What's In Your Way?
When we want to make important changes in our lives, it isn't always easy. What stops us? Why can't we just stop doing something we know we shouldn't be doing? Alternatively, why can't we begin to do something we know would make things better? In this episode, we look at some of the difficulties involved in making change and what we might do to get through them.
---
Listen to the podcast here
What's In Your Way?
If there's a change you’ve been wanting to make in your life and maybe one you've struggled with for a long time, what is it that keeps you from successfully making it? Sometimes, we know the answer. Often, we don't. If you knew exactly, it would be rather straightforward to address the issue and simply make the necessary changes, wouldn't it? For some things in our lives, that's what happens, but there are also, for nearly all of us, at least a few things that don't work like that. Why do you suppose that might be?
In sudden onset, the novel I wrote with my brother Chris, the lead character is a brilliant molecular biologist who also happens to be on the spectrum, a professor at Berkeley. One of the ways Mira Wallace's autism manifests is her single-minded, unwavering focus on the question of what the first cellular life form was and how life propagated over almost four billion years.
She has several quirks, including a few pet phrases. One of my favorites is, “Life is inconveniently complex.” I think about Mira frequently, and that's one of the reasons. What she says rings true to me about the world around us as well as the world we experience within the realm of our minds. Accordingly, it applies to our self-ideal, our priorities, and our expectations of the experiences or possessions we think we deserve.
Life is inconveniently complex.
The things we think are worth the effort to acquire and those possibilities we feel aren't worth our trouble. These notions create the impulses that inform our attitudes and propel our actions. They are inconveniently complex, too. We want many things. They have an annoying tendency to exceed the limits of our time and resources. As a result, in order to get something we want, we must forgo some other thing we want.
There's a constant and never-ending internal balancing act between these competing values. The values themselves are polarized. We can differentiate them into things we want and things we want to avoid. I was at a conference in Phoenix and spoke with researchers at the Brainlab at TTI Success Insights, the company through which I'm certified in a full battery of psychometric tools. They're doing impressive and important work predicting how people behave based on the application of multiple sciences.
They use brainwave scanning technology to map the physical responses in our brains against a wide variety of stimuli. They do this to create colorful pictures of the intensity and locations of brainwave activity in various regions of the two hemispheres in our brains. As you might imagine, different people react differently to different stimuli, but there are commonalities.
As they map the brains of more subjects, certain patterns emerge. They observe certain reactions that are more universal. Subjects reacted in nearly the same fashion and those that are individual, few subjects react in the same fashion. They map these brain pictures against other psychometric instruments. This greatly enhances our understanding of how and why people behave the way that we do.
Their work with brain scans and additional psychometric research. It gives us useful insights. We are learning to better understand why we do what we do. Accordingly, we can predict how people will respond with greater and greater accuracy. One of the biggest takeaways I had from what they've learned thus far in the Brainlab was this. We spend significantly more of our energy avoiding things we don't like than we do moving toward things we do.
What's In Your Way: We spend significantly more of our energy avoiding things.
Maybe that observation doesn't surprise you, but when it comes to predicting and changing our behavior, it has major implications. Avoiding stimuli to which we are versed is a major restrictive force in our continuing development, whether that growth is personal or professional. It's part of the reason change can be so difficult. We're up against our own brains. The situation is even trickier than just that because our aversions are deep-seated. They're not only in our conscious mind.
Our aversions produce physical responses in the older parts of our brains before we can even think about them. When making measurements, TTI’s research team looks at what they call the P300 reading. Brainwave responses happen within a third of a second of exposure to the stimulus. That's before the conscious mind even has a chance to form a thought.
Reactions are apparent to researchers before they're even apparent to the subjects. It's no wonder we feel like we don't have self-control. When we have reactions that keep us from making desired changes and they kick in before we can even think about them, what are we supposed to do? How can we overcome the force represented by the wiring in our brains?
If you've been struggling with a change, it's more likely than not the reason has to do with things to which you're averse or something that triggers an emotion of disgust, anger, or fear. The feeling may be based on something real or something you're right about that you'll have to endure to manifest the desired change, or it may be based on something only real in your imagination that when you make the change, what you experience will not match what you anticipate.
If you've been struggling with a change, it's more likely than not that the reason has to do with things to which you're averse—something that triggers an emotion of disgust, anger, or fear.
In either case and as with all change, the process begins with awareness. As soon as we become aware of our built-in responses, we receive a gift. That gift is the option to do something about it. It's not easy. Depending on what we're talking about, the response and question could be quite embedded, even genetically determined. Nevertheless, we can use free will to change that wiring. It takes commitment and discipline. It usually takes help, but that's what we're all here for to help one another.
Step one is a simple decision. It must be adamant. You must leave yourself no outs. The new reality is simply non-negotiable. Once you achieve that mindset, your power to change increases dramatically. Obstacles lose their ability to slow or impede your progress. People around you know you're serious, and their attitudes change.
They can even transform from being an obstacle, whether unwitting or not, to an ally who supports your efforts to change. This observation is not new. It's the major point in Napoleon Hill’s groundbreaking book, Think and Grow Rich. If you'd like to work in this area and you're not familiar with that book, I recommend it. It doesn't just apply to making money. It applies to any change we wish to make. I'd also recommend that you don't go it alone. We can't see our own blind spots. That means that these kinds of changes are hard to do by ourselves. The Eye of Power is about that very thing, creating a community of people who help one another as we take on these difficult changes. Let's go.