Change is NOT a 5-step process
There seems to be a popular trend of short-cutting the work it takes to make real & lasting change in personal development at the moment. Everywhere I look, I’m bombarded with, “5 Steps to Happiness” and “Find your Bliss in just 2-weeks”.
So, I’m here to deliver what might be a very unpopular opinion: Making lasting change is NOT an 80’s diet fad.
And frankly, I’m really tired of it being portrayed that way.
On the one hand, these types of quick-fix ideas feed us the notion that self-development work is easy and if we can’t do these “5 steps”, we’re somehow failing. And on the other hand, it deeply angers me because it defeats the whole damn point of doing the work!
This kind of thinking:
Encourages emotional bypassing. It doesn’t acknowledge the emotional and thought patterning that requires rewiring, rewriting, and rediscovery in order for us to get to the better-for-you outcome
Overrides where the actual work is, namely, in the messy middle part. The process of working through the old patterning and muddling our way through it is where ALL the learning happens. It is where we get to experiment with new ways to think and manage our emotions. And therefore, learn what works for us and what doesn’t. It’s also where we get to unravel and put into perspective the reasons we had a limited view of our own self-worth in the first place
If true change was as easy as 5-steps, wouldn’t we all have read that one magazine article, Pinterest post or Instagram post & be miraculously changed by now?
To make real change my darling friend, we gotta face the demons.
One of the biggest reasons for lack of change, self-sabotage, and maintaining the same patterning, is because there is a competing or conflicting belief we’re holding onto to protect ourselves from a deeply shameful, embarrassing realization or just unconscious learned behaviour, that is hindering us from that change.
That conflicting or competing belief is hidden from our conscious behaviour & mind. In fact, it’s often so well hidden, it can take months (maybe even years) of self-awareness work and reframing to bring it to the surface. And because it’s so invisible to our consciousness, it operates under the radar - informing our thoughts, our self-talk, our judgment, reasoning and world view, and most of all, our choices & behaviours. Completely undetected.
And to find true change; to really change how we DO things, we would need to reveal that unconscious belief, so that we can gameplan how to counteract it.
This kind of work requires:
Unpacking the behaviours - truly understanding what barrier or hindrance they are really causing in our lives.
Understanding what we’re getting out of these behaviours - what’s the reward? See, we wouldn’t continue to act in certain ways, unless it was useful to us in some way. That “usefulness’ can look positive, like being seen to be the “expert” or best at something. But it can also look less positive, like protecting us from emotional connections, building relationships, or being vulnerable. It’s important to understand the nature of the reward & its effects on us. Because even the “positive” ones may have a negative outcome on our lives. Like always being seen as the expert means we push ourselves to be the best all the time, leading to burnout and personal life neglect.
Getting clear on how we’d rather be behaving and how we’d rather be feeling. Painting a picture of what the ideal would look like in our minds, can be a very powerful tool to motivate change. It gives us an alternative reality to look forward to. And gives us the real goal to work towards.
Only once we’ve unpacked the above can we TRULY start to see new possibilities for how we can behave and experiment with different ways to achieve that ideal.
And some 5-step process of short-cuts cannot give us the same depth of self-knowing. Because, more often than not, those 5-steps belonged. to someone else. They are based on another person’s personal experiences, context, and set of beliefs. This means, they will be of no use to you, because your experiences, context and beliefs are so different.
Real change can only come from unpacking, understanding & experimenting with YOUR unique challenges.
xx
