What Do I Know About the Process of Change?

Nothing in the natural world remains the same from one moment to the next. Everything is dynamic, continually changing whether we want it to or not, whether we are a willing participant or not. We are part of that world, and our lives can expand in response to the changing moods of each season, or we can contract by resisting the change we have been invited to make.

Three Paths to Change

Our lives change for three reasons.

The first, which we experience from time to time throughout our lives, comes from being pulled by the invisible force of biology and life-cycle stages to be a different person than we were before. A baby learns to crawl, walk, and run because she is hard-wired to move through those stages. In adolescence we couldn't ignore our hormones and the changes they bring if we wanted to. And the inevitable act of falling in love dramatically expands our view of life in ways we could not know without that experience. Courtship, marriage, birth of children, the launching of grown children, and the onset of old age each present us with different opportunities to evolve, grow and develop.

Not infrequently, when we have been inspired by a new vision of who we can grow to be, and what the world can become through our efforts, we are pulled to change. For instance, it is hard to read Paradigm Found without feeling compelled to make a genuine difference in the world by following our passion, just as the author, Anne Firth Murray, did when she founded The Global Fund for Women.

ASK YOURSELF ABOUT CHANGE

What is the most significant change I have made in my life?

Did the impetus for that change come from a push from someone or the pull of inspiration and developmental change? Or was it the result of emotional and/or physical pain?

Sometimes, though very seldom, we change because we are pushed by someone to become a different person than we've been. If that person is our boss, and our job depends on changing some habit or characteristic of our personality, the odds that we'll modify our behavior are fairly good, provided we're not asked to make too significant of a shift in how we see ourselves. In some cases, it may be easier to find another job than change long-ingrained patterns of behavior.

Think about it for a minute. How often have you been successful in causing another person to change through nagging, pleading, cajoling, demanding, beseeching, and otherwise shoving that person in the direction of change you wanted him or her to make? Not often, I would guess. I've certainly done my share of nagging, and ev