I received this question the other day:
“Ok I suck at getting to the hard/painful bits, is there a short cut? Cuz lord knows I don’t want to do it the long way….”
So much of personal change is dependent on one thing. That thing is finding what needs to change. Once you identify what that is then making a powerful targeted change is much more likely to generate a result that is tangible and lasting.
Most people just miss the target because they focus on where the pain is. They feel bad and it is that bad feeling that they want to go away. The problem is that the bad feeling is more than likely just a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself. You can spend a lifetime chasing symptoms. Depression is often a symptom of feeling helpless. Social anxiety is often a symptom of feeling fragile and inferior. Smoking is often a symptom of stress. Over eating is often a symptom of loss, of emptiness, or of being unfulfilled.
This is why Most methods of stopping smoking that make smoking feel bad or to taste bad are useless and most often time fail in the long run. Since they do not deal with what drives the problem people either start smoking again OR they cross addict to something else like eating. Then you have to chase the eating problem and then they might cross addict to drinking. Even if they cross addict to working out, if it is an addiction it is unhealthy because there is no choice or control.
Now how do we get to those elusive real problem areas quickly?
We have several questions that help and several processes that pinpoint exactly where to target your efforts. Small targeted changes are much more effective in the long term.
1. What does doing what you want to change allow you to avoid feeling?
Many times our habits and behaviors are just ways of us avoiding a feeling or dealing with a problem. All problems have an emotional component. That emotion fuels the problem and without it the problem weakens. So many of us are lulled into believing that we should always feel good. The result is that we think if we can avoid feeling bad that our lives will improve. This is the basis of SO MANY self-help seminars and it is completely backwards. It creates fragile people who collapse at the slightest bad feeling. They think they can find the answer in whatever method numbs out the bad feeling.
The answer is to be able to deal with feeling bad without falling apart.
2. What is your projected outcome of what you want to achieve?
Success or failure depends on what our projected result will be. It is a double edged sword. If you project success then you are locked into that one measurement of success. If you goal is to be able to talk to anyone comfortably then anything less is a failure. So the favorite advice of self-help gurus to visualize your success is actually a time bomb waiting to blow up in your face.
If you project failure then you will gather any bit of evidence that supports your projection that you have failed. The smallest bit will lead you down the road to disaster but…. At least you were prepared. So phrases like “What is the worst that can happen?”, usually lead to the worst happening or at least imagining that it is happening.
Many time our projections whether good or bad server to make us feel like we have some amount of control of our lives. The brain is a prediction machine and is always looking for evidence that the prediction is right or wrong. While this was helpful in more primitive times in the modern world it betrays us by either making us feel bad when our projection is disproven or making us feel safe by preparing us for the worst. In either case we end up frozen in our tracks trying to figure out what to do next.
The answer is in how you deal with uncertainty. So the third question is:
3 How does it feel to not know what is going to happens next?
Truly successful people realize that they cannot control what happens. They plan for it but they know it is out of their control after a certain point. They do not mentally frozen because they do not have firm projections beyond a certain point. This allows them to be more nimble and creative when challenges come up.
Uncertainty causes us to hesitate. We have all seen this when watching sports. Winners never hesitate losers lose when they are uncertain. If you can accept being uncertain then you don’t hesitate. How many of us can look back over our lives and think about the opportunities we missed out on because we hesitated to act?
4 What does your favorite excuse allow you to avoid thinking or feeling?
We all have them… just some of us believe them more than others. Every time we fail, avoid or blunder we have our favorite excuse as to ‘why’ it is ok. We constantly B.S. ourselves into feeling better about our decision or performance in order to deal with things. Better is not what we need. Life is not about feeling good all the time. Feeling bad is natural. It guides us to better decisions in the future. Losing should hurt a little or winning would not feel great! Failing should hurt a little so success feels wonderful! Rejection should feel like crap so that acceptance can feel so good!
Once you deal with what you are avoiding then you can have the full experience of life.
These are the 4 questions you can ask yourself to help reveal the real problems that are holding you back from having the life you desire. Once you get on target you can be much more effective at making the changes in your life that you need to make.
