You can’t change your whole life in one day! Its change is a process, a path that we have to go through step by step. Our experts describe its main stages.
1. Illumination
This event, noticeable or not, disrupts our habitual life, making us feel a still unclear dissatisfaction with it. The surrounding reality seems to tell us: it’s time to think about how to change your life or yourself in it.
“The desire for change arises suddenly,” says existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova. – First, something happens that makes us stop, get out of the everyday bustle and ask ourselves: “Is this my life? Will she always be like this?
These questions can be prompted by events of varying intensity: something serious – a conflict, illness, divorce, dismissal – or a completely ordinary episode, a chance meeting.
It’s a paradox, but we really often get away from ourselves, following dreams, implementing plans and getting carried away with ideas.
“Such insight – insight – is always preceded by a significant period of reflection and reflection, sometimes not fully realized by us, since they can also occur at an unconscious level,” Svetlana Krivtsova clarifies.
Constant irritation, lowering self-esteem, comparing ourselves with others (not in our favor), meeting with a person who irritated the soul, at the same time causing resentment and interest, because he thinks and lives in a completely different way … At such moments, we come to realize : In order to become yourself again, you need to change.
“It’s a paradox, but we really often go away from ourselves, following dreams, implementing plans and getting carried away by ideas,” emphasizes Svetlana Krivtsova. “That is why it is important not to ignore, not to push away your feelings. And for this you need to try to listen to yourself, your body, learn to understand yourself – why, for example, you don’t want sex or what’s happening around you has become uninteresting … “
2. Doubt
Uncertainty tests the strength of our desire to change, confirms us in this impulse or nullifies it. The period of doubt is a good opportunity to weigh the pros and cons, to test the value of our new ideas.
“Yes, but…”; “What if I don’t succeed?”; “What will your friends say?”; “Will I be happier?” – as soon as we decide to change something in our lives, questions immediately arise that make us doubt ourselves and our plans.
“Change means taking risks, setting off towards the unknown,” reminds business coach Olga Mukhina. “We feel insecure, uncertainty scares us…” Still, doubts are necessary: they give us time to realize how deep our desire is. Doubts make it possible to weigh all the pros and cons and make a choice consciously.
“We hesitate when faced with a choice: change or stay the same? explains psychotherapist Frederic Fanget. “Uncertainty does not take away our freedom; rather, it encourages us to use it meaningfully and fully.”
However, doubt has a downside. “It allows us to avoid the mistakes that rash actions are fraught with, but it can also stifle our desire,” says Svetlana Krivtsova. “If we doubt for too long, we stop acting and return to the starting point, the point of denial. In addition, too much doubt means that we set the bar too high for ourselves. There is a direct connection: the more time we spend in uncertainty, the more we delay at the start, the higher the bar of expectations from ourselves rises.
Solution: limit the time of doubt by asking yourself: “What do I expect from change? Do I understand that it is impossible to change in the blink of an eye, that I will have not one miraculous deed, but many attempts, efforts and, possibly, misses on the way to the goal?
3. Resistance
Insecurity is replaced by thoughts: “I can’t”, “I won’t succeed.” What is a riot on a ship?
“These thoughts are protective filters through which we look at the situation. They turn on automatically and limit us, although they often look quite reasonable,” explains Svetlana Krivtsova. “There are many of them, they determine our character, behavior, individuality.”
If you consider yourself a generally good person, this will help you move towards your goal more effectively.
Filters in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. “They don’t look for good from good”, “I am always right”, “If not me, then who?” – in some situations they help us, in others they greatly interfere. “Even if these habitual attitudes have already created a lot of problems for us, they are still ours,” emphasizes Svetlana Krivtsova. “The only way to change is to know your filters, be friendly with them.”
Only in this way can we become truly free and choose whether to act as we are used to, or look at the situation with different eyes. It’s good if at first you can detect filters retroactively, for example, at the moment of analyzing the situation: “Oh, well, of course, it happened because the usual “I’m always right” worked. Although it is better to learn to detect the filter at the moment when it works.
“Do not seek to destroy filters, do not fight them,” warns Svetlana Krivtsova. “If you notice one of them and decide that from Monday you won’t let it turn on anymore, then starting Monday you will have another one that will control the previous one and even more prevent you from moving towards change.”
4. Implementation of plans
The process of changing yourself is a whole series of small concrete steps towards the intended goal. The first step has been taken – you have realized the need for change. What’s next?
Ask yourself: “How do I feel about myself, by and large?” If you consider yourself a generally good person, this will help you move towards your goal more intensively and effectively. “But the prosecutor’s attitude towards himself, which, as it seems, is pushing us towards changes, paradoxically does not lead to them,” notes Svetlana Krivtsova. That’s why it’s so important to learn to be kind to yourself.
The main assistants in this matter are people whom you trust, who are fair to you: your relatives, friends … It is they who can tell how they see you. Just ask them about it. Not the way people in need of comfort ask, but simply and businesslike – then you will get a more accurate answer.
It is important to understand that grand gestures and excessive activity do not always confirm that change has begun. Radical decisions are akin to dreams of transformations by magic.
Rather, real change is manifested in the most everyday actions: these are the minutes that we spend thinking about ourselves, talking with our teenage son, helping a colleague, thanking a neighbor … Acting in everyday life in a new direction that we have outlined for ourselves, is the best tool for the deepest changes.
Moreover, our brain cannot forget the old patterns of behavior – it can only learn new ones that will replace the old ones. In addition to patience and determination on the path of inner transformation, benevolence will help us.
“Mark each step you take without focusing on its external effect,” advises Svetlana Krivtsova. – Praise yourself in proportion to your own efforts invested in the result. Do not fall into perfectionism and do not rush to transform – give yourself time.
This time is also needed for those around us to get used to and gradually adapt to the way we change. Otherwise, our loved ones may perceive what is happening only as a painful loss of an established order, and then their words “you have changed a lot” will sound like a reproach.