Are you willing to become different?
It’s a question I read this week that struck me. It is simple and yet, so profound. The question asks if we are bold enough to change. Change is extremely hard. It is scary. It requires us to trust in things we cannot see, to jump off the cliff metaphorically. If change was easy, my profession wouldn’t exist. If you’re like me, you HATE the phrase, “change is the only constant.” Just because something is true doesn’t mean I have to like it. Our nervous systems make change hard for us. Our brains like the familiar because it is predictable. It will choose something bad that it knows over something good that is foreign. This is because the familiar “bad” is something it knows it can survive and survival is the main goal of our nervous system. The brain says, “oh I can predict this, I know this, we’ve done it before, and we can do it again.” Where as something new is scary. The brain says, “wait, it sounds good, but I can’t KNOW that is so it is a big risk.” And we are naturally risk avoidant creatures, for good reason! If you touch a hot stove, you don’t want to touch a hot stove again.
The challenge with this is we can find ourselves repeating painful and sometimes harmful patterns over and over again. Whether those be relationship patterns or how we relate to ourselves. We can start to feel trapped, like things will never change. We can start to believe the stories we tell ourselves from these patterns. It can breed shame, resentment, isolation, anxiety, depression, disconnection, and the list goes on. The more you participate in and practice those ways of thinking and being, the stronger those grooves get in your brain, making it harder to do something different. Those grooves didn’t get into your brain overnight, it was after years of repeated practice of them. So change takes years of repeatedly doing things differently to rewire the brain. Now that you know the brain will pick the same old pain every time when left to its own devices, are you willing to become different? It takes courage and bravery to choose to do the terrifying unfamiliar things. Challenging old stories and patterns isn’t for the weak, you are vulnerable and exposed (even though we all have the ability to do this). However, what is the price of staying the same?
Questions to ponder.
What am I afraid of happening by choosing to become different?
What will it take to commit to always making the hard choice to do things differently?
Imagine yourself as a brave person committed to becoming different. What is the brave version of me doing differently than I am currently? How can I incorporate those bold brave changes into my life now?
