I’ve made lots of changes in my life and helped others make changes in theirs. Most recently I moved away from consumer culture to take up residence in an ecovillage and start a home-based Internet coaching business to support my family.
Yet when I started writing this article, the subject reached in and touched me. I cried at my keyboard while I typed. During the writing, I read through some of my journals from 10 years ago and read my articulation of things I wanted then and still want now but have yet to manifest. So before you start reading, I ask you to keep a few things in mind.
Be gentle with yourself. Know that the courage to change is often long-lasting courage. It embraces the courage to make mistakes and to have life unfold in ways you didn’t expect. While some changes happen quickly, many take months or years to fully manifest. We still need courage to keep going and keep building our lives the day after the change and the day after that, too.
Throughout this article I'll keep asking questions then offering some answers. I suggest you read the questions and then take a few minutes to write down your own answers before reading the ones I’ve written. These insights are coming from my work with clients in my parent coaching business, from my yoga students, from friends, and from my own life.
Let’s start with a few questions about why we don’t change. When we want to change but don’t, what holds each of us back? Why do we often stay stuck in the familiar but dysfunctional?
Fear Keeps Us Stuck
What I have found working with myself and others is that fear keeps us stuck. Fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, and fear of success all rank in the top reasons people avoid change.
When you are afraid to make a mistake for fear of looking bad, foolish, stupid, or incompetent, it is very hard to try something new. Especially if you did well in school, you have learned that it is wrong to fail or to make mistakes. Change requires that you be willing to do both. Yet fear of embarrassment is hard to overcome.
Inertia is another powerful force insisting that it is easier to keep doing what you have been doing than to change direction. Inertia is easier to work with when you take change in small, incremental steps.
The biggest fear, however, may be the fear of success. “What if I really change? What then?” you may ask yourself. You don’t really know what is on the other side of change. Perhaps, you worry, you will have to face something about yourself you can’t bear to face and you will lose your own regard.
Perhaps change will cause you to give up something you can’t stand to lose like a person, a feeling, or a belief? You may fear that you will not be able to stand your life after the change or that you will fail trying.
Unspoken Agreements Keep Us Stuck
Do you have masks, fakes, or personae you live behind in order to keep the peace? Most of us do. Usually we have agreements, usually unspoken, about what we will and won’t do, who we are, and what we believe. We have agreements about how we‘ll stay stuck and how we’ll keep enabling each other.
In more extreme cases, it is called codependency, but most of us do it at least some of the time to some degree. We know how to react to our friend, our lover, or our co-worker when they stay in their same habits and keep telling the same stories. They might drive us crazy, but it’s a known sort of crazy where we are comfortable in our discomfort.
In order to change, you have to have the courage to break the agreements that no longer serve you.You have to have the courage to be different and make different choices with no guarantees of how those around you will respond. You don’t really know what changes you can make and still be met with love, tolerance, and approval.
On some cellular level most of us have a fear of being ostracized, kicked out of the group, or abandoned. Humans are social creatures who depend on one another for survival. Throughout our history we have needed one another in order to survive. Being kicked out of the group could literally be a death sentence. We may think we’re safe, but on some level we are aware that outliers are often punished.
The courage to change is a very real courage. The courage to leave behind the known, safe, and livable for the unknown and therefore less safe is a powerful sort of courage.
Sometimes you need the courage to stay in a situation and stay the course. Hang in there through the rough spots of a marriage. Wait for our kids to grow out of a rebellious phase. Wait for the bad haircut to grow out. And sometimes you need the courage to change. The courage to ask for help and start seeing a counselor. The courage to say no. The courage to say yes.
Courage Needs Honesty
What allows someone to let go of old patterns? What gives a person the courage to step into the new and unknown?
The courage to change is the courage to look at what is. What is your reality? What do you want? Can you articulate what you want to yourself, to a higher power, or to your journal? Can you articulate it to a therapist, coach, or close friend? Can you articulate it to your boss, your co-parent, or your parent?
If your heart’s deepest longing often stays hidden, it makes it much harder to manifest it. Speaking the heart’s longing is a very freeing level of honesty.
The courage to change is easier when the people around you support you. Yet, when you have the courage to tell the truth and live real and out loud, you are most likely breaking a deal you’ve made with someone to stay smaller and be less than honest. They may get angry at you. Just when you want their help, they may pull away, get angry, and try everything to get you to go back to your old ways. Why?
