I recommend this as a personal development exercise, by the way. Even if you’re not a blogger, though it’s obviously easier if you are.

Each time you have a significant experience in your life, sit down and write about three things you’ve learned from it. It makes the difference between learning them and knowing you’ve learned them.

Anyway. For my birthday, I went rock climbing at an indoor climbing wall. The idea was to celebrate the fact that I’d overcome my fear of heights.

I shot a bit of video with my head-mounted camera, and my friend Duncan took some photos for me, and I’ve pulled them together into this video/slideshow thing:

Fun, right?

Here are three things I learned.

1. Progress short of perfection is OK

What you may or may not have noticed is that, while my friends were climbing to the top of things, I wasn’t.

I could certainly climb a lot higher than I ever could have before. And what I felt, when I reached those heights, wasn’t fear as such. It was caution, an unwillingness to climb higher.

As I talked about a while back, when I was training as a hypnotherapist, my esteemed sensei Roger Saxelby demonstrated the “Fast Phobia Cure” on me. Since then, I’ve been perfectly comfortable climbing ladders and standing on balconies, where once I had trouble going upstairs in a glass stairwell. But part of the Fast Phobia Cure as Roger practices it (and quite rightly so) is to remind the client to practice reasonable caution in the former phobic situation.

The thing with phobias is that phobic people tend to avoid the situations which trigger their fear. This means that they’re not used to dealing with them, so it’s appropriate to give them the suggestion of caution.

That caution is still with me, and I haven’t yet reached the point where I subconsciously trust the automatic belaying devices at the climbing wall to keep me safe. I can climb to about a two-storey level comfortably, but that’s it. For now.

I’m disappointed that I wasn’t as far on as I’d thought, but I’m also pleased that I’ve made the progress I have.

2. Sometimes doing is more healing than resting

I’ve had problems with my shoulder for a couple of months. I was sitting at an unergonomic desk for a few weeks, and it’s my mouse-using side that’s causing the trouble. Then I strained it doing a new kind of situp that the US Army are talking about introducing, which involves your hands being up over your head. I had to go to the physiotherapist a couple of times, and it’s troubled me intermittently since.

It was bothering me when I went along to the climbing wall, but I’d booked it a month in advance to commit myself to doing it, and I wasn’t going to back out. I put chemical heat pads on it for a couple of days beforehand and hoped for the best.

Since the climbing, though, it’s been fine. Apparently what it needed was not rest, but exercise.

I had a cold, too, but again, I wasn’t going to pull out. And again, I felt better for having done something.

My tendency, and maybe yours, is to think that if I feel bad that’s a good reason to do nothing, to rest, to pull back. And sometimes it absolutely is. But sometimes, getting active is exactly what I need in order to feel better.

The trick is in telling them apart – knowing when I need to rest and when I just want to rest (but would actually benefit more from pushing on).

3. Pre-commit to doing what will do you good

Which, of course, leads into my third point.

One reason that I join groups and classes is that if I do, I’m more likely to do whatever it is. I have a time, a place, and some people who are, however casually, expecting me to turn up. It’s booked. It’s in my calender.

I’ve recently been thinking about how to make my ecourses more useful – not by changing the content, but by improving the way that people engage with the content. I have a few ideas, up to and including an iPhone app, but one of the key ideas is to encourage people to book a time for doing the course into their calendar or diary.

Over 500 people have got the second email for my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course, for example, but fewer than half of them opened it, and only just over half of those have clicked on the link in it to get their ebook.

I can’t blame them. I do that too. I have a course that I’ve paid for sitting mostly unread in my inbox right now, because when I’m checking mail I’m checking mail, I’m not doing a course. When I do open an email for a course, I rush through it. I don’t have time set aside.

When I was planning to start up exercise again, I didn’t do so until I figured out where in my day I could fit it, because I knew it just wouldn’t happen otherwise. There was no point in “committing” to do it in a general sense. I had to commit to doing it at a particular time.

I often say, “I’m planning to do such-and-such”. But unless I have a scheduled time, a booking made, a commitment in place, I’m not really planning to do it. I’m inclining to do it. I’m wishfully thinking about doing it.

I’m not, by nature, a highly organised person. I’m not one of those counsel-of-perfection people who have an empty inbox, an uncluttered house and everything scheduled down to the minute. My filing system is that I generally know where I’ve put things, more or less. But for that very reason, I have to schedule things that I really want to do, or else they’ll get pushed out by the ordinary day-to-day doing.

Action Now

The service I provide here is not that I learn personal development lessons so you don’t have to.

It’s that I learn personal development lessons the hard way so that you can learn them much more easily, by listening to me.

But you haven’t learned them until you’ve acted on them. Personal development always has a practical exam.

So:

• What could you make some progress on, even if you don’t achieve perfection?
• Is there something you’ve been avoiding doing in order to “rest” or “heal” or “keep safe” that would benefit more from taking some action?
• And when are you going to schedule doing something about it?

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Now recovery groups have their critics, and (like everything else) they don’t work for everyone. Clearly, though, they worked for Uncle Al. If you’ve ever known an alcoholic, you’ll know that 40 years without drinking is no small achievement.

Recovery groups started with Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, though the same principles are now used for a much wider range of issues (including things that aren’t exactly addictions, like codependence and emotional health issues). What they have in common are a set of principles and techniques that give a structure for change – for very difficult change.

Most people are aware of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (and the other recovery groups). Many people even know the first step, though they might be hard put to name the subsequent ones. And it’s the first step I want to focus on today.

Step 1: Acknowledge that you have a problem

“Acknowledging that you have a problem” is actually a paraphrase of Step 1. The exact wording is:

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

That’s a big admission to make, and it’s not one that we usually rush into. In fact, often we deny that we have a problem at all.

Denial can be astonishingly powerful. Women can sometimes convince themselves, against all the biological evidence, that they’re not pregnant. Alcoholics, obviously, can convince themselves that they can “handle” their drink, even when their families are tiptoeing around with black eyes and they’ve just lost another job and are halfway through a bottle at nine in the morning. But we all have a greater or lesser talent for denial.

Are you a model?

Our brains make sense of the universe by building models of it. Because the whole universe can’t fit in my head, my models are, necessarily, simplified and approximate. To get these simplified, approximate models and keep from going insane with the detail, we learn to sift and discard evidence. The stronger our model becomes, the more likely we are to discard evidence that contradicts it.

This is known as “confirmation bias”, and it’s why people are able to believe bizarre conspiracy theories, to be fooled by Internet scams, and to hold one-sided political opinions. We deliberately ignore, explain away or dismiss as unreliable any evidence that suggests that a model that’s important to us may be flawed.

photo credit: Kofoed

When the model is not just about how the universe works but who we are, that model becomes very important indeed. And if one of the things that’s important to us is to be strong and cope, then any evidence that we can’t cope never makes it past the gatekeeper. So we pretend, to everyone including ourselves, that everything is just fine.

Can you see the pyramids?

Friends are important here. I’ve lost count of the times that the words of friends have helped me to see that I was knee-deep in denial about a problem that I had and needed to change. The consistent pattern, though, is that they would point out something and I would vigorously deny it. (That’s why it’s called denial, after all.)

Then I would think about what they said, because my friends are a smart bunch and I respect their opinions, and re-examine the evidence in light of what they said. Hey, maybe I am angry and irritable, even if I don’t feel that way. Certainly I have been acting angry. Well, why might that be?

The people who hold on to denial most powerfully are those who have been brought up to believe that everything must be kept on an even keel at all times – that weakness, or disharmony, or change are to be avoided at all costs. There’s a scene in one of the Seinfeld episodes where Seinfeld’s friend George rants that he would rather go ahead with a marriage he doesn’t want and live in misery for the rest of his life than go through the scene that would be involved if he told his fiancee he didn’t want to marry her. That – with perhaps a bit less self-aware cowardice and a bit more automatic thinking – is what I’m talking about.

Because if we admit that everything isn’t fine, then we might have to change. And change is hard, and we don’t feel resourceful. It’s better, isn’t it, to just pretend that we don’t have a problem than to drag it out into the light where we would have to try to deal with it and we might fail. And then everyone would know and think as badly of us as we do of ourselves, and we would think even worse of ourselves, because we failed to change.

That’s a truly terrifying thought for many people. One of the reasons I do what I do is to offer another path out of that dilemma. Your options are not limited to “continue to have this problem and pretend you don’t” or “continue to have this problem having confronted it unsuccessfully”. There are ways you and I can become better at changing, that change can become easier (though it’s never easy), that we can succeed at it. That’s a very hopeful thing, and it’s a great joy to me when I see it happen.

Action Now

Here’s today’s technique, if you can call it a technique. Go to someone you trust who knows you well, and ask them, “If you weren’t afraid of what my reaction might be, what would you tell me that I need to change?”

Do your best to listen without reacting. It’s OK to feel that they’re wrong – that’s the denial, the defense against change.

Now thank them without further comment, and go and consider what they said.

Could they be right?

Speaking of techniques, I created a free resource for the members of my mailing list this month (as I do every month). This month’s, though, is a 14-minute MP3 audio track about how to overcome self-sabotage, another very potent method of preventing change. You can pick it up in two ways:

1. If you join my mailing list before I bring out the next free resource sometime in April 2011, you’ll get a link in the “Welcome to my list” email to download the track (after you confirm your email address).
2. After that date, or before it if you like, you can go to my Overcoming Self-Sabotage Download page and either tweet the link on Twitter or share it on Facebook. You’ll then get a link to download the track.

And tune in next week, when you’ll hear Dr Bob say I’ll talk about how to actively resist change.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.

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The people of Christchurch are justly proud of their beautiful, historic city, but now it lies in ruins. In many cases, they have not just lost homes or possessions – they have friends, family and neighbours crushed under the rubble.

The city’s symbolic heart is Christchurch Cathedral. Its spire has collapsed, the beautiful 19th-century stone building is too dangerous to enter, and it’s feared that the bodies of visitors lie inside.

Through all this, the people have shown a calm courage and a warm neighbourliness to those in trouble which makes me proud to say they are my people.

Help has poured in from around the country, and from our friends in Australia, the USA, the UK, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. The New Zealand Red Cross is coordinating rescue and relief efforts. When their website went down under the mass of traffic (it’s now back up again), my friend Grant at the aid agency Oxfam provided a page on their site to enable donations to continue to flow in. And my friend Louise and her colleagues at Habitat for Humanity have launched the Shelter website (in 24 hours) to provide another channel for assistance to people who have lost their homes.

I want to pay tribute to the people of Christchurch, to grieve with them over their losses, and to provide you with the opportunity to help out if that’s something you want to do. Just click any of the links in the last paragraph to see how you can assist.

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Not just in-general fit, though. I want a measure of fitness that I can point to and say, “That’s how fit I am.”

And since the top Google results for “standard fitness test” are mostly for the US military, those are the fitness tests I’m setting out to pass. (Despite having no intention of joining any military force anywhere at any time.)

photo credit: hectorir

I’m working on the easiest one at the moment, the US Navy Physical Readiness Test. (The Navy Seal one is the hardest, but the Navy one is the easiest, for some reason.)

There are a couple of ways of looking at how I’m doing, and one way is to say that I’m failing.

I can only run about half the distance I need to be able to run to pass the test, and at that, my pace is too slow. I haven’t yet been able to do enough crunches in two minutes to pass that bit of the test, either. I can pass the pushups part, but not by much.

Another way to look at it, though, is that I’ve only just started and I’m not that good yet.

It’s a process – a process of improvement.

Stopping before you start

When I’m a bit further on with the running, I’m planning to start running early in the morning. Once round the block is three-quarters of a mile, which is half the distance of the Navy PRT. When I first considered that, I immediately thought, “But in winter it’ll be cold, dark and wet.” If I’d gone with that thought, I’d have stopped before I started.

I live in the Southern Hemisphere, so at the moment, running in the morning would not be cold or dark (admittedly, in Auckland “wet” is always on the cards). So why am I worrying about that? I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

If I was indulging in “all or nothing” thinking, I wouldn’t keep on towards my goal, because I can’t pass the test now. I wouldn’t even consider running in the mornings, because I can’t promise myself to do that when the weather eventually turns unpleasant. I’d do it totally, or not at all.

I’d never have painted a painting, because I’m not a great artist now. I’d never have written fiction, because I’m not a great novelist now. I wouldn’t be building up my business, because it’s not making me a living income now. I wouldn’t have bought a kayak, because I’m not an Olympic athlete (and, frankly, never will be).

The flip side of perfectionism is one of the greatest dodges against self-improvement and self-development: “I’m not going to try that because I would be bad at it.”

Well, of course you would. Everyone is bad when they start out. You can’t look at someone exceptional who’s at the peak of their career, having practiced for thousands of hours, and declare that you’ll never get involved in their area of endeavor because you can’t immediately (or even ever) be as good as they are.

I know what I know because I’ve done what I’ve done

In most cases, if I’d started doing it earlier I’d know a lot more. I learned by doing it imperfectly, noticing, and correcting myself (sometimes with help from other people). Good at it is what I hope to become, by practicing.

When I started this blog a few years ago, I wasn’t a good blogger. When I started out as a hypnotherapist I wasn’t a good therapist. I had to go through “doing it badly” to get to “doing it well”.

I have to go through “being unfit” to get to “being fit”.

I have to go through “getting it wrong” before I even know what “getting it right” looks like.

Are you an “all or nothing” thinker?

The thing about “all or nothing” is that, in practice, it means “nothing”. You’re not going to get it all. You just can’t, and especially not as a beginner.

So: What are you not doing, what are you not starting, because you know you’d absolutely suck at it at first?

Go and do that thing.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.

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Courses

At the beginning of 2010 I put together a few courses, including 7 Steps to Effective Personal Change and my self-hypnosis course AIM Your Mind. During the year, I asked my mailing list members what would be useful to them, and that resulted in Simple Stress Management Techniques and Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding. All going well, this week I’m aiming to finish my stop-smoking course (in time for the local tax hike at the New Year, which is likely to get more people looking for resources to quit smoking).

Creating these courses is a lot of work, but I enjoy it, and I’m always delighted when someone who’s taking one emails me and tells me that they’re enjoying it too.

There’ll be more courses in the New Year. I’m taking suggestions for topics (contact me if you have one).

Guest Posts

The second half of 2010 was a huge time for guest posts for me – I averaged about one a week. It’s working out well in terms of contact with other bloggers and the people who read their blogs, so I plan to continue next year. Here are 5 posts with 5 tips each from a variety of blogs:

1. 5 Crappy Ways to Deal with Stress at Fatwallet was one of a number of posts on stress in the lead-up to the launch of Simple Stress Management Techniques.  It covered some of the common approaches that make a stress situation worse.
2. At The Change Blog, I wrote about 5 Skills to Improve Your Coping Ability (otherwise known as self-efficacy).
3. The wonderful Steven Aitchison of Change Your Thoughts hosted 5 Techniques to Clarify Your Dreams and Goals.
4. Just recently on Life Optimizer, I presented 5 Things that are Better than a Plan.
5. And last week’s post on Goal Setting Guide, How to Set Yourself a Challenge, presents 5 steps to triumphing in your personal challenges.

(Apologies to early readers, I accidentally published this post instead of saving it as a draft. I’ll continue the post tomorrow with my favourite posts published here and my top recommended resources.)

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“I’m in two minds about whether I can do that.”

“I’ve half a mind to do something about it.”

Do you use these phrases? Do you ever go to do something challenging and feel an internal conflict, as if part of you believes you can and part of you is convinced that you can’t? Does it hold you back from doing things you would really, really love to do?

This is completely normal (or at least usual). We all feel it sometimes. Just yesterday I looked at several opportunities that could help me grow my business and thought, “Nah, I can’t do that.”

Here’s why we think that way.

Our inner Clydesdale still thinks we’re little

photo credit: jemsweb
Here’s how you train a Clydesdale. Clydesdales are enormous horses, far stronger than even the strongest man. But if you pick them up a lot when they’re little, you train them to believe that you are stronger than they are, and they keep believing it deep in their placid horse brains – even when it’s no longer true.

We spend most of our first few years of life – up to the early school years – pretty much believing whatever we’re told. We don’t have a lot of ability, at that age, to interpret or analyse the world. We don’t have the knowledge, and we don’t have the skills. So we rely on what other people, especially our parents, tell us is true.

Unfortunately, even the best parents will occasionally (and the worst parents will constantly) tell us that we’re not good enough or we can’t do things. And, in fact, there are a lot of things that a child can’t do.

But, just like the Clydesdales, we retain a vague impression that we can’t do things into adulthood.

Stacking up the evidence

photo credit: tanakawho
One of the key ways that our minds group things is by emotion. If you’re depressed, for example, you’re more likely to remember sad events, while if you’re happy, you’re more likely to remember happy events. Psychologists call this “state-specific memory”.

Because you will always, inevitably, have a stack of experiences around the theme “Can’t do this”, every time you find something you can’t do, you add it to that stack.

Every time you succeed, every time you can do something, that memory goes into a different stack, because it’s connected with a different emotion. The stacks build up in parallel, never communicating, because there is no bridge between them.

And when the situation arises that poses the question “Can I do this?”, both answers are there. You’re in two minds. On the one hand, you have all kinds of experiences saying you can’t do things. On the other hand, you have all kinds of experiences saying that you can. Whichever one shouts louder – whichever stack is higher, or whichever one can find more similarities with the current situation and the ones it has stored – will tend to win out.

Collapsing the stacks

I said a moment ago that these stacks don’t naturally connect, because they don’t share an emotion (even though they come up out of your deep mind into your consciousness at the same time, hooked by the same situation).

What your consciousness can do, though, is deliberately create a connection. Neuro-linguistic programming talks about this as “collapsing the anchors”. I’m going to say “collapsing the stacks”, to keep the same image going. You could imagine that the two stacks are piles of evidence, documents and photographs, stacked up on one side or the other of the case. Your consciousness is the judge. It’s going to bring all the evidence together into one coherent view of reality.

Here’s today’s simple 7-step exercise.

1. Hold out your hands in front of you, palms pointing up.

2. Let all the thoughts and feelings about “I can’t do it” flow from your head down your arm and stack up on one hand. Sit with that until you’ve got the stack, all those photos and documents, all those memories, sitting there on your hand.

3. Now on the other hand stack up all the evidence that you can do things. Think of all your successes, all your growth points, all the times you did things well. Let those photos and documents stack up on that other hand.

4. Balance the evidence. Move your hands in a weighing motion, and feel how the hand with “I can’t” is getting lighter and lighter, and the hand with “I can” is getting heavier and heavier. It’s as if all the old evidence is shrinking and even evaporating, those old documents and photos curling up and shrivelling and fading, so that hand is getting lighter and lighter. And at the same time, the other hand, the “I can” hand, is getting heavier and heavier, as all those documents and photos become clearer and more vivid and carry more and more weight.

5. And now the “I can’t” hand is getting really light as all of that evidence just fades into mist and smoke and ash and is blown away by the wind.

6. Now bring the two hands together. You need both hands because the stack of evidence that you can do things is just getting so heavy, your arm is being pushed and dragged down by the weight of it, and you need to use both hands.

7. And now complete the image by letting all of that evidence flow back up and stack itself up inside your head, neatly stacked, easily accessible any time a situation comes up where you’re deciding whether you can do something and meet a challenge that presents itself to you.

Once again, subscribers to my mailing list get an audio talkthrough of this technique as this month’s free resource. If you’re not on the mailing list, enter your email address here now and (during September 2010) there’ll be a link on the Welcome email for you to download the audio track. I give a different free resource every month, and there’s an immediate bonus for signing up as well, plus you get all my blog posts and occasional special deals on my courses and other material. It’s well worthwhile.

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This is the free course that helps you to get your stress under control with some effective quick techniques. It also has some background material so that you can start to:

• understand stress better,
• figure out why you keep stressing, and
• get some insights into how you might stop.

If you’re struggling with stress one way or another, and would like to get on top of it, you can find out more (and sign up) in either of two ways:

• If you want a quick introduction and you like video, go to stresshowto.com.
• If you’d prefer to read a longer, fuller explanation, go to emotionalcircuitbreaker.com.

(Both of those addresses point back to Hypno NZ, they’re just easy-to-remember ways to get to the signup pages.)

And if you’re not stressed yourself, but know someone who does, point them to one of those links!

I’ll close off with one of the videos I made last week to answer some frequently asked questions. This one is “What is stress?”.

No related posts.

This is why we don’t play with time machines, kids. Be warned.

see more Lol Celebs

Anyway, my point is that knowing how the future might be different can be highly motivational – whether it motivates us away from or towards a particular outcome. Today we’re going to take a motivational time tour, both to the past and the future.

When this baby hits 88mph, we’re going to see…

Never mind.

The Past is Another Country

If the past is another country, that means we can import things from it that flourish there and that we need, right?

So let’s start out by doing that. Motivational exercise number 1: Think of a moment in the past where you were very resourceful, where you felt like you had it all going on, where you had succeeded and were feeling confident and positive. If you’re a member of my mailing list you’ve probably done this exercise, since it’s part of the download you get when you join. Do it again now – imagine with all your senses, as clearly as possible, capture that memory and all the feelings that go with it, and link it to a finger-and-thumb press on one of your hands.

Resistance is Not Futile

Now think about something you’re doing now that you’re worried about, that you’d like to change. Project that into the future. Think about what things will be like in a year, five years, 10 years. Look, from outside yourself, at what your life will be like.

Because the thing is, if you keep doing the same thing you’re doing now, that doesn’t mean that the future will be the same as the present. If it’s something that’s doing you some kind of harm, that means that the future will be worse than the present if you don’t change something. Imagine that future as vividly as you can.

It’s kind of like the Biff version of Hill Valley, isn’t it? Not good.

But also not inevitable.

The Future’s So Bright, I’ve Got to Wear My Shades

Come back to the present now for a minute. Use your finger press to summon back that feeling of resourcefulness and think about changing the action or pattern in the present that would be responsible for creating that unwanted future. Feel how you are able to use that past success to shift your thoughts and feelings and behaviour so that you can create a different future.

Now imagine that future. Imagine, as clearly as you can, the future where you have changed that pattern and replaced it with a better one, a more positive one, a more adaptive and helpful and useful one. Make it a bright and successful future. Place yourself there, and this time experience it in the first person, from within the image, all the feelings and sounds and colours and shapes and the way that things flow and the way you act and the way people around you respond.

Now back to the present, and reinforce for yourself your ability and your choice to become the person who has that future.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. What’s it going to be like?

(And if you need more jiggawatts to help you achieve that change, get in touch and we can talk about how to make that happen.)

Technorati Tags: motivation, confidence, personal change

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Malcolm found he needed a word for how you feel when you have several equally good options and you’d be genuinely happy with any one of them. (That tells you quite a bit about Malcolm right there.) He came up with “prodivalent”, because “ambivalent” has a negative connotation. It suggests that you’re struggling with a choice because there are benefits and drawbacks to all your options. Whatever option you choose, there’ll be a sense of regret about the ones you didn’t choose, and perhaps frustration with the non-ideal parts of the one you did choose.

photo credit: hans s

And yet, if you’re ambivalent about some decision right now, I’m going to tell you that’s good news. Here’s why.

What fuels ambivalence is an internal conflict where you teeter between two options. Typically, the problem with these options is that the closer you get to either of them, the better the other one looks. From a distance, each option is attractive, but close up you can see the cracks in the paint. So you turn around and head back towards the other, now more attractive, option, until you get close enough to that one that repulsion outweighs attraction, and now the first option is looking pretty good again… Back and forth.

photo credit: by Janine

That’s not the good news, of course. The good news is that if you’re ambivalent, you’re motivated to change. You just haven’t figured out how yet, or in which direction, because every time you make a move you end up reassessing that decision.

In their classic book Motivational Interviewing
, Miller and Rollnick remark, “passing through ambivalence is a natural phase in the process of change…Ambivalence is a reasonable place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”

Sadly, we seem to be capable of living there for years.

Well-meaning friends or professionals may try to collapse the conflict for us by arguing for one or the other option. The problem with this is, we know the benefits of that option and we’ve considered them all many times. When our friend argues for them, in the interests of balance we bring up the arguments against them – the drawbacks of that option and the benefits of the alternative. Our friend responds by pointing out the flaws of that other option, which we also know well and have answers for. And so our ambivalence is not resolved; in fact, the likely result is that we’ve now convinced ourselves that the option our friend was arguing against is actually the one we prefer (since we’ve just been defending it).

photo credit: John Althouse Cohen

What drives this inner dynamic, though? Somewhere inside us is a part that, like our friend, favours Option A, and another part that favours Option B. Both parts are trying to help us. Both parts are trying to make us happy. But the strategies they’re adopting are working in opposite directions, at cross purposes.

The key question to ask is: What do I really want? Not “which of these options”, because that’s clearly the wrong question. If it was the right question, we’d have answered it already. What is the underlying thing that both parts of ourselves are trying to achieve?

Everybody who comes to see me in my hypnotherapy practice is ambivalent. Every single person. If they just wanted to change, they wouldn’t need me, and if they only wanted to stay the same, they wouldn’t want me.

They want to change, but there’s a part of them that is driving the behaviour (and the thoughts and feelings) that they want to change, and that part has some kind of legitimate agenda somewhere, however mistaken.

photo credit: neurmadic aesthetic

What I often do is encourage the parts to enter into dialogue with each other. That sounds odd, but most people understand and accept it immediately. It’s not that they have multiple personalities, of course, they just have multiple agendas, and they can speak for each of those agendas about why that agenda is important, helpful and positive for the person.

What I do then is encourage the client’s creative and problem-solving parts to come up with a new strategy, something that will satisfy both agendas in a way that the client will be comfortable with and can live out in daily life. With both parts in agreement, there’s tremendous power available for change, because instead of wasting energy pulling against each other they are pulling in the same direction.

photo credit: shaggyshoo

So what can you do if you’re ambivalent, right now? Here’s my suggestion.

1. Go over to the Decisionalyzer and figure out what factors are playing into your decision. (That’s a little tool I made as one of the monthly free resources I give the people on my mailing list.)
2. Put your mind into a calm, receptive and focussed state. You can use my free Blue Sky hypnotic induction, or if you want more in-depth instruction, my online self-hypnosis course Change Your Mind will show you step-by-step how to achieve this.
3. Ask the differing agendas to tell you why they are important (without arguing with each other, just stating the positives of their own goals). You may or may not be surprised at what comes up.
4. Ask the creative parts of your mind to come up with a better strategy than the ones you have been using.
5. Let yourself drift for a while, enjoying the peace. There’s no need to gnaw at the problem. Your mind will find its own solution in its own time.
6. At the end of a set time, say 20 minutes, return yourself to your everyday level of consciousness. (Set a timer if you don’t want to have to keep checking the clock.)
7. Allow yourself to move in a decisive new direction.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

You’re very welcome to share your thoughts (and results) in the comments. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: ambivalence, decisionmaking, internal conflict, options, motivation, personal change, motivational interviewing, inner dialogue, parts therapy

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