Genuine, sustainable change does not happen in the absence of healing.
Today is National Quitters Day!
According to a 2019 study conducted by Strava, (a national network of athletes,) 80% of people who make New Year's resolutions abandon them by the second Friday in January. Here we are! Congratulations!
To be clear, I am congratulating those of you who either, A. did not make resolutions, or B. abandoned them by today. Well done!
No, I'm not being sarcastic. I would like to see every one of us achieve our goals. I'm applauding you because you successfully learned that New Year's Resolutions are not effective for change. You didn't fail; This concept failed you.
Agendas
A whole lot of people are currently flooding the public space with what they think the answer to achieving lifestyle change is. (Including the article I mentioned above.) Some will tell you the answer is SMART Goals. Some will tell you the answer is the buddy system. Others will tell you that the missing element is spirituality. Everybody's got an answer. Most of them are trying to make money off of your temporary success and long-term “failure.”
I've been helping people make changes for more than a quarter century. I've personally been invested in changing and growing as a person for more than half a century. From this vantage point, it seems to me that all of those change plan proponents are right, and, they are all wrong, all at the same time.
What Works?
I did a video series and a .PDF last year called Making Sense Out of Change. It maps out the 7 Steps that are necessary to create sustainable changes in our lives. I worked with a number of clients through each step on their way to change. More often, however, I started down that path with clients and found them quickly putting it aside for matters that felt more pressing.
One thing I've learned after sharing these steps with so many people is that we humanfolk can be some seriously impatient people.
We want our changes to be easy and we want them to happen now now NOW! More often than that though, we get easily caught up in old, unhelpful and often shaming self-talk that derails us from the changes we genuinely want to make.
How the Train Falls Off the Tracks
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to the Making Sense Out of Change free .PDF:
Our goals are most typically unraveled by our assumptions.
We assume we can manage on our own, recognize when our thinking starts to drift and pull ourselves out of a tailspin all within the confines of our own heads. (No, reader. No, we cannot.)
We assume that we have only one brain, and that our conscious intentions are the whole truth of what we want and don’t want. (No, reader. No, it is not. For more information, click here and here.)
We assume there aren’t stages of change with different needs at each stage. (Yes, there really are!)
We assume that our ultimate goal is the place to start. (No, it’s really not.)
We assume that failure is a real thing, and let it throw us off of our positive path. (Failure is an insidious myth. As Ron Klein frequently said in our Ericksonian Hypnotherapy training sessions, “There is no such thing as failure; There are only outcomes. There’s the outcome you anticipated, and the outcome you didn’t anticipate that taught you something. You literally cannot fail if you use the information to learn forward.”)
Skipping is for Rocks
Those assumptions push us to skip steps.
When we skip steps, we miss out on building a deeper understanding of ourselves and how we really think. (Pro tip – It’s not how we think we think.) Making a lasting change is incredibly satisfying. One of the things that makes it so satisfying, is the trust we build with ourselves.
We have a chance to heal from the unhelpful stories we have told ourselves when we methodically work with all of the messages we are getting about the particular thing. This is a kind of change that goes way beyond our eating habits, exercise plans, financial disciplines or whatever else we may have set out to change.
Don’t miss anything!
Workbook
In the next month or so, I intend to create a companion workbook to Making Sense Out of Change. I’m hoping that putting the important self-questions out in pixels in worksheets that people can use again and again might make it easier for people to work their way through the 7 Steps as applied to change after change over time.
If that isn’t enough support, I am also available for personal coaching through the steps. I want you to get to your goals! But even more than that, I want you to get there in a way that honors all who you are, your relationship with yourself and your overall well being, and whatever behavioral changes you want to make in your life.