SPONSORED POST
By Brenda Terry
“Change is hard.”
“People don’t change.”
“Change sucks.”
When you’re working on changing, whether it’s starting an exercise routine or tracking your spending habits, every time you dig into all the reasons why you want to change, and what actions flow out of your existing beliefs, thoughts, and emotions, you’re forcing your brain to create new neural connections.
This is where the magic happens. When we teach our brain to forge new connections, it gets stronger and our minds end up being an invisible cheerleader and bodyguard—helping us get the results we want.
There are three types of change:
- Suddenly through a life-changing event: Winning the lottery, marriage, divorce, birth, or death often lead to change happening quickly.
- Organic: A change that happens over time without forcing it. Like eventually growing tired of late nights and bar-hopping when you find a partner.
- Deliberate: An intentional change to make our life better such as switching to a vegetarian diet. Giving up bacon sucks at first, but the payoff is enticing. This kind of change is usually the most tedious, and that’s why I’m giving you all these tools—to unsuck the change!
When you decide to change a behavior, it’s deliberate. And real change happens only when it becomes unconscious. From the time you make the decision to change to the time the change is integrated unconsciously, you’re in the process of changing.
And while you’re in the midst of working to make a deliberate change, your unconscious mind is supporting you by doing all this invisible work in your brain, behind the scenes that you’re unaware of at first. And by the time you see and feel the evidence of change (loving your greens instead of curly fries), your unconscious mind would be like, “Duh. What do you think I’ve been working on all this time?”
The more you work with your unconscious mind to make changes, the easier changing will be over time. This is why we need to repeat, repeat, repeat.
Imagine you’re working on eating less chocolate. Keep in mind that I’m not telling you that “chocolate is bad.” For someone wanting to eat less, there are the potential thoughts, emotions, and values involved with the action of eating too much chocolate that drive the behavior consciously and unconsciously.
Haven’t you ever engaged in some behavour you wanted to change for no apparent reason? The reason is actually that behavior patterns are unconscious and run on automatic pilot when something happens that triggers the patterns, unless we’re familiar with specific patterns and interrupt them whenever it’s necessary. This is the reason being self-aware is so critical.
When you want to make a change, it’s important to stop the behavior you want to stop by engaging in the behavior you want to incorporate. The key to make change that sticks is to repeat the new behavior long enough to make new neural connections that will -in time- replace unresourceful or unnecessary patterns.
Are you trying to make a change in your business and you’re ready to step up your game? Then you’re going to love THRIVE in Business and Sales with NLP. It’s happening in Reno March 22-24 and spots are limited!
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