Changing Your Life: The Three Life Change Traps

"They must often change,
who would be constant in happiness or wisdom."
Confucius

The election of Barrack Obama is a phenomenon reflective of a powerful and ever-present desire for change, that is characteristic of our times. This event may have happened in USA, but you can feel it and hear it in the opinions and desires of people all over the world.

In many places it's almost physically palpable. We need fundamental changes in the way we lead our lives, for unless we change where we are going, we’ll end up where we are heading. We don’t need to look very far in our environment, or our social fabric, or our technologies, to realize we are skating on very, very thin ice.

Perhaps the most ‘inconvenient truth’ of all though, is not all these external dangers that we are facing... The most inconvenient truth of all is that they are not someone else’s problem.

Ultimately, the change 'out there' can only come from you and me 'in here'. Together, we form the social networks that create ‘the government’, or ‘the media’, or ‘the science’… et .al. All these external bodies we consider to be the real powers of change, are really nothing but collections of ‘you’ and ‘me’. Like cells, together we form the organs of this body collective, and it is no more the responsibility of one organ than another, for the total well being of humanity.

It is an inconvenient truth no doubt, and the ways of cynicism that have become trademarks of generations past, are no longer an option. For ultimately the problem can never be fixed out there, by someone else. That’s just a big copout. Confucius summed it up perfectly: ‘To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.’

The inconvenient truth is that the only ‘change we can believe in’, is the change we can create in our own lives – that in turn may benefit our families/ our relationships with all others, that in turn benefit our companies, our governments, our social institutions which we are a part of… which all in turn benefit the world.

So if we are serious about change, the main problem we have in resolving, is a personal one. Self-actualization is the critical factor upon which all others rest - for without it, there is no change.

There are no short cuts and it’s not just for some. It’s for everyone.

It is only the side liners of life, the 'spectators', that see change as only one that is external to them - as in how ‘they’ need to change and why don’t ‘they’… But this article here is not for them.

It is for the players of life, the ones on the field that wrestle with the problem of self-improvement and ask themselves the main question that matters, “How can I change for the better?”

You being here at self-actualization.com, searching out for this website and reading this article now, tells me that you are this second type of person.

This project here is for you. It is here to support you in the process of living victoriously and getting the most you can, out of everything you got.

For talking about making changes, spectating on the process is one thing - but acting on it and working with it, is quite another. The act of making changes is only for the courageous, for the noble, for the strong.

As you would have observed, it is only for the spectators of life - the ones who go with the flow, the ones who let the currents of their habitual patterns of thought and emotion take them where they will – that change appears easy. Their cynicism and critical mindset of 'armchair philosophy', reflects not their excellence as they would believe, but their weakness.

Like floating on a rapid river, change seems easy, because on most part, they never actually had to resist any of their own currents. The strength of a current is only known when going against it.

When going with it, it seems like it’s effortless to make all this progress. Like being on a raft, it may appear that the speed they have in moving through life is due to their will – when it's in fact driven by the river of their habits. They are but its passengers.

When the current leads to a waterfall, and one tries to swim against it - only then does it become clear that the forces running our lives are powerful indeed.

Well, consider that when it comes to our health for example, most of our illnesses are caused by our habits – by the 'vices' we are too familiar with. It’s not the genetics or the thousands of known diseases and germs that many are afraid of. It's almost always caused by the things we should know better -- by the commonly known facts about what to put in the body and not/ by what actions to do with the body and not. This is the ‘waterfall’ that essentially wipes out the health of more than 90%.

What is even more astonishing, is that when people survive their first crash and live to know that their next fall will be fatal unless they change direction, only one out of nine people have the power to fight the currents of their eating patterns, or smoking, or inaction, or any other attachment the mind has created with the past.

When presented with the drama of needing to change or die – almost 90% cannot do it! (These percentages are medical facts.)

The currents of our habitual thoughts and emotions are powerful indeed. Their power comes from the momentum they build in time with use. They’re like a snow ball that reinforces itself with each movement forward.

Therefore mastering yourself, controlling this rolling bolder and reversing its direction, requires an above than average mindset. This is most certainly not realized by using the same old clichéd, tired, quick-fix solutions that most suggest.

You're about to learn here something different: the good news that it is possible, and more important, how to do it. There have been a number of major researches that have made profound realizations into just how to make changes that stick. Unfortunately few people know about them, and fewer still practice them.