Beginning the Process of Change

Over the last two posts, I've invited you to dream about what you would like to be, do, and have in your life, and I've asked you to capture those dreams in some form. If you've done that, now it's time to start the process of change, and that process begins with making a decision.

I have found that in the beginning of the process of change, everyone loves choices, but not everyone loves decisions. It’s wonderful to dream, to imagine that anything is possible, and I do encourage you to do that on a regular basis. Last week, all I talked about was dreaming and how to capture those dreams on paper, in words, or in pictures to make them concrete.

This week, it’s time to start shrinking down your possibilities and cutting off some of the options you have created. This is virtually guaranteed to be not fun at all, unless you approach it with the right mindset.

I lived most of my life with the desire to keep my options open. I don’t like to decide, because choosing one thing often means cutting myself off from all the other options, and I liked feeling that I have choices. I like having options. I love freedom. I don’t like feeling boxed in, and I always associated making decisions with being trapped.

This was an error in my thinking. Decisions can sometimes lead to feelings of being imprisoned by your own choices, but not always. Sometimes making a decision, cutting off all other options, can be the very thing that sets you free.

My Big Decision

That's exactly what happened to me in the spring of 2003, when I decided I wasn’t going to be depressed any more, and I wasn’t going to take psychoactive drugs to treat depression any more. I didn't know how I was going to accomplish those goals, but I knew that what I had been doing was not working, and so I decided to take one option off the table. Antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs were no longer an option for me.

This would be a good place for me to remind you this was my personal decision, and I am not recommending you take yourself off any medication that is prescribed for you. I'm not a doctor, and even if I were, that decision belongs with you and your personal doctor. I did consult with mine to get off the antidepressants that I had taken off and on for years. This was not a decision I made lightly or impulsively. I was well-acquainted with the effects and side effects of the drugs by then, and I decided I had had enough of being at their mercy.

Once I had made the decision to no longer take the medicine, the only option remaining to me was to find other ways to manage my negative emotions and keep my mood on the positive side. I did have some idea of how to do that, because I was familiar with the work of Aaron Beck, David Burns, and others who advocated cognitive-behavioral therapy.

I guessed, correctly as it turned out, that I could put some of those techniques into practice and improve my results dramatically. When I decided drug therapy was no longer an option, I forced myself to look elsewhere for answers, and I was very motivated to find those answers. Even if you have absolutely no idea where to start to look for your answers, deciding to find them will set you on the right path.

Benefits of Making a Decision

When you make this kind of decision, subtle changes start to take place. You start to notice things you overlooked before. Strange coincidences will start to pop up. I don’t know if this happens because you start noticing things that were already there, already in your environment, or if this is the law of attraction at work. It ultimately doesn’t matter, I suppose. What matters is that you start to see the opportunities and to take advantage of them.

This is the most beautiful part of making a firm, overarching decision. It makes many other decisions for you, automatically. This gives you more energy to carry out those decisions. It prevents decision fatigue, which is one of the reasons making changes is difficult.

Decision fatigue occurs when your willpower becomes depleted by having to make many decisions in a period of time. Research has found it doesn’t matter whether the decisions are important ones or trivial ones. Simply having to make the choices drains your supply of willpower, and  willpower is an important ingredient for change, especially during the early stages.

When I decided not to feel and act like a depressed person any more, there were certain choices that were automatically and immediately cut off from me. I could no longer allow myself to lie around moping all day. Instead, I had to spend time actively looking for solutions. Because I made the choice to look for solutions, I started to find them.

I learned to stop allowing my automatic thoughts to run on an endless loop without listening to them, challenging them, and changing them. I learned to stop speaking unkindly to myself, whether inside my own head or out loud to other people. I learned to stop saying how depressed I felt and start choosing words that supported me in feeling better.

To be clear, this took time. Even though I discovered methods to successfully manage my moods, it didn’t happen immediately, and it didn’t happen with 100-percent accuracy. I tried lots of things that didn’t work. I tried things that felt awkward at first but worked a little. I practiced techniques that worked a little until they worked better. I also found ideas that were effective right out of the gate and made me feel much better. Those were the methods that initially gave me enough energy to keep pursuing effective change.

Keeping Momentum

The process continues to this day. I try to stay alert for ideas that elevate my mood and keep me out of the doldrums. I pay attention to how I feel, whether better or worse, and I try to figure out what made me feel that way. Change is an ongoing process, and you can almost always improve your results. Staying aware and open to possibilities makes the difference.

It doesn’t matter what kind of change you are seeking. The process is the same. You make the decision, and then you find ways to carry it out. There is nothing wrong with a little trial and error. It is an effective way to learn what works and what doesn’t. You also don’t have to make a total change on the first try.

I am a big fan of the behavior modification concept called shaping, because it allows you to make big changes by using small steps. In shaping, you reward each effort that leads you closer to the results you want. So whatever your big goal is, you reward yourself and celebrate getting closer to it, even if you don’t achieve the ultimate result right away.

Let me give you an example. If your goal is to increase your fitness level and to fit into a certain size of pants, that obviously isn’t going to happen overnight. In a case like that, you want to build the habit of exercising regularly, which is what will get you the results you want. Each time you go to the gym, you give yourself a little reward—a mental pat on the back, not a doughnut!

Pretty soon, you are in the routine of going to the gym on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and that is no longer something difficult for you to do. So you take the next step, maybe increasing the weights you are lifting or showing up for a class you find challenging. Each step you take shapes your behavior toward being the fit, healthy person you want to be. Shaping takes the pressure off. You don’t have to do it perfectly or all at once.

Of course, you don’t control everything that happens; that would not be realistic. The important thing to remember about starting any process of change is that you own the decision to change, and you are in control of what you do in support of that decision. Will you take steps, even baby steps, toward making the change, or will you find excuses not to?

Sometimes you won’t get the results you hoped for. There may be times when your results are better that what you expected. It is all part of the process, and if you stay open to possibilities, you may be astonished by what you can accomplish.

Next week, I will give you ideas about how to use the golden key of goal getting, which is persistence.