How To Change Your Life

The Variables & Dynamics Of Changing Your Life

How to change your life? This is a very big question and it demands a very large answer! The frequent response to the "how to change your life" question runs something along the lines of this:

"Be clear about what you want, pursue it with focus and persistence, seek and accept help when you need it and never give up."

Whilst that is all true, it's not the whole picture. There are many variables, here are just a few:

So a more realistic and practical response to "how to change your life" needs to be tailored to where you are in relation to these questions.

Understanding & Dealing With Your Immunity To Change

Underpinning ALL attempts at personal change is understanding why you will most likely fail and knowing how to to deal with that.

Your failure to achieve a personal change goal isn’t the result of a lack of will-power, it’s your "emotional immune system" trying to protect you.

Immunity To Change

Keeping It Real

Before you read any more on this page, I recommend that you quickly read through these short pieces of about 500 words each as they will provide context and background to the material on this page and the related pages on the theme of "How To Change Your Life".

Keeping It Real

How To Change Your Life [1]

The fuller explanation to what we have just done can be found below in this article - and also in the supporting articles.

You will find more explanatory material in the following articles:

How To Motivate Yourself In Tough Times

Self Improvement And Motivation

Managing Personal Change

How To Change Your Life [2]

Are you looking for some practical, tactical material to get you "skilled up" at how to change your life?

OK so you're not in mess and experiencing any particular crisis at the moment, but you feel that you'd benefit from some general "how to change your life" material, and this is what has led you to finding and reading this article.

If that is the case, what you are looking for is to some extent beyond the scope of this site however I don't want to send you away empty-handed so take a look at some of this sound and practical "how to change your life" material that I have personally found to be useful and that I can recommend to you.

As I am sure you have found, there is a staggering amount of "how to change your life" type material sloshing around out there in the ether, but here are 4 free documents that you can download and that are really worthy of your time and attention.

(1) The first document - Why People Fail - is easy to read and absorb but nevertheless challenging and quite provocative.

It is written by Dr Ken Evoy a brilliant inventor, entrepreneur and internet pioneer who has guided thousands of people (including myself) through the pitfalls of building a commercially successful website.

(2) The Power of Frustration is written by Catherine Pratt - who is known to me "electronically" - and is an extremely practical look at how to change your life by learning how to how to deal with frustration and learn how you can actually use this emotion as a valuable tool.

(3 & 4) It would be very easy to dismiss The Science of Getting Rich and Think And Grow Rich by their titles - BUT please don't. Please check these links as they will take you to in depth articles, on this site, on each of these books.

These books are classics on the subject of how to change your life and were written many years ago. You will need to filter some of the language and translate into a more modern context, but the principles outlined in these books about how the mind works, and the power of thought, are universal - so universal that they form the basis of most of what all the self-help gurus charge you a lot of money for!

How To Change Your Life [3]

OK, brace yourself, now for a hard-core "under the bonnet" look at the serious dynamics of how to change your life...

Here are the 3 fundamental areas that need to be recognised and addressed in any serious, long term, truly life changing successful attempts at how to change your life.

The simplest and easiest metaphor for explaining all this is to think of your desktop PC (or your laptop or blackberry):

[1] The hardware of your brain - the simple physiology and neurology of how your brain functions

This is all to do with evolution - or more precisely, the current stage of the neurological evolution of the "average" or "normal" human brain - which is that (what is conventionally and colloquially referred to as) the "left brain" and the "right brain" do not communicate easily or much at all.

The same is also true for the other 2 major brain centres (conventionally and colloquially referred to as "the emotional centre" and "the reptile brain" or the survival instinct).

The lack of communication between these 4 major brain centres, or to express it another way the lack of brain balance, is the underlying evolutionary and neurological reason why we feel the need for "how to change your life" tips; why we experience life the way we do; why we suffer so much, and as a species why we inflict so much suffering on each other.

This lack of "brain balance" is also the root cause of all of our personal internal conflict and inner resistance or immunity to change

Improved and more frequent and conscious communication between these different brain centres is the route to peace, insight and overcoming your innate unconscious inner resistance to all of your serious attempts at "how to change your life"

Brain Hardware Resources

Meditation Techniques - For Developing An Adaptive Mind

Brainwave Entrainment - The Technology Of Binaural Beat Meditation

Meditation Programme - No more BOREDOM + no more YEARS of training!

[2] The software running inside your head

For the sake of brevity let's call this your "inner map" of reality - aka your "operating system".

We are all the product of our own ethnic, national, social and religious backgrounds.

We have an inbuilt inner map that sees life from the perspective of that background.

This inner map applies a whole range of filters related to the characteristics and profile of our broad environmental background.

Here’s the big picture of how your internal map of reality operates to generate your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours and why it so often works against your very best efforts at how to change your life.

First, you experience something through your senses. You see something, hear something, touch or feel something, smell something, or taste something. In other words, you have an experience.

These sensory impressions first pass through a number of filters, which delete huge amounts of it, distort it in various ways, and create generalisations. These filters are hugely important in determining how you create your reality.

With what is left after this filtering process, which happens almost instantaneously and almost totally unconsciously, you then create some sort of internal representation of reality.

This internal representation is really a pretty impoverished copy of reality, because much of what came in through your senses has been deleted, distorted and generalised in a number of ways. You’ve made a map that represents reality, but it isn’t reality, and it isn’t really very accurate - which is partially why you feel the need for self motivation tips.

Based on this brief overview, here is a summary of how inner resistance to managing personal change develops and why, and how it manifests:

• From early childhood onwards, we all develop our own inner map of reality

• As we develop, we understand, interpret and relate to the world "out there" through this inner map

• Our capacity to be conscious or aware of our own inner map and especially how we create our experience of life through it is determined by our level of self-awareness

• However, for most of us, most of the time, this is an unconscious process

• In accordance with this inner map we have our own inner commitments to our own personal priorities

• Our inner hidden commitments have a high priority and will over-ride any counter intentions that conflict with them

• We assign this high priority because the hidden commitment is inextricably linked to an inner hidden perception that we have of our own physical, psychological, social or emotional safety

• This hidden commitment is (nearly always) outside of our conscious awareness

• The quickest and easiest way to identify our inner resistance is to observe our reactions and our behaviour in our attempts to apply all the how to change your life tips we read

If you can take charge of these things, and choose how you do them instead of having them just run on automatic pilot, you can make huge changes in how you experience life and what kind of outcomes you get.

Brain Software Resources

Change Your Self-Talk ... Change Your Life!

NLP - Achieve and sustain peak performance

Developing self-awareness via mindfulness practise

[3] The operating environment - struggle and suffering

At the "bigger picture" level there are those who believe that mankind is moving towards a "new era" of peace and goodwill and raised consciousness etc. That may or not be true, but the present lived experience of reality is that struggle and suffering are unavoidable and integral aspects of life on this planet.

There are many people who see suffering and struggle as things to be resisted, that "shouldn't" happen and that are "wrong".

At the personal level this is often expressed as "if only" or "why me" or "it isn't fair" etc, and is another form of resistance - based around our refusal to accept how things are when things don't happen as we want them to or feel that they "should" - and this then creates the desire for yet more self motivation tips!

Without getting too philosophical in what is intended as a brief instructive article, in my view all of the evidence suggests that:

Suffering and struggle are inbuilt into the way the universe runs - not by accident but by design.

If we can drag our attention beyond the horror, unfairness and sheer "unacceptability" of it all and:

Focus instead on the intention behind all this inbuilt suffering and struggle - we eventually and paradoxically find that its true purpose is constructive and transformative, it unmasks the true nature of "who we really are and why we are here" and it reveals a path to real and permanent personal change and transformation.

In the natural world, there would seem to be extensive evidence for the transformative and evolutionary processes conventionally understood as "natural selection" via a competitive process of "survival of the most adaptive". As Darwin put it:

"It isn't the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change"

An adaptive response to our "operating environment" of imposed change, struggle and suffering is possible when we either have evolved and developed the personal capacity to do this, or at least when we have the resources to help us.

Resources For Dealing With The Operating Environment

Relaxation + Meditation Music + Guided Meditations

Higher Awareness - Personal development and spiritual growth programmes

How To Change Your Life - Keeping It Real

The following articles are short pieces of about 500 words and intended to provide context and background, and I recommend you read each of them sequentially and then return to read the material on this page:

The basics

The duck test and the big assumption

How things are

I did it MY way

It's ALL about these 2 simple things

4 big reasons why we get stuck

Another big lie

What do I do then?

Why we think the way we do

Your Inner Map Of Reality

How To Change Your Life - Key Themes

Self motivation tips for tough times

The power of positive thinking

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