One of my favorite aspects of being a coach is having the privilege of collaborating with my clients to make changes in their lives that are deeply important to them.
Often, that's the reason I begin working with them in the first place. They feel "stuck" in some area of their life or business, have attempted to fix or change it multiple times, but have been unsuccessful.
Have you ever been there? You wanted to...lose weight, quit smoking, stop reacting to your spouse negatively, treat your employees better, get in shape, lay off the Doritos and start eating healthier...and the list goes on.
And then what happened next? In a moment of inspiration after watching the ball drop in Times Square, you dove into changing that behavior with all of the fury of a LeBron James dunk...for about 5-7 days. And then...well..."Give me that bag of Doritos! Losing weight is overrated!"
And what do most of us conclude after failing to make those changes? Well, after beating ourselves up and wallowing in our own self-hatred, we come to the conclusion that we're doomed because we're not one of THOSE people who were born with truckloads of self-discipline.
We just don't have enough will power! I'll bet you have heard those words uttered more than a few times throughout the course of your life.
But what would you think if I told you that is not true? What if I told you that you could change any behavior that you really wanted to change? What if I told you that the change you so desperately seek would, in fact, be inevitable if you understood and leveraged the key ingredients that make change possible?
In their book, Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success, Joseph Grenny and Kerry Patterson and their team studied 3,000 people who successfully changed (long-lasting behavioral changes) areas of their lives that were deeply important to them. Throughout the course of their study of these folks, they were able to identify 6 sources of change that every one them used in order to make and sustain the changes they were seeking.
In some of my upcoming posts I'm going to be sharing these 6 sources with you and giving you some practical ideas on how you can begin implementing them in your own life.
But for now I simply want you to hold out the possibility that change truly is possible, even predictable. You just need to start thinking about change differently.
There are some things that you may need to UNLEARN first before you experience the change that you desire. Mark Twain once wrote, "Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned." And the first thing you may need to unlearn is this: Your level of willpower is NOT the problem.
