Preparing for Change

Desire and motivation are usually linked, but they are fairly different creatures. You may have a practical motivation to change something without any desire whatsoever, no emotional interest. You may have a general desire for a change without, say, a time crunch motivating you to pursue it right now. These words come up a lot when speaking of change, so I thought I’d establish some distinction between them.


This may be familiar: you have both the desire and motivation to make a change or perhaps several changes. You could even have a list, a plan. Perhaps you’ve visualized what these changes would involve and how they could affect your life. One problem. Your “car” won’t start, or if it does, it stops every few yards.

I’m not talking about emergency decisions. Just everyday choices that require some degree of effort if real change is to be a result.

This is a feeling which many experience, this inertia. It feels part physical, part psychological. It’s heavy. Whether the source is a bit of depression or not, awareness of this sense of being unable to get out of our own way and do things we want to do, often things which unquestionably would be of benefit…just this awareness can feel depressing. What is wrong with us???

Individually, each person could work to examine the psychological roots of this gap between a desire and the energy to move in that direction. Do that if you choose to. You may find freedom through understanding. I have another approach in mind, one which I'll share with you after some brief observations on age and how it often relates to change.



I do think on average, as the years roll on, there is a tendency to have greater difficulty with change, even fairly simple change which we are initiating. There is a time factor for one thing. Changes we make when we are young can make a difference for a long time, while some changes made relatively late in life will impact fairly little. There are changes which can be experiments whose benefits take awhile to test. When you don’t have so much time, you are more likely to continue with what you know in these cases. As well, the more perceived risk involved in a change, the more resiliency may be required if it doesn’t work for us; resiliency being a trait we may have possessed in spades in our teens and twenties, but not so much in our fifties and beyond.

Also, change is rarely just a matter of attitude. There is a brain-body-habit component to nearly everything we do. It takes a certain degree of elasticity combined with energy to make shifts, especially durable shifts. We simply have more of both when we are younger. I’ve met a couple of exceptions, who were once young farts and then found energy, fun, looseness in a process of aging well…but these are rare.

Let’s stop there on age-related issues even though more could be written. My goal there was to lend perspective on some of the natural differences in dealing with change depending on one's stage in life.


If you are young, you can develop in a way which will make you more flexible both now and for your long future. If you are more mature, you probably have more patience than the “kids,” and may take to my suggestions and stay with them longer, increasing the chances that they stick. What I will recommend applies to people of any age, particularly those who are beginning to abandon their dreams of change because they don’t feel equipped to do anything about them.

Some of you are expecting brutal homework; something which will cost you time in your crowded day, something only a nerdy instruction follower will actually try applying to their lives. Good news! I’m just not that cruel or impractical. I’m on your side and I hope you get some of the results that I’ve experienced.


What is required of you is that you be a little relaxed, open-minded, free with some of the experimental child I hope you can still access. If you are compulsive (short of a full-blown disorder), this will be a challenge, highlighting your need to start “mixing it up.”

SHIFT WHAT IS AFFORDABLE IN YOUR ROUTINE!

Work on this like it’s your own private, silly yet purposeful game. Anything you can do differently without affecting something critical – like safety or time delay you clearly cannot afford – is now up for grabs. Make each day as different from every other day, inch by inch. Mess it up a little, add flair! While there is a lot of necessary and some enjoyable repetition in our lives, there’s quite a bit which is unnecessary and numbing re-run. Your life may be so locked down with predictable routine that you can relate too well to the movie “Groundhog Day.” Even that sort of life…especially that sort of life has room for freshness without a radical makeover. First, I’ll give you some examples, then I’ll give you my spin on how this will help you.

There are so many things you can do differently just by switching the hand you normally use to do something. Some activities clearly depend on your dominant hand, but a considerable number do not. Change the hand you squeeze shampoo into. Brush your teeth with the other hand. Use the other hand to hold cups. Grab door handles with the “opposite” hand. Change the lead hand you steer with. You’ll find so many others. Change and change back…the idea is to stay loose, not to replace one way with the other. (If you don't get the ultimate value I have in mind, at least you'll become more ambidextrous!)

Other ideas. Bathe yourself, get dressed in a different sequence. Shave your legs or face starting with the opposite side you are used to. Park your car intentionally further away from your destination or take a slower route to get there, time permitting. Change the music volume you are used to wherever you are.

Exercise routines are very easy to vary, even just slightly. One basic physical thing is to notice which leg you tend to lean on when standing. Once you’ve established that, switch when you catch yourself doing it!

Changes that others might consider weird…keep these off camera for now. The goal isn’t attention; it’s freedom, practicing change in innocent incremental ways. It’s also to increase your awareness, to reduce your conditioned behavior. If you add doses of this into your daily life, I feel sure that more significant change will begin to seem easier and more inviting.

It may take a few weeks, even a couple of months for the benefits of this behavior to kick in…in the meantime have as much fun with it as you can and don’t measure the success by how quickly you feel more confident about handling change in general.

So as to hopefully strike a chord with any of you for whom this still feels pointless, let me leave you with this analogy…

In school most of us seemed to learn a lot we’ve never had use for later in life. (I’m very good with “quick” math, but all I recall from calculus was our bizarre high school teacher.) Much of it was to exercise our minds; teaching us how to think, to organize ideas. It can be the same with change. Make a lot of little changes which appear to have no meaning by themselves, with the purpose of making you more comfortable with change, more fluent in its language.