How Quickly Can Change Happen?
One of my great desires has always been to be able to change things in my life and that of others. I believe that it is in helping others that we all learn about ourselves. A major question I had asked myself early in life was can change happen in an instant. Now, I’m not talking about change in terms of things like "can I change the weather or move a mountain", no. What I am talking about is changing my behaviour and my emotional patterns.
I have come to the conclusion that change can happen in an instant. You see most of us, whenever change is necessary in our lives we generally take a long time to do it. Mostly that’s because we wait until certain events occur before we decide to make a change finally. Another reason why we think that change should take a long time is, we have tried and tried to change many times in the past through the use of willpower, and failed. So we assume from the experience that change, especially the important ones must be difficult to make and take a long time. The difficult in changing happens because we don’t know how to change effectively. No amount of will power by itself will create lasting change. One more reason why we don’t change instantly is the culture we live in. We give negative associations to changing instantly. If you change instantly in our culture it tends to mean that you never had a problem.
Consider what would happen if the person who you were deeply in love with left you suddenly. How soon cold you get over the loss? Well for all intent and purposes you could do it in a matter of hours because you have the capacity to do so. Yet you don’t because our culture dictates that we should ‘grieve’ for some amount of time. If two hours later you had declared or behaved like you were over the person people would think and believe you really didn’t love nor care for the person.
Many of us want to change things now, but our culture says if we change now we never really had a problem to begin with. We must take up the belief that we can change in an instant. Once we take control of those feelings that are conditioned to associate in our nervous system we take control of our lives. We develop our existing neuro-associations by indulging in behaviours and emotions consistently over and over again for long periods of time. It is these neuro-associations that will determine our behaviours and our emotions in any given moment. Whenever you engage in the behaviour of yelling at your kids, what happens is that the neural connection in your brain becomes stronger and hence the possibility that you will do it again. So if you would stop engaging in this behaviour long enough the neural connection will weaken and eventually disappear and the behaviour will also disappear with it.
If you were crying and someone held a gun to your head and said stop crying now, chances are we do so instantly. Similarly if we never ate vegetables in our life and our doctor said that we must start eating vegetable or we are going to die. I am sure the same day we would start eating vegetables.
In order for us to weaken or neuro-associations and thus allow change to occur in an instant we must link enormous pain to the behaviour we want to change and enormous pleasure to changing it. But before this can happen we must believe that something must change. We must also believe that we can change it and that we can change it! Your change is not the responsibility of someone else, it is your responsibility.
I have come to the conclusion that change can happen in an instant. You see most of us, whenever change is necessary in our lives we generally take a long time to do it. Mostly that’s because we wait until certain events occur before we decide to make a change finally. Another reason why we think that change should take a long time is, we have tried and tried to change many times in the past through the use of willpower, and failed. So we assume from the experience that change, especially the important ones must be difficult to make and take a long time. The difficult in changing happens because we don’t know how to change effectively. No amount of will power by itself will create lasting change. One more reason why we don’t change instantly is the culture we live in. We give negative associations to changing instantly. If you change instantly in our culture it tends to mean that you never had a problem.
Consider what would happen if the person who you were deeply in love with left you suddenly. How soon cold you get over the loss? Well for all intent and purposes you could do it in a matter of hours because you have the capacity to do so. Yet you don’t because our culture dictates that we should ‘grieve’ for some amount of time. If two hours later you had declared or behaved like you were over the person people would think and believe you really didn’t love nor care for the person.
Many of us want to change things now, but our culture says if we change now we never really had a problem to begin with. We must take up the belief that we can change in an instant. Once we take control of those feelings that are conditioned to associate in our nervous system we take control of our lives. We develop our existing neuro-associations by indulging in behaviours and emotions consistently over and over again for long periods of time. It is these neuro-associations that will determine our behaviours and our emotions in any given moment. Whenever you engage in the behaviour of yelling at your kids, what happens is that the neural connection in your brain becomes stronger and hence the possibility that you will do it again. So if you would stop engaging in this behaviour long enough the neural connection will weaken and eventually disappear and the behaviour will also disappear with it.
If you were crying and someone held a gun to your head and said stop crying now, chances are we do so instantly. Similarly if we never ate vegetables in our life and our doctor said that we must start eating vegetable or we are going to die. I am sure the same day we would start eating vegetables.
In order for us to weaken or neuro-associations and thus allow change to occur in an instant we must link enormous pain to the behaviour we want to change and enormous pleasure to changing it. But before this can happen we must believe that something must change. We must also believe that we can change it and that we can change it! Your change is not the responsibility of someone else, it is your responsibility.
posted by Vladimir C Murray | 4:36 PM
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