Lies Told About Change – Part 1
I’ve changed a lot in my life. Anyone that knows me or of me knows about the 150 lbs I lost after growing up obese. Some people know about how I recovered myself from chronic anxiety, negativity and fear based living. Others are aware that I transformed a lot in my social and romantic life. And still others are familiar with the fact that I up and quite a 14 year career without knowing what the hell I was going to do next and successfully started a coaching business.
I was so successful at changing myself that I learned how to create my living helping other people change. With so much of my life being focused on how we change, I’ve become aware of the misconceptions, misunderstandings and outright lies that surround the concepts of change, transformation and creation.
In this series of blog posts, I will expose some of the more popular bull shit about change. Each post will have a concept to digest and an example from my own life or from a client’s work.
First up!
“Smart, successful and high performing people can simply apply themselves and change is easy for them.”
Not True!
Being extremely smart, successful or being able to accomplish a lot has nothing to do with our capacity to change. In fact often people who are high performing have the most difficult time changing. Life has rewarded them generously for the way that they think, act, perform, relate, transact or create. So when those ways are no longer helping them live the life they want, it’s actually harder for them to change.
When you are highly intelligent, powerful or successful…you are a tougher nut to crack.
Being able to change takes a set of skills, characteristics and virtues that are very different from those that lead many people to academic and then corporate success. Emotional competence, introspection, radical honesty, patience, courage and belief in a vision, rather than instant results, aren’t always rewarded in our institutions and systems of typical achievement. Additionally, the capacity to really change takes the cultivation of a high tolerance for uncertainty, discomfort, trust and commitment when we don’t see those tangible results right away. It also takes the desire to learn from “failing” as well as the discomfort of trying new things that are not naturally talented at.
One of my favorite clients is absurdly smart. Way smarter than me and very successful. He is a director for a tech company with over 12,000 employees. He brokers badass deals to keep the internet up and running for most of us. He has been successful since second he entered the workforce and now makes around $500,000 per year in his mid-thirties.
When his wife told him she wanted a divorce, the floor fell out from under him. As far as he was concerned, even though they were seperated, he believed they were both committed to working it out. At the time he had already spent over a year studying every book about marriage, relationships or women that he could get his hands on. He would try simple techniques or make efforts to apply concepts he learned in his studies. But nothing seemed to shift the dynamic with his ex or his daughter.
He realized that it was time to change his way of being in relationship. He was smart enough to find a new therapist and to hire me. Now he is rapidly transforming who he is with his daughter, his friends, his employees and with the women he is now dating. In our work we are actually doing an active dismantling of what has led him to success in his career, without losing the ways he provides value.
At the same time that his marriage fell apart and he felt lost in the world of women, he also started receiving feedback that until he changed the way he related to people at work, a VP title wasn’t in his future.
Because he was so successful at treating people transactionally, being efficient, studying harder, working longer, he was imbalanced in the skills to both change but also in creating more meaningful relationship. It’s taken him letting go of some of those things that have helped him to succeed to finally change. Recently he is having a great time dating again and received that promotion.
Are you high performing in school, work, athletics or some other important performance area in life? If you are, there is a chance that it’s actually harder for you to change than for other folks. The most elite performers in the world have a huge support team around them, to get them to the next level.
Is it your turn?
If it is, click the link to learn more about how I can help.