Why Change Is Hard

Growth asks you to practice a future before it becomes your life.

You can want to change and still find yourself doing exactly what you did yesterday. You want to earn more money, lose weight, drink less, or bring more clients into your business. You know what you want. And yet moving toward it feels hard.

Of course it does. Change asks you to leave what your brain already knows. It asks you to think differently, feel differently, and become willing to experience discomfort before you have the result you want.

The question is whether you want to do that hard thing on purpose.

You do not need to change to become worthy

Before we talk about growth, I want to be very clear: you are already one hundred percent worthy. You do not have to improve yourself to become acceptable. You do not have to earn more, accomplish more, or change your body to deserve your life.

Growth is an opportunity to see what you are capable of. That is what makes it exciting. You get to explore what you can create with your mind and your actions. You get to surprise yourself.

There is a very different feeling behind wanting to discover your capacity and believing you must change because something is wrong with you. I want you to understand that difference. Your worth stays the same either way.

Your brain likes what is familiar

Your primitive brain wants immediate pleasure and wants to avoid pain. Familiarity feels safe. If the choice is between sitting on the couch now and doing something uncomfortable for a future result, your brain has a very understandable preference.

It is interested in right now. It is not naturally excited about the discomfort required to create something you have never created before.

This is why wanting a different life is not the same as being willing to do the work of creating it. You can imagine the result and love it, then encounter the first uncomfortable step and retreat into what you already know.

When I first started lifting weights, the experience was uncomfortable. I was sore, and I did not immediately look different. There was no instant reward that made every part of it feel wonderful. Later, I began to enjoy a hard workout because I understood what it was doing. The discomfort became part of the pleasure of growing stronger.

You are choosing a kind of discomfort

Sometimes we act as if staying where we are will spare us discomfort. But consider what happens when you buffer instead of doing what you really want to do. You get the immediate relief, then you may feel terrible about buffering. That feeling can send you right back to buffering again.

That is a version of the fifty-fifty experience of life. Growth has its own fifty-fifty experience. There is discomfort in doing something new, and there is the experience of pursuing your dreams.

You are choosing the flavor. You can have the discomfort of staying in the same pattern, or the discomfort of moving toward what you want. Neither choice makes life permanently comfortable.

Once you stop expecting growth to remove all negative emotion, you can decide whether the discomfort of growing is the discomfort you want to experience.

Practice your future now

Your future begins in your mind. All the possibilities you are considering exist there before they become results in your life.

If you only use your past to decide what is possible, your options will be limited to what you have already done. Your education, your current results, and the identity you have practiced will become the boundaries of your future.

But you can think beyond those boundaries. You can ask what you would believe if you were already living the future you want. You can practice those thoughts now.

I think of this as pre-experiencing the future. It is not waiting for the world to change so you can finally believe something different. It is thinking the future thought, feeling what that thought creates, and taking action from that feeling while the result is still ahead of you.

My one-hundred-million-dollar goal is an example of this. I can work with the identity and beliefs of that future now. The result has not caught up yet, but I can begin practicing the thinking that creates it.

The thoughts that got you here may not take you there

This can be especially challenging when your current thinking has worked. You have built a successful business. You have made a million dollars. You know how to create your current result.

Then you want to create something bigger, and you discover that you are attached to the identity that got you here. You do not want to let go of thoughts that have served you so well.

It can feel like giving up an old friend. But moving toward a new result requires you to consider a new way of thinking. You cannot insist on keeping every familiar belief and also expect an entirely different experience.

The same thing happens when we identify with a struggle. You may have practiced being the person who has a weight problem, or the person who sees a villain in the story of your life. Letting go of that identity can feel strange even when you say you want something different.

Take responsibility without attacking yourself

The Model gives you a way to understand what you are creating. Look at your result and work backward through your actions, your feelings, and your thoughts.

This is not an invitation to criticize yourself. It is a math problem. You are looking at how the pieces fit together so you can understand your own mind.

When you take responsibility for your thinking, you can change it. If you locate all the power outside yourself, you do not have that same opportunity.

You can also look at results you have already created. Those are completed Models. A thought you once had about your future became a feeling, actions, and eventually a result. Your current goal is a Model in progress. The result is not here yet, but that does not mean the thought cannot become your life.

Choose growth consciously

You get to decide whether to keep creating what you are creating or pursue something new. Both choices are available. Neither changes your worth.

If you choose growth, study your thinking. Notice where you are using your past as your only guide. Notice the beliefs and identities you are holding onto. Then practice the thoughts of the future you want and do the uncomfortable work of moving toward it.

Change is hard because it asks you to become conscious of what you have been doing automatically. It asks you to feel discomfort and keep going. It asks you to let an old way of thinking go.

You can do hard things. And you can choose a hard thing that gives you the chance to blow your own mind.