Managing personal change is inherently tricky.
We usually make the flawed assumption that it is skills based, in other words that we can read about it, go to seminars, watch videos and be taught to change.
Whilst it is true that we can be taught, generally we won't change.
For background reading [free download]: "Managing Personal Change"
Contrary to what the multi-billion dollar self-help sector, and it's gurus, will tell you:
"Narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to a better life, and there are few who find it."
This site can help you become one of those few.
[1] Immunity to change
We can't change because of what Professors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey have referred to as: "Immunity to Change" or inner resistance.
So what is the source of our inner personal resistance that lies beneath and sabotages our best attempts at managing personal change?
Research undertaken by Kegan and Lahey has led them to define inner personal resistance to change as a "hidden commitment", with a hidden underlying root cause, and this "hidden (or unconscious) commitment" is in direct opposition and conflict with our stated commitment to change.
So what this means in practise is that our best intentions, for example a New Year resolution, to lose weight or stop smoking is sabotaged from the outset by another unconscious part of us that actually likes and wants to smoke and over eat.
Your failure to achieve a personal change goal isn’t the result of a lack of will-power, it’s your "emotional immune system" trying to protect you.
Here's how to deal with it:
[2] The knowing doing gap
So quite clearly, any attempt at managing personal change starts with a clear understanding of what our unconscious or hidden commitments really are.
This is often referred to as the "knowing doing gap", or as Kegan puts it:
"... how to close the gap between our intentions, things we actually want to carry out, and what we are actually able to do".
[3] Your inner map of reality
As we are all the product of our own ethnic, national, social and religious backgrounds we quite naturally have an inbuilt inner map that see life from the perspective of that background and that has a tremendous effect on our attempts at managing personal change.
This inner map applies a whole range of filters related to the profile and characteristics of our environmental background. We develop our own personal beliefs that are based on this inner map of reality, to navigate us through life and primarily to keep us safe. For most of us, most of the time, this is largely an unconscious process.
These inner beliefs are very strong and have a very strong emotional (or energy) element and it is this unconscious feeling, based on an inner belief, that is the root cause of our resistance to our best attempts at managing personal change. The inevitable outcome is that it is this unconscious belief and associated powerful feeling that causes us to not do things we commit to doing.
These inner beliefs also act as very strong filters and stop us seeing or hearing anything that conflicts with those beliefs.
[4] How you build your own personal (and unconscious) inner map of reality
Here’s the big picture of how your internal map of reality operates to generate your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours:
It is these sequences of internal representations and
associations all strung together that create your experience of life,
internally in terms of how you interpret it and how you feel about it,
and externally in terms of how you experience it.
The problem is that this internal representation that you have created, and that shapes your thoughts feelings and behaviours and all of your attempts at managing personal change is a very poor copy of reality, and it interferes with your all of your attempts at managing personal change.
This is because so much of what came in through your senses has been deleted, distorted and generalized in a number of ways.
You’ve made a map that represents your perception of reality, but that perception isn’t reality, and it isn’t really very accurate.
If you change the internal representations and associations that you make, if you change the meaning that you attribute to them, and if you change how you string them together you get a different outcome – i.e. you feel differently and behave differently.
Also, this works on reverse, if you change your behaviour you change how you think and feel, so:
See: Why we think the way we do
[5] A summary of how inner your inner resistance to change occurs
Based on the descriptions we have just examined, here is a summary of how inner resistance to managing personal change develops and why, and how it manifests:
[6] And here's how we all get stuck in the mud with all this
Part of the way our minds work is that:
This is the tragedy of the "natural" human condition and why we fail at managing personal change.
If you can take charge of these things, you CAN succeed at managing personal change as you choose how you do them instead of having them just run on automatic pilot.
By taking charge, you can make huge changes in how you experience life and the kind of outcomes you get.
You can waste years of your life (as I have done) and spend a fortune in various forms of introspection, analysis and therapy digging and delving into how and why you think and feel as you do - and becoming very well informed.
Please don’t get me wrong, there can be value in doing this – for a while. But ultimately there comes a point when we want to move beyond all the information about why we think and feel as we do and we just want a practical solution - we want to change.
Practical solutions to change the way you think
Note:
Some of these solutions are free of charge and some are paid for.
I have no commercial relationship with any vendor and I do not receive any commission or financial payment if you purchase any of their services.
I recommend them because I believe them to be of benefit and value.
Each of the links below will take you to another page on this site that provides a full context and review of the solution offered.
In most cases I have also provided you with a write up of my own experiences with the solution.
Then, and only then, if you wish to take it any further you can either download the free material that I have provided, or connect with the third party solution provider via the links shown on that page.
Personal Development Tools
Self Talk: Dealing With The Ghost In Your Machine
NLP Course: Achieve and Sustain Peak Performance
Emotional Freedom Technique: Dealing With Your Anxieties & Stress
Cybernetic Transposition: Get All Levels Of Your Mind Working For You
Meditation Programme + Relaxation Music
Meditation Programme: No More Boredom + No More Years Of Training!
Relaxation + Meditation Music + Guided Meditations
Personal Development + Spiritual Growth Programmes
Higher Awareness: Personal Development and Spiritual Growth Programmes
Your failure to achieve a personal change goal isn’t the result of a lack of will-power, it’s your "emotional immune system" trying to protect you.
Immunity to change can be defined as a "hidden commitment", with an underlying root cause, that competes and conflicts with a stated commitment to change.
It these hidden commitments that cause people to not change and to fail to realise their best intentions.
Understanding this and knowing how to deal with your inner resistance is key to making any lasting personal change.
Understanding your personality type and thinking style is important.
I have wasted an awful lot of time both in business and in my personal life by not understanding this, and by wrongly assuming that we all think in fundamentally thinking in the same way.
It is true that as human beings, and regardless of ethnicity, culture and demographics, we have so much in common, and our basic values, needs and aspirations are very similar. But, and this is a very big but:
The way we receive and process experiences and information is very different.
This is partly to do with the "hardware" of our brains - the physiological structure of our brains - and partly to do with the "software" of our brains - the conditioning our brains have been exposed to by our primary care-givers and ethnic, cultural and societal influences.
The articles below will provide you with the basis of helping you form your own mental model for:
Who do you think you are, and what makes you so special?
This is why most people don't
think like you do. Are you a leader? Then less than 1 in 50 people think
like you do!
Katherine Benziger - Thinking Styles Assessment
How your brain makes you think. Why it matters to you to understand this. How to avoid suffering from "Prolonged Adaption Stress Syndrome".
Enneagram of Personality Types
Plotting your position in life the universe and everything via a modern synthesis of various wisdom traditions aka Integral Theory.
Howard Gardner: Multiple Intelligence
Multiple Intelligence Theory - suggests that you may be more intelligent than you thought you were and in different ways!
George Kelly: Personal Construct Psychology
Here's why you think the way you do and the big picture of how your internal map of reality operates to generate your responses
Emotional Intelligence - Self Awareness In The Emotional Dimension
Emotions get in the way or get you on the way. Reason leads to conclusions, emotion leads to action.
Primal Leadership - How The Leader's Emotions Infect The Organisation
The leader's emotions can affect you in ways you may not be aware of.
It is also helpful to understand models of change for providing a proven route map through the stages of change and learning:
Bridges Transition Model - Coping With Imposed Change
There is a distinction between the events, situations and circumstances that are imposed on you and your inner response to these things. This is known as "transition". One of the major causes of the difficulty that you will experience with transition is that it necessarily involves letting go of something.
Lost In Transition - How To Cope With Hard TimesFurther advice and support for successfully making the transition with the three stage psychological and emotional transition process
Recognising Limbo As A Stage Of TransitionLimbo is a situation in which nothing happens or changes for a long period of time, and it is difficult to make decisions or know what to do, often because you are waiting for something else to happen first.
Kubler Ross - Change Curve -Mapping The Impacts Of Imposed ChangeMapping the impacts of unexpected or imposed change. Understanding that people can go through grief responses when faced with unexpected life-changes.
Conscious Competence - Stages Of Learning
Why 95% of your thoughts are an unconscious competence. How to move from “I don’t know what I DON’T know” to “I don’t know what I DO know!
Return to: Home Page
Just Because You Have A Spectacular Failure Doesn’t Mean The Game Is Over. The thought that you could fail can really slow you down. But the problem is not the failure, the problem is your relationshi…
Are You Lost In Transition? To be in an alien North African city, late in the evening, in the dark, completely lost in transition from the main market square back to the obscure location of our Riad…
Do You Believe What You See Or Do You See What You Believe? Like the characters in "The Matrix" we are fooled by the illusion that what we see is how things really are. Why? Because this is the mind's…
What Impact Will You Leave In The Lives Of Others? If you knew you were going to die tonight and you were given a few minutes to reflect before that happened, what would you say was the meaning of yo…
If You Want Others To Be Happy, Practice Compassion. If You Want To Be Happy, Practice Compassion. Compassion is derived from the Latin words "com pati" meaning to suffer with. It has been defined as…
The Power Of Expectation Of An Outcome Regardless Of The Lack Of Any Substance To That Expectation. Traditionally, the placebo effect occurs when false, or dummy, treatments of inert substances [that…
This Is What Will Happen After You Take It.
"This is your last chance," rebel leader Morpheus tells Neo, holding a coloured pill in each hand. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in y…
This Has To Be One Of The Best Ways For Living The Best Life You Can Possibly Live. An online search on life hacks will invariably provide you with multiple links to ways of increasing your productivi…
The Blessing And The Curse Of Impermanence. There is a story of a king who sought wisdom. Eventually he heard of a man living in a remote part of the kingdom who had a reputation for great wisdom. The…
The Stories That We Tell Ourselves Are A Matter Of Choice. The stories we tell ourselves form the backcloth and the tapestry of our lives. These narratives shape and define our sense of self and how a…
Trust Is A Choice And It Creates Your Reality. Nothing in life is permanent and nothing lasts forever. Every relationship ends in tears. Somebody leaves or somebody dies. This is how things are. This…
Finding This Hidden Value Is The Key To A Huge Upside. Most of us spend our lives working to linear rules where there is an equal relationship between effort and result. Work hard you get a result. Wo…
How To Be There When Preparation Meets Opportunity. The growth mindset holds the core belief that your intelligence and personality is something you can develop and that you can expand and grow. The p…
If you can't think of the right thing to say, say nothing.
The concepts we employ, the categorizations we apply and the words we choose and use to articulate a direct experience put us in a double bi…
To Believe Or Not To Believe - That Is The Question. Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its beliefs and dogmas. The religious and cultural beliefs that sanction and allow or impose…
How To Stay Far From The Madding Crowd. Herd mentality describes how we make decisions based on what everyone else is thinking and doing. It is also known as a mob or crowd mentality. We follow the he…
We Suffer Every Time We Believe A Thought That Argues With What Is. When your mind is perfectly clear, what is, is what you want. If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try…
Slack Is The Capacity To Effect Change And The Resource To Deal With The Unexpected. Many organizations are obsessed with efficiency and try to ensure that every resource is fully utilized to its full…
Less and less do you need to force things, until you arrive at non-action. We are brought up to believe that we get what we want in life as a result of what we do, by the actions that we take, that ha…
Is It Helping You Or Hindering You? Your point of focus is the central point of your attention. Your point of focus is a binary choice and the result of that choice is critical to your happiness, your…
To accomplish any success in life, you must identify accurately what it is that you hunger for, thirst for and long for. The purpose of this article is to look at the foundation of the secret for succ…
Discover The Joy Of A Quiet Mind Can you stop thinking? According to Zen Buddhist priest Shunmyo Masuno the art of not thinking about anything is not easy to achieve. Even practising monks find it dif…
What Is Holding You Back From Pursuing Your Dreams? Your self confidence is based on ability. Your self confidence is all about your level of trust, faith and belief in your abilities [your power] and…
Learning how to overcome fear and perform powerfully is a skill that we all need to acquire as fear of failure affects most of us at some point in our lives. Whilst it is natural to feel a level of fe…
You are creating hell on earth when you are too subsumed within your underlying and deeply embedded negative energetic states. To counter your dissatisfactions and misery you initially go unconscious…
How you mentally characterize a situation has a profound impact on how you respond to it emotionally. There is a direct causal link between how you think about a situation, the words you use to articu…
What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it? What Conclusions Can We Draw About Living In A Participatory Universe? The inescapable conclusion is that the world and the universe (wit…
The journey home to the energy of life does not consist in arriving at a new destination it is a coming home to one’s self. [1] How are you feeling, what is your dominant emotion right now? [2] Where…
You have to be willing to suffer today in order to reap enormous rewards tomorrow. The long game is so hard to play because it involves taking a series of very small steps, that people rarely see, per…
How To Build Self Esteem In my early life and until my early twenties I suffered from a deep inferiority complex and low self esteem. Forty years later and, said in sincerity and with humility, I have…