How to Quit Fighting Yourself & Make the Changes You Want

Do you feel like you want to change your life, but find that everytime you start making changes, you get in your own way and sabotage your own efforts. Do you feel like you want change and fear change at the same time, so you get stuck and don't move forward at all? Don't worry, you're not crazy or broken - your mind-body system is working exactly as it's meant to. When you understand how it works, instead of trying to use willpower to fight your natural tendencies, you can use your natural tendencies to take you to where you want to be. This is how we work:

We like what’s familiar, because familiarity is easier. Familiarity enables us to process and make meaning of reality much more quickly. Familiarity is also safer - processing the meaning of reality more quickly, means we can respond to reality more quickly, which is sometimes necessary for survival. And we’ve all heard the saying, “better the devil you know than the one you don’t know.” Because we like familiarity, we’re drawn to stick with it and bring more of it into our lives. And have an automatic tendency to resist or avoid anything unfamiliar.

This is great if you love the life you’re familiar with. But if there’s anything you don’t love about your life, changing it is probably going to mean bringing something unfamiliar into your life. Remember that we automatically resist anything unfamiliar... so how can you stop fighting yourself and leverage the way you’re naturally designed, to make the changes you want to make? Well, before you try bringing them into your life, you can get familiar with the new things you want to have, do and be. That way, they’ll be familiar, and you won’t resist them - in fact, you’ll naturally draw them into your life.

How do I get familiar with the new things I want to bring into my life? Whatever you’re focusing on in your mind is what you’re getting familiar with. So if you want to get familiar with something different, start focusing on it in your imagination, before you even start working on bringing it into your reality. That way, by the time you start bringing it into your reality, it’ll feel totally comfortable, like a sense of coming home.

In our busy, information-saturated lives, the ability to control what you focus on is possibly the most powerful skill that you can master. We have stuff going on that distracts us and demands our attention all the time, and it can be really difficult at times to manage or change what we’re focusing on. What you’re focusing on is what you’re getting familiar with - and what you’re going to bring more of into your life. So here are some tips on how you can take back control of your attention and focus your mind on the stuff you want to bring into your life:

• Reduce your sources of distraction. Tim Ferris, author of the Best-selling book, “The 4 Hour Work Week,” talks about limiting incoming channels of information. Unsubscribe from the mailing lists and RSS feeds that don’t really add value. Switch off your email alerts and check email only twice a day. Block off time in your diary and close your office door, put your phone on voicemail and let your colleagues know not to interrupt you unless it’s genuinely an emergency. Don’t subscribe to those services that let you get notifications by sms on your mobile, and limit your TV intake or quit TV altogether.

• Introduce anchors to remind you what you want to be focusing on. You can create reminders that will help to distract you from focusing on the stuff that tends to automatically pull your attention. Create sms or email alerts that remind you what's important to you. Put up pictures around your workspace of the experiences you want to bring into your life. Subscribe to blogs that are talking about the stuff you want to get familiar with. Write statements of the beliefs you want to be familiar with and place these where you’ll see them regularly.

• Hang out with people who are focusing on what you want to focus on. Possibly the most powerful pull on our attention comes from other people. In our attempts to connect with other people, our natural tendency is to focus on the stuff that other people we’re interacting with are focusing on. Also, we tend to find people who already think like us, and hang out with them, and then we reinforce those familiar ways of thinking for each other. If you want to bring new experiences into your life, start hanging out with people who are already familiar with those experiences - because that’s what they’ll be focusing on. Because focus is so contagious, make sure you hang out with people who are focusing on what you want to focus on.

• Take time to relax yourself and do some concentrated day-dreaming, focusing on what you want to bring into your life. You already know how to do this, except most of us are day-dreaming about stuff that could go wrong, imagining the disasterous ends in great detail, and getting ourselves familiar with alot of experiences that we don’t want. Take back control of your attention and focus on imagining having the experiences you want already, and how your life will be different as a result. Imagine how you’ll feel. Dream up all the multi-sensory detail. The more detailed you are in your day-dreaming, the more familiar you’ll be with the changes you’re dreaming about - and the more smoothly you’ll start bringing them into your life.

Your Unique Voice... Hallelujah!

Michael and I had had 6 sessions together and he was still stuck. Michael was the typical Renaissance Professional - talented at a multitude of different skills, deeply curious about a variety of different fields, a quick learner, and exploding with ideas of new ventures to pursue. Loads of great ideas, quick learner, multi-talented... surely it’s the perfect formula for success? So why was Michael still stuck?

Michael was suffering from a bad case of RESISTANCE. Resistance is the silent killer, stealing more dreams and leading to more un-lived lives every year than heart disease and cancer put together, and made so much more powerful by the fact that so few people know how to recognize it. Resistance comes in many strains, but here are a few of the common symptoms that’ll let you know may have it:

• low energy, fatigue and increased desire to sleep during the day
• restlessness, boredom and fidgeting
• an increased fascination with detail and a strong desire to clean, organize, and alphabetize everything in your workspace
• a major drop in productivity
• poor concentration, easily distracted
• a sudden breadth and depth of imagination for catastrophe
• a mild to major paranoia about what other people think and a sense that the world may be conspiring against you
• increased sensitivity to the personality and behavioural flaws of those closest to you
• a flush of creativity and skill in the art of criticism and “soap box” oration on topics of a purely philosophical and irrelevant or non-practical nature
• increased desire for activities that provide immediate self-gratification: alcohol, shopping, TV, masturbation, and food containing fat, sugar, salt or chocolate
• increased participation in gossip and a penchant for drawing attention to yourself, getting yourself into trouble and creating life drama

In severe cases:

• the development of full-blown ADD
• clinical depression
• panic attacks
• the breakdown of significant relationships
• the development or recurrence of addictions to illegal, mood-inducing substances
• engagement in verbal aggression, violence, crime or self-destruction

But don’t worry if you got top scores on this test - just like heart disease and cancer, resistance is a disease of lifestyle, and entirely preventable and, in many cases it’s curable too. The key is to know what lifestyle habits put you at risk and to make better lifestyle choices. Here are some of the high risk lifestyle habits that Resistance Expert, Steven Pressfield, says could cause you to join the millions who suffer the agony of resistance:

• the pursuit of creative activities such as writing and art-making
• the launching of entrepreneurial ventures
• dieting and following health regimes
• participating in any program of spiritual advancement or personal development
• any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals
• any course designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction
• education of every kind
• any act of political, moral, or ethical courage
• the undertaking of any endeavor to help others
• any act that entails a commitment of the heart (like a decision to get married, have a child, weather a rocky patch in a relationship)
• the taking of any principled stand in the face of adversity

Oh, dear... if you’re anything like me, Michael or the people I typically work with, you’re probably off-the-scale high risk. And the worst part is, you’re about as likely to change your lifestyle choices as Homer Simpson is to quit beer and do-nuts. Because you’re wired for doing the very things that elicit resistance. Even if you wanted to fall back on the mold, and live a conventional life, you wouldn’t know how. You’re just not good at that. You feel compelled to question and to push the boundaries, to take up challenges and to create. It’s like you don’t have a choice. So if we can’t prevent it, we’ll beat it some other way. So let’s take heart in Pressfield’s encouragement: “Overcoming resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.”

So here’s what Michael and I did, after diagnosing a chronic case of resistance. Resistance is a dis-ease that’s triggered by the body. The body reacts to any major change by creating resistance, because, from a survival point of view, major change (in body temperature or blood pressure, for example) could be fatal to the body. But the actual embryos of resistance manifest in the mind - and we can find them and pluck them out one at a time, to ease our path forward.

At the core of Michael’s resistance was the thought that he needed to come up with something truly unique and original, for it to be a worthy pursuit that the world would welcome and people would be willing to throw their money at. The problem was that, for every idea he came up with, he found that there was already somebody else doing “his idea” or something similar to it. And then he’d tell himself that his idea is already being done, the market is probably already taken, and the world doesn’t need another one of those. Of course, you’ve probably already started to notice a couple of holes in that argument - the gaps in the rationalization behind our resistance are always easier for other people to spot!

By identifying the core rationalization behind his resistance, Michael was able to turn his finely tuned skills of criticism on his own thoughts, and soon enough was able to see them for the lies they were, opening his eyes to the paradigm shift that made all the difference. Michael realized that the fact that somebody else was doing “his idea” was a useful indication that there IS a market for that service, and he came to appreciate that there are, in fact, very few truly original ideas behind the successful ventures being launched all over the world each day. Instead, successful people recognize that creativity is often more about bringing already existing ideas together in a new way, with a new voice - and there’s alot of room for that.

This Christmas season reminded me of Michael and the particular brand of resistance that he had struggled with. I'm sure you've all become familiar with the two versions of the "Hallelujah" song that made the top 2 chart spots, and being played everywhere this Christmas. The same song, sung by two different people, made it to number one and number two on the charts. And it wasn't their original idea - Leonard Cohen wrote it 20yrs ago. For me this is clear evidence that you don’t have to have an entirely new idea to be successful with your venture, and that there’s enough room for us all to be appreciated for our unique “voice.” So how will you be expressing your unique voice and what high risk lifestyle plans have you got lined up for this year?

‘Cos you know what’s great about resistance? Resistance is the clearest indication that you’re growing. So when you feel the symptoms of resistance coming on, just pause and smile to yourself, knowing that it’s a sign that you’re already making progress.

Get real! What do you REALLY Want?

If you haven't got what you want, it's probably because you haven't decided specifically what you want. When we feel stuck we're often very clear on what we DON'T WANT, but when I ask my clients, "so what do you want instead?" they often look at me as though I just asked them when last they cleaned their toenails. Then they spew out a few vague ideas and hope I'll drop the line of questions. But I stay with it, because I know that probably the most important driver of change is having a clear, detailed outcome.

Seth Godin's blog this week addresses the importance of being really specific, and creating a really clear, detailed outcome picture - for the purpose of marketing, leadership and getting people to buy into your version of the future. The same principle applies for personal change - "if you want yourself to embrace your version of the future, talk about it like it's right around the corner, not on another planet."

Because we like what's familiar. In fact we like it so much, we gravitate towards it and we seek to repeat it - even if it wasn't ideal. One way that you can get familiar with the version of the future that you really want is by articulating a detailed picture of that future - the more detailed and specific you are, the more familiar and close that future will seem, and the more effortlessly you'll get there.