The Flavor of Successful Personal Change

The Bottom Line:

• The ability to direct positive change in the areas of your life that matter most to you is a superpower.
• Too often in our society, we confuse striving with the process of healthy engagement with successful personal change.
• Striving and successful personal change each have a different flavor. Striving is more ego-directed and often involves an attachment to an outcome instead of a commitment to the process. The flavor of successful personal change is a result of simplicity, patience, and compassion.

Much of our distress boils down to an inability to accept how little control we have in this big world. As the world gets bigger and faster, accelerating the rate of change around us, our anxiety only seems to increase. One part of the equation is being willing to let go a little more. We have to give up trying to control the uncontrollable. Personally, I got a lot of work to do in this department. But there is another side of the equation that is about controlling the little we do have the ability to control. That's what we're going to discuss today.

My goodness have we screwed the pooch as a society on how we go about addressing this second side of the equation. I'm not going to try and diagnose every aspect of the problem, but suffice it to say that the general strategy for controlling the little we do have the ability to control appears to come down to a couple unhealthy ways of exerting effort:

1. An attachment to the end-result we're after
2. A desire to get to that end-point as fast and with as little discomfort as possible
3. Doing what we see other people do instead of doing what is right for us
4. Deep unkindness to ourselves as we compare to others and judge our results against decontextualized and depersonalized standards
5. Making things more complex than they need to be

This is striving. This is self-improvement in the U.S. of A. This striving is built into our institutions from healthcare to education. And it is a big stinker because when we give of ourselves in a healthy way to managing positive change, few things compare. It feels so good. One thinker I really respect, Naval Ravikant, put it well when he said, "The ultimate superpower is the ability to change yourself." And contrary to the unhealthy parts of the "wellness" and self-improvement industries, this superpower is not about being selfish and doing anything better than others. What it's actually about in the end is the ability to grow as an individual, and when you grow as an individual in the ways you're meant to, you're naturally going to be changing the world just by being who you become. Too confusing? Ok, we'll stick to the individual level for today.

Let's keep it simple and short today and discuss the flavor of successful personal change briefly before signing off.

There are two concepts I recommend keeping in mind when you decide to embark on the active process of personal change management. The first of these concepts has to do with holding two ideas in your head at the same time. In kids, this ability to hold two competing ideas simultaneously is a real sign of maturity, and to be honest, I still struggle to pull it off at times. The two ideas are knowing that we must act with absolute commitment while also knowing that the outcome is actually not in our control. Sometimes the outcome is very probable if we act with commitment, but nothing in the future is guaranteed. If you know that improving your strength is important to you, and you start lifting weights with consistency and follow all the tenets of a good strength program, it is highly likely you will become much stronger. But life might also throw any number of wrenches in your way that delay your ability to meet your goal considerably or make it completely unfeasible. Be committed but not attached.

The second concept that really defines the flavor of successful personal change is summarized by one of my favorite chapters of Stephen Mitchell's Tao Te Ching. This comes from chapter 67:

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.

Simplicity, patience, and compassion. Gold baby! Simplicity cuts through the cultural noise and keeps you from getting distracted. Simplicity also provides structure that moves the ball forward when you add in the second virtue of patience. Patience creates a perspective that rises above the noise of striving and allows you to see the process in its totality. Patience also gives you the strength to keep showing up and doing the work even when it doesn't feel like you're going anywhere (and this will happen during almost any meaningful change process). Patience is the antidote to the burnout that is so often a result of striving. Lastly, compassion allows you to meet yourself where you are, without judgment. It is from this place, the place that aligns where we actually are with our actions, that we decrease things like our risk of injury, of developing bad mechanics during the change process, or of being so hard on ourselves that we quit. Compassion also connects us back to the first concept and our willingness to act with full commitment despite knowing we may fail…life might make us look like a fool. But that's okay, because this is what trying our best really means.

All three of these "treasures" unlock our inherent wisdom. They help keep us on the path we know we're meant for, and they help us grow in ways we often never imagined possible.

Good luck out there directing your own positive change process and making a difference in the lives of others!