Today I’m going to be discussing how it is that change is possible even when you think it isn’t my behavior and communications

It’s interesting because in my work I have people who come to see me, at my Hertfordshire therapy clinic, because they want to change and they obviously believe that change is possible, otherwise they probably wouldn’t bother coming to see me. There are other people that I work with, who are not clients and there are the people that I know socially, for example where I have noticed that some people develop an idea that the things that they dislike about themselves are not changeable.

Imagine being in a situation where you have resigned yourself to being stuck with the things that you dislike about yourself, you’ve decided that these things cannot be changed, that you cannot change them and that there is no point really finding another way of doing things, you’re just stuck with what you’ve got and that’s the end of it. Then imagine that those things about yourself actually really impact upon your relationships with other people, how well you are perceived to the rest of the world, how well you are able to form other relationships moving forward, imagine believing that those things about yourself, those qualities that you need to improve that there’s no point even trying because you’re just stuck with them doesn’t that sound a little bit crazy.

To not want to bother improving and changing the things that you can change and improve about yourself but actually just living with it instead, that’s nuts! why would anybody ever do that? Here’s the thing, sometimes change is not seen, sometimes the tools that we need to be able to make those changes are not easy to come by and perhaps in the past you have given it your best, like a lot a lot of other times before, you’ve really gone at it all guns blazing, thinking that this thing, this new way of being, this methodology, this strategy, this therapeutic intervention, this is going to be the one that finally makes things change for you and then it doesn’t work.

It happens that sometimes the route that we want to take to create the changes that we wish to make are not the right ones for us, for our individual psychology, for our way of being, for our environment, for our way of life, sometimes you don’t hit upon the right route to take you to where you want to be first time around or second or third or a hundredth time. Sometimes change doesn’t come fast, sometimes it doesn’t come easy and sometimes it doesn’t come via the route that you think you need to take. Does that mean that you should just back off and you know just make do with what you’ve got in life?

Is it at all possible that this thing that you want to change about yourself is actually quite important? It could actually make a really big difference. Is it not even more important to continue? The pursuit of that change, in spite of the knocks and failures and errors that you’re going to make a long way, I believe and I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I believe that even when we have these situations where it seems like we’d invested too much hope in finding the right source to help us to become the person that we want to be, even if that doesn’t work out and it turns out you have been completely going the wrong way forward. that there is still going to be a time in the future when you gain something from that experience and that thing might be wisdom, later that thing might just be a funny story about how once upon a time you tried rebirthing or age regression or some other new-age methodology to help you to overcome those anxieties that you had and it didn’t work and you felt like a woolly nose lady bashing cymbals in the background.

Even if all you get from it is a funny story that you end up telling somewhere and  for some people it works. Even if that’s all you’ll get, you’ll still get something out of it, there is still some reward to be had by keeping going and looking for a way that will work for you, to help you become the person that you want to be. We know that the human brain has the ability to rewire itself, things can change in there and you can change them but sometimes it’s as if our ego has got cemented into place and that ego says this is who I am and everyone else is gonna have to live with it and in fact, therefore, I have to live with it too, I have to stay this way.

Don’t let your ego in the way of you being able to recognise that past you doesn’t know everything, that perhaps other people have solutions that you haven’t discovered yet, that perhaps other people might have some quirky alternative ways that really work for helping you to be able to change who you are and how you are in life that would wreak, for you, very positive rewards and benefits. Don’t let your ego get in the way of you exploring another way of changing yourself, your habits by convincing yourself that you are the one person on the planet whose psychology is set in stone and doesn’t work on the same brain wavelength that every other human being does, don’t do that to yourself, that’s silly and it prevents you from moving forward and from having the life that you might like to have.

Sometimes we need to put aside our current thinking and get a bit curious all over again so that we can figure out, we can begin to take, to move in a different direction in life, maybe there are some learnings that you have yet to experience that will take me to where I need to be. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you’ve already learnt it all, that if it existed you would have already found it, that’s not going to wash around here, around here we keep searching, we’re curious, part of what we learn in NLP is an attitude of curiosity, we’re looking at developing within ourselves a way of being using our creative brain to find alternative ways forward when we are in stuck situations and when we cannot find them we accept that we haven’t got all the answers here but this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist, it just means that you haven’t found them for yourself yet.

If you cannot find them alone then find someone who’s a good researcher, who has a good brain for being able to find a way forward when they seem to be stuck in times of trouble because those people exist. I would like to think that on the most part, always for my own problems but certainly for other people’s, I am one of those people. we’re going to suck up the potential for disappointment because we know there is highly likely to be a lot of it around but we’re also not going to give up on ourselves quite so easily moving forward, we’re going to accept that we might not know how that change will occur but we’re also going to accept that change can occur and if it can then there is a way for us to evolve ourselves with that, there is a way for us to bring that forward into our awareness. The skills and knowledge of other people who might be able to look at things from a different angle to what we can could helps us to evolve, to achieve  that change. That may require that we reach out for and ask for help because sometimes we need to reach out to others in order to be able to cultivate that opportunity to find whatever it is we need to find in order to open up the possibility of change to ourselves and that’s the pursuit of change is what I want you to focus on.