Change Yourself (1st of Gandhi's Top Ten)

Changing yourself (# one of Gandhi's Top Ten)

Whether you like it or not, changing yourself is the only thing you truly can change. Change is a personal decision, made by you. So it is also true for others. You can not change another person unless they choose to allow it. They may agree to it, they may negotiate it, they may choose to give up their power of choice to you, but you alone can not make it happen. So if you really want to be in control (that's a topic for another blog post, hee, hee) you can only change yourself.

Choices can range from easy to hard. As an adult, choices can become hard because we are either navigating new pathways ( the unknown) or we are facing something that we have already experienced that was a negative experience. Choices are based on our belief system. Our beliefs are shaped by our experiences ( whether its an event, interaction with others or what we encounter with our five senses), we tend to base our decisions on what we have already experienced.

But what if we want to change our belief system. For example, what if we hated broccoli as a child, but we read an article as an adult that it's good for us, so we try broccoli again. Maybe we like it, maybe we still don't. Then we make a decision. Will I eat broccoli ( even though I don't like it) because an article I read said its good in helping to prevent colon cancer and I know that colon cancer runs in the family. We have then made a choice on multiple "experiences" or "knowns" including knowledge of our family genetics; the research we have read which we decide has countered the experience of not liking the taste of broccoli.

Change can even get more complicated than that. What if as a child, when we were first introduced to broccoli and said we didn't like it, our parent said You will sit there until you eat your broccoli!. Now the experience of eating broccoli has an emotional association to it. Our emotional response often gets "hard wired" into our subconscious. Now any time we think of or see broccoli we have an adverse emotional reaction. It may not matter how important to your health broccoli is, your subconscious says broccoli is bad stuff. You may even want to change that belief but because emotions can be so hard wired into our subconscious, there is no way you can overcome that ingrained belief. That is an over simplified description of how complex how belief system can be and how sometimes it is very hard to change.

This happened to me with a popular brand hydration drink. After so many years of being given and having to drink a certain flavor (only lemon/lime), while in the hospital, I developed a very strong emotional distaste for it. You could not pay me to drink it because the dislike is so hard wired into my subconscious and associated with bad memories. Fortunately for me there are other options. But what if your old belief needs to change?

In my next post, I will talk about how to change our beliefs when they are emotionally hard wired into our subconscious.