Incremental Change of Life

Posted on September 12, 2007
Filed Under Journal |

When we want to change our lives, we want it to be a sudden process. Waking up the following morning to find that we are a different - perhaps better person, with an improved, happier life. Truth be told, it took me a while to learn that such thinking actually gets in the way of our ability to change. Eventually I came to the realization that changing my life isn’t a very difficult thing, and it needn’t be difficult for you either. Here I will share with you what has worked for me over the years. However, there is one proviso which none of us like to hear - three little words that send people fleeing to the hills - that make them stop reading, close the page or shut the book:

Change takes time.

No one wants to hear those words do they? People want “10 easy steps to change your life”; if it really was that simple, everyone would have done it a long, long time ago. So you have to make a decision. Do you really, honestly and truthfully want to change? If the answer is yes, then you are going to have to go through a fairly lengthy process and to some degree an extent of pain. Our egos - the little child within us that stamps their feet wanting it all easy - and all right now! - demands the path of least resistance. You want to know why? It’s like this; deep down, your ego knows that simple self-change programs rarely ever work.

Anything that threatens the ego’s current condition will be rejected. The ego’s hold is so powerful that when you come across something that can be truly life changing - the ego will mess with your sub-conscious and cause you to push that thing away. That’s why it accepts those “10 easy steps”; they are non-threatening.

Meanwhile the idea of change taking time has a least two problems for the ego. 1; The ego really doesn’t want to change, 2; The ego doesn’t like anything that takes too long.

So to start with, changing your life is partially about staking a claim of ownership over it. Do you want to run your life - or do you want your ego to run it? Once you have made that decision you can either appease your ego and sit back, never to think about this again, or you can consciously move on - knowing that eventually you will be leading a very different life.

Changing your life then, takes time. But what precisely are the steps you need to take? Well, as I see it - there are two sides to the process. The first side is the what I call the internal process. The internal process is understanding what is going on under the hood, in general terms it’s about attitude, belief and self-awareness. I covered this in the Conscious Thinking Series.

The second side of the process, is about the physical aspects of your life; that is the things you do, how you live, what you eat, where you go, your job, the people around you etc. These are the things people mean when they talk about changing their life. All this certainly can be changed, but that change has to happen hand-in-hand with awareness of that internal process of conscious thinking. Secondly, drastic changes will not work - at least not for long. For lasting, effective and true change - things need to be taken in incremental steps.

Don’t be afraid of starting small. Twenty small changes over the course of three or six months is far more effective than one sudden major change. In many ways, it is about re-programming yourself - and that doesn’t happen instantly. Think of all the years it has taken you to get where you are now. All those things in your life have built up slowly over the course of time…and life can be changed to anything you want in exactly the same way.

In a later part of this series, I will talk about how to create your own methodology for personal change.

Comments

3 Responses to “Incremental Change of Life”

Seamus on September 13th, 2007 2:14 am

Here here … couldn’t agree more.
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Attila Borcsa on September 16th, 2007 12:05 pm

Sounds good. The question is, what is really to be changed? As you say, it is about re-programming yourself. Isn’t this just perfecting the machinery? If so, I think there is a need of a radical alteration of the paradigm of (self- or life)change. The ego will want to survive by all means. Even fear of physical death is conquered if there is a chance for the ego to survive (heaven, reincarnation etc.)
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Marcus on September 16th, 2007 12:56 pm

I am going to write a bit more soon about how we can change things on a personal level.

But in general, I think it all depends on how you look at this. That is, we can make a ‘program’ for other people to follow; in which case we are considering this from the point of view of how it affects others. In this case we can only talk about generalized changes, because everyone is unique - so we can only really deal with things that affect everyone. This in my opinion is why a lot of personal-development programs don’t work for a lot of people. Although we have generic building blocks, people in general are not generic. And this maybe a part of the paradigm change you are talking about.

On the other hand, I tend to look at personal and self development in an individualized way. Not how it affects others, but how it affects me. This makes it a matter of our own individual change and allows us to get down to specifics, rather than vague generalities.

What needs to be changed? Well that is up to the individual. We just need basic guidelines for how to most effectively implement these changes.

If you want to be literal about your analogies then sure we can call it perfecting the machine. But I feel that goes back to the generalized “catch-all” idea of applying themes to all humanity, rather than focusing on ourselves as an individual. I prefer to focus on an individual learning to become aware of how they personally function rather than how everyone else functions. Those two aspects tend to be vastly different.
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