Are you afraid of Change?

If you want to improve your house, then you need to change it. If you want to improve your life, then you have to embrace change.

If beliefs are causing us pain and suffering, then why don’t we change them? Why haven’t we done what needs to be done to have exactly the kind of life that we want?

It is because we’ve been programmed to fear change. We are addicted to certainty. We would rather be certain we are miserable than to risk being happy and satisfied. We are programmed to always look for security and survival, and we are also programmed to fear the unknown.

Making a decision says something about you. It’s also true that not making a decision says something about you. So don’t get hung up on the end of the pendulum swinging back and forth between “yes” and  “no.” Giving yourself such a conflict means you are avoiding change.

And like any obsession, excessive conflict is a cover-up.  The “yes” and “no” of the conflict is a distraction to keep you preoccupied so that you do not pay attention to something else. The

something else is usually “What will they say?” or “What if I make a mistake?” Change involves dealing with the unknown. It involves going from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and it involves risk. If you changed your job today, how would you feel? Supposing you’ve just taken a job

that provided a higher salary, more chances for advancement and better working conditions. Wouldn’t there still be some doubt, fear, nervousness and insecurity regarding the change?

Most likely there would. You see, even when change is positive, we have anxiety.

The Difference Between Successful and Unsuccessful People

The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is how they handle change. Successful people have anxiety too, but they don’t get immobilized. Unsuccessful people let their anxiety immobilize them.

Successful people still have anxiety, but they re-channel it into creativity. Start to look at change as a friend instead of an enemy. Take it with you and allow it to work for you instead of against you. Each one of us is climbing the ladder of life. And each rung has new opportunities and

new obstacles.

You may be familiar with the Peter Principle that states that eventually each one of us rises to our level of incompetence, and then we stay there because we do not have the ability to continue. I don’t believe that’s true. I think it’s because of our fear of change that we stay stuck,

because we don’t reevaluate and reprogram ourselves to adjust to change. We just stay where we are, which is just a little bit over our heads. The Peter Principle infers that we have limited abilities. But the truth is we cease developing our abilities because of our fear of change.

INSIDE-OUT, OUTSIDE-IN

We need to remind ourselves, and every individual on this planet, that we can and must change the world from the inside out approach and NOT outside-in. We have overwhelming proof that the outside-in approach does not work. The long-term solution to poverty, lack and limitation lies in our ability to turn our inner potential into reality.

The only way we can truly heal the world is to heal ourselves first. We can't look around us for help; we have to look within. This is not a new message, but I think we need to remind ourselves of who we are and what we are capable of. We need to take responsibility for everything that has happened to us. Through the law of attraction, we attract either consciously or unconsciously everything that happens to us. Whatever anyone has done to us, we have participated in it, and are at some level, responsible. In essence, there are no victims, only volunteers.

This is a hard pill to swallow, but unless we accept it we cannot change things for the better. All change comes from the inside. Trying to change things using the outside-in approach is always doomed to failure. On the surface this looks selfish, but you know by now that we can only change the planet one person at a time.

It seems we are a culture of blamers. If you wristwatch shows the wrong time, what do you do about it? Would you ask your neighbor to set their watch according to yours, or would you correct your watch? Unfortunately, we do not make similar corrections when our lives are not

working. Instead, we insist that reality should conform to our illusion.

There Is No Way to Know Ahead of Time

In the growth process you will make many mistakes. You’ve been programmed since childhood to look at your mistakes. What you’ve been taught to do is to concentrate on what isn’t, what should be, and what could have been. We’ve been brought up with a belief system that says we should constantly judge ourselves, evaluate ourselves and see if we are doing it right. We end up judging ourselves so harshly that we quit producing results because we are afraid to make mistakes. You and I have been taught to fear the unknown, so we start worrying about

what’s going to happen two weeks from now, two months from now or  two years from now instead of concentrating on what is. We are always looking for certainty, and if we can’t be certain, we don’t move. We allow ourselves to be immobilized. It is because we don’t like the unknown. But the truth is that no matter what you do, there’s always going to be

the unknown. And there’s no way to know before experiencing.

It’s OK To Make Mistakes

There’s no security between the cradle and the grave. The only security that you and I have is our ability to create and produce results. If we are not tied into to the belief that we should not make mistakes, uncertainty won’t be a problem. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in  my life. Some of them were very large. But that’s part of the growth process.

It helps to realize that an airplane spends ninety percent of its time in error. We need to take a look at that. If you could see that you can get an airplane from New York to London even while having been in error ninety percent of the time, maybe you could be less critical of yourself.

Maybe you would allow yourself to be in error. A sailboat cannot get from where it is to where it wants to be by traveling in a straight line. It has to zigzag. So in terms of a true course, it’s always in error. What is important about an airplane or a sailboat is that the errors cancel out.

To Success!