September 12, 2007
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How People Change
The truth is people don’t change very easily.
There isn’t ever this extraordinary moment where all of a sudden you
just become a different person than the person you’ve always been. You
don’t suddenly just start holding different beliefs and living a
completely different life in an instance. There just isn’t going to be
a day in the future where all of a sudden President Bush will just
decide that he doesn’t want to use war as a tool for spreading
Democracy in the Middle East and start to think that the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan were just terrible mistakes. It just won’t happen. Not
any time soon.People are naturally resistant to change. Our
habits and instincts and thought patterns are strongly ingrained in us
from a fairly early age and the longer we live with them the more
essential they become to our nature.But stubborn presidents
aside people do change all the time and usually when they do there
tends to be one or more quintessential moments that serve as the
turning points that make the change possible. Sometimes we don’t
realize these turning points until long after when looking back in
retrospect. Other times we consciously choose to make a certain moment
such a moment. As in you might on a particular day say that you are
going to live differently from now on and resolve with all your might
to work as hard as you can to do so.There is a problem though.
These turning points no matter how meaningful and significant they may
be and no matter how sincere and determined we are in our conviction
are not the ends of the process of change. Rather they are but a step
along the path. An important step, often the most important first step,
but still just a step. Just because I say today that I will never be a
person who lives in X way again doesn’t mean I won’t ever again do
anything X-like no matter how much I might mean it when I say it.
Rather change is a gradual process. It takes time.Let’s take an
example from my own nature. I am a naturally disorganized person and am
very much inclined to just throw papers and stuff about and let them
lie wherever they lie. Taking the time to sort them and place them in
folders or what not has never been a thing I’ve been good at or
particularly interested in doing. Let’s say though that one day I
decided that this being disorganized was a detriment to my life. I
might resolve that from this point forward I will be a neat and
organized person.Even if I were to do that I’d imagine an
outside observer who perhaps witnessed my declarative moment might
notice on another occasion some time after that I got some papers and
just threw them on the floor or something without looking at them or
thinking about them and went about the rest of my business. Now the
question is after having observed my resolve and my failure to meet my
goal, should said observer conclude that I am a liar? Or rather a
hopelessly weak person incapable or unwilling to change? I think not.One
incident is not sufficient evidence to draw any such conclusion. It may
be that the old me before I set forth my conviction would have out of
ten opportunities to throw papers on the ground without organizing
them, gone ahead and thrown the paper on the ground 9 or 10 out the 10
cases. But perhaps the new me has thanks to my new conviction managed
to in 6 out of the 10 cases remember to sort the papers properly. Have
I changed then? Yes. Am I, as I want to be, “a neat and organized
person”? Clearly not yet. But I am getting there. Nevertheless if you
judged just by watching one of those four lapses you might conclude the
wrong thing. You might think I was just lying or am not really trying
to do my best to be a different person.So the observer has at
least three choices upon observing me in such a lapse. They can condemn
me as a failure or a liar. Or they can ignore the lapse and just say ‘I
guess he just forgot this time’. Or they can remind me in this instance
of my conviction and point out that I lapsed. Surficially
and perhaps in most cases the third choice seems like it really is the
best option if it is done without malice or blame. If you tell me that
I didn’t pick up the papers just now, I am likely to pick them up and
thus through enforced habit I’ll change into a person who picks up my
papers without thinking about it faster thanks to your reminder.However,
I have observed that in my case, reminding me of my lapse might not be
the best thing to do. The truth is that if I had resolved with all my
heart to be a neat and organized person and then I failed to organize
some papers and you saw it and reminded me of my error, I am likely to
get upset at you. I am likely to say quite rudely something like “Oh
give me a break. It’s just some friggin
papers. Leave me alone!”. Or I might be rudely dismissive: “Blah blah.
Papers. I’ll get them when I feel like it.” Or worst of all I might
just say “Thanks. I’ll get them.” And then the next time I’ll say
“Thanks for reminding me. I’ll get them. I’ll try to do better next
time.” And the third time I’ll say “Many thanks to you. You’re a life
saver.” And I’ll continue like that as pleasant and as polite as could
be each and every time you remind me. Until. The twentieth time comes
along and let’s say it happens to be on a bad day where I am feeling
miserable or something terrible happened to me or maybe it’s just
nothing at all, just a normal day. But for some reason on that 20th
day, rather than politely responding to your reminder, I’ll really
really freak out. I’ll start cursing and raging and say all kinds of
mean and cruel things about picking up papers and being reminded. I
may not even be coherent but one thing will be clear by my actions and
mannerisms that your words this time oddly and bewilderingly made me
extremely ticked off.Why would I react in this way. The “20th
case” example is obviously the consequence of my having been angry in
all 19 cases before hand and having kept it all bottled in. The real
question is though, why I am likely to get angry in the first place.
After all, I did say that having some one point out my mistake will
likely help me reach my goal faster. So it’s a good thing, not
something to be angry at. But I know me. I will definitely get angry no
matter how important the goal and no matter how much I don’t want to
get angry at the person pointing out the error.Upon reflecting on this I have come up with the following possible partial explanations for my irrational anger:
1.
I have a natural extremely strong aversion to the sensation of feeling
like I am being watched or tested. When someone points out a mistake I
have made I perhaps irrationally get the impression that they are
watching my every move waiting for my error. I sometimes even begin to
imagine that they are testing me trying to determine if I have ‘really’
changed in the manner that I said I would and then finding me lacking
for having failed to measure up. They may well be doing that, but it
doesn’t matter if they are, the mere act of their mentioning that I had
made a mistake would make me feel as if they were. And that would make
me angry.Where does this aversion come from? I don’t know. I’ve
always been a person who feels as if he is being watched and I’ve
always been extremely self-conscious about it.2. Secondly I
might be upset because I feel as if the observer is not giving me a
fair shake. In effect, rather than seeing the observer’s commentary as
merely helpful advice meant to benefit me, I might see it is an
external criticism for my error. Which is not necessarily something
that would make me angry, bu the more frequently I feel criticized and
if it is not balanced with equal or greater praise than I might get
angry. I might start to wonder at why the observer only seems to notice
the times when I *fail* to pick up the papers and organize them
correctly but never seems to notice how much better I have become at
sorting and organizing papers. The 6 out of 10 times where I succeeded
might feel like meaningless victories because the only thing that
matters to outside observers is the 4 out of 10 times I failed. That
would make me angry and increasingly angry as time went on. I would
want people to see me as the person who now is organized enough to sort
my papers 6 out of 10 times whereas before I never did it at all not as
a person who still can’t manage to keep himself organized 4 out of 10
times. It’s one of those glass half empty, glass half full things.3.
Much more likely to be the source of my anger would be feelings of
disappointment and anger that I would feel toward myself for the
lapses. Each and every time I fail to act in a neat and organized
fashion a good part of me would get very annoyed at myself. I would
think millions of people around the world manage to lead their lives
every day in a neat and organized fashion, why can’t I? What makes me
so inadequate? The stronger my conviction to change the more I would
feel like a failure each time I show evidence that I had not changed.
And of course I’d be embarrassed by those failures and I wouldn’t want
others to know about them or take note of them and if they did the last
thing I would want them to do is tell me about them, remind me of my
inadequacy, even if doing so might help me to get closer to my goal of
succeeding in changing. It is not surprising then that I would take out
those feelings if disappointment and anger on others in particular
those who happened to be the ones who brought my failure to my
attention. Being rude, curt, or just plain mean might well be the
behaviors I might exercise as a consequence.4. Perhaps the most
important reason why I might get angry and the hardest for me to face
would be the fact that I might well be angry because I don’t really
want to change. Not that I don’t not want to change either. Rather I
may well be internally conflicted over my desire to change and those
occurrences where I lapse and act in accordance with how I used to act
all the time are in fact occurring in large part because there is still
a big part of me that does not feel that these new behavior patterns
are right or good or better for me than the old.I may just
want to be a messy person. The experience of striving to be neat and
organized I might find stressful and unpleasant, more so than I
expected. And whereas when I made my conviction to be neat and
organized I saw only benefits to making such a self change, now after
say the twentieth reminder perhaps I am starting to rethink it on some
level. Was the way I was before so bad? Is the way I am now so good?
Deep down I might be lost unsure of how I should be acting, unclear on
what is best for me. I still want to follow through with my convictions
and become a neat and organized person but I may be afraid of what kind
of a person that will really make me. Will I be happy that way? Or will
I feel as if I am forever tapped by my convictions forced to act in a
manner that is unnatural and uncomfortable for me. So when I act in
accordance with my will I might get angry and when I act outside of my
will I might get even more angry. The contradiction might drive me into
a rage, until I can settle it within myself and decide finally who I
really want to become.The truth is, as Aristotle taught us (or
rather as was blindingly obvious to anyone who ever thought about it),
we have to live in our lives in a balance. The fact that I have setup
my self change as an all or nothing proposition is likely the source of
my anger. I said I will become a neat and organized person. That’s it.
That means any lapse is failure toward that goal and I can only succeed
if I manage a 100% success rate. This is wrong. There may be people
out there who are perfectly happy being 100% neat and organized and
there may be people for whom it makes their lives just perfect to be 0%
neat. But it is clear that I am neither. The fact that I felt the
desire to become neat and organized is sufficient evidence to suggest
that I am not content being at 0% but the fact that I might still be
conflicted over my desire to change suggests that I might not be
satisfied with 100%.So what I should ask myself is what is the
correct amount of neatness and organization that works for me? Would I
be content with being 40% neat and organized or 60% or 80%? Whatever
the amount there will by definition be cases where I do not act in a
manner that is consistent with a neat and organized lifestyle. But if I
am only aiming to be as neat and organized as I feel comfortable being,
that should not phase me or upset me at all. Nor would there be any
need for a reminder when I lapse since I could understand any err as a
component of my attempt to find the amount of organization in my
lifestyle that makes me happiest.Still, it’s clear I won’t be
happy until I make it clear to myself and to others exactly what level
of balance between myself as I was and myself as I am that I am seeking
to obtain or at least as close as I am able to estimate and then accept
that person as who I am.Over time that balance may change. As
I become more neat and organized I might well become a person who wants
to be more neat and organized and does not feel any bit conflicted over
it. Eventually all unawares to me I may one day become nearly 100% neat
and organized just by virtue of slow incremental developments of
organized habits that became ingrained in me. Being neat and organized
had external benefits that made my life easier and happier over time so
I had incentives leading me to become incrementally more and more neat
and organized over the years. But it would surely take a long time. At
first 40% neat and organized might be the best I am comfortable with
and rushing to strive to be 80% or more would make me feel miserable
and angry and likely to snap out at anyone who reminds me of what seems
to be my failure to become as much as I want to be. But after say 30
years or so, I might be able to easily manage being 80% or more neat
and organized. It might just be who I have become over that extended
time period.Such is the way that people change. We don’t change
easily. We don’t change quickly. It takes a long time and a lot of
effort and the right kind of effort. Try too hard and the backlash may
be worse than the original. Try too little and you might not change
enough to make you satisfied. There’s just a big component of human
beings that just doesn’t want to change very much. We tend to be
comfortable leaving well enough alone. But even when we develop a
conviction to change and apply our strictest and utmost resolve to
become different and better than we were. It still takes time. A long
time. And rushing it can be a dangerous thing that can cause more harm
than good.So it is unwise for us to wish or expect of others or
ourselves that we might become immediately different or better people
or to hope that we might see or find some certain proof of the extent
to which we have changed. That will only lead to our owninevitable disappointment.
