You are probably used to “white knuckling” it when you are trying to change a habit.
You grab on tight until your knuckles turn white. You are grinning and bearing it until you make it through to the other freakishly distant side.
You want to change this habit.
What you secretly want is for change to be easy.
What you REALLY want is to change without feeling bad.
Here’s the reality:
Change often hurts. It’s uncomfortable. It’s sometimes painful, but usually at least uncomfortable.
And you are hardwired to avoid discomfort.
Internal dialog:
“I’m going to make this birthday cake for my friend, and I’m not going to eat a bite of it, even though it’s my favorite too.“
This feels sucky. I feel deprived. I get a bit pouty when I’m trying to white knuckle my way through a habit change. I’m sure that’s enjoyed by everyone around me too. Sorry, guys.
The kicker is that pushing through doesn’t work for the long-term.
All that pain and no gain.
So, here’s the thing…
In order to create long-term, lasting change, you will still do that thing that makes you uncomfortable, like stopping smoking or eating less or whatever.
And it will still be uncomfortable.
But, instead of gritting your teeth and white knuckling it and trying to NOT FEEL THE BAD FEELING,
Don’t fight it.
Relax into the discomfort.
Feel the uncomfortable feeling and stay in that moment.
Don’t ignore it or distract yourself.
That’s the trick.
Allow yourself to feel uncomfortable and don’t try to escape it.
In THAT moment, you will make a small degree of change.
Do that often enough, and you will make real, permanent change.
New internal dialog:
“I am baking this cake for my friend because I choose to do it for her. I don’t have to, but I choose to. And I am feeling a bit jealous. OK, a lot jealous. And deprived. And that’s really interesting. I feel it in the pit of my stomach. Not hunger, but tensing, like the beginning of a knot. I feel it in my sinuses, like a precursor to crying. That’s an interesting feeling… all tingly. I’m going to stand here for a moment and feel how my body is reacting. And it’s OK that this is happening. Noticing how my body feels is all part of changing.”
The secret ingredient of change is accepting how you are feeling, even when it’s sucky.
And keep in mind that most change doesn’t go on forever.
It’s just the transition.
It’s for a limited time.
Also, I doubt if your habit involves something truly painful, like sawing off a limb.
It’s more like water splashed in your face.
It’s feeling the desire for coffee.
Or feeling the craving for a smoke.
You can do this.
Some of the most transformational work I do is one-on-one, helping someone figure out what fundamental belief they have that is holding them back or causing them grief.
What the heck is keeping them from living a huge, delicious, wonderful life?
I throw out hunches.
Sometimes my hunches are right.
Sometimes they’re wrong but head us in a more productive direction.
And sometimes the hunches need time to percolate.
It might go something like this…
Me: “I have a hunch that you think your children shouldn’t whine.”
Them: “No, I know all kids whine. That’s not the problem.”
(Feel free to insert husband, mother, boss, etc.)
The truth is, we are both on the right track.
She knows that kids whine… that’s just kids being kids.
That’s in her intelligent mind.
But somewhere underneath, there’s a thought that those kids shouldn’t whine. The reason I know that is because she has just spent five minutes talking about how the kids’ whining bothers her!
It’s not the intelligent, reasoning mind that has the thought.
The painful thought is on the layer beneath the intelligent reasoned thinking.
Our intelligent, reasoning mind says no, there really shouldn’t be a problem.
But it’s bothering you, so it’s worthy of attention.
It is worthwhile to feel better.
And that’s the beauty of life coaching. We can work on big problems like a child dying, or a not as heavy problem like your kid being snarky.
Just because you have a seemingly small problem like eating the entire bag of chips doesn’t mean it isn’t dragging you down.
Whatever the problem, be compassionate with yourself.
It’s okay if you have a thought that goes against your logic.
You have to acknowledge you have the thought before you can dissolve it.
The process is no, no, no, Aha!
No, that’s not a problem. (Denial.)
No, I don’t logically believe that. (I’m too smart for that.)
No, this is just an annoyance, it will go away. (Stuff it down.)
Aha! I really do think that kids shouldn’t whine! I didn’t know I actually thought that. I am a unique, interesting animal.
The Aha! might come an hour later or a week later. It might not show up as an Aha, but a slow yeaaaaaah.
But it’s really cool when is comes.
And from there, my friends, we can dissolve that pain.
That I know of.
Here goes.
How acupuncture miraculously cured my allergies.
By Ellen Yale.
The kids were about 8 and 10-years-old as I was standing in my driveway (underneath the five enormous willow oak trees in my postage stamp sized yard) talking with my mother about how I was getting the flu again. Every fall I would get the flu and then get laryngitis, then totally lose my voice and be bedridden.
I would miss three weeks of work every fall.
That can really be a stress on work.
And raising the kids.
So, we are standing there and Mom said (brilliantly I might add), “How are your allergies doing?”
Which I didn’t think was so brilliant at the time, because I didn’t have any seasonal allergies.
But it was one of those things that once said made perfect sense. Every Halloween since the kids were born, I was very sick. And in hindsight, it was right when all my big willow oak trees started changing.
Normally this would just be good information, “Hey – I’ve got allergies. I should probably think about getting shots”.
But my next-door neighbor’s mother had once mentioned that her chiropractor had healed her allergies.
He had used acupuncture.
Coincidentally, I had been in a car accident and was going to that same chiropractor three times a week for nine months to try to heal my back.
I knew them. I trusted them.
I was willing to give acupuncture a try.
It’s not that I didn’t believe acupuncture was a real thing, it’s just that I don’t go out seeking alternative therapies.
I would not have made an appointment had I not already been going there.
I default to the skeptic in me.
The first three or four sessions went fine. The little needles don’t even go through all layers of the skin, they are as fine as a hair, and it’s only an ouchy twinge if it the energy needs to be unblocked in the correlating area of your body. (That’s as close as I get to technical explanation.)
The trees were a little late that year, but shortly after Halloween it started.
My voice dropped down to Lauren Bacall levels. I was losing it fast, but people could still understand me.
When Dr. Steele heard my raspy voice, he said, “Oh – I’ve got a spot for that.”
He put a needle in my forearm.
Acupuncture normally doesn’t hurt.
This felt like a lightening bolt entered and went up my arms.
I screamed out in pain.
His reaction was, “Well, that worked.” And he walked out of the room.
I laid on the table for the usual 15 minutes of electricity. (After putting in the needles, they hook them up to electrical current to increase effectiveness. It doesn’t hurt, it just buzzes. I think the only thing that could make it look worse is if they set the needles on fire. When I told Dr. Steele that, he said they set them on fire in China, but he doesn’t do that. Glad I’m in America. Gulp.)
But back to the table.
I laid there the requisite 15 minutes, and his assistant comes in and removed them as usual, and I walk out of the examining room. When I turn to say goodbye to the group, MY VOICE WAS BACK TO NORMAL.
It was immediate and it was total.
It was like a miracle.
I mentioned that I am usually the wary skeptic. If the change had not been so extreme and immediate, I would have wondered if my allergies had gotten better because of the car accident or chiropractic work or a change in my trees or all of the other variables in life.
Not only do I want to share with everyone including strangers on the street how my allergies were cured, but I don’t think I would have been so open to other changes in my life if I hadn’t had this wake up call.
This changed how I see the world.
This was one of the events that made me hyper-alert to what else in our world could be here to help me that I hadn’t tapped into.
This event made me question other beliefs I had that seemed like facts.
I don’t think I would have been successful in life coaching if it hadn’t happened.
And it’s really at the core of what great life coaching is: questioning what we believe and being open to looking at other truths.
I have found that since that moment in time, I have gone down another path. I have turned towards things that seem on the fringe of society and put them to the test.
I have questioned my relationships and career and body image, to name a few. And all for the better.
So, take this for what you will. It is information on how you might cure your allergies, as well as a call to question the rules of nature and the world around you.
Here is the question I ask myself every morning as my feet hit the floor:
What is here that I haven’t noticed, that is here to help me?
It’s been pretty amazing.
PS – You might find it interesting to know that I figured out later that the acupuncture also cured my allergy to bee stings and bug bites and bacteria in combination with dust. Which is my whole house. So far, so good and it’s been about 8 years.