How to Stay Committed to Your Own Growth, Part II
When it comes to making big changes in your life, it isn’t the decision to change that’s the most challenging part. It’s sticking with that decision.
The closer you come to making big changes in your life, the more your negative mind tends to resist those changes.
This is what happened to my client Chloe, whom I wrote about in Part I of this post.
As soon as she started to take steps toward building the life she wanted, Chloe came up against some serious inner resistance.
Over time, though, she developed the skills to cope with that inner resistance and lower the volume on her negative mind.
But even then, her struggles didn’t go away.
The External Resistance to Change
Even as Chloe learned to cope with her inner resistance to change, she came face to face with resistance from another source: the external resistance to change, i.e. some of her family and friends.
Yes, there were people in her life who accepted and encouraged her transformation.
But there were also people she cared about who felt threatened by all the changes she was making.
“Who are you?” they asked her. “You don’t even look like the same person!”
Translation: who did she think she was, making all these big changes?
“It’s hard enough for me to hold onto all this new stuff in my life,” Chloe told me. “How am I supposed to deal with losing part of my support system, too?”
“The first step,” I said, “is understanding that their behavior isn’t rooted in bad intentions.” Instead, it was an expression of fear—fear of losing the Chloe they knew.
But rather than expressing that fear, I told her, some of her family and friends were unconsciously resisting her efforts to change for the better. Why? Because they didn’t know how to relate to the person she was becoming.
When You Meet Resistance, Seek Out Support
Like Chloe, whenever we reach a new level of awareness or fulfillment, we can expect to face resistance, often from the people closest to us.
If we’re in this situation, what’s the best way to respond?
Once we recognize the fear at the root of people’s resistance, we want to do two things:
1) Depersonalize their reactions. Instead of seeing their behavior as an attack on us, we can acknowledge their fear by saying something like “it’s okay that they’re scared.” We want to respond gently to other people’s fear, just as we want to respond gently to our own.
2) Move toward the people who are supporting us. When we’re making big changes and facing discouragement, it’s important to find people who can offer us love and reassurance.
Why is it so important to seek out support at this stage? Because when people we care about push us away, it triggers our instinctive, survival-related fear of being kicked out of our tribe. Our negative mind kicks in, and we start to think the changes we’re making are going to leave us alone and unloved.
When this happens, we need to look for love and support wherever we can find it. This way, we reconnect with the strength we need to keep growing. A little love and encouragement go a long way toward helping us stay the course.
In the meantime, if we don’t resist the people who are resisting us, most of the time they’ll come to accept the person we’re becoming. By meeting them with compassion and giving them time to adjust, they’re much more likely to support the changes we’re making in the long run.
Remember, every time we take a step forward, we can expect some pushback—internally, externally, or both.
When we learn to recognize that resistance for what it is—and see it as a natural part of our growth process—we develop the resilience to sustain the positive changes we want to make in our lives.
Do you want to learn more about how to sustain the positive changes in your life? In my book, Life Launch, I give you additional guidance on how to identify—and stick with—your goals and create a roadmap to the life you want. Download a sample chapter here.