Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

I have a rule. I don’t do smoking cessation work with people whose families want them to stop smoking.

I only do it with people who, themselves, personally, want to stop smoking.

I learned this after two unsuccessful experiences with clients in their 20s who were booked in, and brought along, by their mothers. The young man was pretty clearly just there because it was the path of least resistance; the young woman, I think, wanted to be able to say to her mother that she’d tried and it hadn’t worked (so that her mother would shut up about it).

Neither of them were motivated to change for themselves. It wasn’t a priority for them, it wasn’t important to them, and they didn’t really believe they could do it anyway.

So if someone rings up on behalf of their son, daughter, partner, mother, father, brother, sister or friend, I politely turn them away, because the outcome’s not going to be good for anyone. It’s like trying to teach a pig to sing. You waste your time, it annoys the pig, and the farmer thinks you’re a bad singing teacher.

photo credit: The Pug Father

But if there’s a change you’ve been thinking about, and wondering about, but just not doing anything about, you’re not stuck with your current level of motivation for change. Here’s how you can increase it, by working on the three elements of motivation: Ready, Willing and Able.

Ready

Readiness to change is about priority. If the need to change isn’t taking up a big slice of your mental landscape compared to everything else that’s going on, it’s not going to get the resources it requires. This is why it’s almost impossible to sell prevention, but easy to sell rescue: People in need of rescue are highly focussed.

photo credit: Tim Green aka atoach

One of the most successful methods of stopping smoking is to be told by a cardiologist, when you have just had a heart attack, that you are definitely going to die if you don’t. Being told exactly the same thing when you’re feeling perfectly healthy just doesn’t have the same impact.

It’s sad but true that you often won’t be ready to change until the need for change looms in your view like an elephant you’re about to hit with your car.

How to be more ready: Start to make your desired change more prominent in your life. Leave pictures lying around, or pin them on a bulletin board, that remind you about it. Subscribe to (and read or listen to) blogs, podcasts and mailing lists that talk about it. Get books about it.

Sit down for a few minutes, close your eyes to screen out distractions, and think about it for a few minutes. Bring the most vivid sensory imagination and the most intense emotion you can into play and attach them to the change you want to make. Picture yourself after the change.

photo credit: Valerie Everett

Willing

Willingness to change is about importance, which is different from priority. A change can be important without being high-priority. It’s important that I get my tax done soon, but it’s not high priority, which means it keeps getting bumped by other things that are.

“It’s not really that bad.” Those are the words that stifle the impulse to change. Even if we don’t like our current life, we may put up with it rather than change, because change can be uncomfortable and require energy.

How to be more willing: The question to ask is: What are your highest goals, and how does this change serve them?

Think about the benefits of the change. How does it take you closer to being the person you want to be?

Think about the benefits of the benefits.

Keep thinking (and write them down) until you get to the heart of the matter: If you make this change your life will be better than it is now. The change will be worth it.

Or maybe you’ll conclude that it won’t. If the shoe don’t fit, it ain’t your shoe.

photo credit: chaosinjune

Able

Finally, you can be convinced that change is important, you can have it as a high priority – but if you don’t have a basic confidence that it’s possible, you’re unlikely to start.

The thing is, too, you can actually have the potential to change without realising it. If you think you can’t change, you’re right. But if you think you can change – and have a realistic plan and possibly some support to do so, because hope is not a strategy – you’re probably right about that, as well.

This is the part of the motivation process that most people find hardest, and it feeds back into the other two. If you don’t think you can do something, trying is not going to be a priority, and you’re going to convince yourself it’s not that important.

How to be more able: Having a plan – any plan – is better than having no plan. Even if you abandon the plan for a better one once you’re underway. You can’t steer if you’re not moving.

photo credit: Andre Charland

And there are very simple, very accessible skills that anyone can master which put change within your reach (and help you to focus on it and make it important and a priority).

Here’s my suggestion. If you don’t have a plan yet, sign up for my free course, Seven Steps to a Personal Change Plan.

And if you’ve already done that course, or you know what change you want to make but aren’t sure how to get moving, get focussed and succeed, sign up for my cheap course, Change Your Mind. It shows you a simple, step-by-step process for achieving your goals – and I’ve just added a new bonus: an ebook which reveals seven top techniques and tells you exactly how to use them to work on 12 very common real-life issues. It’s still just $29, though (NZD, so even less in the rest of the world).

You can increase your motivation and change your life for the better by working on these three elements: becoming ready, willing and able.

Technorati Tags: motivation, personal change, self-efficacy, confidence

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