How do I change my life?

The major impediment to growth is resistance. You know resistance. It comes up as a desire to fall back into old habits and mental patterns. It’s the voice that says, “I’d rather just eat something quick and easy. Eating healthy takes too much work”. Then that voice might turn into, “In fact, I deserve a break from eating healthy. I’ve been doing that for 2 weeks straight. I deserve a big slice of greasy pizza as a reward for my efforts”. Before you know it your healthy lifestyle is nothing but a memory and you are gorging on sugar and fat every meal.

What is the cure for resistance? It’s all about making a clear decision to change, and then sticking to that decision. If you are like me, though, you have made decisions to change many times and given up on them. So how do you make sure that change sticks?

Most people are operating under the false impression that change is a superficial thing, that to change they simply adopt some behavior and add it on top of everything else they do. This assumption is based on a misunderstanding of change at a base level. In order to understand what change really is you first have to look at the self. The self is what you are changing, after all.

So what is the self? If you really explore the subject, you find that our sense of self is made up of conditioning. Our self is nothing but a mental construct, a collection of notions, habits, and patterns about who we are. So to change our life we have to actually change the structure of our self…we have to give up that old pattern, completely let it go and form a new sense of self that includes the new habit. For instance, we don’t just give up the physical action of smoking to stop the habit. We give up the identification with being a smoker, we give up our self as a smoker…then stopping is easy.

Changing habits is all about adopting a sense of self that the desired habit fits with. Tony Robbins says it beautifully with, “The most powerful force in the human psychology is the need to remain consistent with how we define ourselves”. We have to change how we define ourselves a fundamental level, and the habits that fit that identity naturally become our own. To change a habit, we have to change ourselves.