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By Root 364 0

By really focusing on what they want, they assume people make certain targeted changes, and of course some do. Perhaps yoga might help us reorient and de-stress. Time management would prevent us from clogging up our lives with the irrelevant. Therapy would give us an understanding of where things had gone wrong in the past so that we could move on. Government initiatives to make us healthier and have better lifestyles work hard at educating us. They tell us what we should do that is good for us. Eat five fruit and veg a day, they say. Exercise for thirty minutes five times a week. Drink only so many units of alcohol. Attempts to fill us with information, education or incentives naively assume that people will willingly take their messages on board and then act in ways that reflect their best interests. So, according to this model, we are ignorant and just need be told what to do and then, miraculously, we will make the right changes. Most of us don’t.

Anyone can see the nonsense in this. The obesity problem grows despite the emphasis on the need for a healthy diet. Smokers continue to light up from packets plastered with death warnings. Most dieters I have met are expert calorie counters but are still overweight. They know what they should and should not eat. They just cannot do it. We all have behaviours and thoughts we know are not good, we know what we should do, but we continually fail to do it. Change is not tackled by educating people; it is brought about by flexing people.

13. Inertia and the status quo bias

What if people think they are fine as they are? Surely personal development should be a matter of personal choice? Some people cannot see the need to change, either personally, or for the benefit of others. Some have religious beliefs that say we have been made the way we are for a purpose. Some are too lazy. Some are too depressed to try. I have often found that the people who say they do not need to change are the ones in greatest need. They are often the people who are stress carriers (they cause stress in others but are fine themselves) or who lack self-insight, or whose behaviours damage others (often the ones they say they love). Yes, there are successful people too who say what they did worked for them, so why change? They think they have a unique formula for their success. However, there is no logic or sense in ignoring alternatives, or in being closed to possibilities. Ignorance and prejudice grow out of this kind of narrow-mindedness. Why dismiss an option that might be worth considering as potentially good for you? Being blind to possibility and personal growth is self-limiting. OK, so you might be fine today, but things don’t stay the same – new behaviours become necessary, the world changes, different mindsets will constantly rise up and challenge you. You have to be open and ready.

There is another much stronger and more compelling reason for being open to alternatives. Consider whether there is an area of your life that is not as perfect as you would like it to be. We can almost guarantee that if you do nothing it will not improve. If you carry on in the same way, nothing will change. Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. Yet how often do we wish things were different but do nothing to bring about changes? Isn’t it madness to want something different but to continue to do the same? That is a key point but one that’s often overlooked. We are taught by evolutionary theory that creatures who fail to adapt perish. It is the same for humans. We need to flex to thrive.

14. The pull of the past

A commonly held view is that problems can be overcome – and personal development progress – by looking into the past. Many people have a strong affinity with the past and especially with their own past. People usually think – quite erroneously in my view – that they know quite a bit about it too. We could argue about that. People know things from their viewpoint better than anyone else, but there are many other viewpoints. Our