Why is change so difficult to make and why could an Agent of Change help you?

For many people the concept of change is a scary one. Take a look around you, everything changes, and all the time. It’s the one truth of life, other than death. So it’s no surprise then that people tend to avoid change as much as they do. Ultimately, change means accepting things are not working as they are. Which is SCARY, right?

Most of us  (99.9% of the population) have become overly invested in the way we “ARE”, whether this works for us or not. We have spent years installing our own systems, or patterns of behaviour, that make us tick. So why would we want to change them?

Well, basically, human nature is such that for most of us, we only consider changing something within ourselves or our lives when staying the same is more painful than morphing into something new. Or, in other words, when changing a behavioural habit becomes less traumatic than doing nothing – so stopping smoking if you find you are short of breath and the doctor has warned you it’s time to stop. Or stopping the negative self-talk after years of feeling miserable (these are simplistic examples but you see what I mean).

So what to do when we do actually acknowledge that we need to make changes, but we don’t know how? Or what if our feelings are more covert? In other words, it might be that we have a knot in our stomach something, but we don’t know what to do about it. Or it might be that we are feeling lost, that there has to be more out there for us in life, but we don’t know how to identify what this “more” is. All of the above are cues that the pain of staying the same is going to get worse if we don’t change something soon.

And this is where your Agent of Change comes in. Someone who is going to hold a space for you to first accept the knot in the stomach, and then help you understand it, before facilitating you to take action to do something about it.

Often, receiving the “reflection” from a neutral third-party is enough to get the ball rolling. In other words, you describe your “problem” and your Agent of Change mirrors to you your role in it so that you can see and understand how your own behaviour (thoughts, feelings, emotions) is creating it. And trust me every problem we have in our lives always starts with us, however hard that it is to digest.

Once you see how your behaviour/thoughts/feelings are creating your role in your situation, deciding what you want to do about it often becomes much easier. And this will always mean taking action. Be it through changing your own thoughts and changing the way you respond (with the help of Hypnotherapy or other coaching techniques).

Also, though, I have seen many people walk out of a session a lot happier simply because they have understood the reason for the knot in their stomach. Seeing and accepting the way you feel at the body level is one way for the raw emotion to dissipate. Try it and see.

Got any comments, drop me a line.

Bye for now xx