The challenge with change

One reason women seek coaching is knowing some part of their behavior isn't serving them. They’re doing something that used to work, but it's value has expired. They want freedom from a behavior that makes them feel out of integrity with themselves. It doesn’t fit the vision they have for themselves.

Sometimes that particular behavior never served them. 

The behavior feels like it’s not theirs, because it isn't. They'd picked it up through explicit guidance about how to achieve something. Or, more often, it's adapted from implicit conditioning to satisfy a real desire they hold.

Does that sound like you? If so, there are two things that make any change in your behavior hard: identifying with the behavior and ignoring how it’s served you. 

Seeing yourself as the behavior

The first is when you collapse your behavior and identity — you see yourself as the behavior. 

For example, I've recently found myself yelling. That’s the behavior. Logically I understand yelling is an expression of my anger. I do this to feel seen when I’m feeling unseen (hey, invisible mom workload). 

When I see myself as the behavior, in this case as a yeller or angry person, change is hard. I’m neither of those things. Reminding myself of that, while acknowledging that I do yell, creates space to change. Giving myself a visual reminder that those two things are different increases the likelihood of change, too. 

Not acknowledging the purpose your behavior serves

The second hurdle is not acknowledging the purpose your behavior serves. Often it's to fulfill a real, important human need. You may need to feel seen, like me, or any of the needs that are inherent to you as a human being in the world. Until you know another way you can meet that need, you’ll be immune to change. 

If I want to stop yelling (I do, mostly), I need to trust that I can still feel seen. I can build that trust by taking an inventory of recent times I’ve felt seen. That itself may loosen the grip of my behavior. 

Or I can go further by looking at the part I played in creating those experiences of feeling seen. Whenever your needs are being met, you’re contributing to that experience in some way. What was it? That part is your asset that can continually deliver your core needs.  

When the only way you see yourself satisfying that need is through the behavior you want to change, don't give up. You can stretch yourself by experimenting with other ways you might be able to satisfy that need. Take some wild guesses about what might work. 

Once you’ve created a catalog of possibilities, set up some low-stakes tests. What works? How might you evolve your experiments? The goal is to have a new set of experiences where your needs are met without the old behavior.

Call for reflection:

Think about a behavior that is not serving you. In what ways has it served you? What else can you do to satisfy that need?

Shine On,

Alicia