Why is it so difficult to really make an important change? Because a part of you functions like a powerful, but hidden, stage director who lives inside you and orchestrates some of your reactions from below your conscious level of awareness. This Hidden Director as I call it, being completely loyal, meticulously follows the life script you have spent years writing for yourself. You were not necessarily aware each time you added something to your script, which is why consciously you often don’t know some of what is written there. But when you set out to change, that script stirs up feelings in you that hold you back from change. Those feelings are based on some unconscious belief that either 1) you aren’t capable of making the change or, 2) changing would cause truly awful things to happen to you—like nobody would like you anymore, or you’d lose your job, or your spouse would leave you, or you’d sound stupid—or (fill in the blank with a catastrophe).
What a breakthrough it is when people come to understand that this kind of resistant negative feeling, though compelling and intense, is only a feeling, not an accurate measure of what will really happen to you if you change. Of course you still have to manage that feeling in order to get yourself to move forward, but there are techniques for doing that. I talk a lot more about coping with resistance to change on my audio CD and in my book, Take-Charge Living: How to Recast Your Role in Life...One Scene at a Time. Read more at www.take-chargeliving.com
2 comments:
I once took a course called "Changing Difficult People". It took three days, but the message was very simple. We can't change difficult people. The only thing we can change is our own reaction and behavior.
So I learned that the most difficult person to change in my life, is me! The message seems self-depricating. But actually it is completely empowering. Whenever I am in an uncomfortable situation, I know that I must decide to take action. I can't just sit back and hope for the best, because no decision is a decision.
If a pattern of behavior has lead to less than positive results, I am the only one who can break that pattern. And when I do, I am the one who can take quiet pride in having done so. What a powerful messsage!
I worked with a company once that offered a course called "Dealing with Difficult People." The instructors said that invariably the attendees had been enrolled by their employers in hopes that they would learn how to be less difficult to work with.
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