And now the conclusion of my series about
whether people can change.
I’ve looked at this from a few ways. What
exactly happens when we encounter people, and why we think in this way. Overall,
I think it’s been a rather grim and depressing look, so this blog I’m going to
completely turn this around.
To start with, I’m going to tell you the
big secret why all of this happens. Are you ready?...
We are afraid of changing ourselves.
That’s it, it’s that simple.
We know ourselves, in fact we know
ourselves inside out in every way. After all, we are the ones who made us that
way. There is no other way to put it. We created ourselves, through all of our
decisions, and experiences, through every book we read, and film we watch, game
we play, every punch we take, every punch we throw, we created ourselves.
And what’s amazing about this, is that we
have control over it. We decided how we change.
But of course, we live in a fast moving
world. Everything around it changing all the time. A new Call of Duty copy-paste
comes out every year, a new Iphone Generation, a new sequel to whichever film
series are popular right now. There is so much going on, that keeping our
integrity intact is something the only thing that we can hold onto, so
instinctively, we don’t want to change.
And this has somehow morphed into, we can’t
change.
We have an image of ourselves, who we are,
what we think, and this sometimes isn’t any truer than the snapshots we take of
other people.
But the secret to this is, we can change.
Changing is scary, a huge part of which
comes form the meaning society places on things. Whether you use an iphone or
an HTC, an apple or windows computer, whether you play a playstation or an
xbox, even utterly arbitrary things like whether you wear boxers of briefs
becomes some kind of signifier of who you are. And no-one judges this more than
you yourself.
Whatever decisions we make, we read into
far more than anyone does, judge it, think about how this reflects on
ourselves. What’s funny is that, when you think about it, no-one does this to
anyone else, and yet we’re still terrified of it. But really, you don’t do it
to anyone else, all you take from someone else is a surface impression, so why
be scared about it?
With this in mind, that really, no-one is
reading that deeply into you, except yourself, a small mindset change can come
into place. We can, even in some small way, change.
It’s not that we don’t want to, because we
do. Every movie and tv show, and book has characters who change, and we love it
when they do, when they get new experience, and conquer old and new challenges.
We want to do the same, to grow and change as people, to be able to do more
than we used to, and do what we currently do better.
The real challenge is actually something
very simple. So much changes around us all the time, that keeping ourselves the
same is often all we can do. Our successes and failures, and achievements and
shortcomings, can all just be attributed to the fact that that’s just who we
are.
The real challenge is telling ourselves is:
That it’s ok to change. And once we realise that, we can start swapping phone
companies, computer operating systems, game console manufaturers and underwear,
and start becoming the person we really want to be.
In short, people can change.
Daniel Lyons.
No comments:
Post a Comment