Day Eighty Nine!!!

Apparently, there is a good portion of us that want to change some sort of fundamental aspect of ourselves. It used to be that the old adage ‘you can’t teach an old dog a new trick’ meant that at a certain point we become defined as a fixed pattern. Change is only available to the young at a time in life when identity is still being established. It was thought that by the age of 30 you were done! However, what we have come to learn in this post modern era, is that life is dynamic. Everything is continuously changing all around us and within us. We have learned that the adult brain is plastic, and that by doing a new thing, having new experiences, learning new information, the brain changes; meaning that no matter how old you are, you can change. 


Now the truth is, as we get older, change might come more slowly, as it might feel like it takes more effort. After all, everything we do, we practice ,and the longer you have been practicing the more you have it down by rote.


The other truth is we do what we do because we get something out of it. Even when we have dreams, we also have existential fears. Fears such as; disappointing yourself, disappointing others, and just shear fear of failure, sometimes it can actually be fear of success. In order to be able to change it does take courage, and the other difficulty with change is that you are no longer in the comfort zone, you enter into the struggle zone, and that sense of fear can completely undermine future attempts to change. 


So, if you happen to be one of those people who have taken on one diet plan or another, gone to one program or another, experiencing set back after set back, you can become  afraid of hope. For you, opening yourself up to hope, could actually just represent the road to more failure, not the road to recovery. Because its not just about making the change, its about maintaining the change. For those who have had a dream unattained, then what happens is, that fear becomes real, as you've had to face the fact that you lack the power to realize your dreams. 


The more success you've had, the more you realize that you can have faith in yourself. The less success you’ve had the less you will be able to have faith in yourself. If you happen to be the type of person that beats yourself up because you haven’t attained your goals, then you are also the type of person that mires yourself in your own negative self-judgment in either guilt (I did a bad thing) or shame (I am a bad person). 


The real key is to be able to look at what is standing in your way of attaining success non-judgmentally, in order to; begin to understand what might be missing, or what might need to be added, or what might need to be substituted, because the truth is what you were doing, you were doing that for a good reason, and once you can accept that, understand that and realize that there is something at work beyond just ‘going on a diet again’ you will be able to free yourself up in order to move forward to real maintainable success.