I took part in one before (which is why I’m getting those invitations). I got about 300 new subscribers to my newsletter. But I’m not doing it again.

Why not?

Because part of the expectation in participating in those things is that you’ll promote the giveaway. And frankly, most – no, practically all – of the stuff in the last one was crap. The giveaway was HYPE HYPE HYPEHYPEHYPE from start to finish, and it was dominated by unprofessional promoters of get-rich-quick schemes (both literal get-rich-quick schemes and the personal development equivalent *cough* flawofdistraction *cough*).

I picked up a dozen things myself that looked less dire than the average. Some were competitive products to mine, others were “build your online business” sort of things. None of them were up to much, and some were just ridiculous nonsense. If there was a single new idea in any one of them, I must have overlooked it, because I certainly don’t remember any.

A few months later, I’d unsubscribed from all the mailing lists and deleted all the worthless material I downloaded. (If you joined the giveaway on my recommendation, my belated apologies. And if you subscribed because of the giveaway, and you’re still here - well, I hope that means that something good came of it.)

What I’m going to do instead of taking part in that giveaway is to point you to the best personal development resources I know of personally on the web. I’ve got three criteria for inclusion:

1. The person producing the resource is genuine, not a non-stop crazy hype machine, and has a good story to tell about their own personal development journey.
2. It contains original ideas and material I haven’t seen anywhere else. It’s not just restating truisms that anyone with half a brain could figure out for themselves.
3. It’s practical, and tells you how to apply the principles it’s teaching in real life.

Now, you’d think that there’d be a huge mass of material that would meet those three simple criteria, but if there is then it’s hiding in the Dark Matter internet where I can’t see it. If there’s someone out there doing this stuff that I haven’t noticed, by all means jump in and comment below (no self-recommendations, please).

I’ll structure this by person rather than by topic, since (let’s face it) you take your personal development advice from people, because of the people that they are. And I’ll go in alphabetical order, to be fair.

Some of the resources I’ll mention are free, and some are paid. Of the paid ones, some have affiliate programs, meaning that if you buy them on my recommendation (using my link) I get a cut. I only ever recommend things with an affiliate link if I’d recommend them without.

Steven Aitchison

Steven’s genuine personality shines through every line of his blog Change Your Thoughts. He’s not the greatest writer on the internet, but he has some excellent insights and a generous heart.

He has a free “best of” that you can get by subscribing to his newsletter. Steven is doing a lot of offers lately, I will warn you, for his own and other people’s stuff.

His leading paid resource is How to Become an Advanced Early Riser (link is to my review). It hasn’t got me down to 5 hours of sleep, but then I haven’t implemented everything in it. And it has got me up early to exercise, which has been one of the best changes I’ve made.

Leo Babauta

I’ll admit that I wasn’t that impressed with Leo’s Zen Habits blog when I first looked at it. It seemed too obvious. But maybe that’s his strength: he points out the obvious and draws attention to it in a new way. I’ve been following him on Google+, and I have to say I’m warming to his approach.

The only one of his resources I’ve read myself so far is The Essential Motivation Handbook. It’s a competent, useful ebook.

Vlad Dolezal

Vlad is one of the new breed of young coaches that are making the Internet a better place. I first came across him through his free course on procrastination.

To find out what Vlad’s all about, start here: Best of Fun Life Development.

I reviewed his truly excellent ebook Unleash Your Confidence back in March, and it got a great big tick in each of the boxes: genuine, original and practical. It’s the confidence ebook I wish I’d written – and the kind of material I wish everyone was producing, so I could recommend more resources.

Charlie Gilkey

I’ve recently subscribed to Charlie’s Productive Flourishing, and it’s refreshing to read something so intelligent and thoughtful on an internet that’s usually more full of fluff than a feather pillow.

I haven’t looked at any of his products yet so I can’t say anything about them. But the blog is unusually good. It’s primarily for people in creative businesses, but there’s personal development stuff woven through.

Aaand… that’s about it 

I’ll admit that I haven’t obsessively tracked down every personal development writer on the Internet and looked at all their products, but I keep my ear to the ground, and there’s really not a lot else that I’m aware of.

And, ultimately, personal development isn’t about resources you buy. A good resource can help with a specific issue, definitely, but personal development is about developing resources within yourself. The people I’ve mentioned can definitely help you with that, but there’s no such thing as “done for you” personal development.

So, what have I missed? And are there personal development resources you’re looking for that you can’t find (or can only find crappy examples of)?

Related posts:

1. 7 simple steps to a workable personal change planHere is my seven-question system for writing your personal change...
2. Review: The Motivaider personal change deviceI’ve been trialling a device called the Motivaider over the...
3. Multiple selves and personal integration: the Parts ConferenceThe blog Improved Lives consistently features things I am interested...

Instead, I’m going to talk about why you get upset, why that’s completely understandable, and what you might do about it if it distresses you. It’s a direct follow-on from How to Hold Your Outcomes Lightly.

Over on my other blog, How to Be Amazing, I wrote recently about what to do when you offend someone. It wasn’t just a random choice of topic. I’d offended some people – not deliberately – with a guest post I wrote on another blog. One of the people I’d offended later came to my “what to do when you offend” post and left a lovely comment, and that got me thinking about why people get upset, as she had originally done.

Why you get upset

You get upset – angry, sad and/or afraid – when you feel threatened. That’s probably not a big revelation, but let’s think about it for a minute and unpack some of the implications.

Any time I’m feeling these strong emotions, it’s because I believe something has threatened my wellbeing. I talked about this last time in The Real Secret.

I have some belief that things “should” or “must” be otherwise than they in fact are, and that because they are not that way my identity, my existence, my wellbeing or the things I value are under threat of destruction.

And the reason that I believe this is that the situation reminds me, in some way, of a situation in which I felt that way before.

Often, what’s going on is what the Transactional Analysis folks call “hooking the not-OK child”. All of a sudden I’m a helpless little kid again, one who’s in a bad situation that he doesn’t know how to deal with. I feel intensely unresourceful in that moment, and so instead of using my many years of experience of solving problems rationally and effectively, I strike out, run away, or turtle up and stop interacting.

When I wrote a post that used stuttering as an analogy for procrastination, I hooked a number of not-OK children who had been teased and bullied for stuttering. I don’t stutter, but I’ve been teased and bullied, and it’s painful. Naturally, in many cases, their first reaction was to strike out. (The non-striking-out ones didn’t leave comments, but I’m sure there were some people in that category too.)

Getting upset is perfectly understandable

photo credit: rabble

Getting upset when you feel threatened is understandable. It’s natural. It’s usual. It’s human nature. Everybody does it.

It’s not necessarily desirable.

Crapping in your pants is also natural, also part of human nature, but we teach our children not to do it.

As children, we also get taught not to express our upset, or at least not to express it in particular ways that are unacceptable to our particular parents or their culture. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we don’t get upset, just that we get better at hiding it, and/or express it in ways that were rewarded (or at least ways that escaped the degree of punishment that would have caused us to change our behaviour).

What we seldom get taught is how not to get upset in the first place. The parallel with defecation only goes so far. We have to relieve ourselves regularly, but we don’t have a biological need to regularly get upset.

If we know how not to get triggered, or how to deal with the feelings if they do get triggered, there’s no reason we can’t deal maturely with all of our challenges, without falling into the unresourceful not-OK child mode at all.

Anger, fear and sadness are often distressing, not only to you but to people around you. They don’t usually help to resolve the situation. They are completely understandable, and no blame attaches to you for feeling them (you feel what you feel, and nobody can tell you not to). But it’s often more adaptive and more helpful to give those feelings less control of the situation rather than more.

What happens when you don’t act out of upset

I’m not going to claim any kind of flawless victory in the Incident of the Ill-chosen Metaphor. When I first started to see the comments piling up on my guest post, I was, yes, upset. I had several reactions:

• Anger at being misinterpreted
• Defensiveness at being criticized
• Sadness because I’d hurt other people
• Fear for my reputation

All of those were natural and understandable.

The thing that I did right, though, was that I didn’t respond immediately and primarily out of those upset feelings. Instead, I:

• recognised that the upset feelings of the people leaving comments were natural and understandable – I adopted some of their viewpoint.
• realised that some of their upset came not from what I had said but from what it reminded them of.
• accepted responsibility for my own role in the situation.
• apologised.

This had two good outcomes, from my perspective, in that two of the strongest critics calmed down and became much more positive. To use the language of transactional analysis again, by speaking from my Adult I had engaged their Adults and brought them out of the not-OK child. One of them has actually become a subscriber, which is a result well beyond what I expected.

So there are the benefits of not reacting out of upset - but how do you get to do that?

How not to get upset

If you’ve read the Emotional Hamster Wheel ebook that’s part of my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course, you’ll know the answer already.

The key is to start paying attention to your upset reaction so that you can start to slowly, slowly insert wedges between the stimulus (the event that reminds you, rightly or wrongly, of a threat) and the response, and widen the gap.

You can work backwards from the reaction to the irrational beliefs that trigger it off. You can work forwards from it, and put longer and longer pauses in before you react, to give your brain chemistry a chance to normalise and your rational brain to come back online.

And you can use self-calming techniques (such as the ones in the other ebook in Simple Stress Management Techniques) to reduce the intensity of your feelings in the moment and let you see above the emotional alligators.

With time and practice, you’ll be able to do it without as much concentration.

It’ll become natural and usual. Like second nature.

Related posts:

1. Breaking the Emotional Cycle: IntroductionDo you find yourself doing the same things again and...
2. How (and Why) to Let Go of Emotions“Don’t choke don’t choke don’t choke…” As we all know,...

It teaches you to fantasize obsessively about material possessions, to deliberately delude yourself into relentless positivity, and to blame yourself whenever things go wrong.

Why any personal development blogger would promote this claptrap is beyond me, particularly since the research is so consistently against it. (Fantasizing about outcomes reduces your chances of achieving them, trying to remain relentlessly positive arguably leads to worse outcomes than realism, and self-blame is, surely, a problem, not a solution.)

And yet, the Flaw of Distraction has made millions, not just for its originator but for many other promoters who know an easy sale when they see one. Tell people to do what they were going to do anyway (dream about the impossible), promise them that they’ll get what they want without doing any actual work, and then leave yourself the out that if it doesn’t work, it’s not because the process is wrong and completely flawed, it’s because they weren’t doing it perfectly? That’s a formula for success – not for the suckers, I mean customers, who buy it, of course, but for the hucksters who sell it.

Now, there are some people who promote this idea who genuinely believe in it, of course. Most of them, though, have probably adapted it and added to it to make it work – put the nuance back in and realigned it with actual reality. What they’re selling is not the original, pure snake oil.

Anyway, I’m going to tell you about a completely different, in fact opposite, secret. This one actually works.

The secret to success and happiness is holding your outcomes lightly.

Easy as ABCDE

Let me introduce you to Albert Ellis.

Ellis was a very strange, but very brilliant man who founded Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, basically to deal with his own issues, which were numerous.

He introduced a very simple mnemonic – you’d strain to make up a simpler one – for the process of his therapy. It goes like this: ABCDE.

A is for Adversity

Adversity (or the Activating Event) is any challenge that we face in life. It might be getting turned down for a date, an extra demand at work, a near-miss on the road, being eliminated in a competition - anything.

In itself, it’s just a thing that happens.

B is for Belief

We think the problem arises from the event, but it doesn’t. It arises from our irrational belief about the event.

The Adversity is just a thing that happened. The Belief – that that thing should not have happened, must not happen, is the end of the world, cannot be allowed to stand - is what converts a thing that happened into a crisis.

C is for Consequences

Beliefs have consequences. If we believe that the thing that happened is a horrible, terrible, wrong thing, we will be angry, sad, afraid. We will think things and do things and say things in response to the event – or rather, in response to our belief about the event.

The things we say and do and feel and think are the actual problem. Not the adversity – that’s just a thing that happened. Not even the belief, though that leads to the problem, the consequences. Because those thoughts, feelings, words and actions, arising from our irrational beliefs, don’t change the situation for the better. Instead, they make it worse.

D is for Disputing

photo credit: Alex Barth

Ellis’s method was to dispute the irrational beliefs. He was very confrontational about this in his own practice, swearing and shouting and talking over his client to challenge their thinking. You don’t need to do this. All you need to do is question the beliefs that lead to the consequences.

There are three key questions to ask about a belief that is causing you distress.

1. “How’s that working out for you?” Whatever else I think of Dr Phil, this catchphrase of his is pure gold. If your belief is making your life miserable, it definitely needs to be challenged. To take an example from my own life, I get annoyed and frustrated when other people use my kitchen and leave it in a mess. That doesn’t help me in any conceivable way.
2. “Where’s the proof for that?” What basis do I have for believing that other people “should” treat my kitchen exactly the way I do – put things in the right places, clean them up immediately when they’ve used them (and in the way I clean them), et cetera? Where is that written?
3. “Is this logical?” Here you’re looking for proof that your belief is not just a reflection of your preferences or desires. If I rewrote my belief as “I would prefer that people who use my kitchen leave it as I would leave it”, does that completely represent my belief, or is there some logical remainder that isn’t just a preference?

E is for Effect

The intended effect of disputing your irrational beliefs is a change in your thoughts, feelings and behaviour that used to arise from those beliefs. You’re able to adopt a response that is less distressing to you (and possibly others), and more likely to result in a positive change to the situation – if such a change is even called for.

You can say, “I would prefer,” or “I would like”, instead of using words like “must” and “should” – as if your preferences were moral laws of the universe.

Your preferences, and my preferences, aren’t any kind of law. They’re preferences.

Holding your outcomes lightly

Rather than obsessing about your desired outcome – imagining it, putting up pictures of it, writing about how great it would be – what if you held it more lightly?

What if you just acknowledged it as something you wanted to happen, and preferred?

What if you put your effort into imagining how to bring it about, and taking action to bring it about, instead of pretending it had already happened and that this had therefore become the best of all possible universes?

What would happen, then, if you achieved it? You would be able to look back on a process – a process you’d paid attention to and participated in and enjoyed for its own sake and been active in – and commend yourself for your hard work, which had earned your achievement. Not by magic, but by a real process of transformation that you brought about in ways you can point to and replicate in the future.

And what would happen if you didn’t achieve it? You would be able to look back on a process – a process you’d paid attention to and participated in and enjoyed for its own sake and been active in – and learn from it so that you could be more successful in future. You’d be free from self-blame, because even if your actions had led to the result you didn’t want, that was a learning experience for you. (You can’t learn from magic.)

Your world would not have come crashing down around your ears because you didn’t get what you wanted. That’s for two-year-olds. You might be disappointed or annoyed, but not devastated or enraged.

And next time round, you’d be able to look out for the same issues which prevented you from achieving your goal last time.

Because you’re allowed to think about the possibility of things going wrong, and plan for it, without it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Perhaps you might even decide that your original goal wasn’t important to you any more, and you could stop trying to reach it. Perhaps you learned enough just from the process.

Next time, I’ll talk about the effort we put into undoing our pasts – and what might happen if we stopped. But for now, I leave you, as always, with action to take.

Action now

Identify some things that happen that get you upset to no good purpose.

Consider the consequences of the beliefs you hold about those adversities.

Dispute your beliefs.

What was the effect?

No related posts.

As we all know, thoughts like that lead inevitably to choking. Why?

Because trying to suppress a thought gives it power. It’s like pushing against a spring. The harder you push, the more force it pushes back with.

I was reminded of this recently by a post on PsyBlog: 8 Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression. It’s not just thoughts of failure this happens with. Whether you’re trying not to be attracted to someone or not to mention a secret, trying not to be depressed or trying to fall asleep, the harder you try, the more you fail.

Psychocybernetics

Back in the 1960s, Maxwell Maltz had an explanation for this. His book Psychocybernetics (which is excellent, by the way) talks about your mind as a guided missile, heading for the goals you present to it most vividly.

So when you’re trying to think unsexy thoughts, guess what happens?

Your mind heads straight for what you are so vividly imagining.

Suppressing thoughts takes effort

Of course, we can suppress thoughts to a certain degree. But it does take effort. A study in Biological Psychology led by Philippe R. Goldin used brain scans to investigate the difference between two strategies for dealing with distressing thoughts: expressive repression (that is, keeping a “stiff upper lip” and not showing your distress), and cognitive reappraisal (changing the way you think about the distressing situation). Expressive repression was less effective – and took more mental effort.

And this is why it’s harder to suppress thoughts when we’re tired. A pattern I’ve noticed with the people who come to me for help in changing the way they eat goes like this: In the early part of the day, even up to the afternoon, they eat healthily. But when they get home from work, they head for the junk food and undo all their good work.

One likely reason is that they’re tired, and the thoughts they’ve been suppressing all day about how good some chocolate would taste have become stronger than their ability to control them.

How not to be a (thought-suppression) hero

photo credit: The World According To Marty

So, if the battle against thoughts we don’t want to think is doomed to failure, what can we do instead?

We can think the thoughts and then let them go.

Both parts are equally important. Thinking the thoughts (which you’ve actually been doing anyway while you were trying to suppress them) brings them out into the clear light of day and gives our rationality time to kick in. Particularly for thoughts that hold a strong emotional charge, we respond emotionally before we respond rationally, and if we instantly react by pushing the thoughts down again, all we’re doing is winding ourselves up emotionally. We’re never thinking about the thoughts.

Often, when you think about a thought, it becomes obvious that it’s a stupid thought and you don’t really want to act on it. How often have you done something stupid and said, “I didn’t think that all the way through?”

Think your thoughts all the way through. Say you’re attracted to someone inappropriate, for example. Let yourself think about that. Your mind will come up with all the reasons that the attraction is inappropriate and the relationship couldn’t work.

The feeling, of course, will very likely still be there. And this is where the letting go comes in.

Letting thoughts and feelings go

If you’ve been reading my stuff for any length of time you probably know what’s coming next. Yes, it’s the Welcoming Practice. It’s such a good one that I keep teaching it at every opportunity.

First, notice how the feeling is in your body. Where is it located? What is it like? Is it warm, cool, tight, loose? Become aware of it as a body sensation. This simultaneously connects you to it and distances you from it – it’s like letting the thought come into consciousness. It stops the suppression and your attempts to ignore it, but it also gives you enough space to look at it from the outside instead of being carried along in it.

Second, name and acknowledge the feeling. Naming it sets up a circuit between the “feeling” and “rational” parts of your brain and starts to siphon off the activation of the “feeling” part. In the classic Welcoming Practice, you actually say “Welcome, [name of feeling]“, hence the name of the practice. You’re acknowledging the feeling as a part of yourself, as a genuine reaction. You’re not trying to push it away any more. (You’re not, of course, welcoming the situation that led to the feeling, which may be quite harmful and wrong.)

Take your time over each step. When you’re ready, the third step is to gently let the feeling go. Allow its activation to subside, without having led to any action. You might even make a mental or physical gesture of letting something go from your hand. I usually take a deep breath and let it slowly out as I let go of the feeling.

Now you can move on with your life.

Practicing the Welcoming Practice

You may have to keep letting the thoughts and feelings go for a while before they stop bothering you. That’s OK. It’s no more effort than you were spending suppressing them, after all, and that wasn’t working, whereas letting them go will.

So take a moment right now to set yourself a mental alarm. Take a few deep breaths, relax in your chair, close your eyes and tell yourself, “When I’m suppressing a thought or feeling, I notice and remember what to do. I think the thought and let the feeling go.”

For extra effectiveness, write that down and put it somewhere you’re going to see it frequently.

I think you’ll be surprised by the results.

Related posts:

1. One Simple Step Towards Managing EmotionsManaging moods and emotions is something that many of us...
2. How Not to Get Swept Away By EmotionsImagine you are standing by the side of a busy...
3. Don’t suppress emotions – think: brain imaging studyA neuroimaging study led by Philippe R. Goldin of Stanford...

This came as a big surprise to me. Growing up, I’d never had much of a clue about romance, and although I had a lot of female friends (and still do), I reached the age of 30 without ever having had a girlfriend.

Why am I talking about this now? Largely because one of my readers, who’s turning 30 soon and has never had a girlfriend, emailed me for advice (or really, for encouragement – he knew what action to take already).

That reminded me that I’d never told the story here of how it is that I come to be happily married, when for most of my life I thought that was never going to happen. I think it’s a good story – and maybe it’ll be inspirational, not only if you’re long-term single but if you struggle with any elusive dream.

Meant for someone else and not for me

Let’s start at the beginning. I have a mild form of a genetic condition called Marfan’s syndrome, the main visible signs of which in my case are that I’m very thin, with a noticeably distorted back. I was always self-conscious about my appearance, plus I wasn’t comfortable with emotions. (My family are very emotionally reserved, even for New Zealanders.)

All this meant that I was shy around girls-as-girls (girls as people I was mostly fine with), and asking one out was an impossibly scary thing. I was also very nerdy and unconventional, which didn’t help. I had a strange hyaena-like laugh, deliberately dressed unfashionably, and since my intelligence was the one thing about myself that I did feel confident about, I displayed it at every opportunity. Power tip: This isn’t an endearing trait.

I didn’t have a girlfriend at school, but that was normal in a way, because nor did my two great friends. As it turned out, one of them was gay; the other was just as big a nerd as I was. Once he and I got to university, though, he got a more fashionable haircut, started to dress in jeans and satin shirts (it was the 80s), lost the horn-rimmed glasses (his sight recovered when we were in our late teens), and eventually started dating. I didn’t.

I was very religious at the time, and at least some of the time I rationalised my singleness as a “calling”. Trouble was, I didn’t actually want to be single, deep down, and that led to several years of emotional struggle and internal conflict that didn’t really need to happen.

When I needed sunshine I got rain

And then I created a couple more years of unnecessary pain for myself by falling for a fellow student who only wanted to be friends, not saying anything to her for months, and not taking “no” as her final answer (as I recall, she wasn’t as direct and unambiguous as she could have been, but still).

The two of us then joined the staff of a voluntary organisation that we’d both been involved with at university and went off to Australia to train together, living in the same house. This organisation, incidentally, had a policy that if you were on their staff and wanted to get married, your spouse also had to be on staff already or join, and you can imagine how that distorted things.

I wasn’t over her, but didn’t say anything for more months, by which time I was severely stressed by other things that were happening in my life (like training for an occupation I was completely unsuited for), and I took her second and more definite “no” very hard. I then had to continue to see her almost daily for a few more months, until I left the organisation when it clearly wasn’t going to work out.

Back home, we ended up at the same church. She started going out with one of the other guys from the course – the three of us had been good friends and hung out a lot – and they eventually got married. Still very emotionally vulnerable from severe stress breakdown, I didn’t cope with that well. (I actually turned and fled once when I saw her walking towards me.)

Round and round in little unhappy circles

So that experience overshadowed my romantic life, or lack thereof, for a few years afterwards. It didn’t help that my next serious attempt to start a relationship, with another friend, also got a “no” response. I did go out with a woman for about six months, but “go out” was all we did, and at the end she “clarified” that it had always been on the basis of being just friends – definitely not the impression I had, or the impression that the mutual friend who introduced us had had either. Either I moved too slowly and she lost interest, or her clarification was actually the truth.

There were a couple of times that women did show interest in me. One invited me to a film at the film festival – Blade Runner, which I had watched before and not enjoyed – and it took me a second after I’d said “no” to realise that she’d asked me out. After another second’s review, I decided that my answer stood, though. She was – well, to be honest, she was kind of a female me, and I didn’t find her attractive. (This was back before nerd girls were confident and sexy.)

And then there was the friend of a friend who came on so strong and so desperate that I got horribly nervous, and had to visit the bathroom four or five times during our dinner date at my favourite restaurant. We didn’t go out a second time.

And so I reached 30, having had a total of one date that both people present had definitely considered a date, and it had been – kind of a train crash.

I take action at last

Towards the end of the year I turned 30, though, two things happened that created a shift. The first was something I did. I was aware that I wasn’t good at expressing emotions, though I certainly felt them powerfully enough (my years of romantic hope and disappointment had shown me that – several of those many rejections, even some that were indirect and happened before I’d even asked, had plunged me straight into depression, no stopping, no waiting). So I went and took a community acting class. I figured that if I learned to convey emotions that I wasn’t feeling, I’d be able to translate the skill into conveying emotions I was feeling.

The week before the class finished, the second thing happened: my father died suddenly. I was able to grieve him much better and more openly – the class had done its work – and my emotions began to open up. I also – this feels a little disloyal, but it’s the truth – felt released from the pressure of his expectations, including the expectation of not expressing emotion. He was a good man, but like all of us he had his issues, and emotional expression was definitely one of them. He’d been through the Depression and World War II and had learned to cope by not talking about it.

A fortunate friendship

My father’s death was the trigger for me to get back in touch with a friend I’d made online the previous year. This was the late 90s, when the Internet was still relatively new to most people and a lot of today’s ways of connecting didn’t exist or were in their infancy. But a guy I knew slightly on an email discussion list had started a site for people to meet each other, including as “just friends” with no romantic expectations, and I’d decided, “Why not check it out? What could be the harm?”

A woman had posted there with a very interesting-sounding profile, and she was just looking for a friend, so I emailed her. I was apparently the only normal, non-creepy person who contacted her, and we started mailing back and forth, discussing books, and our personal struggles (including with singleness), and psychology, which she was studying, and everything else that came to mind. But then she started having computer issues, and we lost touch for a while.

When I emailed her about my father, I was also emailing another woman, who had contacted me about an article I had written on singleness on my now-long-gone Geocities website (remember Geocities?). I mentioned this second woman to the first woman, Erin, and she became indignant that I’d been emailing someone else (however innocently). This was my first clue.

We started swapping audio tapes in the mail (this was before MP3s or Skype, and you could only do video on CD-ROM). She has a pleasant voice, and I started to notice an attraction – and started to suspect it was mutual. Summoning up all my courage, I asked. It was mutual. YES!

It was the very early days of Internet romance, and it had a bad reputation. To the initial dismay of her fellow psychology students and her father (“How do you know he’s not an axe murderer?”), we decided it was serious. I went and met her – she lived in California – and then a few months later brought her out to New Zealand for Christmas to meet my friends and family. They approved, not that they got a vote, and we were married in February of 1999.

What I learned

I’ve passed 1500 words here, and I haven’t brought out a personal development lesson yet (which is what this blog is for, after all). So here it is.

If you want a change, make a change. Your life isn’t going to magically change by itself and suddenly work out when it never did before. Work on your confidence, your ability to listen, your ability to connect, your emotional management skills. Worst case: you’ll be a better and more interesting person and you’ll like yourself more.

Secondly, learn to take action. The reader who emailed me has an excellent plan: read some of the books he’s bought about confidence and interacting with women, and then join an online dating site and start practicing. I wasted far too much time having conversations in my head that should have happened outside my head, where I would quickly have learned what was what and had the opportunity to move on.

And finally, don’t take it all so seriously. Enjoy your life as it is now, let go of some of your emotional overinvestment in particular outcomes, and roll with the punches. If you’re working actively on improving your life, you’re taking action, and you’re able to become resilient to rejection, disappointment and loss, eventually things do improve.

Keep the questions coming, by the way. If there’s something you’d like me to write about, or write more about, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send an email. I love to connect with my readers and write about what you want to know about.

Related posts:

1. 3 Things I Wish I’d Learned EarlierThis is part of my occasional life lessons series, Three...
2. How to Make Hard Things Easier(This is part of my continuing series of posts related...

It’s been running since January, which is longer than I’ve ever run a series here before. I’ll probably do something similar again, though, because it’s been good to focus on one topic over a long period.

I didn’t want the original post to just be another list post. List posts are popular with blog readers because they’re easy to skim, but they can easily be shallow and lazy ways of blogging about a topic without engaging with it in any depth. Instead, I expanded each point in the list into its own post, averaging around a thousand words or more.

That’s 26,000 words, which is almost enough for a small book. And that’s exactly what I’m going to turn the series into.

I’m going to go through all the posts, of course, and revise and expand them, add in material that I deliberately left out for space reasons (or that I’ve thought of since), and write a few completely new chapters – I’m thinking seven for some reason. I might include some other relevant material from guest posts I’ve written, my other blog at How to Be Amazing, or my archives here. The whole thing will likely be 35,000 to 40,000 words by the time I finish.

A book? When?

I’m planning for that finish date to be early January 2012 – just in time for New Year’s resolutions, and a year after the series began. But if you want to be kept in touch (and get a discount on the book when it’s available, and some pre-release material that I won’t be sharing anywhere else), sign up down the bottom of this post to my “early notification” mailing list. I won’t flood you with a lot of email, just relevant updates about the book’s progress and how you can get some extras and special deals.

I’m self-publishing, of course. Not because I don’t think I could get a publisher, but because I can’t see the point in putting all that work into finding one in order to have less creative control and still do most of the marketing. (I used to work in traditional publishing, and I’ve self-published before. I know the ins and outs.)

That means, by the way, that if you’re a graphic designer and you fancy doing a book cover, you should email me a proposal (mikerm at hypno co nz). I’m offering to pay, of course, though if you wanted to swap some of your work for some of mine I’d be happy to discuss it. I got my last book cover that way.

If you, or someone you know, reviews books or personal development resources, get in touch with me as well. I’d like to have lots of reviews in hand by the time I launch in January. You’ll get an electronic copy for review, and if your review is published or I use a quote from you I’ll send you a physical book when they’re available. Sales of the book may also be part of my affiliate program.

I want to find a way to offer everyone who buys a print book an ebook version as well. That’s surprisingly difficult to achieve, technically, with the major print-on-demand services, but I want to make it work.

photo credit: ElvertBarnes

What this means for the blog

Obviously, some of the time I’ve been spending blogging is going to need to be spent on the book.

I’m also working on a cunning scheme which I hope will make my online personal development courses much more effective and engaging. And I’ve just joined Toastmasters, as I mentioned last week, and some of my blogging time needs to be diverted to preparing speeches. (Some of them may end up here as video posts.)

Also, as I hope you know, I’m posting weekly at How to Be Amazing. And I want to do some guest posting on other blogs, too.

All this, and a few other things I won’t bore you with, means that I won’t be posting as often here over the next few months. I’ve been posting regularly every week for, I think, a couple of years now. During that time, my average post length has roughly tripled, I’ve started another blog, and… well, see above. To be honest, the only reason I could keep up a weekly schedule for so long this year is that I was writing to an outline – the outline provided by the original 25 Ways Not to Change Your Life post.

My philosophy of blogging is that I’d rather post less regularly and more usefully than knock out a filler post each week for the sake of it. So you will hear from me when I have something substantial to say that fits here rather than at How to Be Amazing or on someone else’s blog as a guest post.

I’m going to aim for a post every two to three weeks, but it may be less. I’ll have to see how things go.

Action Now

If you’ve enjoyed the How Not to Change Your Life series, if you’re serious about changing your life for the better, if you want more and better, and if having a print book that you can read (or an ebook) rather than a series of blog posts appeals to you, I can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t sign up for my pre-release email list below. There’s no obligation, it costs nothing, and I’ll offer a substantial discount and preview material to whoever signs up. Do it now!

And if you still want to get weekly blog posts from me, there’s now only one way. Head over to How to Be Amazing and subscribe. You get immediate free access to some great resources, too.

No related posts.

Today, though, I want to talk about trying for too much too soon, because it’s one of the classics of not changing your life.

Whether you’re trying to lose weight, get fit or build a skill, aiming too high to start with will reliably result in failure – and not always the good kind of failure, either. (The good kind of failure is the kind that you learn from and treat as education, feedback or a course correction.)

Thing is, when you have a great goal, when you’ve pictured it in your mind, when you’ve maybe imagined yourself in the future situation – which is a good motivational technique, done right – it seems closer than it really is. And therein lies the trap.

The sticky middle

Beginnings are fun. They’re fresh and exciting.

Endings are fun. They bring a sense of completion and achievement.

Middles? Middles are not so much fun. But if you’re going to do anything worthwhile, the middle is going to be the biggest part.

I have a fitness challenge. I’m in the middle of it. I started seriously in March, I think it was, and really seriously in May, and now it’s September and I’m still not there. I got the persistent cold that’s been going round this year, and it set me back from “almost at my first goal” to “not anywhere close”. I’m frustrated.

I have to work with that. I have to work with the fitness that I have and build on it as much as I’m able to – but no more, because that way lies injury and further months of being in the middle. I went for a run the other day, with the Couch to 5k iPhone app, which coaches you through a sequence of running and walking. (Over the several weeks it’s supposed to take, you gradually run more and walk less, until you’re running all the time.) I skipped the last run segment, because I could feel my body starting to protest seriously at the strain of its first run in a couple of weeks.

I wasn’t going to leave myself in pain for three days just to finish the day’s programme. There’s a time to persevere, and a time to stop.

Achieving anything worthwhile takes time

Look at advertisements for weight loss. I saw a billboard the other day advertising a six-week weight-loss programme (by the title, it also involved exercise). It put the words “six weeks” next to the illustration of a body that I am morally certain could not be achieved in six weeks by the average person, by any known means.

Why do people run these advertisements? Because they work. The products don’t work, but the advertisements work. Everyone wants a body like that in six weeks. Never mind that it actually takes at least six months if you also have, you know, a life (and if everything goes smoothly, and you don’t give up because you’re discouraged at your slow progress).

And that’s the real problem. Having created a false expectation, the programme or product fails to deliver the achievement you were after, and even though it’s delivering progress, you give up because it’s not what you expected.

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos

A crowded life is hard to change

The other pitfall in trying for too much too soon – apart from the inevitable disappointment – is that if you’re a serious-minded person, you’ll probably put in a lot of work trying to achieve the impossible. You’ll devote a lot of time and attention to it. You’ll leave yourself very little time for rest and restoration, or simple human being.

And simple human being is essential if you’re going to change your life in any positive way. (I’ll go into that in more depth in the book.)

Thing is, if you’re scheduling yourself solid and never leaving time to think, reflect and unwind, you may achieve external success, but your inner life, which is in many ways your true life, will remain profoundly unchanged – or even change for the worse.

It takes a lifetime to learn to live

I’m in a study group where we’re going through some booklets based on the teachings of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, mystic and poet. There are questions for reflection after the readings, and the other night, one of the questions was something like, “What would you tell a young person about learning to live more joyfully?”

We’re all similar in that we’re slowly overcoming a tendency to take ourselves too seriously, so we came to an easy consensus. We’d tell young people (like our younger selves) not to worry so much, that it was all going to come out basically OK in the end, and to do their best to enjoy the ride.

We’re mostly in our 40s. I don’t know what an older group would say, but that’s what we’ve learned so far about changing our lives. Treating everything as urgent and serious is a recipe for anxiety, but it doesn’t get you to a helpful place any quicker.

Striking the balance

You won’t change your life if you do nothing. But you won’t change it if you take on too much and fail, either. Somewhere in the middle (there’s that word again) is the Goldilocks spot, where you’re making consistent effort, doing consistent and regular practice, within your capabilities, in a way that grows those capabilities to where you want to be.

That place of balance isn’t a cruisy place. It’s challenging – but it’s not desperate. It’s near, on or maybe just slightly beyond the outer edge of your comfort zone. It’s stretching, but not agonising.

I recently joined Toastmasters, and because this is the time of year that competitions are held, before I’ve even scheduled my first speech, I’m in a speech competition. I had two choices: the humourous speech contest, or the Table Topics contest (where you speak for one to two minutes on a topic that you don’t know about in advance).

I was going to enter the humourous contest, but I changed my mind. From the meetings I’ve attended so far, I’ve discovered that I’m good at Table Topics (as I ought to be, having done a 10-week improv course and been a client-centred hypnotherapist for several years). I felt I had a reasonable chance of even winning that contest, whereas doing a humourous speech as my “Icebreaker”, the first-ever Toastmasters speech, was probably too ambitious.

I went for the more achievable option, because it was still challenging enough to be a growth opportunity, but one I was likely to do well in. Result? I won. I’m in the area competition next week. The club I’m part of is located in the central city, which means I’m likely to have some serious opposition – top corporate people with a lot more experience. And my feeling is, bring it on!

That’s striking the balance. Every so often, sure, it’s worth trying something that you know you might fail spectacularly at, just to have the experience. But you need to go into that with your eyes open to the likelihood of failure, and be prepared to go on anyway, whatever the result.

Don’t set yourself up for failure by trying for too much, too soon.

Well, that concludes our series on How Not to Change Your Life. Tune in next week to hear more about how it’s going to become a book, and what’s next for the Living Skillfully blog.

Related posts:

1. How Not to Change Your Life: Expect Change to Happen By ItselfUp to a point, change does happen by itself. But...
2. How Not to Change Your Life: Stay IgnorantWhen you’re ignorant, you don’t know what you don’t know....
3. How Not to Change Your Life: Learn Without DoingThis has been a hard post to write. I managed...

There are three kinds of education (that I can think of), and three kinds of expertise that go with them.

Just the facts, Ma’am

There’s the kind of education that fills you up with facts but doesn’t give you much to connect them together into any kind of coherent whole – all too common in schools, so let’s call it “schooling” for short.

The expert with this kind of education is the know-it-all. He (or she, but usually still he) can bore you for hours with the details of his particular passion. Think of the character of Ross in Friends.

The problem with this kind of expert is that he doesn’t understand his chosen field as a whole, and, more importantly, can’t achieve anything with the knowledge he has. He’s substituted knowing for understanding and acting. And because he never actually knows it all, he can always use “further research needed” as an excuse to avoid committing to action – so he’ll never change his life.

photo credit: peyri

Having been a know-it-all, I can tell you how I broke out of that particular trap. I started doing things based on imperfect knowledge, and discovering more as I acted. What I learned is that you can’t figure out everything in advance – and if you think you have (see the True Believer, below), you’re likely to take that as sufficient achievement and stop without having done anything with your knowledge.

So if you think you might be a know-it-all expert, here’s the cure: Do things. Learn by doing. Discover in the course of action. And leave theory and detailed knowledge to one side for a while.

I’ve spoken before about how learning tai chi helped me to start a virtuous cycle of self-improvement. That was partly because I didn’t approach it as a know-it-all. I struggled for weeks and months to learn something that had no words, that could only be learned by doing it, by practice. It broke me out of more than one rut. I’m sure it freed up my mental energy as much as my physical energy.

True believers

Secondly,there’s the kind of education that fills you up with opinions and only gives you one way to fit them all together. We also call this “indoctrination”.

The first thing I think of in this context, because I experienced it myself as a young man, is religious instruction in an orthodox (with a small o) community. But I’ve seen it in political opinions of every shade, in conspiracy theories, in the New Age movement, in the kinds of causes that young people adopt passionately – vegetarianism, environmentalism, minimalism – and even in health and fitness fads.

Now, I’m completely in favour of passion, and of at least some versions of most of the causes and commitments I’ve just mentioned (except the conspiracy theories). But the danger of being a “True Believer” expert is that you lose all ability to listen to anyone who disagrees with you even a little.

That’s a large amount of potential wisdom consigned to the outer darkness, and almost a guarantee that you won’t change your life. After all, you’re already right about everything, so nothing needs to change.

The Greek legend of Procrustes, who strapped travelers to a bed and either stretched them to fit it or cut off parts that hung over the edge, is the best metaphor I’ve ever found for the true-believer kind of education.

I’ve been a true believer as well, and here’s my recommendation for escaping:

• Enjoy connecting with people and things as they are, without trying to fit them into your overarching theory of everything.
• Let go of instant judgement.
• Suspend yourself in that space where you don’t know the answer yet or have an opinion. Learn to enjoy being there.
• And draw back from the specifics of your particular commitment – the ways in which it’s traditionally been implemented – and contemplate the principles that lie beneath. Is there another way of living out those principles? Look around for people who are doing that, and learn from them if you can.

It’s a slow process. It took me years. But the starting point is to consider: What if I’m not right about everything? What if other people have a point?

Exploring the principles

Speaking of principles leads me on to the third kind of education.

In the third kind of education, you learn principles – not “theory of everything” principles into which everything must fit, but what’s sometimes called “heuristics”, principles of exploration.

You learn skills, practical skills that you can use when you do things in the field.

You learn to observe – not so much in order to make fine distinctions and categorise (like a know-it-all) or in order to judge and discriminate (like a true believer), but in order to understand and decide on a course of action.

Because exploration and action are the two great methods of this third kind of education. Let’s call it “training”.

Obviously, I’m more in favour of this kind of education than the others. But there are still dangers to becoming an expert this way.

A trained expert (or master practitioner) has put in a lot of practice in the field (the famous 10,000 hours), and his or her brain is now structured differently. The complex patterns that a beginner needs to perform consciously have become built into the expert’s cerebellum, which looks after unconscious use of complicated patterns like movement and speech.

That means that the expert can act without conscious thought. More often than not, this produces the right result – after all, the expert has spent years learning what does and doesn’t work. But in a genuinely new situation, the beginner may have some advantage over the expert, because the beginner approaches every situation without knowing how to handle it, and has to figure it out.

Also, as you become an expert, a layer of sophistication starts to separate you from the simple, human responses that may have been what drew you to the field in the first place. It’s a rare doctor who can simply sympathise with a sick friend, and a rare ornithologist who can take simple pleasure in watching a bird and hearing it sing without naming, categorising and cataloging it.

Zen teachers sometimes talk about having “beginner’s mind”, the kind of fresh approach to any thing or situation that sees it as itself and not an example of a phenomenon.

In order to change our lives, you and I need to approach them with beginner’s mind.

How to be a beginner

In order to be a beginner, I need to let go of being a know-it-all and acknowledge that some things can only be learned when I do them.

I need to let go of being a true believer and acknowledge that I don’t have answers for everything, that some things have to remain mysteries to me.

I need to be prepared to explore, but explore thoughtfully, letting go of being a master practitioner, approaching everything as if for the first time. Even if it looks like something I’ve seen or done before, each time is different.

Because life is untidy and chaotic and provisional, and we can’t live it as experts. If I’m being an expert, I’m not really living. I’m just playing a role.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life – which ends next week with Try for Too Much, Too Soon.

Related posts:

1. How Not to Change Your Life: Stay IgnorantWhen you’re ignorant, you don’t know what you don’t know....
2. How Not to Change Your Life: Try For Too Much Too SoonThis is the last post in the epic How Not to...
3. 25 Ways Not to Change Your LifeIn January, we traditionally think about making changes in the...

Think about a pool of ink dropped on a page. If the page represents everything that you can possibly know, and the ink represents what you actually know, then a small spot of ink will not only take in a small amount of knowledge. It will also have a small circumference, with limited contact with other knowledge – the things that you know you don’t know.

As the pool of ink grows, as you become more knowledgeable, so does the number of things you’re aware of that you don’t know yet.

photo credit: billerr

So, what might be outside the inkblot that will keep you from changing your life?

Ignorance about needing to change

There’s ignorance that’s unintentional, and then there’s deliberate ignorance.

Deliberate ignorance usually comes out of arrogance or fear (if there’s a difference; arrogance is often a mask for fear of being wrong, after all). If you’re afraid to change, keeping a deliberate blind spot is one way of ensuring that you don’t feel the need to do so.

I’m going to assume that if you’re reading a personal development blog, your main problem is not that you’re carefully remaining ignorant of needing to change your life. You may be avoiding change in other ways, which is what this whole How Not to Change Your Life series is all about, but you’re aware that you need to change.

You may not, of course, be sure what about your life needs to change.

Ignorance about what to change

All too often, we feel a sense of unease about our lives. Something we can’t quite pin down. Something obviously needs to change – but what?

Should I change my job? My house? My partner? My appearance? What if I change all those things and the same sense of unease persists?

And even if I know that I need to change something on the inside… what, exactly? Do I need to be more confident? Less anxious? Deal with my stress better? Get on better with the people around me who irritate me? Do I need to care more about some things, less about others? Do I need to be more organised, more punctual and more motivated? And if I could just improve my memory and sleep better….

Often enough, a cluster of things come together, and we don’t know what to change first. Everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph could describe one person’s issues, and none of them are uncommon. (I couldn’t tell you how many of my clients would have ticked all of those boxes when they came in to see me.)

Where do you start? Is it even possible?

Ignorance that change is possible

All too many people don’t even realise that they can change. It seems too hard. Some other, really disciplined people might be able to change, but not me, they think. I’ve always been like this, and I always will.

I take an optimistic view of personal change. I think that anyone who wants to can change, with the right help. It’s definitely hard – I don’t mean to suggest otherwise for a moment. But it is possible.

People who are less intelligent than you, have less money then you, have fewer opportunities and less support and less education and less anything else you might use as an excuse, have succeeded in changing. I guarantee it.

OK, how?

Ignorance about how to change

This is where we start to get real. What are the steps you follow to change your life? How’s it done?

This is a big part of what I call the Missing Curriculum. It’s something we weren’t taught at school (unless you went to a very unusual school).

There’s a process of change, and although going through it takes dedication and perseverance, the concept is simple.

1. Your motivation to change needs to be, at least on average, stronger than your reasons to stay the same.
2. You need to pay attention to what you’re doing and what you want to be doing instead.
3. You need to practice regularly.

That’s it, really. There are no more secrets to change than that. Except maybe, “What your imagination got you into, it can get you out of – once you know what to do with it”.

Almost everything I write is about the change process and how to facilitate it, so I’m not going to try to repeat it all here. If you want a concise summary of a powerful technique for change – which incorporates attention, imagination, motivation and regular practice – take a look at my Self-Hypnosis How To site.

Action Now

So, if you’re in that place of feeling discontented and unsure, of knowing you want to change your life but not knowing what you want to change or how to do it, here are some concrete first steps.

1. Let yourself dream. Get yourself into a “daydream” state and listen to yourself say what you really want to do and how you really want to be in the world, no matter how crazy or unrealistic it sounds.
2. Figure out what’s stopping you from heading towards that dream – however slowly and hesitantly.
3. Find out how people change that. Once you’ve identified what you want to change, research. Discover how it’s done, how other people have done it. Browse this site, and my other site, How to Be Amazing. Write down keywords. Google them.
4. Put a practice in place. Do something on a regular basis that moves you in the direction of the person you want to be. I can’t stress this one enough.
5. Watch yourself change. See what works, what doesn’t work, what continually trips you up. Every outcome is an education.
6. Keep up your motivation by celebrating small successes, by holding on to the dream, by thinking about how it will be if you remain as you are.
7. Get help when you need it. I’m here, and there are lots of other people around who are trained in helping you change. Talk to us.

There’s no need to remain ignorant about how to change your life. Make use of the amazing resources you have that earlier generations never dreamed of.

And tune in next week, when I talk about the dangers of becoming an expert.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.

Related posts:

1. How Not to Change Your Life: Expect Change to Happen By ItselfUp to a point, change does happen by itself. But...
2. How Not to Change Your Life: Stay IsolatedImagine this. You live alone in a run-down, cluttered house...
3. Change Your LifeThe main reason people come to see me is to...

There’s a cheesy 50s song to the effect that thinking and wishing and hoping and praying isn’t going to be enough. Hope, as I’ve said before, is not a strategy (sorry, Mr Obama).

No, for change – the right change, the important change – to happen, you’re going to have to do something. You’re going to have to do it consistently, in fact, for some time.

So what is it that you’ll need to do in order to make change happen? I’m glad you asked.

1. Decide what you want

This obvious first step can be easier said than done. Often, we just want something to change, but we’re more concerned with “change from” than “change to”. Here are a few questions to help you decide on your change destination.

1. What about the current situation bothers you most?
2. What are you most afraid of if the situation doesn’t change?
3. If you could have any outcome you wanted, leaving practicality aside, what would it be?
4. Is anything starting to change already that you want to encourage?
5. Out of all the things you could change, what would give the greatest bang for your buck?

Somewhere among those questions, you’ll find the answer to determining what change you want to create.

2. Do a “now” versus “then”

Take a piece of paper.

Draw a line down it vertically to create two columns.

Label one “Now” and the other “Then”.

In the “Now” column, list the things you are unhappy with, that need to change.

In the “Then” column beside each one, list how you want them to turn out.

I’d suggest that in the “Then” column, you use the words “more” and “less” a lot. At least in the early stages, change will consist of doing some things more than you used to and other things less. It’s not going to be instantly a case of switching from an old behaviour to a new one.

3. Figure out your motivations and rewards

photo credit: Snap®

To make a significant change, you’re going to have to persevere. That means you’re going to need a strong enough motivation to get over your natural resistance to change and to keep you doing the practices that will help you.

According to research, the way to do this most effectively is to first imagine the negative consequences of not changing, and then have a dessert of the positive consequences of changing.

Then, once you’re clear on your motivations, immediately take the next step.

4. Get your process clear

Imagining the process by which you’re going to change is going to give you a much better outcome than if you just imagine the change having happened. It prepares you mentally to go through that process, and reminds you that change isn’t going to happen by itself.

When you think about your process, think about what’s worked for you before. What have you succeeded at? What changes have you made already? What are you good at doing that would make one process easier than another?

For example, in my fitness goals I’ve discovered that having a tracking system that also tells me what to attempt next is a process that works a lot better than deciding for myself how hard I’m going to work. Which leads me to Step 5.

5. Gather maximum resources

I firmly believe that the more resources and the more techniques you have available to you, the better your chances of success. That’s why I write so many posts about techniques. (I just checked: counting this one, there are 93 posts in the Techniques category on this site, which is almost a third of all the posts I’ve ever written here.)

What tools do you have? What skills? What knowledge? And what tools, skills and knowledge do other people around you have – your friends, certainly, but also professionals who help people make the kind of change you’re considering? You live in a society, which magnifies your personal power immensely – if you make use of it by connecting to others who have the skills you need.

Some extra guidance and encouragement from someone who helps people change all the time can mean the difference between success and failure, or between moderate success and resounding success.

6. Be aware of the pitfalls

Don’t kid yourself. Any significant change is going to be hard. That’s why most people don’t change much, and why change won’t happen by itself.

You are going to have to keep trying even after you fail. You are going to have to do the equivalent of going jogging in the rain. You are going to question your ability to change. You are going to find yourself back in your old patterns again, just when you thought you were making progress.

You are going to need to circle back to your motivations and reinforce them, practice your techniques, get help from the friends or professionals you’ve recruited.

Something else that can help: non-obsessively consider in advance what issues may come up, and how you’re going to deal with them. My post on How to Make Hard Things Easier may help.

7. Count the cost, assess the benefit

Back in Step 3, you thought through the negatives of remaining unchanged. But there’s a cost to change, a benefit of staying the same – again, this is why so few people change successfully. It pays to be clear-eyed about these things.

What are you going to be giving up with this change? Is it worth it to you? You’ll need to remind yourself, in those moments when the costs are particularly vividly presenting themselves to you, of what the benefits of changing are.

If you’re particularly alert, and have done my free Seven Steps to Effective Personal Change course, you may have recognised the outline I’ve used here. The course has a series of videos in which I talk more about each step, an ebook with some of the most effective personal change techniques, and a set of planning sheets that you can use for self-reflection about the steps I’ve laid out above.

If you feel you want to change something in your life, don’t expect it to happen by itself. Take some action – like signing up for the free Effective Personal Change course (and, naturally, putting in the work).

One more thing about change. You need to set aside time in which to work on it – otherwise it’s just another form of expecting it to happen by itself. Schedule yourself a time that you’re going to spend taking action.

Because hope is not a strategy.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.

Related posts:

1. How Not to Change Your Life: Stay IgnorantWhen you’re ignorant, you don’t know what you don’t know....
2. Change Your LifeThe main reason people come to see me is to...
3. How Not to Change Your Life: Learn Without DoingThis has been a hard post to write. I managed...