How to Change Your Life, Part 1: 4 “Easy” Steps
(Okay, so this is fairly tongue in cheek, but this is really everything there is to do. Though it doesn’t rate the tasks by difficulty. That would be too heartbreaking.)
The overall gist of this set of tactics is as follows:
Change your relationship to everything from the outside in.
That is,
- Step One: Never DO the wrong thing; Do the right thing.
- Step Two: Never SAY the wrong thing; say the right thing.
- Step Three: Never THINK the wrong thing; think the right thing.
- Step Four: Never FEEL the wrong thing; feel the right thing.
No excuses.
That’s it. At first blush, our response is “Well, of course…I can do that. Just do the right thing.” But in practice we begin to realize how difficult it is to always do the right thing, how much potential and momentum we have that is often going the wrong way. How many decisions we make each day for which we merely follow habitual patterns and don’t even consider what the right thing is.
What gets in our way?
- Ignorance: Not knowing what the right thing is.
- Existing Potential: The momentum created by our life history and sometimes from doing the wrong thing habitually.
- Not Paying Attention: Not noticing when we are making decisions and acting on them.
The first element, ignorance, is the easiest to remedy. We can learn something new and use that to make better informed decisions. Maybe. I do find that information alone is often not enough for me to change my behavior. (I can immediately learn to say the right word in Spanish, but I cannot instantly learn to be non-judgemental.)
Of course, our actions, words, thoughts, and feeling are all tied up together—we often just DO an immediate reflection of what we feel. But we have to start somewhere. So we start with the most powerful and accessible creative action most of us have, external action, and we do the right thing.
This is where concentration, paying attention, and meditation can help—to slow down the transaction that takes us from an wrong-headed feeling directly into a wrongly-directed action. This requires knowledge—what is the right thing—and the ability to be congruent, approach the evolution of our capacities with our minds (with rules and guidance) AND our intuition (hoping to find the updraft and catch a ride.)
Is this easy? Well, no, not easy. But there are tactics that we can use to help us make better short term decisions and change our long term momentum.
Next time—applying a tactic to a constant challenge.
