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By Root 363 0

personal narratives can be shaped – and distorted – by the passing of time, by other people and by intervening events. People are very attracted to the idea that the past is the ‘cause’ of how they are today. They underestimate the extent to which our natural tendencies and personality contribute to where we are. These are, in fact, the most likely causes of our current issues and problems. Not our past. Our past may have shaped us. The more traumatic or abusive it was the greater our tendency to believe this. But – and this flies in the face of psychoanalysis and many psychotherapies – I believe solutions do not come from an analysis of the past. Nor does change happen naturally in a habit machine such as ourselves.

Our habits and natural tendencies account for why our past seems to stick to us very easily without the effort of will. This ‘stickiness’ is very difficult to shake off even when we need to, because many forces operate to maintain our natural inertial path. These include:

genetic make-up

parental upbringing

past experiences and learning

social pressures and the need to conform

needs and wants for things and status

demands of work and work colleagues and

demands in our immediate environment.

These are all inertial or habit forces that conspire to keep us the way we were, largely independently of what is good or right for us. They are ‘current self’ cement. Or concrete boots slowing down the journey towards a different future self. If we do not flex away from them we can end up getting the opposite of what we want or risk making the present become permanent.

15. Shaping a new self

Who are you? Who am I? Perhaps we are only the sum of our genes, biology, upbringing and experiences. This would explain why we try to keep a strong grip on this container of the past. We have a tendency to believe it does define our ‘selves’. We are probably programmed to defend it and not to move on because – in some sense – that means killing the current self. The alternative is to change our own habit machine and replace those natural tendencies with a different and more appropriate set of thoughts and behaviours; to construct almost a new ‘self’. I stand by my assertion that if there is any fundamental difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom it is apparent in how we develop ourselves independently of, and far beyond, our basic animalism. We can have more control over our own destiny than we often realise. And the litmus test of this is in our facility to shape a new self from past-driven natural tendencies.

flex is a proof of that personal control and the special position of being a human animal. flex is about:

monitoring our existence and adapting to the subtle variations that we perceive

hijacking our own habit machines to shape a better world

putting the individual in control and

abandoning notions of past, luck and limits, and replacing them with the potential and the positive.

The later sections of this book show you how we managed to find an easy way for people to do this. How people achieved changes in areas where they had failed repeatedly before. How some experienced life-changing transformations.

16. Show me a stressed person and I’ll show you a habit machine

I have been researching occupational stress for over thirty years. In 1991 I wrote a book called Work, Stress, Disease, and Life Expectancy. Many tens of thousands of studies had tried to show that stress caused ill health and shortened life expectancy. I concluded that the term ‘stress’ is unhelpful and virtually meaningless because it encompasses all sorts of ways of defining ‘stress’ from the positively good to the definitely dangerous.

Nowadays very few people work in psychologically toxic environments, even though that may not be how it feels to many. People feel their work is stressful because they have got into the habit of attributing negative feelings to things outside themselves. For example, they blame the management, shortage of resources or the inefficiency of colleagues. My research on work