The observation I would make about what gets people to make important changes in their lives is that things have to reach a pressure point (“trigger point”) before there is enough leverage to spark the change.
So why can’t we often get on the front foot and be proactive with the change that we know would greatly benefit us and instead leave things until it is almost too late to do anything about them?
The answer I would suggest is that the pleasure we know we will experience in making change is not as strong as the fear of being hurt or feeling pain if we go against what we believe is true. We have ingrained into us limiting beliefs that no longer serve us which are so rigid we hang on to them for grim death (sometimes it can end up like that literally). Hopefully before that happens, we get a big enough wakeup call that the fear of the consequences not changing outweighs the fear of moving away from our limited version of truth.
For example, a visit to your doctor’s office brings some unexpected bad news – the tests reveal you have the beginnings of lung cancer! So, you are faced with a choice – to keep smoking and almost certainly become very ill and possibly die or to give up smoking and at least with treatment have the possibility of being in remission after time. It may be that you had tried over many years to give up smoking and had tried many options to help with that, but it never stuck. It is most likely that now after the doctor’s news, you will go “cold turkey” and stop smoking immediately. Why now? Well, the fear of death is far bigger than the fear that if you give up you will feel stressed and anxious again, you will lose your confidence, that you have tried before and failed, you will lose friends who also smoke, or whatever other beliefs have kept you smoking all those years notwithstanding attempts to give up. You have at last reached your “Trigger Point”.
So many of our ingrained beliefs which have often been there from childhood disempower us and stop us from achieving our true potential.
- We do not know that we are not in charge of own ship and that someone or something else has control over the rudder.
- We do not realise that the reason we overeat and struggle to lose weight is because of something that happened to us when we were small children.
- We are not aware that historic trauma leads us to self-sabotage and prevents us from experiencing long-term fulfilling relationships.
- We are not aware that feelings of not being good enough to our parents have created perfectionist tendencies and result in procrastination and the list goes on.
For many of us our lives are lived on autopilot, and we are guided by default settings which may have been useful to us at some point in our life but are no longer. It’s like trying to navigate around town using an out-of-date map. You just end up either going round in circles or never reaching your destination. Fortunately, we do not have to have a gunfight to change our programming in advance of reaching our trigger points.
The simple act of attributing greater pain to hanging on to our limiting beliefs will help us shift to more empowering ones which will support us in making those decisions we need to make to ensure we reach our goals and achieve our full potential.
Self-awareness is crucial. An unexamined life produces unremarkable results. Looking inwards is strength. Being vulnerable is strength. Being prepared to change before life forces change on you is strength. How strong to you feel?
Would you rather wait it out until the gunfight at the “Am I Okay Coral” or get on your horse now and head off towards a bigger and brighter future? Your choice or someone else’s?