, you do not take the whole bottle at once. Instead, you take a little at a time, slowly introducing the medicine into your system over time.
This is not to say that at times change does not occur suddenly or relatively rapidly. I have seen people suddenly and forever give up alcohol use and never look back. However, the best way to manage change is to initiate it gradually. Stay away from quick 
fixes and earth moving starts. Make your changes slowly. If a miracle comes along and brings you the changes you desire overnight and without much effort receive it and be grateful. In the meantime, bring change into your life at slow pace. You will stay balanced longer.
“Slow” is successful and it lasts. A quick fix of quick fixes usually does not last and ironically, can bring unintended, unexpected negative outcomes.
Why do you need to make changes in “SMALL” steps?
Because success and only success breeds success. You are more likely able to pull off small increments of change than huge sweeps of the pendulum. Small steps allow you to keep track of what you’re doing and not overlooked details that may trip you up later.
Learn to identify and take care of needs in your life on a daily basis. This way you can take care of one thing at a time and not become overwhelmed. Furthermore, it’s easier to practice one small step at a time and practice is what helps you become comfortable with your normal. Small steps are not as frightening as big changes and therefore you’re less likely to become discouraged.
Major rule of how the Universe functions: big, stable and long lasting things all start small: acorn to majestic oak tree; fetus to full grown mature adult; seedlings to producing tomato plant. The same principle applies to making personal changes and establishing new habits of personal behavior. There is no other way.
Why is “STEADY” change important to overall behavioral shifts and successful change?
Start and stop change is exhausting. It does not allow for regular building of the changes you want. Huge buildings are built by the steady me up upon. Babies grow cell by cell on a steady schedule. Health and quality of life is damaged if you do not take care to meet all of your needs on a steady regular and daily basis, such as breathing, sleeping, eating.
A steady pace can have a boring side effect. On-again, off-again movement and change may seem more exciting, but it jeopardizes successful building up of what you want because it does not keep the momentum of change going.
Building new habits requires a methodical pace. This is a matter of commitment to laying the bricks, rain or shine, no matter what stands in your way. To be sure, challenges arise and the unexpected obstacles will come at you. But you persist and go back to where you left off, getting back on course, steady as she goes. This stabilizes the increases in the progress of your personal changes.
Why is it necessary to keep new changes for the better “SECRET” from other people?
This necessary ingredient for substantial change often perplexes people. They asked, “Why do I need to keep my success at making behavioral changes secret, especially when they are for the better?”
Here is the answer: anything new is fragile and needs to be protected in its early phases of growth. Not talking about your early success with other people provides this protection by not exposing it. If you talk about early success often what people say and do are two different things. They may say, Hey, that’s great!” and other congratulatory statements. However unconsciously, without you or them knowing it, other parts of them, unconsciously, may be resisting your changes because those changes may require them, for example your friends, to deal with you differently.
In effect, this may mean they have to change in order to keep pace with you and keep in sync with your new behaviors. And your friend may not be ready for that. So without knowing it, the more you talk about how great it is to be losing weight, for example, by exercising at 5:30 am every morning, your friend may subtly do and say things that are not so encouraging as they di9d when you first announced your commitment to regular exercise.
New behaviors generate reactions from other people that may be designed to bring you back to being the way you were. Dieting is another good example. Your family, let’s say, has generally been on the large and overweight side, but you have decided to bring about changes in your diet and eventually changes in your body mass.
You can easily imagine a scenario where the new dieter gets nonverbal and verbal reactions at Thanksgiving at her parents’ house when she announces that she’s been eating half as much as usual and as a result in the last months has lost 35 pounds. On one hand, how great is that! Congratulations to the dieter are in order. On the other, hand the dieter’s mother who loves to eat has just finished long preparation of a huge meal. As the family gathers around the table and begins to eat, the dieter takes small portions. You can bet your last pound lost that there will be comments, some of them negative about dieting in general and perhaps that dieter in particular.
To give others close to you a chance to catch up and adjust to the new you, keep changes a secret for at least the first six months. This is not to say changes may not become obvious, but you don’t initiate conversation about those changes and if someone else, does you change the subject.
Slow, small, steady and secret changes keep you focused on your new behaviors which is where your mind needs to be early on. Talking about it with others, rushing the process, taking shortcuts or bragging about all your progress in all likelihood will relieve you of the fruit of your labor and return you to where you begin, only with more discouragement and despair than before you started.