InsideOut Empowerment Principle # 8: People do not change until the pain of staying the same exceeds their fear of change. You may have a superficial desire for something but until you can drill down deep enough to discover your real soul reason for wanting to make a change, it won’t happen. And then you will want to examine just how painful it will be to do nothing. Really flesh out the scenario. You want to create as much psychic pain as you can muster so you will make a change. Sometimes just wanting something is not enough. It must be more painful to do nothing than to risk the change.
InsideOut Empowerment Tenant #4: What you want is based on what feels good to you (increasing pleasure or avoiding pain). Remember, what you want feels good to you. It may not feel good to everyone, especially those close to you. If people know what you want, they may judge you if they don’t think it’s a “good” thing to want. For example, my son quit college 18 credits shy of graduating. I certainly didn’t think that was a good thing. He didn’t want to go further in debt by going another semester. This was his choice, his decision, his life. There were many people in his life, who claim to love him, that told him what a mistake he made. It’s seven years later and he earns a six-figure income in a sales position in a rural area where the cost of living is less than most places in the US. Should he have graduated? Who can say conclusively? Perhaps the stress of owing more money for student loans would have caused him to do something desperate. We’ll never know. All I know is that it was his decision to make and my job was to support him in his right to make it.
There are two ways to look at the title of this blog. One is to identify what you love and take the leap to do it for a living and the money will follow. This can work well for people like me. I am someone with a very high need for freedom and I have a lower need for survival, so I can tolerate more risk than many. The other way is to look at what you believe you have to do and change the way you see it so it actually becomes what you want to do.
