Jobseeker Columnist (January 2010)

So much can change in a year

The act of changing our life is over hyped, over-complicated by our social circles and totally misunderstood as time consuming and effortful. Change takes place in an instant. Making a decision takes no time at all. We do however take a lot of time to prepare to change and we take eons to come to a point of decision making. Here’s a paradigm shift: We can decide to change now and do the necessary action to keep the change.

Why do we associate change with taking a long time? It’s because we have all been there haven’t we? We made a decision to do something or NOT do something and never kept our word. “I will be tidy from now on”, “I will exercise three times a week”, “I will lose 10 kilos this year”. We have done this to ourselves over and over again till we have conditioned ourselves to not changing, subconsciously thinking, “What’s the point?” What’s the point in quitting smoking? I’ll just start again. What’s the point in losing weight? The weight will come back with the first cake I sniff. What’s the point in working out? I’ll just lose my muscle when I stop for a few weeks. What’s the point in looking for a new job? They are all the same miserable thing anyway.

Here’s the point. We want change because our life conditions do not equal our blueprint of the world. We feel happy and contented when who we are and what we have is equal to our expectations. When the two sides of the equation are not equal, we have varying degrees of unease depending upon how big the difference is. Have you ever felt not only deep unease, but a sense of misery? We feel miserable if our life conditions do not equal our blueprint of the world AND we feel we cannot do anything to change it. We feel miserable if we feel helpless and out of control.

So we really only have two choices, either change our life conditions or change our blueprint of the world. Let’s just safely assume that you hold yourself to a fairly high standard (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading a personal development article) and hence you have a blueprint of a fairly high standard. Then what you want to do for 2010 is to change your life conditions. Trust me, A LOT can change in a year. Let me give you an example of what happened for me in 2009, I went from working for someone to owning my own company. I went from being unfulfilled about work to being fulfilled with what I do. I went from being tied to an office to having the world as my office space, parks, coffee places and swimming pools are all fair game (sure I have an office but I no longer have to be there). I went from making a small difference to making a big difference in my work with people. So don’t let people tell you that change takes a long time. It doesn’t and it’s easy. Here’s how.

When we talk about changing our life conditions, what we are really talking about is firstly, changing the way we make decisions and second, once we have made these decisions, how to condition new actions into our lives to replace the old actions. Let’s start with making decisions. We make decisions to change for two reasons, either we are experiencing extreme unbearable pain or we are chasing after something really pleasurable. If we are comfortable, we will not have the impetus to change. If the pain is bearable, you will choose to live with it than to bear the pain of changing. Here is a classic example, the gym. The pleasure is in the looking good and feeling good for ourselves and others and having perfect health. The pain is in all the work you have to put in, the sweat and the smell of other people in the gym. If you don’t associate tremendous pleasure in looking good and excruciating pain with losing your health, you will automatically pick the path of least resistance and give yourself daily excuses why you should not go to the gym.

So in order to make a decision to take action, you must first give yourself massive pain in not taking action and tremendous pleasure in taking action. You will end up with a push-pull factor. Going back to the gym example, if you would want to start exercising or become more consistent, you need two lists. One list details the pain that you will go through if you don’t exercise and the second list details the pleasure you will get with consistent exercise. It should look like this: -

Choose to make the list emotional because emotion results in motion for both the avoidance of pain and your pursuit of pleasure.

Now that you have chosen to make a change, the next part is in conditioning ourselves to accept the change as a part of us and to instill this change as a new habit. We are creatures of habit because our brain simplifies our life and reduces our need of conscious attention by consistently taking in stimulus and turning it into automated responses. Kind of like driving a car, imagine if you still need to think about where your feet and hands need to go even after years of driving experience, life would turn out to be very stressful. We find it hard to change a habit because this process of automation creates physical connections in our brain, so it’s not just a thought; they are physical connections between synapses.

It’s like crossing a jungle. If it was your first time crossing the jungle, you would have a difficult time; the jungle would be covered with vegetation and undergrowth. With a lot of effort and hacking away with your parang, you eventually get through. You will be tired and drained. The second time through the same path makes it slightly easier and by the 100th time, you have a pathway through the jungle. Because the old path is not leading you to where you want to go, you want to make a new path. You would not have the motivation to go hacking away at bushes unless you have a definite toward pleasure – away from pain relationship. Unless there was something really pleasurable at the end of the jungle, or a gorilla is chasing you from behind, you will keep your parang in your tool shed and say “maybe I’ll do it tomorrow”.

To make change consistent you will want to look into this list on a daily basis or at least every time you are in a crossroad in making a decision. By doing so, you are fashioning new physical neurological pathways which will replace the old pathways. Do this for one habit at a time. When one habit has become habitualized, move on to the next. By the end of 2010, you will look back and be ecstatic with the progress you have made with yourself and you will look forward to 2011 with a big child like smile.

As for the old neurological habitual pathways. Like old jungle paths, they will be overgrown with time and you will find it hard to go down the old path again. Happy New Year and may you have a Happy Whole Year.

Cheers,

Edmond Yap