Life Change Blog

22 March 2010.

Welcome to the Monday Morning Life Change Blog. Over the past twenty years we have amassed a huge amount of knowledge and experience in "life change". We post a new Life Change blog article every Monday morning. Hope you enjoy them and find them useful.

3 Things That Will Help You Change.

Although Change Therapy and Motivational Psychology are relatively new there are some key ideas that are emerging as central players. If you are struggling with change of any kind, from giving up smoking to overcoming depression these are a few ideas that will help, I promise.

Life Change Blog Idea No 1 :Change The Way You Talk

“We learn what we believe as we hear ourselves talk”.

This is a wonderful old psychological adage that has been around a long time. It is only recently that it has been recognized as a central player. In short, we literally “talk ourselves” into something. So if you are trying to give up smoking and saying things like “I’ll never be able to do this”, you probably won’t. Not because you can’t but because you are telling yourself you can’t. This is a simple example but permeates through the whole of the change spectrum. So try to listen carefully to what you are saying and change anything that is working against yourself.

This will take some practice as it is not always easy to “hear ourselves speak”. Good practice starts with listening carefully to others, you’ll be able to spot unhelpful “change talk” if you listen hard enough.

Life Change Blog Idea No 2:Choice Is Everything

We change much better if we can have a choice in how to change. Choice is generally good. Too much becomes bewildering, and as every sales and marketing person knows, if you give someone too much choice they wont choose anything, but no choice at all is even worse. Remember that in most change scenarios there are different ways forward. It is seldom the case that we are restricted to one option.

A student of mine once commented that this felt very true if you think about a box of chocolates (a little bit Forest Gumpish). If you have a box of chocolates and you select one to give to a friend they will almost certainly want to see what the other choices are. If you offer the whole selection people will choose quite happily.

Quite often this plays a part in why it feels so difficult to “give up” smoking or drinking or chocolate or anything that feels good.

Life Change Blog Idea No 3:Who Wants To Change

The difference between achieving goals that we set ourselves and those that are chosen for us are enormous. Usually if we set ourselves goals we eventually achieve them. If somebody else sets them we usually fail. We function much, much better if we are in control of our own goal setting.

Hope these Life Change Blog ideas are useful. Talk to you next week.

Alex.