What we call our nature, our personality, is a whole series of habits of thinking and feeling. For example habits of initiating, reacting or responding to others.
For many of us, our thoughts may be easy to shift but the behavioural aspect may take longer to shift. For others the opposite is true.
You CAN change your personality but there’s a vulnerable phase going from something that you know – the habit of being yourself – through this phase of not knowing, to a more stable new you. And it is a similar journey for organisations wanting to change their culture.
It’s hard to hold someone’s hand through the phase of wanting but not knowing if it will work. There are certain people who can’t handle the ‘agony’ of wanting something really badly and fearing they may not get it, so they resolve the tension by talking themselves out of wanting it. They learn to argue for their limitations. To argue for the negatives. To assume it won’t work. Then it is sensible not to want.
But it’s just a habit.
Want we want to learn is how to honour that habit and acknowledge that is going to take a while to change the ‘habit’. But if everyday I practice being a bit more hopeful, I move from having a belief that I can change, a conceptual understanding to a very embodied knowing that I have changed in the past and can change again now, or in the future.
we move from ‘I hope it’s true’, through little actions to ‘I know it’s true’.
Is it accompanied by a felt sense in the body when I am thinking that thought?
Sometimes when well acknowledged, it will reveal more about it’s fear and show you what it’s protecting you from.
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I am having the experience – after our last check in – of using an age old habit of mine – as a “consciousness signal”, like a quiet, subtle alarm clock. So when I notice I’m about to engage in this long practiced habit: I stop. I don’t do it.
For many many years I believed it was not possible to overcome this bodily ingrained habit. So I never really tried. Oh, maybe for a few seconds, maybe several minutes at a time. But I never believed it was possible, so I never really tried.
Lately I’d been telling a story about my Dad who smoked several packs of cigarettes a day until one day, I think in his 60’s, possibly late 60s, he decided to quit and did. As a bridge, for a few weeks he chewed ice. But he never smoked again. His wife never quit, she smoked indoors, in his presence, a pack or two a day until the end. But Dad, never had another.
After our last check in I realized I could take this story I’d recently been re-telling, I could take it in as inspiration to change a habit I’ve long wanted to stop. So now I’m owning the story as part of my inheritance, turning what for me was absolutely not possible, into something highly likely. something available to me. Amazing!