Why Is It So Hard to Change?

“We do have the capacity to step out of past conditioning, but as anyone who has consciously attempted it can attest, it’s a difficult project. One of the reasons for this is that doing something truly new—actually moving off those habitual tracks—feels like some combination of weird, unfamiliar and wrong.

The trick is to learn to stay with the exp

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Most of our attempts to become better people, fitter and healthier, more moral/ productive/ organised, and so forth, make this problem worse– because it's basically impossible to pursue any program of personal change without the thought, somewhere in the back of your mind, that successfully completing the change will catapult you into a new and som

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Given this understanding that "control" is at best an illusion and at worst a devastating violence to living systems, the question that Bateson was asking is: How does change happen? How does a family change? How does a marriage change? How does an ecosystem change? How does a culture change?

An understanding of living systems reveals that change c... See more

“The practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counter- instinctual.” I take him to mean that if you’re trying to get better at life in some way– more patient, or better at listening, or less prone to procrastination or anxiety or self- sabotage– the necessary actions are pretty much guaranteed not to feel es

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The forces in our lives that have established our current equilibrium will work to pull us back whether we are trying to change for better or worse. In the words of George Leonard, “Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one.”

In our everyday 3D lives, we apply force to matter and get predictable results. We unpack groceries, chop garlic, and switch on a stovetop to boil water for spaghetti. These familiar objects appear to be inert. They do what you make them do. But this model doesn’t port to inner moves. In the subtle realms of mind and emotion, applying force creates... See more