Personal change and growth.
This series is about the whole process of change.
Once we start to make changes in life, start to try to make improvements, put ourselves on a new path, a new direction, it can be of course a very long and bumpy journey to actually get any results.
For one thing, there’s this delay effect, where if we make a change, we often don’t see any results of it for a long time.
It’s like planting a seed sometimes, and then it has to germinate.
And sometimes, it’s like the whole winter.
You could plant the seed, it takes the whole winter before then it starts to have any noticeable effect at all So we have to somehow keep going through this time of simply being unrewarded, where we can’t see the results of the change that we’re making.
But that I find to be one of the most useful things to think about, is just that even when we don’t see the results of change, that it’s happening there below the surface somehow, and that the results are germinating, and we will see the results only later.
And that applies whether we do good or bad things.
Often the payback, the results, good or bad, often don’t come until a long way in the future.
Then there’s just this idea of change, that things are always changing.
We’re always becoming a new person every day, and even if the change is very small, we can be open to that change.
We can be open to being a new person every day, and really celebrate that ability to be a new character, to be a new person every day.
And this also helps to keep us from falling into a routine.
If life just seems to be an endless routine of repetition, then it seems like there’s something we’re missing, that we’re not allowing the new to come in.
I always find that after a certain amount of routine, I just need something to shake it up.
Something has to come to make some kind of change to the routine, to allow that freshness in.
And that freshness is ready to come in every day.
Then there’s the idea of when it comes to this impatience for change, there’s the feeling of being on a good path.
And so much satisfaction comes from the feeling that we’re moving in a good direction.
Even when the change itself is very slow to manifest, just knowing that we’re heading in a good direction can be in many ways more satisfying than having good change.
Because we could be very happy, we could be in a strong state, but if we feel that change, time is against us, and our happy state is slipping away, then we’ll be very uncomfortable.
Whereas even being in a bad state but feeling that good things are on the way is a much better state to be in.
So we can sort of get used to this idea of being on a good path, as that being the true satisfaction, even without the immediate results visible.
Then there’s the limits to how much we can change.
We can’t directly just shift ourselves in like a very direct way.
We can’t just change our automatic thoughts.
We can’t just program our feelings like a computer, telling ourselves not to feel something because we’ve decided it’s not rational and not useful to have that feeling.
We can’t just turn off the feeling.
So in many ways, this change that we’re going through is an organic change.
It’s not a change that we can make happen, like it’s some kind of machine that we’re operating.
But instead, it’s more like growing a plant.
It’s more like an organic thing, where we set the conditions, we try to give a good environment for ourselves, and set good conditions for ourselves, but then ultimately we have to let life unfold.
And change, then, is a matter of setting good parameters, setting up good conditions, and then letting that change happen.
#personalchange #personalgrowth #letchangehappen