Afraid You’ll Never Change? This May Be Why You Still Feel Stuck?

Ever asked yourself, “Why do I know exactly what to do but still can’t seem to do it?” 

Why do so many self-aware people still feel stuck?

If you’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, understand your patterns, and still can’t seem to create lasting change, you’re not alone.

In this episode, we explore why insight alone doesn’t transform your life. We walk through the four stages of lasting personal change and explain why so many people become trapped in learning without ever reaching true transformation.

Whether you’re struggling with self-criticism, procrastination, unhealthy relationship patterns, perfectionism, or feeling like you’ve tried everything, this episode offers a practical roadmap for creating sustainable change without relying on willpower alone.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• The four stages of lasting personal change
• Why motivation fades and commitment matters more
• The difference between learning and true integration
• Why your brain resists change even when you want it
• How repetition and reward reshape behavior
• Why self-compassion leads to greater consistency than self-criticism
• How identity change creates lasting habits
• A simple exercise to begin integrating change this week

If you’ve ever wondered, “Why do I know exactly what to do but still can’t seem to do it?” this episode is for you.

Connect with me:

If you’re ready to move beyond insight and begin creating lasting transformation, schedule a complimentary coaching strategy session at:

https://www.jerryhenderson.org

You can also connect with me on Instagram:
@jerryahenderson

If this episode helped you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs encouragement on their own journey.

Chapters

00:00 Why You Still Feel Stuck Despite Trying to Change

01:05 The Four Stages of Lasting Change

03:30 Awareness Is Necessary, But Not Enough

05:05 When the Pain of Staying the Same Becomes Greater

06:45 Why Motivation Doesn’t Create Lasting Change

11:06 The Trap of Endless Learning

19:13 The Missing Step: Integration and Embodiment

21:27 Why Real Change Feels Slow

24:26 Letting Go of Old Identities

28:07 How to Make Change Stick

32:12 Consistency Beats Intensity

37:02 Why Self-Compassion Accelerates Growth

40:01 Identity Change vs. Behavior Change

42:01 A Practical Exercise You Can Start Today

44:57 Final Encouragement and Next Steps

I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

COMPLEMENTARY STRATEGY CALL:
Schedule Call

OVERCOMING SHAME COURSE:

ACESS COURSE HERE

Watch On Youtube

Website:
www.jerryhenderson.org

How is your relationship with yourself going?
Get your free-self assessment guide

Pick up your copy of my book:
Returning: Meditations and Reflections on Self-Love and Healing

Get Your Free Weekly Tips!

Instagram: @jerryahenderson

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jerryahenderson

Disclaimer

Transcript

Jerry Henderson 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to Personal Mastery. I'm your host, Jerry Henderson. And if you're ready to create a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside, you're in the right place. Let's get started. If you've ever felt like you've tried to change things a hundred times or you're really stuck in a certain area, or you know what you need to do, but you just can't seem to do it or do it consistently, if that's you, this episode is for you. And if you're new here, I'm Jerry Henderson. I'm trained in the psychology of human behavior at Harvard University, and I help people figure out how to have a healthy relationship with themselves so that they can create the life that they love. So I hope that by the end of this episode, you'll start to understand why this happens in your life, why you know all this stuff, but it doesn't seem like you're doing it, and then why you maybe feel stuck and how that might be serving you to stay stuck. And then we're actually going to talk about how you begin to move it from desire and information into actual sustainable change in your life. So, why is it that people who can be so self-aware and have learned so much don't actually make the changes that they want? Well, I do want to let you know that it's not about laziness, it's not about the fact there's something broken with you, or you're the one person on this planet that's not going to be able to make the changes that you want to make, right? That story will show up for many of us. We keep trying to make changes, those changes don't stick. We begin to get what is known as learned helplessness from Seligman and positive psychology and others who've looked into that. And we start to think to ourselves, well, because I've been trying so hard to change and I've learned all of the things about what change is and what uh I want to be, but I can't seem to figure out how to do it and make it stick. Well, all of that is a part of what might be keeping you stuck, and all of that is serving you in some way, that thinking. And that thinking is keeping the pattern going. But I do want to take a moment, I want you to know you are not the one person who can't change. Why do I emphasize that so much? Because I've seen it so much as a pattern in people's lives. I know it was a pattern in a belief system in my life. And as I started to put into place the things I'm going to be talking about with you today, those changes started to come and they started to come in ways that felt more sustainable. And I really began to see that it wasn't that I couldn't change, it was the way that I was going about it that was the problem, not the me that was the problem, as in brokenness, but it was my methods that were the problem that needed to change. So let's start by talking about how change happens and some of the things that need to happen in order for change to happen and to be sticky in your life. Now, I'm going to run through these real quick, but I'll go into each one a little bit more in depth. So the first one is becoming aware that a change needs to happen. The second is around deciding to make those changes. And then the third is learning or understanding. We're out there trying to gather information about why we have these patterns, why we have these issues in our life, kind of understanding the core root issues around all of them. That's a stage of change, and there's a lot of change that can happen in learning and understanding, but that is often where people get stuck and they never move into the fourth stage. And the fourth stage is around integration or embodiment. So let's talk about awareness, because awareness is this doorway right into change, because we cannot change what we are not aware of, and we cannot change what we're not willing to work on. But we first have to become aware of what's going on with us, some type of insight that something about life isn't working right and we don't want to stay where we're at. And in this stage, maybe you're becoming aware of the wounds that you carried, the impact that the past has had on your present, uh, maybe understanding what some of the patterns that you have right now are doing to prevent you from the relationships that you want, the life that you want. And you're probably saying to yourself, I'm becoming aware of some things that I want to change or to begin to let go of. Now, unfortunately for us as humans, the uh fact that we're aware of something isn't always enough. I mean, we know people and ourselves included in this, uh, of things that we're aware of or they're aware of, but they're not changing. They've just allowed it to be. They know it's causing harm to themselves and others. There's awareness there, but there's not a motivation to change. Well, often what happens is this next piece of what motivates people to change is that the pain of staying the same is exceeding the pain of changing. And when that starts to get out of balance, right, if a person's pain of staying the same starts to exceed the pain of changing or the cost of change, they'll start to move towards making some changes in your life. And I'm sure you can relate to this, right? Whether it's a relationship or I I know I can relate to it in my drinking. There was a moment where that pain of drinking, well, several moments, but one in particular, that the pain of drinking and drinking myself to death was so much more painful than anything that I was going to have to do to change, that I then decided to truly change. And it wasn't rock bottom for me, but it was getting very close to rock bottom. And when I made that decision or had that awareness then with the pain, it then I then said to myself, I don't care what it costs me to get sober, I don't care what I have to do, I don't care if it costs me my job, my relationships, I don't care what it costs. I have to make this change because I can't stay here any longer. And so when a person becomes aware, but then they also feel the tension of, I can't stay in this place any longer, that is when they decide to change. They say, I am going to make this change in my life. I cannot stay here any longer. I don't know what here is or there is, but it doesn't matter as much about what there is because I know I can't stay here. And so they decide to do the work, to start the journey of leaving whatever that is, that relationship, that environment, that pattern, that habit, and start to approach the life that they want. Now, you might be saying to yourself, listen, I've been aware of patterns. I've decided like 20 times to make these changes, but they're still not happening, right? And so I want to take a moment and I want to address that. So if the pattern feels familiar to you of making a big promise to yourself, this time it's going to be different. This time I'm really going to change. And from that, you feel a lot of motivation and you feel commitment to start moving towards change. But then a week later, a month later, or three months later, you find yourself falling back into the old pattern. I do want to note that that is a part of change, right? Even for people trying to get sober, right? Relapse is often a part of the change process. And so don't shame yourself, don't judge yourself just because you've tried, you know, a dozen or a hundred times to change something and you haven't been able to, uh, that is also part of change, is trying to figure out how do we keep moving forward. And uh, for many people, it was that one more try, that one more deciding moment that actually was the thing that stuck. So just because you've tried a bunch of times and it hasn't worked, doesn't mean the next time's not going to work. And if change and becoming the person that you want to be is important enough to you, you will keep trying to figure it out until you figure it out. Now, some of the reasons why that happens, where we get the big emotional charge and we want to make the change, but you know, we find ourselves back in the same position, is we're often confusing emotional intensity with actual commitment to change. You can have a commitment to change without emotional intensity, right? Let's say you've you've had that fourth or fifth time where you've fallen into a pattern and it's caused enough pain where you're like really determined, I'm going to make some change. There's a lot of emotional charge around it. Uh, that does not mean always that that's going to stick. Change is a decision that we make and then the ability to stick with that decision. And we don't need, we don't have to find ourselves relying just on emotional energy to always make that change. Because what happens is we're going to go through emotional cycles. We'll feel up, we'll feel down. And in those down moments, if we don't have a commitment to becoming that new version of ourselves, that's when we're going to get pulled back into old patterns. Okay. And guess what? If you do get pulled back into the old pattern, that's okay. And what happens for a lot of people is they let that one moment of getting pulled back into an old pattern give them a justification and a reason to sabotage all of the change that they're wanting to make. They kind of throw their hands up in the air and say, see, I told you you couldn't change uh because you slipped up once. That's not a commitment to change. That is an emotional roller coaster and a response to feelings. And what we want to try to do is level that out and say, no, it's a decision of becoming a new person and it's a commitment to that. And even if I slide into the old, I am becoming a new person, a new version. And that's going to take practice, that's going to take consistency, it's going to take times of falling off the wagon or you know, veering into the ditch, and then coming back out of it without the story that says, see, told you you weren't going to be able to change, or others telling us that story. See, I knew you wouldn't be able to get that temper under control, or C, you weren't going to be able to tackle that problem of procrastination and be able to follow through, et cetera. So, but whatever that is, okay, mistakes along the way are not uh the defining factor in that. Those are just data points. It's one of the big things I work with people in coaching is to see all of those things, the wins and what we would call the losses, the failures, right? They're not really losses or failures. There are no failures in our journey to becoming the person that we want to be. There's just data that we're collecting. I know it feels like a big emotional failure, but that's different, okay? That that's often patterned and it's a part of our belief system. But if you can get yourself to the point where you're just seeing those struggles and those times where you kind of fall back into the ditch, per se, as a data point of what didn't work well, not what's wrong with me. The conversation isn't what's wrong with me. The conversation is what's not working in my current environment, not what's what's not working in the way that I'm approaching this. What adjustments do I need to make to set myself up for success in the change that I want to make? So now let's talk about the third part or the third stage of change, which is learning, understanding, information gathering. Okay. And I'm just going to refer to it as the learning journey. And what happens here is we've decided, you know, we've become aware of some challenges and patterns and things that we want to change. We've decided to make those because the pain of staying the same has exceeded the pain of changing. We've understood that this change is going to take some time and it's not going to happen overnight. And so we go on this journey of learning. So, for example, trauma survivors, when they begin to understand that the patterns that are showing up in their life, the relational challenges, their avoidant relationship style, or their anxious relationship style, or uh the anxiety, the panic attacks, whatever it is that's manifesting in their life as a result of the trauma that they experienced, they want to learn about that. They start to dig in, they read all of the books, they watch all the podcasts, and they uh you know are constantly trying to figure out what happened to me. And there's a great book that kind of summarizes this, and it's by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey. That's uh the title of it is What Happened to You. And it's a great book that reframes the statement from what's wrong with me to know, it's not what's wrong with me, but what happened to me. And so for many trauma survivors, their understanding and their learning journey uh can be very healing as they start to understand what happened to me, the trauma that I experienced. And for many trauma survivors, especially early childhood trauma, they will disassociate from it, suppress it, or minimize it, right? And I've seen this a lot in coaching guys, right? They just really want to minimize all of that and say, ah, some stuff happened. I mean, that was my story, you know, and I would always just say, ah, some stuff happened back there. And that minimization of it kept me from really understanding the impact that it had. But as trauma survivors begin to understand what happens in the brain, what happens in your nervous system, how it affects so much of who you are, and you really begin to get insight to that, it becomes a healing process in and of itself. But what can happen is we can get stuck in the learning phase or the learning stage of healing. Now, this might show up as, you know, you hear the one thing, right? You go, oh, if I could start to implement that, then my life is really going to change, right? And so you're out there trying to find the magic bullet, the thing that's just gonna change everything. Uh, and many people, when they're trying to change, they're looking for the light switch. They can just turn it on and everything gets illuminated. And they're like, ah, I understand, you know, why I have these patterns and how to change them. I always tell people change is not a light switch, it's a dimmer switch. We bring it up little by little by little, we get more and more awareness as our systems can handle it. We learn more, we understand more. And that, as I said, can be healing because it helps us have compassion for ourselves, right? We can stop judging ourselves so much about some of the things that are happening in our life, right? For many high achievers I work with, where they just can't seem to get off of the achievement treadmill, or they can't seem to figure out how to be present with people, or they can't seem to not raise the bar, right? They can't seem to figure out how to celebrate wins. It's always, oh, we did it, but it kind of wasn't enough because of this, that, or the other thing. And they minimize that. And so they're never satisfied, never fulfilled. They're in a constant loop of trying to prove themselves or trying to uh get enough acceptance and validation that they can finally accept and validate themselves. And the real gift, though, is that as they understand and begin to learn why that high-achieving mechanism has gotten wired that way for them, they can have a little bit more compassion with themselves and begin to understand why it may be a little hard for them to stay present and why they experience so much anxiety around sitting still because they start to see some of these early coping mechanisms and patterns that they adopted and developed, how they're serving them, right? And then that can help them have compassion towards themselves, that understanding of, oh, that's why I can't be present. Oh, that's why I feel like I can never let off the gas. And they understand the fuel that they're using for their achievement. And then the the challenge becomes is finding a new fuel source for their achievements. Because achievement in and of itself is not bad. It's the fuel source that's behind it. And that's a big thing, right? That I work with people on. How do you change the fuel source from shame, imposterism, not enoughness, and proving and all of that to a true sense of aligned values, purpose, fulfillment, intrinsic rewards versus having, you know, trying to find all of these ways to make things be okay in here, right, by trying to do things out here. And so that shift is really important. But as a person begins to understand why they have those patterns and learning all of those patterns and why we do the things that we do and getting understanding around that has a lot of great payoffs. And in and of itself, as I've said, that can be very healing. How? Well, it allows us to practice self-compassion towards ourselves. We understand the patterns, why they're there. It allows us maybe to have a little bit more patience with ourselves and trying to see, okay, this is why I do some of the things that I do. And I can begin to maybe catch it on the front end and begin to practice some principles that will help me uh regulate that a little bit better, etc. But here's the challenge for many people in this stage. And we all know people in this stage, they have so much information. They could teach classes on it, they could, you know, travel the world and give seminars on it. They know it inside and out. But even in their knowing it, they don't seem to be able to change. And maybe that's you. It's like I got all this information on trauma and uh self-compassion and how I should be practicing it and what I should be doing, but I'm not changing. It's like I'm not embodying it. It's here, it is not made the distance from the head to the heart, the longest 18 inches that anything ever has to travel, from the head to the heart. And it does not feel embodied to you. It feels like information to you, and it might even feel a little bit more uh disengaged from you. Well, what's happening in that, you know, why can people know so much and yet not do that much with what they know? Well, the challenge is the learning process, there's a lot of dopamine that gets released in that. There's a lot of sense of I am changing because I got an insight. I do not want to minimize or dismiss the fact that insights absolutely can be life-changing and transforming, but we can get stuck in the insight phase, that we just keep chasing the next insight. Because once again, we're looking for the magic bullet. We're looking to flip the switch, we're looking for us to get zapped and get change, and we're a totally different person. All right. But the challenge in that is we're confusing the dopamine hit that, oh, I finally found the thing that's going to bring the change to me, all right? That lighting up of the brain. I'm confusing that with long-term transformation. It is change, it is healing, it is helpful. But if that knowledge does not make the journey to embodiment, if that knowledge does not get applied in my life, then I am going to stay stuck. That's why very self-aware people are stuck in the same patterns. That's why you feel like I know all of this, but why can't I do it? Right? Because we are on the hunt and on the search for information, but that information has not made its way into the next stage of change, which is the integration. We're stuck in information, we need to move to integration. We're going to talk about how to do that. So let's talk about integration, that part of change that actually makes change sticky and actually begins to wire it into our system so that the changes that we want to make or the things that we want to stop doing actually become about our identity, who we actually are, because it's now an embodiment of who we are, not just a desired wish or theory. Right? We begin to see it showing up in our daily life. So this is the part where you take what you've learned, all the insights that you have, and you figure out how to dumb that down to very simple, repeatable practices that you can do on a daily basis that begin to make change happen. Now, why is this part so hard for people? And I will tell you that this is one of the longest bridges for people to try to cross from I'm aware of it, I've decided I want to change, and now I'm over here learning. I'm highly self-aware. I'm kind of in this thing. And I, as we say, we can talk about it, we can teach it, but we're we're stuck there. And this bridge to say, how do I take that, or that journey, right? How do I take this and actually put it into something that's useful? The challenge, the reason it's hard is because this is where it's kind of the rubber meets the road. There's things here that can feel boring, uh, repetitive, right? I always tell people that, you know, one of the ways that change happens, repetition and reward. Part of my change journey was understanding there's a part of my brain, very primal, dog brain, lizard brain, whatever we want to call it. I said, that's part of my belief system. I got to retrain that part of my brain that kind of wants to default into some of these reactions. And I decided I wanted to change it the same way it got trained, right? Repetition and reward. And I said to myself one day, Jerry, there's part of your brain, it's just like a dog's brain. You're gonna need to reward you're gonna need to change through repetition and reward, repetition and reward. And it's gonna be very boring at times, but if you'll stick with it, the payoff is gonna be worth it. So let me just summarize uh really quickly why integration can feel so hard for people. Number one is about the delayed reward. We're not seeing change fast enough in the way that we think it should. And so, because of that, we start to give up and we say, Well, I'm not changing. I'll tell you that for many people, they give up right before those seeds start to grow in the garden or the change actually starts to take place. Don't do that to yourself. Allow yourself the ability to be as patient with yourself in your healing as you have been in tolerating your suffering, and tolerating. That stuff for years, decades. Give yourself the permission to have a year to five to ten or whatever it is. You're building a new life. You're not just trying to solve a problem. And that's going to take time. The second challenge for many people is boredom, right? They want to go back to dopamine. They want to go back to learning a new thing, figuring something out, mental gymnastics, right? To try to figure out, well, what about this and what about that? And then the whole time they're distracting themselves from implementing a very practical tool, right, that can help them make that change. And we think about affirmations. For some people, like affirmations, I don't want to do affirmations, they don't work for me. Get it? I thought the same thing. I didn't understand how affirmations worked. I didn't understand that I needed to use them regularly. I needed to do mirror work. I needed to, in mirror work, being looking in the mirror and saying those things to me. I didn't realize that I needed to connect emotion to it, right? There's an emotional connection that I need to make with those words. And for many people, they're so shut off emotionally that that becomes a place where you got to start that work to go. How do I find the positive emotion? And there's all kinds of ways and strategies to do that. Now, another reason that it's hard for people to do this integration work is they're lacking some of the emotional regulation tools. Okay. You're taking it from theory and you're putting it in practice. And if they're, if it doesn't feel safe to do that, right, we start to retreat from it. So as a part of integration work is learning the regulation tools. They're going to help you feel safe in those moments where you're practicing some of those new skills and tools each day. So whether it's taking risks to be more vulnerable, for say you want to not be closed off and you go, I want to be more vulnerable with people in my relationships. Well, practicing vulnerability when it doesn't feel safe will cause you to retreat. And then you might shame and blame yourself and say, see, you're never going to be able to open up to people. You need to keep yourself hidden and people really knew you, they wouldn't like you, and whatever's you know going on there. And so if you can learn a regulation tool, breath work, other way, grounding, or whatever it is that can help regulate you as you're putting into practice some of these skills, it'll feel more safe to practice those skills, let go of the old way of doing things. And in doing that, you're providing a safe environment for those changes to happen. And people often ask me, like, well, when will this change or stay or stick? Or when will I be able to let go of this thing over here? And what I'll say is that, well, in many cases, it's about when your system feels safe for you to let go of it, when your system feels safe for you to let go of that old coping mechanism that's not serving you anymore, and start moving to a new way of living life that serves you better. But there needs to be a safe environment for that transition to happen, for testing this new way or this new handle that you want to hold on to as a way to live life, letting go of the old, coming over to a new safety that you create for yourself for that transition to start to happen. Now, another reason that I'll touch on, and I'm not touching on all of them, but just a few of them, uh, that change can and integration can feel hard, is uh something that people don't talk a lot about, which is grieving the old version of ourselves that we're letting go. We've gotten so used to playing a certain role in life, the way we show up in relationships. That's why we often keep choosing the same type of person because we're not just choosing a relationship, we're choosing to be able to play the role that we're comfortable of playing in relationships. For a fixer, we look for people who can be fixed. If we need to be taken care of, we look for people who are fixers, who are codependent, who will take care of us. And so when we start to think about change, we're not just letting go of behavior, we're letting go of a version of us that found a coping mechanism that served us and kept us safe for years, maybe decades. So grieving the loss of that coping mechanism, even if it's very unhealthy, our system needs to be able to grieve that. We need to be able to grieve the person that we're also moving away from, that I'm not going to be that person in relationships anymore. I don't know what kind of person I'll be moving forward. That's not the most important thing in that moment. It's just like, I don't want to be that person anymore, right? Sometimes change isn't always about knowing who we want to be, just knowing that we don't want to be that anymore. And so when you start to let go of the role you play, the identity that you have, maybe you have the identity of the person who's always in need or who always feels broken, or the identity of shame. And as crazy as it sounds, many people feel comfort in that pull towards shame and self-loathing. There's a soothing that happens in their system. Why? Because it's emotional regulation strategy for them. And letting go of an emotional regulation strategy that feels painful later, or you know, or even realizing that, you know, you're carrying that. But in the moment, it helps do something internally. And the idea of letting all of that go, there's a grieving process that can happen that needs to happen often in order for you to make that transition. I often say about grief, grief is an emotion that helps us honor the old, deal with the emotions, and allow acceptance and forward movement to happen so that we can open ourselves up for the new, right? It doesn't mean we have to let go of all the old to have space for the new, but grief helps us make some of those transitions into a different space and place in our life. So be aware of the fact that it might be there's a fear of letting go of who that person was. And it's okay that it's a fear that's there. And it's okay to experience that. It's also okay to grieve that version and to realize that those emotions may want to keep you stuck in old patterns. So, what actually makes integration and embodiment happen? Well, the first thing is not trying to change everything at once. You do not want to overload your system. This can be trying to change five things at once: my relationship, my work, my career, my finances, you know, my physical fitness. I mean, you just start to stack it up. Setting doing that is setting yourself up for disappointment. And people will come to me sometimes and they'll say, I got all these areas I want to change. Okay, how quick do you want to make these changes? Oh, in the next three months. Okay, well, let's talk about how we can focus on one, the most important one, and then what would it look like in that area to make some changes? Okay. And so it's once again, it's not just about we're trying to change too many areas, but even when we choose the one area, we're trying to make too many changes in that one area really fast, overnight, and change it all. All of a sudden, I want to go from having really unhealthy relationships to being in the most beautiful, healthy relationships ever. And I want that to happen in the next four months. Well, here's the thing: we need to understand what are some of the principles and practices and things that you believe, and how are you showing up in relationships, et cetera, et cetera? And as you start to learn that, you start to see and uncover that there's probably some fundamental, basic changes that need to happen. And then those basic changes, they need to start getting integrated in very easy, repeatable ways that you find to do that in your life on a daily basis. So, for example, if you're highly self-critical of yourself, you want to find a really simple 30 to 60 second way of being kind to yourself and catching the self-critical voice and adjusting that, right? Because we're not trying to move from I am really critical to I fully love myself overnight. That might happen and maybe some miracle, we might get zapped. I don't know, but for the most part, we see that that doesn't happen. So if I break that down to the most basic fundamental thing that I can do that's easy to do, that's repeatable, and I don't try to change the whole thing at once. I just say I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna integrate that new practice into my life every single day. Might be a morning routine or it might be a card that you have with you that you look at and you say whatever's on that card X amount of times a day with some emotion connected to it, right? So we can start to believe it in your nervous system. And so we want to take it, make it very simple, and then that becomes something that we're integrating, right? We're embodying, we're becoming the person who talks to themselves that way instead of the negative. And you might be saying to yourself, well, what happens if if in that I keep talking to myself negatively? That's fine right now, right? Allow that negative stuff to go ahead and come up, but also have the positive, right? That you are beginning to plant these seeds of the positive. Okay. It's like if you've got a garden and you've got all these negative words that are growing in that garden, and you want to go in there with a weed whacker and knock them all down, and you haven't pulled them up by the roots, and the seeds and the beliefs and the way that you see yourself is still there, those things are going to grow back up. Okay. And you might say, all right, they're there, and you know, weed whacking them is one way to do it. But another way to do it is to start planting positive words, positive seeds into that garden. And you get enough of those seeds in there that for a time being, they're kind of growing up together. They're there. You're starting to notice the positive language more. You're seeing that in your garden, the words of affirmation and life-giving words instead of just all this negativity. And then eventually there will be enough of those positive seeds and the positive words that your garden and your self-talk garden has become more life-giving and filled with negativity. So, as you're practicing this, the goal is to not automatically shut down the negative right now. The goal is to start putting the positive out there and learning to allow that language to become a part of your life. Which brings me to the second part of how this integration happens, is it happens not through occasional acts or action of change, but with consistency, the dosage of it, that we keep doing it on the regular, that it is something that has now become a part of our life. You might say, Well, how do I remember that? And I don't always seem to, you know, know when to do it. Tie a wrist, tie a string around your wrist, put sticky notes wherever you need to. Do the things that are going to remind your brain to engage in it, engage in it often. Put a screensaver on your phone or whatever it is that keeps you reminded of the fact that this is an action that I need to keep doing. I need to keep practicing. Why? Because you're integrating it. And this is where, once again, it can become boring. It can feel like just doing reps and it can feel mindless sometimes. But I'll tell you, just like when you go to the gym and you're just lifting that weight and you're not putting the intensity in it that you normally would, and you feel like, oh my God, is this even working? That muscle's working. Benefits are happening. You may not be able to know it, see it, feel, but it's there, right? Same thing with whatever practice that you're doing. You may not feel it, you know, it may not feel like, oh, this is really working right now. That's not, that's not what we're after. We're after consistency. We want to keep taking consistent action. And that consistent action is what's going to integrate it because it's the consistent action, for example, of talking to yourself negatively all the time that integrated it into you and made it a part of your belief system. Now, the other thing that's important in making change happen is rewarding yourself for any behavior that you want to reinforce. Okay. Behavior gets reinforced because it gets rewarded because chemicals get released in our system, like dopamine, that then cause us to pursue it and want more of that payoff. Okay. You are getting a reward, by the way, when you talk to yourself negatively. You're reinforcing your belief system, you're releasing the emotions and chemicals of stress and all of that's coming up. And so there is a reward that's there. We want the same thing with the positive. Find ways, whatever small way that it is, that when you talk to yourself, for example, once again, with kindness, reward that. You say, well, how do I do it? You'll find the way that feels rewarding to you, but find a way that rewards it because when you reward things, you want those things to stick around. And that is what integration and embodiment is change that is sticking around. Now, the other thing that can be helpful in this, reduce friction towards the change that you want to make. Okay, what I mean. For example, if you're wanting to work out in the mornings, that's your new behavior that you want to be able to do. Whatever that new uh workout is, whatever that new routine is, reduce some friction. Okay. Friction would be going to bed too late. Friction would be having to get up in the morning and find your workout clothes and where my shoes and all of that, all right? So you want to reduce the friction so that the behavior becomes easier, the barriers are lower. So set your clothes out the night before. I know it sounds like kind of old hat and we've all heard it before, but there's real science around it. Another way that you can reduce friction is to remove the emotional weight around it to a degree. So if you say, hey, I've got to get up at 4 a.m. and I've got to go work out for an hour, and you haven't been doing that, there's a lot of friction that you've just entered into your system. So if this is you just getting started, you might want to say, I'm gonna get up 15 minutes before my normal time, and I'm just gonna move my body in whatever simple way that is. Maybe I'll do a jumping jacks or walk around the block real quick, just something that gets the system going. And the research of habit formation and behavior change supports this. We need to reduce the friction that our system is feeling towards the changes that we want to make. And so setting that bar in a space where it feels like I can do that consistently, right, takes a little bit of stretch, but it's not like lifting, you know, a thousand pounds or moving a mountain for me to do it. All right. We don't want that. We want it to be as simple and as achievable as possible. And then once we've got that base built, we then stack on it with a little bit more and to where it becomes something that is moving us in the direction that we want to be. Now, another thing that's important for integration is practicing self-compassion. Why? Because you are gonna make mistakes on this, you are gonna fail, you're not gonna get 100% right. Nobody gets anything ever 100% right. Okay. And so when you do have a setback or you do make a mistake, or you don't get it just right, right, or you're trying to find a reason to beat yourself up for how you didn't do it the way that you thought you would, etc., practice self-compassion. Be gentle with yourself. And here's something really important to understand about self-compassion. Self-compassion increases resilience. Self-compassion sets realistic goals. Self-compassion actually allows you to self-regulate or emotionally regulate through that setback so that you don't shame yourself out of the changes that you want to make. So you don't say to yourself, see, I knew I wasn't going to be able to do this. No, you show up with compassion. You treat yourself like you'd treat a good friend. You understand that we all struggle in making changes in our life. And just because you're struggling to make the change doesn't mean the change isn't happening. There is change happening under the surface. And this is another key part of what makes integration happen, is that we're not focusing only on the outcomes in the beginning. We're understanding the things happening underneath the surface and we trust the process, right? That allows us to be able to stick with these things, not expecting, as I said earlier, immediate rewards. And self-compassion can help us with that. And it can give us grace when we have setbacks. You might be saying, well, if I give myself compassion, I'm letting myself off the hook and I'm just going to spiral back into the old. Well, I want to challenge you on that because the way you have been doing it evidently hasn't been serving you the way that you'd want it to. And so trying a new way might just be different, uncomfortable, a little bit scary, but it might just be the key that unlocks some of this. Because self-compassion has been shown to calm the fight or flight system, to help us relax. And when we're in that state, we're more likely to follow through with the things that we've committed to. On the other hand, if we beat ourselves up, shame ourselves, we'll actually wind up shaming ourselves out of the change process. And this is why a lot of times people give up, because they've focused in on the times that they didn't get it right instead of rewarding and celebrating the times that they did. And what happens is your brain and body wants to avoid that new behavior or that change because it's now anticipating disappointment and self-judgment and self-loathing when you don't get that thing right. And of course, what's going to happen? That's going to make that behavior feel very fatiguing, something that's going to turn on the avoidance side of your brain instead of the approach side of your brain. And so integrating change into our life, I believe self-compassion is a necessary part of it, not just beating yourself up, whipping yourself into shape, confusing, you know, self-criticism and beating yourself up with discipline. It's not discipline. You can make changes in a way that feels life-giving, and you can make them with self-compassion and treating yourself and encouraging yourself in the same way that you would a friend. And all the research supports that that is a much healthier and more sustainable way for change to happen in your life. Now, the final thing I want to address around this that makes integration happen is to get our eyes off of the fact that we're just trying to change a behavior, that we're actually working on changing an identity, the person that we're becoming. That requires patience. That requires time. That's a goal worth continuing to pursue no matter what setbacks that we have. The reason this is so important is because it shifts language. It's not just about I'm trying to stop doing something, it's or I'm trying to do something. It's about the language of I am becoming the person who does X, Y, or Z. I'm becoming the person who loves themselves. I'm becoming the person who knows how to achieve, but yet do so in a way that doesn't cost me my family, my health, and my mental health. I can do this in a way that is intrinsic, that is an expression of myself. It is an expression of my worth instead of trying to prove my worth. And the research on behavior change is becoming more and more centered on identity change, allowing ourselves to connect to the identity of the person that we want to become and the things and the behaviors that that person does. I often will work with people as they're trying to figure out who they want to be three to five years. And I just have them sit and imagine who is that person? What do they do? How did they get there? What got them there? And then they start to talk about some of the behaviors, et cetera. And we go, okay, let's move that all the way backward to today. And then today, of all of that, right, what would that person do now? So if they're in a certain role or they're making a certain amount of money or they're in certain types of relationships, what skills do they have to make that work? Okay. How did they get those skills? And what was the likely first step that they took towards getting those skills? And then we move that towards a behavior that you can start to do or an action that you can start to do today that'll move you towards that. So now let me leave you with one practical exercise that you can do to start putting this into practice and start moving this towards integration. So take a moment, sit with this question. What is one thing in your life that you've learned or that you've had insight on that you believe you could be practicing that would make a difference in your life that you're not doing right now? Don't rush this. Really sit with it. One thing that you know that you've learned that you had insight on, that you know that if you did that thing, it could bring some change about in your life, but you're not doing it. Now ask yourself this question about that. What would integrating that into your life, that change, what would integrating that change in your life look like? Let's not be theoretical about it. Let's make it very practical. How would that change show up in your daily life? Now, if you can't find it, it's probably not granular enough or small enough. We want to bring it down to one little repeatable action that you can do on a daily basis that would integrate that into your life so it would feel more embodied. Now, take that one little thing, and can you commit to a week of doing that? And we want to make it really simple. As I said before, 30 to 60 seconds, just something that you could practice a few times, several times, or whatever it looks like throughout your day over a week, and then just see what happens at the end of that week. We're not trying to commit to it right now for six months, a year, five years, or whatever. Just taking that one thing, very simple, very repeatable, doing it over and over and over, rewarding yourself as you're doing it, learning that pattern, learning that little muscle memory around that one behavior. What would happen if you were to do that for a week? Now, while I'm caution you, don't try to figure out how to make that super complicated. Like, oh, now I need to research how to do it just right, and I need to figure out should I do it this way or not that way? And you spend like three weeks trying to figure out how to learn about how to integrate that into your life. You probably don't need that right now. And if you do, it's probably a really overly complicated behavior that is giving you a reason and an excuse to not practice it. Okay. We'll do that to ourselves. We'll complicate something so much that it begins to feel difficult to implement. And so therefore, we have an excuse not to. Okay. I'm asking you to find the most simplest thing that you can integrate on the daily that doesn't feel like a big thing. You might even want to get to one that goes you think to yourself, well, I don't know how that's going to make a difference. That might be the exact one that you need to start practicing and see what happens at the end of the week after integrating that for a week. And I'd love to hear from you on your ideas around that, what you are practicing, what the outcome is after a week. And so feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on Instagram at jerryahenderson, or you can shoot me an email. My email address is jerry at jerryhenderson.org. Now, also, if you need help on learning how to take things from awareness to a decision to learning and getting insights around it to actual integration so the behaviors change, then I want to encourage you to set up a complimentary strategy call with me. It's a call where we can get together, no obligation, but to determine if working together is the right fit. You can do that by seeing the description in this episode, or you can simply go to my website at jerryhenderson.org. I'm looking forward to hearing from you, connecting with you, and learning about the goals that you have and the changes that you want to make. I want to encourage you, if this episode was helpful for you, share it with somebody, because if it made a difference in your life, it'll probably make a difference in their life as well. And also, if you've not had a chance yet to subscribe to this podcast, I want to encourage you to take a moment to do that because I don't want you to miss out on a single episode. Well, thank you for being here with me today. And I just want to remind you that the most important relationship that you have in your life is the one that you have with yourself. Because when that relationship is healthy, everything else in your life gets better. And from that place, you can truly create a life that you love.