Instead, I’m going to talk about why you get upset, why that’s completely understandable, and what you might do about it if it distresses you. It’s a direct follow-on from How to Hold Your Outcomes Lightly.

Over on my other blog, How to Be Amazing, I wrote recently about what to do when you offend someone. It wasn’t just a random choice of topic. I’d offended some people – not deliberately – with a guest post I wrote on another blog. One of the people I’d offended later came to my “what to do when you offend” post and left a lovely comment, and that got me thinking about why people get upset, as she had originally done.

Why you get upset

You get upset – angry, sad and/or afraid – when you feel threatened. That’s probably not a big revelation, but let’s think about it for a minute and unpack some of the implications.

Any time I’m feeling these strong emotions, it’s because I believe something has threatened my wellbeing. I talked about this last time in The Real Secret.

I have some belief that things “should” or “must” be otherwise than they in fact are, and that because they are not that way my identity, my existence, my wellbeing or the things I value are under threat of destruction.

And the reason that I believe this is that the situation reminds me, in some way, of a situation in which I felt that way before.

Often, what’s going on is what the Transactional Analysis folks call “hooking the not-OK child”. All of a sudden I’m a helpless little kid again, one who’s in a bad situation that he doesn’t know how to deal with. I feel intensely unresourceful in that moment, and so instead of using my many years of experience of solving problems rationally and effectively, I strike out, run away, or turtle up and stop interacting.

When I wrote a post that used stuttering as an analogy for procrastination, I hooked a number of not-OK children who had been teased and bullied for stuttering. I don’t stutter, but I’ve been teased and bullied, and it’s painful. Naturally, in many cases, their first reaction was to strike out. (The non-striking-out ones didn’t leave comments, but I’m sure there were some people in that category too.)

Getting upset is perfectly understandable

photo credit: rabble

Getting upset when you feel threatened is understandable. It’s natural. It’s usual. It’s human nature. Everybody does it.

It’s not necessarily desirable.

Crapping in your pants is also natural, also part of human nature, but we teach our children not to do it.

As children, we also get taught not to express our upset, or at least not to express it in particular ways that are unacceptable to our particular parents or their culture. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we don’t get upset, just that we get better at hiding it, and/or express it in ways that were rewarded (or at least ways that escaped the degree of punishment that would have caused us to change our behaviour).

What we seldom get taught is how not to get upset in the first place. The parallel with defecation only goes so far. We have to relieve ourselves regularly, but we don’t have a biological need to regularly get upset.

If we know how not to get triggered, or how to deal with the feelings if they do get triggered, there’s no reason we can’t deal maturely with all of our challenges, without falling into the unresourceful not-OK child mode at all.

Anger, fear and sadness are often distressing, not only to you but to people around you. They don’t usually help to resolve the situation. They are completely understandable, and no blame attaches to you for feeling them (you feel what you feel, and nobody can tell you not to). But it’s often more adaptive and more helpful to give those feelings less control of the situation rather than more.

What happens when you don’t act out of upset

I’m not going to claim any kind of flawless victory in the Incident of the Ill-chosen Metaphor. When I first started to see the comments piling up on my guest post, I was, yes, upset. I had several reactions:

• Anger at being misinterpreted
• Defensiveness at being criticized
• Sadness because I’d hurt other people
• Fear for my reputation

All of those were natural and understandable.

The thing that I did right, though, was that I didn’t respond immediately and primarily out of those upset feelings. Instead, I:

• recognised that the upset feelings of the people leaving comments were natural and understandable – I adopted some of their viewpoint.
• realised that some of their upset came not from what I had said but from what it reminded them of.
• accepted responsibility for my own role in the situation.
• apologised.

This had two good outcomes, from my perspective, in that two of the strongest critics calmed down and became much more positive. To use the language of transactional analysis again, by speaking from my Adult I had engaged their Adults and brought them out of the not-OK child. One of them has actually become a subscriber, which is a result well beyond what I expected.

So there are the benefits of not reacting out of upset - but how do you get to do that?

How not to get upset

If you’ve read the Emotional Hamster Wheel ebook that’s part of my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course, you’ll know the answer already.

The key is to start paying attention to your upset reaction so that you can start to slowly, slowly insert wedges between the stimulus (the event that reminds you, rightly or wrongly, of a threat) and the response, and widen the gap.

You can work backwards from the reaction to the irrational beliefs that trigger it off. You can work forwards from it, and put longer and longer pauses in before you react, to give your brain chemistry a chance to normalise and your rational brain to come back online.

And you can use self-calming techniques (such as the ones in the other ebook in Simple Stress Management Techniques) to reduce the intensity of your feelings in the moment and let you see above the emotional alligators.

With time and practice, you’ll be able to do it without as much concentration.

It’ll become natural and usual. Like second nature.

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It teaches you to fantasize obsessively about material possessions, to deliberately delude yourself into relentless positivity, and to blame yourself whenever things go wrong.

Why any personal development blogger would promote this claptrap is beyond me, particularly since the research is so consistently against it. (Fantasizing about outcomes reduces your chances of achieving them, trying to remain relentlessly positive arguably leads to worse outcomes than realism, and self-blame is, surely, a problem, not a solution.)

And yet, the Flaw of Distraction has made millions, not just for its originator but for many other promoters who know an easy sale when they see one. Tell people to do what they were going to do anyway (dream about the impossible), promise them that they’ll get what they want without doing any actual work, and then leave yourself the out that if it doesn’t work, it’s not because the process is wrong and completely flawed, it’s because they weren’t doing it perfectly? That’s a formula for success – not for the suckers, I mean customers, who buy it, of course, but for the hucksters who sell it.

Now, there are some people who promote this idea who genuinely believe in it, of course. Most of them, though, have probably adapted it and added to it to make it work – put the nuance back in and realigned it with actual reality. What they’re selling is not the original, pure snake oil.

Anyway, I’m going to tell you about a completely different, in fact opposite, secret. This one actually works.

The secret to success and happiness is holding your outcomes lightly.

Easy as ABCDE

Let me introduce you to Albert Ellis.

Ellis was a very strange, but very brilliant man who founded Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, basically to deal with his own issues, which were numerous.

He introduced a very simple mnemonic – you’d strain to make up a simpler one – for the process of his therapy. It goes like this: ABCDE.

A is for Adversity

Adversity (or the Activating Event) is any challenge that we face in life. It might be getting turned down for a date, an extra demand at work, a near-miss on the road, being eliminated in a competition - anything.

In itself, it’s just a thing that happens.

B is for Belief

We think the problem arises from the event, but it doesn’t. It arises from our irrational belief about the event.

The Adversity is just a thing that happened. The Belief – that that thing should not have happened, must not happen, is the end of the world, cannot be allowed to stand - is what converts a thing that happened into a crisis.

C is for Consequences

Beliefs have consequences. If we believe that the thing that happened is a horrible, terrible, wrong thing, we will be angry, sad, afraid. We will think things and do things and say things in response to the event – or rather, in response to our belief about the event.

The things we say and do and feel and think are the actual problem. Not the adversity – that’s just a thing that happened. Not even the belief, though that leads to the problem, the consequences. Because those thoughts, feelings, words and actions, arising from our irrational beliefs, don’t change the situation for the better. Instead, they make it worse.

D is for Disputing

photo credit: Alex Barth

Ellis’s method was to dispute the irrational beliefs. He was very confrontational about this in his own practice, swearing and shouting and talking over his client to challenge their thinking. You don’t need to do this. All you need to do is question the beliefs that lead to the consequences.

There are three key questions to ask about a belief that is causing you distress.

1. “How’s that working out for you?” Whatever else I think of Dr Phil, this catchphrase of his is pure gold. If your belief is making your life miserable, it definitely needs to be challenged. To take an example from my own life, I get annoyed and frustrated when other people use my kitchen and leave it in a mess. That doesn’t help me in any conceivable way.
2. “Where’s the proof for that?” What basis do I have for believing that other people “should” treat my kitchen exactly the way I do – put things in the right places, clean them up immediately when they’ve used them (and in the way I clean them), et cetera? Where is that written?
3. “Is this logical?” Here you’re looking for proof that your belief is not just a reflection of your preferences or desires. If I rewrote my belief as “I would prefer that people who use my kitchen leave it as I would leave it”, does that completely represent my belief, or is there some logical remainder that isn’t just a preference?

E is for Effect

The intended effect of disputing your irrational beliefs is a change in your thoughts, feelings and behaviour that used to arise from those beliefs. You’re able to adopt a response that is less distressing to you (and possibly others), and more likely to result in a positive change to the situation – if such a change is even called for.

You can say, “I would prefer,” or “I would like”, instead of using words like “must” and “should” – as if your preferences were moral laws of the universe.

Your preferences, and my preferences, aren’t any kind of law. They’re preferences.

Holding your outcomes lightly

Rather than obsessing about your desired outcome – imagining it, putting up pictures of it, writing about how great it would be – what if you held it more lightly?

What if you just acknowledged it as something you wanted to happen, and preferred?

What if you put your effort into imagining how to bring it about, and taking action to bring it about, instead of pretending it had already happened and that this had therefore become the best of all possible universes?

What would happen, then, if you achieved it? You would be able to look back on a process – a process you’d paid attention to and participated in and enjoyed for its own sake and been active in – and commend yourself for your hard work, which had earned your achievement. Not by magic, but by a real process of transformation that you brought about in ways you can point to and replicate in the future.

And what would happen if you didn’t achieve it? You would be able to look back on a process – a process you’d paid attention to and participated in and enjoyed for its own sake and been active in – and learn from it so that you could be more successful in future. You’d be free from self-blame, because even if your actions had led to the result you didn’t want, that was a learning experience for you. (You can’t learn from magic.)

Your world would not have come crashing down around your ears because you didn’t get what you wanted. That’s for two-year-olds. You might be disappointed or annoyed, but not devastated or enraged.

And next time round, you’d be able to look out for the same issues which prevented you from achieving your goal last time.

Because you’re allowed to think about the possibility of things going wrong, and plan for it, without it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Perhaps you might even decide that your original goal wasn’t important to you any more, and you could stop trying to reach it. Perhaps you learned enough just from the process.

Next time, I’ll talk about the effort we put into undoing our pasts – and what might happen if we stopped. But for now, I leave you, as always, with action to take.

Action now

Identify some things that happen that get you upset to no good purpose.

Consider the consequences of the beliefs you hold about those adversities.

Dispute your beliefs.

What was the effect?

No related posts.

As we all know, thoughts like that lead inevitably to choking. Why?

Because trying to suppress a thought gives it power. It’s like pushing against a spring. The harder you push, the more force it pushes back with.

I was reminded of this recently by a post on PsyBlog: 8 Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression. It’s not just thoughts of failure this happens with. Whether you’re trying not to be attracted to someone or not to mention a secret, trying not to be depressed or trying to fall asleep, the harder you try, the more you fail.

Psychocybernetics

Back in the 1960s, Maxwell Maltz had an explanation for this. His book Psychocybernetics (which is excellent, by the way) talks about your mind as a guided missile, heading for the goals you present to it most vividly.

So when you’re trying to think unsexy thoughts, guess what happens?

Your mind heads straight for what you are so vividly imagining.

Suppressing thoughts takes effort

Of course, we can suppress thoughts to a certain degree. But it does take effort. A study in Biological Psychology led by Philippe R. Goldin used brain scans to investigate the difference between two strategies for dealing with distressing thoughts: expressive repression (that is, keeping a “stiff upper lip” and not showing your distress), and cognitive reappraisal (changing the way you think about the distressing situation). Expressive repression was less effective – and took more mental effort.

And this is why it’s harder to suppress thoughts when we’re tired. A pattern I’ve noticed with the people who come to me for help in changing the way they eat goes like this: In the early part of the day, even up to the afternoon, they eat healthily. But when they get home from work, they head for the junk food and undo all their good work.

One likely reason is that they’re tired, and the thoughts they’ve been suppressing all day about how good some chocolate would taste have become stronger than their ability to control them.

How not to be a (thought-suppression) hero

photo credit: The World According To Marty

So, if the battle against thoughts we don’t want to think is doomed to failure, what can we do instead?

We can think the thoughts and then let them go.

Both parts are equally important. Thinking the thoughts (which you’ve actually been doing anyway while you were trying to suppress them) brings them out into the clear light of day and gives our rationality time to kick in. Particularly for thoughts that hold a strong emotional charge, we respond emotionally before we respond rationally, and if we instantly react by pushing the thoughts down again, all we’re doing is winding ourselves up emotionally. We’re never thinking about the thoughts.

Often, when you think about a thought, it becomes obvious that it’s a stupid thought and you don’t really want to act on it. How often have you done something stupid and said, “I didn’t think that all the way through?”

Think your thoughts all the way through. Say you’re attracted to someone inappropriate, for example. Let yourself think about that. Your mind will come up with all the reasons that the attraction is inappropriate and the relationship couldn’t work.

The feeling, of course, will very likely still be there. And this is where the letting go comes in.

Letting thoughts and feelings go

If you’ve been reading my stuff for any length of time you probably know what’s coming next. Yes, it’s the Welcoming Practice. It’s such a good one that I keep teaching it at every opportunity.

First, notice how the feeling is in your body. Where is it located? What is it like? Is it warm, cool, tight, loose? Become aware of it as a body sensation. This simultaneously connects you to it and distances you from it – it’s like letting the thought come into consciousness. It stops the suppression and your attempts to ignore it, but it also gives you enough space to look at it from the outside instead of being carried along in it.

Second, name and acknowledge the feeling. Naming it sets up a circuit between the “feeling” and “rational” parts of your brain and starts to siphon off the activation of the “feeling” part. In the classic Welcoming Practice, you actually say “Welcome, [name of feeling]“, hence the name of the practice. You’re acknowledging the feeling as a part of yourself, as a genuine reaction. You’re not trying to push it away any more. (You’re not, of course, welcoming the situation that led to the feeling, which may be quite harmful and wrong.)

Take your time over each step. When you’re ready, the third step is to gently let the feeling go. Allow its activation to subside, without having led to any action. You might even make a mental or physical gesture of letting something go from your hand. I usually take a deep breath and let it slowly out as I let go of the feeling.

Now you can move on with your life.

Practicing the Welcoming Practice

You may have to keep letting the thoughts and feelings go for a while before they stop bothering you. That’s OK. It’s no more effort than you were spending suppressing them, after all, and that wasn’t working, whereas letting them go will.

So take a moment right now to set yourself a mental alarm. Take a few deep breaths, relax in your chair, close your eyes and tell yourself, “When I’m suppressing a thought or feeling, I notice and remember what to do. I think the thought and let the feeling go.”

For extra effectiveness, write that down and put it somewhere you’re going to see it frequently.

I think you’ll be surprised by the results.

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Today, though, I want to talk about trying for too much too soon, because it’s one of the classics of not changing your life.

Whether you’re trying to lose weight, get fit or build a skill, aiming too high to start with will reliably result in failure – and not always the good kind of failure, either. (The good kind of failure is the kind that you learn from and treat as education, feedback or a course correction.)

Thing is, when you have a great goal, when you’ve pictured it in your mind, when you’ve maybe imagined yourself in the future situation – which is a good motivational technique, done right – it seems closer than it really is. And therein lies the trap.

The sticky middle

Beginnings are fun. They’re fresh and exciting.

Endings are fun. They bring a sense of completion and achievement.

Middles? Middles are not so much fun. But if you’re going to do anything worthwhile, the middle is going to be the biggest part.

I have a fitness challenge. I’m in the middle of it. I started seriously in March, I think it was, and really seriously in May, and now it’s September and I’m still not there. I got the persistent cold that’s been going round this year, and it set me back from “almost at my first goal” to “not anywhere close”. I’m frustrated.

I have to work with that. I have to work with the fitness that I have and build on it as much as I’m able to – but no more, because that way lies injury and further months of being in the middle. I went for a run the other day, with the Couch to 5k iPhone app, which coaches you through a sequence of running and walking. (Over the several weeks it’s supposed to take, you gradually run more and walk less, until you’re running all the time.) I skipped the last run segment, because I could feel my body starting to protest seriously at the strain of its first run in a couple of weeks.

I wasn’t going to leave myself in pain for three days just to finish the day’s programme. There’s a time to persevere, and a time to stop.

Achieving anything worthwhile takes time

Look at advertisements for weight loss. I saw a billboard the other day advertising a six-week weight-loss programme (by the title, it also involved exercise). It put the words “six weeks” next to the illustration of a body that I am morally certain could not be achieved in six weeks by the average person, by any known means.

Why do people run these advertisements? Because they work. The products don’t work, but the advertisements work. Everyone wants a body like that in six weeks. Never mind that it actually takes at least six months if you also have, you know, a life (and if everything goes smoothly, and you don’t give up because you’re discouraged at your slow progress).

And that’s the real problem. Having created a false expectation, the programme or product fails to deliver the achievement you were after, and even though it’s delivering progress, you give up because it’s not what you expected.

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos

A crowded life is hard to change

The other pitfall in trying for too much too soon – apart from the inevitable disappointment – is that if you’re a serious-minded person, you’ll probably put in a lot of work trying to achieve the impossible. You’ll devote a lot of time and attention to it. You’ll leave yourself very little time for rest and restoration, or simple human being.

And simple human being is essential if you’re going to change your life in any positive way. (I’ll go into that in more depth in the book.)

Thing is, if you’re scheduling yourself solid and never leaving time to think, reflect and unwind, you may achieve external success, but your inner life, which is in many ways your true life, will remain profoundly unchanged – or even change for the worse.

It takes a lifetime to learn to live

I’m in a study group where we’re going through some booklets based on the teachings of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, mystic and poet. There are questions for reflection after the readings, and the other night, one of the questions was something like, “What would you tell a young person about learning to live more joyfully?”

We’re all similar in that we’re slowly overcoming a tendency to take ourselves too seriously, so we came to an easy consensus. We’d tell young people (like our younger selves) not to worry so much, that it was all going to come out basically OK in the end, and to do their best to enjoy the ride.

We’re mostly in our 40s. I don’t know what an older group would say, but that’s what we’ve learned so far about changing our lives. Treating everything as urgent and serious is a recipe for anxiety, but it doesn’t get you to a helpful place any quicker.

Striking the balance

You won’t change your life if you do nothing. But you won’t change it if you take on too much and fail, either. Somewhere in the middle (there’s that word again) is the Goldilocks spot, where you’re making consistent effort, doing consistent and regular practice, within your capabilities, in a way that grows those capabilities to where you want to be.

That place of balance isn’t a cruisy place. It’s challenging – but it’s not desperate. It’s near, on or maybe just slightly beyond the outer edge of your comfort zone. It’s stretching, but not agonising.

I recently joined Toastmasters, and because this is the time of year that competitions are held, before I’ve even scheduled my first speech, I’m in a speech competition. I had two choices: the humourous speech contest, or the Table Topics contest (where you speak for one to two minutes on a topic that you don’t know about in advance).

I was going to enter the humourous contest, but I changed my mind. From the meetings I’ve attended so far, I’ve discovered that I’m good at Table Topics (as I ought to be, having done a 10-week improv course and been a client-centred hypnotherapist for several years). I felt I had a reasonable chance of even winning that contest, whereas doing a humourous speech as my “Icebreaker”, the first-ever Toastmasters speech, was probably too ambitious.

I went for the more achievable option, because it was still challenging enough to be a growth opportunity, but one I was likely to do well in. Result? I won. I’m in the area competition next week. The club I’m part of is located in the central city, which means I’m likely to have some serious opposition – top corporate people with a lot more experience. And my feeling is, bring it on!

That’s striking the balance. Every so often, sure, it’s worth trying something that you know you might fail spectacularly at, just to have the experience. But you need to go into that with your eyes open to the likelihood of failure, and be prepared to go on anyway, whatever the result.

Don’t set yourself up for failure by trying for too much, too soon.

Well, that concludes our series on How Not to Change Your Life. Tune in next week to hear more about how it’s going to become a book, and what’s next for the Living Skillfully blog.

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There are three kinds of education (that I can think of), and three kinds of expertise that go with them.

Just the facts, Ma’am

There’s the kind of education that fills you up with facts but doesn’t give you much to connect them together into any kind of coherent whole – all too common in schools, so let’s call it “schooling” for short.

The expert with this kind of education is the know-it-all. He (or she, but usually still he) can bore you for hours with the details of his particular passion. Think of the character of Ross in Friends.

The problem with this kind of expert is that he doesn’t understand his chosen field as a whole, and, more importantly, can’t achieve anything with the knowledge he has. He’s substituted knowing for understanding and acting. And because he never actually knows it all, he can always use “further research needed” as an excuse to avoid committing to action – so he’ll never change his life.

photo credit: peyri

Having been a know-it-all, I can tell you how I broke out of that particular trap. I started doing things based on imperfect knowledge, and discovering more as I acted. What I learned is that you can’t figure out everything in advance – and if you think you have (see the True Believer, below), you’re likely to take that as sufficient achievement and stop without having done anything with your knowledge.

So if you think you might be a know-it-all expert, here’s the cure: Do things. Learn by doing. Discover in the course of action. And leave theory and detailed knowledge to one side for a while.

I’ve spoken before about how learning tai chi helped me to start a virtuous cycle of self-improvement. That was partly because I didn’t approach it as a know-it-all. I struggled for weeks and months to learn something that had no words, that could only be learned by doing it, by practice. It broke me out of more than one rut. I’m sure it freed up my mental energy as much as my physical energy.

True believers

Secondly,there’s the kind of education that fills you up with opinions and only gives you one way to fit them all together. We also call this “indoctrination”.

The first thing I think of in this context, because I experienced it myself as a young man, is religious instruction in an orthodox (with a small o) community. But I’ve seen it in political opinions of every shade, in conspiracy theories, in the New Age movement, in the kinds of causes that young people adopt passionately – vegetarianism, environmentalism, minimalism – and even in health and fitness fads.

Now, I’m completely in favour of passion, and of at least some versions of most of the causes and commitments I’ve just mentioned (except the conspiracy theories). But the danger of being a “True Believer” expert is that you lose all ability to listen to anyone who disagrees with you even a little.

That’s a large amount of potential wisdom consigned to the outer darkness, and almost a guarantee that you won’t change your life. After all, you’re already right about everything, so nothing needs to change.

The Greek legend of Procrustes, who strapped travelers to a bed and either stretched them to fit it or cut off parts that hung over the edge, is the best metaphor I’ve ever found for the true-believer kind of education.

I’ve been a true believer as well, and here’s my recommendation for escaping:

• Enjoy connecting with people and things as they are, without trying to fit them into your overarching theory of everything.
• Let go of instant judgement.
• Suspend yourself in that space where you don’t know the answer yet or have an opinion. Learn to enjoy being there.
• And draw back from the specifics of your particular commitment – the ways in which it’s traditionally been implemented – and contemplate the principles that lie beneath. Is there another way of living out those principles? Look around for people who are doing that, and learn from them if you can.

It’s a slow process. It took me years. But the starting point is to consider: What if I’m not right about everything? What if other people have a point?

Exploring the principles

Speaking of principles leads me on to the third kind of education.

In the third kind of education, you learn principles – not “theory of everything” principles into which everything must fit, but what’s sometimes called “heuristics”, principles of exploration.

You learn skills, practical skills that you can use when you do things in the field.

You learn to observe – not so much in order to make fine distinctions and categorise (like a know-it-all) or in order to judge and discriminate (like a true believer), but in order to understand and decide on a course of action.

Because exploration and action are the two great methods of this third kind of education. Let’s call it “training”.

Obviously, I’m more in favour of this kind of education than the others. But there are still dangers to becoming an expert this way.

A trained expert (or master practitioner) has put in a lot of practice in the field (the famous 10,000 hours), and his or her brain is now structured differently. The complex patterns that a beginner needs to perform consciously have become built into the expert’s cerebellum, which looks after unconscious use of complicated patterns like movement and speech.

That means that the expert can act without conscious thought. More often than not, this produces the right result – after all, the expert has spent years learning what does and doesn’t work. But in a genuinely new situation, the beginner may have some advantage over the expert, because the beginner approaches every situation without knowing how to handle it, and has to figure it out.

Also, as you become an expert, a layer of sophistication starts to separate you from the simple, human responses that may have been what drew you to the field in the first place. It’s a rare doctor who can simply sympathise with a sick friend, and a rare ornithologist who can take simple pleasure in watching a bird and hearing it sing without naming, categorising and cataloging it.

Zen teachers sometimes talk about having “beginner’s mind”, the kind of fresh approach to any thing or situation that sees it as itself and not an example of a phenomenon.

In order to change our lives, you and I need to approach them with beginner’s mind.

How to be a beginner

In order to be a beginner, I need to let go of being a know-it-all and acknowledge that some things can only be learned when I do them.

I need to let go of being a true believer and acknowledge that I don’t have answers for everything, that some things have to remain mysteries to me.

I need to be prepared to explore, but explore thoughtfully, letting go of being a master practitioner, approaching everything as if for the first time. Even if it looks like something I’ve seen or done before, each time is different.

Because life is untidy and chaotic and provisional, and we can’t live it as experts. If I’m being an expert, I’m not really living. I’m just playing a role.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life – which ends next week with Try for Too Much, Too Soon.

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Think about a pool of ink dropped on a page. If the page represents everything that you can possibly know, and the ink represents what you actually know, then a small spot of ink will not only take in a small amount of knowledge. It will also have a small circumference, with limited contact with other knowledge – the things that you know you don’t know.

As the pool of ink grows, as you become more knowledgeable, so does the number of things you’re aware of that you don’t know yet.

photo credit: billerr

So, what might be outside the inkblot that will keep you from changing your life?

Ignorance about needing to change

There’s ignorance that’s unintentional, and then there’s deliberate ignorance.

Deliberate ignorance usually comes out of arrogance or fear (if there’s a difference; arrogance is often a mask for fear of being wrong, after all). If you’re afraid to change, keeping a deliberate blind spot is one way of ensuring that you don’t feel the need to do so.

I’m going to assume that if you’re reading a personal development blog, your main problem is not that you’re carefully remaining ignorant of needing to change your life. You may be avoiding change in other ways, which is what this whole How Not to Change Your Life series is all about, but you’re aware that you need to change.

You may not, of course, be sure what about your life needs to change.

Ignorance about what to change

All too often, we feel a sense of unease about our lives. Something we can’t quite pin down. Something obviously needs to change – but what?

Should I change my job? My house? My partner? My appearance? What if I change all those things and the same sense of unease persists?

And even if I know that I need to change something on the inside… what, exactly? Do I need to be more confident? Less anxious? Deal with my stress better? Get on better with the people around me who irritate me? Do I need to care more about some things, less about others? Do I need to be more organised, more punctual and more motivated? And if I could just improve my memory and sleep better….

Often enough, a cluster of things come together, and we don’t know what to change first. Everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph could describe one person’s issues, and none of them are uncommon. (I couldn’t tell you how many of my clients would have ticked all of those boxes when they came in to see me.)

Where do you start? Is it even possible?

Ignorance that change is possible

All too many people don’t even realise that they can change. It seems too hard. Some other, really disciplined people might be able to change, but not me, they think. I’ve always been like this, and I always will.

I take an optimistic view of personal change. I think that anyone who wants to can change, with the right help. It’s definitely hard – I don’t mean to suggest otherwise for a moment. But it is possible.

People who are less intelligent than you, have less money then you, have fewer opportunities and less support and less education and less anything else you might use as an excuse, have succeeded in changing. I guarantee it.

OK, how?

Ignorance about how to change

This is where we start to get real. What are the steps you follow to change your life? How’s it done?

This is a big part of what I call the Missing Curriculum. It’s something we weren’t taught at school (unless you went to a very unusual school).

There’s a process of change, and although going through it takes dedication and perseverance, the concept is simple.

1. Your motivation to change needs to be, at least on average, stronger than your reasons to stay the same.
2. You need to pay attention to what you’re doing and what you want to be doing instead.
3. You need to practice regularly.

That’s it, really. There are no more secrets to change than that. Except maybe, “What your imagination got you into, it can get you out of – once you know what to do with it”.

Almost everything I write is about the change process and how to facilitate it, so I’m not going to try to repeat it all here. If you want a concise summary of a powerful technique for change – which incorporates attention, imagination, motivation and regular practice – take a look at my Self-Hypnosis How To site.

Action Now

So, if you’re in that place of feeling discontented and unsure, of knowing you want to change your life but not knowing what you want to change or how to do it, here are some concrete first steps.

1. Let yourself dream. Get yourself into a “daydream” state and listen to yourself say what you really want to do and how you really want to be in the world, no matter how crazy or unrealistic it sounds.
2. Figure out what’s stopping you from heading towards that dream – however slowly and hesitantly.
3. Find out how people change that. Once you’ve identified what you want to change, research. Discover how it’s done, how other people have done it. Browse this site, and my other site, How to Be Amazing. Write down keywords. Google them.
4. Put a practice in place. Do something on a regular basis that moves you in the direction of the person you want to be. I can’t stress this one enough.
5. Watch yourself change. See what works, what doesn’t work, what continually trips you up. Every outcome is an education.
6. Keep up your motivation by celebrating small successes, by holding on to the dream, by thinking about how it will be if you remain as you are.
7. Get help when you need it. I’m here, and there are lots of other people around who are trained in helping you change. Talk to us.

There’s no need to remain ignorant about how to change your life. Make use of the amazing resources you have that earlier generations never dreamed of.

And tune in next week, when I talk about the dangers of becoming an expert.

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

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There’s a cheesy 50s song to the effect that thinking and wishing and hoping and praying isn’t going to be enough. Hope, as I’ve said before, is not a strategy (sorry, Mr Obama).

No, for change – the right change, the important change – to happen, you’re going to have to do something. You’re going to have to do it consistently, in fact, for some time.

So what is it that you’ll need to do in order to make change happen? I’m glad you asked.

1. Decide what you want

This obvious first step can be easier said than done. Often, we just want something to change, but we’re more concerned with “change from” than “change to”. Here are a few questions to help you decide on your change destination.

1. What about the current situation bothers you most?
2. What are you most afraid of if the situation doesn’t change?
3. If you could have any outcome you wanted, leaving practicality aside, what would it be?
4. Is anything starting to change already that you want to encourage?
5. Out of all the things you could change, what would give the greatest bang for your buck?

Somewhere among those questions, you’ll find the answer to determining what change you want to create.

2. Do a “now” versus “then”

Take a piece of paper.

Draw a line down it vertically to create two columns.

Label one “Now” and the other “Then”.

In the “Now” column, list the things you are unhappy with, that need to change.

In the “Then” column beside each one, list how you want them to turn out.

I’d suggest that in the “Then” column, you use the words “more” and “less” a lot. At least in the early stages, change will consist of doing some things more than you used to and other things less. It’s not going to be instantly a case of switching from an old behaviour to a new one.

3. Figure out your motivations and rewards

photo credit: Snap®

To make a significant change, you’re going to have to persevere. That means you’re going to need a strong enough motivation to get over your natural resistance to change and to keep you doing the practices that will help you.

According to research, the way to do this most effectively is to first imagine the negative consequences of not changing, and then have a dessert of the positive consequences of changing.

Then, once you’re clear on your motivations, immediately take the next step.

4. Get your process clear

Imagining the process by which you’re going to change is going to give you a much better outcome than if you just imagine the change having happened. It prepares you mentally to go through that process, and reminds you that change isn’t going to happen by itself.

When you think about your process, think about what’s worked for you before. What have you succeeded at? What changes have you made already? What are you good at doing that would make one process easier than another?

For example, in my fitness goals I’ve discovered that having a tracking system that also tells me what to attempt next is a process that works a lot better than deciding for myself how hard I’m going to work. Which leads me to Step 5.

5. Gather maximum resources

I firmly believe that the more resources and the more techniques you have available to you, the better your chances of success. That’s why I write so many posts about techniques. (I just checked: counting this one, there are 93 posts in the Techniques category on this site, which is almost a third of all the posts I’ve ever written here.)

What tools do you have? What skills? What knowledge? And what tools, skills and knowledge do other people around you have – your friends, certainly, but also professionals who help people make the kind of change you’re considering? You live in a society, which magnifies your personal power immensely – if you make use of it by connecting to others who have the skills you need.

Some extra guidance and encouragement from someone who helps people change all the time can mean the difference between success and failure, or between moderate success and resounding success.

6. Be aware of the pitfalls

Don’t kid yourself. Any significant change is going to be hard. That’s why most people don’t change much, and why change won’t happen by itself.

You are going to have to keep trying even after you fail. You are going to have to do the equivalent of going jogging in the rain. You are going to question your ability to change. You are going to find yourself back in your old patterns again, just when you thought you were making progress.

You are going to need to circle back to your motivations and reinforce them, practice your techniques, get help from the friends or professionals you’ve recruited.

Something else that can help: non-obsessively consider in advance what issues may come up, and how you’re going to deal with them. My post on How to Make Hard Things Easier may help.

7. Count the cost, assess the benefit

Back in Step 3, you thought through the negatives of remaining unchanged. But there’s a cost to change, a benefit of staying the same – again, this is why so few people change successfully. It pays to be clear-eyed about these things.

What are you going to be giving up with this change? Is it worth it to you? You’ll need to remind yourself, in those moments when the costs are particularly vividly presenting themselves to you, of what the benefits of changing are.

If you’re particularly alert, and have done my free Seven Steps to Effective Personal Change course, you may have recognised the outline I’ve used here. The course has a series of videos in which I talk more about each step, an ebook with some of the most effective personal change techniques, and a set of planning sheets that you can use for self-reflection about the steps I’ve laid out above.

If you feel you want to change something in your life, don’t expect it to happen by itself. Take some action – like signing up for the free Effective Personal Change course (and, naturally, putting in the work).

One more thing about change. You need to set aside time in which to work on it – otherwise it’s just another form of expecting it to happen by itself. Schedule yourself a time that you’re going to spend taking action.

Because hope is not a strategy.

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

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I can think of at least three reasons.

1. You don’t think you deserve to succeed

Sadly, some of us get tapes installed in our heads from an early age that say we’re no good. People like us don’t deserve to succeed. If we fail, that’s right and just because we’re just not right.

If you do get close to succeeding, you effectively sabotage yourself – jog your own elbow so that you spill. Time after time, you’re this close to making it, and you flake out at the last moment. Because preserving your understanding of how the universe works – that people like you don’t succeed – is more important to you than achieving your dreams. And because that tape comes on in your head again and tells you that you don’t deserve success.

If you have one of those tapes, let me invite you to eject it and install a much better alternative. I have one free for download, as it happens: Overcoming Self-Sabotage. (You do have to share the link on Facebook or Twitter to get access.)

2. You think successful people aren’t very nice people

photo credit: Yiie
There can be a few reasons for this one. Perhaps you were taught it by someone who wasn’t successful, and used it as an excuse. Perhaps you’ve met a successful person who’s not a nice person – there certainly are plenty.

It’s an irrational generalisation, though. Some people, sure, become successful by being ruthless bastards. This has always happened and always will. But some become successful by helping people, especially these days – when the Internet is one of the main paths to success.

The main example I’m thinking of here is Pat Flynn. He teaches Internet marketing – a field that’s crowded with hucksters, rip-off merchants, scam artists and bunko men. He stands out from the crowd – and makes a very comfortable living – by adopting “helping people” as his sole business model.

I’m subscribed to his newsletter, and his stated policy – which he sticks to – is that he never makes sales offers in it. Never. He just offers genuinely useful content that will help people.

I can’t count how many newsletters I’ve unsubscribed from because they’re just one dodgy, over-hyped offer after another. I recently unsubscribed from one which recommended another marketer’s “free ebook” about the future of the Internet and “exactly what to do to make sure you benefit from the changes that are coming”. Well, it wasn’t an ebook – it was a sales letter, and a very overexcited, fear-mongering one at that. And it didn’t tell you what to do, unless “join my membership program” counts as telling you what to do. I was disgusted.

I trust Pat not to do that kind of stuff. Pat’s a nice guy. He’s friendly, positive, and unfailingly helpful. He answers reader questions all the time in the comments on his posts, by email and on his Facebook page. He never asks you to join his membership program or buy his product, because he doesn’t have either of those things. (Though people keep asking him to make something they can buy from him, because his free content is so valuable.)

So how the heck does he make tens of thousands of dollars a month, if he never hustles a product or joins in the latest hypefest for some other marketer’s overpriced e-course? He simply shows people how to do what he does, mentions the products he uses, and provides affiliate links for people to buy them if they see the value. (He also has other websites where he does sell products or run advertising, but he’s making more income now from recommending good stuff to people who trust him.)

Success doesn’t make you a horrible person, though being a horrible person can make you (by some, very limited measures) successful. Frankly, if you’re worried that success will corrupt you, it won’t. The kind of people who are corrupted by success don’t think that way.

3. You’re afraid of the work that would be required if you did become successful

I’ve left my own biggest reason for being cautious about success till last. There’s a very well-known blog in the personal development field which is one of the most popular blogs in the world, about any topic. The person who started it is almost completely inaccessible. He’s turned off comments on the blog and stopped using email, because it was just becoming too much to handle. I see other people at a lower level of success who are only a little easier to talk to – everything goes through their virtual assistants, who act as gatekeepers, because everyone wants a piece of the successful man or woman.

Becoming successful is very hard work (do not buy anything from anyone who claims otherwise). But being successful can be hard work, too. I look at these people and think, “Direct contact with the people who read my stuff, who want help from me or just want to tell me what they got out of one of my articles or courses, is one of the things I love most about doing this. Would I lose that if I scaled up to a point where I’m making enough money to do it full-time? Or would I spend all of that time buried in email, without enough time to do the other things I love, like producing new material? Would I end up with a blog full of guest posts and a shop full of affiliate offers for other people’s courses?”

Well, of course I wouldn’t. Pat Flynn, again, has several tens of thousands of people subscribed to his blog, newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel and Facebook page. He manages to answer all reader questions himself, and still produce huge amounts of useful material in all of those channels. Admittedly, Pat is a lot younger than I am, but in principle it can be done.

Success definitely brings a new set of challenges, but that’s no reason to shun it. You do deserve it, it won’t make you a bad person, and – if you think it through – there’s no reason why you can’t handle it well and enjoy it. Success is OK.

Action Now

If you’ve been shunning success for one of the reasons above, think it through carefully and logically.

Now feel it through passionately and honestly.

How can you shift your attitude to success so that it’s something you’ll allow yourself to do?

The book is coming

And speaking of success, we’re close to the end now of the How Not to Change Your Life series. Only four more posts to go on the original 25 ways I came up with in January.

My plan from there is to turn the series into a book. I’ll add a few more chapters, probably another seven, and expand the material I’ve done so far. I’ll make sure there are concrete steps to take at the end of every chapter, maybe drop in some other useful material from here an there, and create a few bonus recordings which will be accessible to people who’ve got the book.

It’ll probably end up about a third longer than the original blog posts when I publish it. I’m planning to do that in January, a year after I started the series and just in time for New Year’s resolutions.

If you think this sounds good, put your name down using the signup form below, and I’ll keep you posted on progress (and give you a discount when the book comes out).

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I’ve often thought about that old saying when I’ve held back from trying something because I was afraid I might fail.

I’ve talked here before, probably too often, about how I had a serious failure in my early 20s – I tried something I thought was challenging and exciting (training to be a youth worker), and it turned out really badly.

I’ve failed at a few other things since then, and part of the reason is that I haven’t committed myself enough – because the more I commit myself, the more disappointing failure is going to be.

But a big part of the reason that I’ve failed at things is that life is just like that. You’re never going to succeed at everything you try unless you only try the very safest things. And that’s a form of failure in itself.

Fail fast

Successful innovators use the phrase “fail fast”. What they mean is that you should try lots of things that might work, figure out quickly which ones don’t work, and move on to the next trial. Don’t spend a lot of time trying to make something work – go for the easy win.

Now, more patient people may well come along behind you, pick up something you abandoned because it didn’t work quickly enough, and give it the time and attention it needs to be a success. That’s fine too. Different strokes for different folks.

But there’s another reason for trying things fearlessly. Guessing an answer wrong, studying the material and then answering the question again is about 10% more effective than just studying and answering (according to Scientific American). I would guess that this is because, having got it wrong, you focus on finding out why you got it wrong. You’re more motivated. You’re paying more attention.

In other words, failure is part of the process of success.

Learning from failure

This series right here – How Not to Change Your Life – is a testament to the teaching power of failure. You think I could write this stuff without having got a lot of things wrong? And I got them wrong by trying them out.

The story of Edison and the light filament is so famous I’m sure it’s apocryphal. Apparently, when Edison had tried a thousand different materials to make a filament for his electric light bulbs, he remarked that those had been very useful experiments. He now knew a thousand things that wouldn’t work.

You know why I don’t give a lot of relationship advice? I’ve only ever had one serious relationship, with the woman I’ve been married to for over 12 years now. I had plenty of unsuccessful attempts to start relationships (which I learned from), but unlike the relationship gurus – most of whom have many unsuccessful relationships to look back on and draw from – I can only point to one experience, which may well not be typical.

Now, you might think that a guy with one successful relationship would know more about the topic than someone with thirty unsuccessful ones, but really, if you think about it – not the case. I wouldn’t take relationship advice from someone like me.

photo credit: Casey David

How not to be terrified

You may be saying by now, “Well, that’s all well and good, but what if I am terrified of failure? It’s one thing to point out all the advantages of trying things and failing, but if I’m still terrified of it, that doesn’t do me a lot of good.”

And this is true.

Here’s where I suggest you start. Start by asking yourself, “What exactly is it that I’m terrified of?”

• Is it being less than perfect? Sorry, you’ve already lost that one.
• Is it people thinking less of you because you’ve failed? How much power are you giving them that doesn’t belong to them?
• Is it the disappointment that comes with failure? That’s a stepping stone. That’s getting down to the bedrock so you can build something amazing.
• Is it your mother’s voice in your head telling you that you have to always succeed or you’re no good? She doesn’t get to talk to you like that any more, and it’s not true and never was.

Ask yourself this: What’s the worst that could happen if I try and don’t succeed?

If the cost is too high, is there a way I can try something a bit smaller and less risky that moves me in the right direction still?

Can I mitigate the risk? (Don’t try anything where death is the probable outcome for failure, by the way. I do not recommend that.)

Can I – pay close attention here – can I redefine success so that trying is succeeding and not trying is failing?

Can I turn this into an intentional learning experience?

Try something. Take notes. Make it an experiment.

Write down your hypothesis in advance. “If I ask this person out, I will make a complete fool of myself and be humiliated.”

Now try to disprove that hypothesis by testing.

Observe the experience. Write down what you learned. What went well? What went badly? How much of that was circumstances and how much was your choices? (Because you can’t be blamed for circumstances, and you can change your choices, so either way you win.)

Find out how other people have succeeded and model them. What was it that created their success? (Small bet: Persistence and perseverance and a willingness to take risks will figure in there somewhere.)

Connect to your fear and, when you’re ready, let it go.

And then go and boldly do what you once wouldn’t have attempted, because holding yourself back in fear is the real failure.

You never know. You might reach your goal immediately. But if you do – you were probably setting your sights too low. Aim higher next time!

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

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See, when the people that you know always do what you expect, you don’t have to think about what they’re likely to do. It’s comfortable. It’s restful. It’s safe.

But when they suddenly change, you have to pay attention to them, and you don’t know what they’re going to do next. It’s frightening. We’re wired to be uncomfortable when patterns around us change, because that usually means something is wrong.

And any change can do it. I read about an experiment where teenagers were asked to be unusually polite and helpful and the experimenters monitored the parents’ reactions. The parents were totally freaked out, suspicious and hostile.

So when you change, you might get pressure from your friends and family to change back. It might not be open, it might be subtle, but that’s how groups work. I’ve mentioned before how researchers analysing years of data from the Framingham Heart Study discovered that people who were socially connected tended to gain weight or give up smoking more or less together. (Which is also good news – you may be the catalyst that inspires your friends to make a positive change, too.)

Who do you think you are?

One of the common reactions to a change is, “Do you think you’re better than us now?”

One of the thoughts underlying this, of course, is, “You’re better than us now, and that makes us feel bad.” Another is, “Now that you’re not like us, you might leave.” A third is, “If you can do that, it takes away one of my excuses for not changing, because I’m like you.”

Particularly if the change involves something that you and your friends used to do together socially – eating junk food, for example, or smoking, or drinking too much – when you stop, it sends up a red flag that you might leave the social group. (And, in fact, if they keep giving you a hard time about it or keep trying to get you to go back to your behaviour, that might be a good idea.)

It’s probably not a good idea to suggest right away that they can (and should) do the same. Tell them about the concerns that you had that led you to make the change for yourself. Keep talking about your own situation and how this change arose out of your own genuine being. Stay away from generalising to your friends or people overall.

When they come to understand your motivations, and how this changed behaviour is actually consistent with the person they know and, presumably, like, your friends may accept the change more readily.

In due course, they may take you as a role model. Let this happen by itself.

photo credit: joshuahoffmanphoto

It won’t last

I became a Christian in the middle of my last year at high school. I’d previously been an atheist, and one of my classmates who was also an atheist said, in my presence, “It won’t last. He’s too logical.”

I laughed then, and in fact I was right to. That was 26 years ago, and although my faith is almost unrecognisably different now, it’s still an important part of who I am (and has been throughout those years).

Be prepared for the “It won’t last” prediction, and recognise, when it comes, that it may be much more about the person making it and their wishful thinking than it is about their assessment of you.

Underlying my classmate’s words was the conviction that she was right, and no rational person could believe differently from her for long. The fact that I had changed my view of the world away from hers was a threat to that conviction, which she had to shore up by stating it strongly and publicly.

How to stand strong against pressure

I’m stubborn and rebellious, and people trying to stop me from doing something is more likely to encourage me to do it. But if you find it hard to resist pressure from people around you, and find it easier to just go along and keep the peace, here are some suggestions.

1. Ask yourself, “How much of this is about me and how much about them?” An angry reaction is almost always about issues that the angry person has, and ways in which they feel unsafe.
2. Ask them why it bothers them that you’ve changed (or want to change). Their first several answers are likely to be a smokescreen, probably from themselves as well. Keep asking, with genuine concern, and try not to show frustration with their answers.
3. How can you increase the sense of peace and safety within your friend, without yielding to them to keep the peace? What would make them feel less threatened by the change that you intend to keep?
4. Show them a way in which you haven’t changed which is supportive of them.
5. Remind yourself of the reasons that you want to change, and why they’re worth more than giving in to pressure.
6. Remind yourself that this is the “new you” and you want to keep it.
7. Reflect on how your example can be inspiring to your friends and others around you, and how some temporary discomfort is a small price to pay for achieving that.

If you’re committed to personal change and personal growth, you’ve almost certainly had the experience of changing and then going back to your previous behaviour. (I know I’ve started and stopped exercise many times over the years, for example, before I found a sustainable way to make it part of my life.)

Reflect: How much of that return to your earlier behaviour was because of pressure, open or subtle, from people around you?

What can you learn from that so that you don’t make the same mistake again?

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

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