Change is as Good as a Holiday

My thanks go to everyone who commented on the ‘Dream Big’ post written while on holiday in China – and to those trainees and coaches who put up with slight delays in support over the past two weeks or so.

Now it\’s back to business as usual again … except that, after recuperating from a very long and eventful return journey, I feel a sense of renewal!

In life coaching we advocate frequent change as a means to ensure personal growth and development. I realise now after foregoing a proper holiday for far too long, that I needed some of my own medicine more than I cared to admit.

China is so different, culturally and historically, from what I am used to that it represented a substantial change to the status quo and with that has come a great deal of refreshing reflection.

As a result, I thought I would use this post to commend to you the value of making a change in your own life, whether that be an extended holiday, a week-end break away, a career change or simply a change in your daily routine.

[box type=\”shadow\”]“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

– Lao Tzu

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Change is as good as a holiday (continued)

 

Why we resist change

I’ve written extensively in other posts about why most of us tend to resist change.

In short, we are subject to two fundamental motivating forces; the desire to avoid pain and the desire to seek out pleasure. Whereas both are powerful, our desire to avoid pain is even stronger than our desire to experience pleasure.

As we all know, we are programmed to do everything we can to survive. Anything that threatens our survival will engender strong feelings of fear and activate our ‘fight or flight’ response.

In our less evolved hunter-gatherer days, the main forms of change (such as venturing out of our caves in search of food or new hunting grounds) were strongly associated with danger and quickly put us in a fearful, adrenaline fuelled alert mode.

In the world we live in today, change is highly unlikely to be life threatening. Nevertheless, the uncertainty that it evokes often engenders that primal response – feeling fearful.

An obstacle to our growth

Whereas fear was once a healthy protective mechanism, it is, more often than not today, an obstacle to our growth and development, as it causes an unhealthy aversion to change, or what I call inertia, that prevents us moving forward.

Taking action

The solution to the problem of inertia is a simple one – taking action. But when the inertia is well developed and supported by high levels of anxiety or fear, taking even a relatively small action may seem exceptionally challenging if not daunting.

Doing nothing, or procrastinating may seem like a far easier and more comfortable option in the short term – but of course it does nothing to enhance your ongoing growth, development and well-being in the longer term!

Small actions encourage bigger actions

The answer to this apparent \’catch 22\’ is to scale down the level of action to the point where it brings up an acceptably low level of anxiety. Taking a very small action makes it much easier to take a slightly bigger action and this makes it easier to take an even bigger action … and so on.

What is necessary is to take action, any little action, to get the ball rolling!

Try it and see what I mean.

If your inner voice is telling you need to make changes for the sake of a better, more fulfilling future, but you just can’t come to terms with the action required because of a deep rooted fear or anxiety at what might result, just dumb down the action to something you can live with, then just do it, then immediately start working on the next action.

Let me give you an example.

The story of Darren

Darren was someone I coached a few years ago. His inner voice had been telling him for some time that he should travel to Peru and follow the Inca Trail. He had even saved enough to make the journey to do so. The problem was that he had never left the country and was terrified at the prospect of going to a foreign, non English speaking country on his own.

When Darren first told me about his dream he did so almost apologetically, saying that he knew it would never happen. Although something within him sensed a deep spiritual connection with Peru and Machu Picchu, he explained that he was \’just not made for such adventure’.

I explained to him that his inner voice knew what was good for him and that he was certainly cut out do do this, it was just a matter of breaking the inertia that was holding him back.

We explored what had brought him to coaching and he told me that it had taken him three years to summon up the courage. I asked him what had held him back and he said, to my great surprise, that he had felt anxious about whether coaching might have an adverse psychological effect on him.

I asked him what had finally broken the inertia and he said he had called a friend who had been to see a life coach and was put at ease by what his friend had said.

“Then there is the solution to living your dream,” I told him. He looked at me quizzically.

I continued: “You are looking at this Inca trail thing as a really huge deal and the thought of going is overwhelming you and preventing you from moving forwards. What you need to do is take a very small action that will start you off in the right direction. How about calling someone who has already done the trail?”

He replied saying he had no idea of how to make contact with someone like that. I asked him how he found the answers to most of his day to day questions and, like most of us, he responded “I type the question into Google.”

Suddenly he smiled and said “Ok, Ok, I get the message!”

At our next session Darren’s attitude had transformed. He told me how he had stumbled across an online forum in which people had shared their experiences at Machu Picchu and how he had ‘met’ someone rather anxious like himself looking for a person to travel to Peru with.

To cut a long story short, his simple fist action led to a bigger action – calling the person he had met in the forum and that led to the next action, meeting up. As we know, a problem shared is a problem halved and before he knew it he and his new friend had booked their flights to Peru and ventured off on a dream trip!

The impossible had suddenly become more than possible!

 

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