Resistance To Change? Beat Her!

People often have difficulties promoting their personal development and coping with what is happening in their environment with increasing solvency. This is what we mean by “resistance to change” or “changing without changing anything.”

Small changes or large transformations are our way of evolving and developing. It is a necessary and natural re-adaptation to the changing environment.

Many studies consider this attitude of rebellion against change an effect of human rigidity and intransigence. However, we can also evaluate it in terms of a system’s ability to protect its identity and integrity, and therefore its stability.

Be that as it may, change and development are intrinsic to human nature. We live in a changing world, in constant progress, which requires permanent transformation on our part as an adaptive strategy to the environment.

Big and small changes

If we look back with the intention of observing our development process, we will see an itinerary of gradual growth sustained over time, but we will also note notable turning points in our life trajectory, moments after which we have not been the same again.

We call these transformations changes of the first and second degree.

• The first – also called quantitative – are small and subtle mutations, imperceptible and unconscious at first glance, that we experience daily.
• Those of second degree, or qualitative, are those that are produced by virtue of drastic crisis-provoking experiences, which are finally resolved through some metamorphosis in our way of acting or thinking.

Imagine an airplane on the runway. First, after starting off, progressively increase your speed while maintaining contact with the ground. The tiny and seemingly insignificant modifications that we experience on a day-to-day basis, as a whole, signify an uninterrupted personal maturation.

At the ideal moment, the plane takes off and stays in the air, so that the state of the movement is modified although the aim continues being the increase of speed. At certain times we live in difficult situations that, well managed, become moments of incalculable value because they are enormously conducive to learning and, therefore, to make a qualitative leap: take off.

Who has not lived through a limit event whose overcoming has not meant a before and after? Our experiences are, if we know how to decipher them, authentic life lessons that make us stronger.

Turning a painful event into growth requires awareness, reflection, and effort. Analyze what happened, how we reacted to it, what we did well, what did not go according to our expectations and the appropriate way in which it should have been overcome.

Resistance to change

This process is accompanied by many obstacles that put our capacity for metamorphosis and our willingness to transform to the test:

• The addiction, understood in its broadest sense: the reliance on any external practice yourself. Today’s society promotes numerous forms of entertainment to deal with feelings of discomfort through spurious, deceptive means. They are recreations that help us evade our unwanted thoughts, emotions and moods, hindering any positive transformation.
• The fear of losing the balance and stability that we had achieved, of abandoning the status quo of the known. Popular sayings reflect this type of resistance with expressions such as “Better known bad than good to know.”

The joy, the illusion of seeing ourselves in a better future, the hope of becoming who by nature we can be, are certainly the original sources of energy to undertake positive changes.

• Such erroneous coping strategies create the need for us to develop defense mechanisms such as pride : when we feel questioned by the way of proceeding of others, who embody the transformation that we are not being able to originate, we react by showing ourselves convinced that we do not need any change .
• When this lack of meaning and purpose is maintained over time, impotence appears , which we ourselves generate by not courageously adopting adequate strategies.
• And when laziness we plegándonos to inertia, developed the apathy, a passive attitude to become victims of our own lives.
• Last but not least, there is the sadness of believing ourselves imperfect, that we cannot improve.

5 steps to take off towards a complete transformation

A researcher placed a glass barrier in an aquarium that divided it in two. In one part he put a large fish and in the other a small fish. The small fish was the only thing the big fish could eat , so logically, it tried repeatedly to cross the barrier to reach its food.

After hitting the invisible obstacle over and over again, he learned that it was an impossible task and gave up trying. The researcher then withdrew the glass and left it free, but the big fish was so self-aware that it never attacked again in the direction of the small fish.

The glass had disappeared from the aquarium but the fish had ended up creating a glass barrier in its instinct that prevented it from acting.

If we dig into our minds, we will find that we also have our glass barriers; the most difficult obstacles to overcome are found in our beliefs and thoughts. And it is often such resistances that slow or impede our growth and well-being.

With these five actions you can win over them.

1. Be modest and meditate on yourself

Look for spaces for reflection on the recurring episodes that take place in your life and that, if you observed them in other people, you would not like them. Try to put your mind blank so that you can then contemplate from the outside your ways of proceeding or the character traits that you would like to improve or improve.

But, at the same time, identify your strengths and the resources you have to generate those modifications that you want so much.

2. Imagine the way

Seek joy in change , enthusiastically visualize the new habits that you would like to acquire. Be specific and select one or two of the aspects that you consider priority or urgent.

Set simple, specific and realistic goals. Abstractions do not help to objectively evaluate whether you have achieved an improvement or not.

3. Exercise in change

Practice the behaviors that you have proposed to do as generators of change. This is perhaps the most decisive step, since your musings about your personal transformation process will be of no use if they are not accompanied by their translation in action.

Only through small repeated acts will you acquire new habits of behavior and attitudes.

4. Identify your successes

From time to time, evaluate in detail your way of reacting to the situations that you have proposed to modify, focusing your attention on those cases that you consider that you have managed correctly and whose mode of resolution must, therefore, be maintained and consolidated in the future. Also ponder the aspects that you think you have not controlled.

5. Be persistent and repetitive

Another key to change is reiteration. Only by insisting on your appropriate attitudes will you be able to consolidate and root them. As in so many things in life, if an action or process is not repeated over time, it will not become part of your character and way of proceeding.