How To Change Your Life – 5 Things To Do
How To Change Your Life
Image Courtesy of Happyologist
To learn how to change your life you must understand how your identity is formed.
I attained a BA in Organizational Behavior & Communication from NYU and during my course of study we examined how we develop as a people.
Our identifies are developed through a powerful process that is greatly unconscious which saves us the headache of consciously trying to learn everything. This powerful process removes the “why” of learning and we just learn how to do things through modeling.
The difficult thing with this process is that if there are shortcomings in the person or persons you are modeling then you can easily inherit those shortcomings.
The good thing is that you are not only a sum of our experiences and you can become more than your experiences, but the reality is that many don’t become more than thier experiences because they lack to tools to do so.
How To Change Your Life: Nurture Over Nature
Yes we are born with baselines, meaning we are born with some genetic dispositions, but much more of who we become comes from our interaction with people.
Our core responses to the people we interact with and our environment becomes ingrained in us unconsciously as children. We learn these responses through mimicking and through our reactions with people and images we come in contact with. We are like sponges, we are like sheep in this way.
We get queues early on of when smiling, openness, kindness, exploration, introspection is supported, and when it is not we learn negative responses. Depending on the child’s baseline, one child is more resilient than another in adverse situations.
As we grow, we build patterned responses to familiar situations. We build eating patterns, emotional patterns, mental patterns, and physical patterns in response to our environment.
These become ingrained patterns reinforced and supported by our emotions, mind, and body, and they form a cycle to keep the pattern going. For many, we become no more than a product of our experiences, unable to break the patterns our experiences have molded us out of.
Since we gain a core part of our pattern when we are children, we are learning mostly from the people who we are most around which is our families. Family traits are mostly passed o through modeling and not genetics.
But we can change…
How To Change Your Life: 5 Keys To Changing
- First understand how your identity was formed.
- Once you understand how your identity is formed know or at least feel you can change who you are with work.
- Identify with you want to change and make a list, and decide what you want to replace it with.
- Distance yourself from the people who reinforce the current behavior you wish to change, whether that is family or friends.
- Hang around people who model the behavior you like and ask questions about how they handle particular situations and do the same or similar. (I remember growing up as a kid that many kids didn’t like if you did something the same way as they did. They wanted to stand out in the crowd and claim some certain thing or behavior for themselves, and even family members did the same thing. In competitive societies many of us are taught to want to hold on to the better things for ourselves and discourage others from doing the same thing. We must ignore this. Find out how people achieve behavior and actions that you like. Talk to as many people as you can and incorporate what they do into your own life.)
We Can Change!
Yes we can change, but no one said change is going to be easy and we must embrace the difficulty of the journey.
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