When It Comes to Change, You’re the Only One Who Can Do It

By Rosemarie Sumalinog Gonzales

Change is hard. Really hard. You must be uncomfortable to make a change. Get real with yourself. The good part about this is that with enough dedication and willpower, you can change every aspect of yourself and create a new version of “who you are”. But can anyone do it?

A person is still young, learning new things and changing drastically. As infants, we are focused on learning the basics. In the end, we enter adulthood with more or less a firm structure of ourselves – our “first persona”. Sadly, most people never change their first persona because they believe it’s “who they are” and that changing yourself in any way is blasphemy or peer pressure. Quite the opposite, that’s a loser’s approach. Your first persona is your first try.

And like with anything, your first try is never the best. As a matter of fact, it’s usually the worst. If you want to dress better, learn about style. If you want to quit smoking, make it a priority. It doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence, simply with habits. Aside from that, many others factors can be an influence.

As a rule, these sorts of changes don’t occur overnight. They take time and effort. Most of us also know from hard-won experience, though, that when it comes to making significant changes, launching ourselves into action is often harder than it sounds, and less productive than we hoped. In fact, it turns out that “just doing it” before you are emotionally ready and properly prepared to take on a particular goal may be one of the fastest ways to sabotage your success.

Lasting change rarely occurs as the result of a single, ongoing decision to act. More often, change evolves from a subtle, complex and sometimes circuitous progression which involves thinking, hesitating, stepping forward, stumbling backward, and, quite possibly, starting all over again.

But if you’ve been striving to put your own change efforts into perspective, understanding your “readiness to change” may very well be a step in the right direction. People underestimate the benefits of changing and overestimate the cons or costs. But they’re not particularly conscious of that, so it’s not a focused, rational decision-making process.

Weighing the pros and cons of a behavior is an important component of CHANGE. Thinking about making a change is what gets people used to the idea of actually making it. You should make a change – but you’re not seriously considering doing anything about it anytime soon. It may take a scary test result or a major life event to get you motivated to start thinking differently about your prospects for change. Meanwhile, recognize that by just thinking about it has potential value, too, and can help open your mind to new possibilities.

In our world, we are the center of it. Everything we know and experience involves our existence. The fact is that our world exists within a sad reality – Only US can make a change of our LIVES.

Challenge yourself. Dare to make a change in your life by following your goals instead of comparing yourself with others. Change depends on YOU.