66| Finding Peace in Change: Why We Resist Change & How to Finally Move Forward

Need to change but every time you think about starting it just feels too late, too hard, or too overwhelming to even try? What if the story you've been telling yourself about why change isn't possible is actually the thing standing in your way? Or are you exhausted from trying to change someone else? Any or all of the above, have a listen. 

Transcript

Need to change but every time you think about starting it just feels too late, too hard, or too overwhelming to even try? What if the story you've been telling yourself about why change isn't possible is actually the thing standing in your way? Or are you exhausted from trying to change someone else? Any or all of the above, have a listen. 

This podcast is always 20 minutes or less so you don’t have to feel overwhelmed or overhaul everything in your life, but just make small, simple changes to create more calm and peace. To get to your better life, make small changes and begin to live it!

Welcome back friends or if it’s your first time, thanks for taking a chance on us today. Let’s take a deep breath, maybe a few and just relax. Today we’re talking about why we resist change even when we know we need it. What's actually keeping us stuck, and how to start moving when everything else in you feels frozen. And what do you do when it's not you that needs to change? What do you do when it's someone you love, someone whose choices are affecting their health, their relationships, their life, and maybe yours too, and they just won't budge? How do you help without losing yourself? How do you love someone through their stuck without getting stuck right alongside them?

Let's start with the stories. Because before any change ever happens or doesn't happen, there's a story. It’s the story we tell ourselves and those stories create the beliefs that we have about ourselves and that’s what creates our lives, so what are your stories and your beliefs? Do you believe it's too late for me. I've tried before and it didn't work. People don't really change. Or you tell yourself I'm just wired this way. I don't have the energy. I wouldn't even know where to start. These are stated like they’re facts, but they’re not. They're interpretations from stories. They're conclusions that got drawn somewhere along the way, usually from a real experience, or something that didn't work out, and then they hardened into beliefs. And beliefs shape not just what we’re doing now, but also what we're willing to try.

The too late story is maybe the most common one and also one of the most painful because the real part of the story is that when time passes, some doors do in fact close. But the too late story likes to grow. It takes a specific, legitimate truth, like I can't become a firefighter at sixty, and turns it into a weighted blanket that covers everything and says, it's too late for me to change anything. And that leap, from one thought to the everything thought, is where the story surrounds you and starts being a cage that you can’t seem to escape from, that you feel like you’ve lost the key or never even were given one.

The too hard story is different because it’s partially true because of course, real and significant change does require effort and can be hard. But there's a difference between something being genuinely hard and something feeling impossibly hard before you've even started, like no matter how hard you try you will never succeed and so why even start? A lot of what we call too hard is actually just unfamiliar, and uncomfortable, and honestly a little scary too. And unfamiliar feels hard because your brain is working harder as it tries something new, learns a new way, building new pathways but that's not permanent. That's just the beginning and once you move past the initial discomfort, it becomes easier and you realize you’ve done hard things before and you can do them again. 

Okay so let's get into what's really going on underneath the resistance, because understanding this is key. It really isn’t just it’s too late or too hard. When someone says it's too late or it's not worth it or I can't change, what they're usually saying, underneath all of that, is one of three things. One is that I'm afraid of failing again. Two is I don't believe I deserve better, and three is I'm more comfortable with familiar pain than unfamiliar possibility. And none of these are character flaws. Every single one of them is a completely normal human response.

The fear of failing again is huge. If you've tried to change something before and it didn't stick, your brain has filed that away as evidence. Evidence that you can't do it, evidence that trying is just setting yourself up for another disappointment. And your brain is always trying to protect you and keep you safe from that disappointment by talking you out of trying and instead taking the safe route which may be the route of doing nothing. It genuinely thinks it's helping. The problem is it's helping you stay safe at the cost of staying stuck.

The not believing you deserve better, is quieter but it can run deep. Sometimes people don't make changes, especially health changes or relationship changes, because somewhere underneath everything there's a belief that this is just what they get, it’s what they deserve. That they're not the kind of person who gets to feel good or be well or have peaceful relationships. It usually shows up as a lack of motivation to even try, a feeling that it wouldn't work anyway, and as a habit of prioritizing everyone else while neglecting yourself without realizing that’s what you’re doing.

And then there's the comfort of familiar pain. This one is maybe the most counterintuitive but it's one of the most real. There’s a saying, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. The pain you're in right now, however real it is, is known. Your nervous system has learned to work around it. You know what to expect from it. Change, even positive change, can be scary and your nervous system doesn't distinguish between unknown good and unknown bad. Unknown is unknown and it registers as a threat. So staying in something painful can actually feel safer than stepping into something that might be better, because might be is uncertain and while the familiar pain is certain, even when it's bad, you’ve learned how to handle it. 

Psychologist James Prochaska developed what's known as the Transtheoretical Model of change in the 1970s, and the idea is simple. He found, after studying thousands of people trying to make significant behavioral changes, that change doesn't happen in a single decision. It happens in stages. And one of those stages, which he called precontemplation, is essentially where you're not even considering changing yet. You might be there because you don't see the problem, or because you've tried before and given up, or because the thought of change feels so overwhelming that your mind has just sort of shut the door on the whole subject. What Prochaska's research showed is that trying to push someone straight from that precontemplation stage into action almost never works. People dig in. They resist. Not because they're being difficult, but because they genuinely aren't ready and forcing readiness doesn't create it. What moves people through the stages towards change is something gentler, it starts with awareness of the needed change, then contemplation about it, then preparing for it mentally, then acting or making the change, and then maintaining it. Each stage has its own needs. And rushing any of them tends to collapse the whole thing.

People who believe their abilities and behaviors can change through effort actually do change more successfully than people who believe their traits are fixed. Which means the belief that people don't change is itself one of the biggest obstacles to change. It's a self-fulfilling story, if I say there’s no way I can change, I am who I am, then guess what, you’re not going to change. And the good news, the genuinely good news, is that the story can be rewritten. Not easily and not overnight, but it can be thru those stages of change.

Okay so let's talk about what it actually looks like to start moving when you've been stuck. Surprisingly it doesn't start where most people think it starts. It doesn't start with a plan or a goal or a new year's resolution or a dramatic commitment. It can start with one question. And the question is, what would have to be true for this to feel possible, what would have to be true for this change to feel possible? Not what do I need to do. Not what has to change. Just, what would have to be true for this to feel even a little bit possible. What’s true is that others have started their careers over at 60 and so it’s possible for you. Maybe it’s true that your friend would easily offer their couch for a bit if you needed to move out of a relationship and now that becomes possible.

The second thing is to make the change smaller than you think it needs to be. We dramatically overestimate what it takes to start and we dramatically underestimate the power of a beginning. If the change is a lifestyle change, you don't start with a complete overhaul. You start with one meal. One walk. One glass of water that wasn't there before. You start by noticing when the old pattern shows up and doing something one degree different. That's it. Because direction matters more than speed, and a one-degree shift in direction, held consistently over time, leads somewhere completely different. Think of a cruise ship turning around...it’s only done by the slightest turns, a little at a time but consistently made. As we’re always talking about here, little by little.

The third thing is to separate the identity from the behavior. A lot of people resist change because changing a behavior feels like an indictment of who they are. If I change the way I eat it means I was doing it wrong and I deserve to be overweight. If I change how I talk to my family it means I was a bad parent or a bad partner. But you can change what you do without it meaning something terrible about who you've been. You can say I've been doing this a certain way and it's not working for me anymore and now it needs to change, and that's not a confession of failure. That's actually wisdom and self awareness.

And the fourth thing, the one that might be the most self-care thing, is to get support. Someone who'll be honest with you, who'll sit with you in the discomfort of the process, who won't let you off the hook when you want to give up but also won't make you feel terrible when you stumble. That could be a therapist, a coach, a friend, a support group going through something similar. Change in isolation is hard because we aren’t designed for isolation. We’re designed for community, and community makes hard things easier to go thru and stick with.

Now one of the hardest change is when the person who needs to change isn't you. It's someone you love. It's a parent whose health choices are shortening their lives. A partner whose patterns are breaking down the relationship. A friend you've watched make the same self-destructive choice over and over again. And you've tried, you've said something. You've said it gently and you've said it directly. You've sent articles and made suggestions and had hard conversations and maybe even issued ultimatums. And they're still exactly where they were. And you're still there loving them and not knowing what to do with any of it.

First, I want to acknowledge how really painful this is. There's a particular kind of helplessness that comes from watching someone you care about stay stuck in something that's hurting them or hurting the people around them. It can feel like your own failure, like you haven't found the right words yet. Like you haven't tried hard enough. Like if you could just explain it the right way one more time they'd finally hear it. But the truth is you can’t want someone's change more than they want it for themselves. And trying to is one of the most exhausting and frustrating things you can do.

This is where the concept of radical acceptance comes in, and I want to be careful here because I don't mean acceptance as in I'm fine with this and it doesn't affect me. I mean acceptance in the psychological sense, which is acknowledging reality as it currently is rather than fighting against it. They aren't changing right now. And fighting against that reality, trying to force it to be different through your worry and your words, doesn't change them. Accepting that they're not ready doesn't mean you stop caring. It means you stop making their readiness a condition of your own peace.

If there's someone in your life right now who you're trying to pull toward change and it's exhausting you, I want you to ask yourself honestly: how much of my energy is going toward trying to change them? And what would it feel like to redirect even some of that energy back toward myself? That's not giving up on them. That's choosing not to disappear in the effort of saving someone who hasn't asked to be saved. 

So what else can you do? The first thing is to be honest about what you can and can't live with. There's a difference between someone's choices that affect only themselves and choices that are directly affecting your life, your safety, your peace, your family. If someone's behavior is causing real harm in your world, you're allowed to set limits around you. Setting a limit or boundary isn't punishment and it isn't abandonment. It's self-preservation. And sometimes, honestly, it's the only thing that creates enough friction for the other person to take a real look at what they're doing.

The second thing is to say your piece once, clearly, lovingly, specifically, and then let it rest. Not never bring it up again, but stop repeating it in the hope that the tenth time will be different from the ninth. Because let’s be honest, they heard you the first time. They probably heard you the third time and they’re just not ready. Repetition only creates defensiveness and distance where they feel nagged and you feel ignored and nothing moves. Saying it once and meaning it is more powerful than saying it ten times and being tuned out.

The third thing, and this is the hardest one, is to grieve the version of this relationship or this person that you hoped for. Because when someone we love won't change, there's a grief in that. A grief for what could be and that grief deserves space. It doesn't mean the relationship is over or that the person is lost. It means you're allowed to feel the gap between what it is and what you wish it were, and you're allowed to be sad about it. Letting yourself feel that grief, rather than dumping your energy into change that won’t happen, is actually one of the more courageous things you can do.

And the fourth thing is to tend to yourself with the same energy you've been pouring into them. Go back to your own life, your own needs, and your own growth. Not as a way of punishing them but as a genuine redirect toward your own wellbeing. Because when you get really serious about your own growth and your own health and your own joy, and you actually change, actually get well, actually thrive, sometimes this is what finally makes that other person say, maybe it's possible for me too. Now that may not happen. And in fact that other person may be even more stuck and more angry at you for changing without them, for possibly thinking you’ve left them behind. But don’t let that stop your change and your movement to what you need for your own peace. You don’t have to stay in the same place they’ve chosen to stay stuck. You can choose to move into the light and grow however you need to grow and not feel guilty. You may not be responsible for your wounds but you are certainly responsible for your healing. Every adult person is responsible for their own lives and their own growth. We can each help each other up, but you can also let go if they’re pulling you under. 

And for the people you love who stay stuck, remember your love for them is not wasted even when it feels like it's not landing. Your honesty is not wasted even when it's not heard yet. You can love someone and let them be where they are. You can care deeply and still have limits. You can hope for their change while choosing not to make that hope the whole of your life. That's not giving up on them. That's loving them and yourself at the same time. As Maya Angelou said, do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. That’s what you can hope for them while doing better for yourself.

So what is one thing that you want to change but you feel you can’t, that you feel it’s too late? Ask yourself if you decide to move one degree towards the change today, how will it feel tomorrow? How many more tomorrows will you have without that change? Now how many tomorrows will you have with that change? It’s the same number right, so how can it be too late? Or what’s one change that you feel is too hard? What’s one small movement toward the change that is so small it can’t fail? And make that one small change, let it not be so hard, just that one smallest of changes. And then when you’re ready, make another smallest of changes and let them build.

I hope you feel a little bit more unstuck or at least thinking about changes you’ve felt were impossible and maybe they’re feeling a bit closer today. And if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs to see that it’s not too late, yes, it may be hard but it’s not impossible, and yes, they and you deserve this change. Remember to love people where they are and encourage and support each other as you make that one degree movement, that one smallest change towards your better life, little by little and peace by peace.