“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” ~ Joan Didion
Are you living like the world is about to end and everything needs to be finished urgently, on time, in accordance to schedule and with the minimum of fuss.. phew! don't even have time to achieve a personal goal?
Surprisingly, in a fast paced working environment, achieving a goal can feel frustratingly slow, particularly if that goal is about changing something about the self, like trying to lose weight. Here, time might be the prohibition restricting learning and how to change the self, in terms of balancing diet, exercise, making a living and creating a lifestyle. Cultural norms may be another inhibitor where the intention to change might be at odds with our involvement in the established culture of the family or social unit we're closely attached to. When seeking to change an eating habit, addiction to the habit might be the barrier needing to be diminished before the question of the habit can be tackled head on. When thinking about change, one of the most difficult questions to answer can be what exactly is meant by change and how that meaning can be integrated into what exists, so that what does exist can be eased into being different without unbalancing the scales too much and causing unplanned, unprepared or unwanted additional changes. Which of course, is what tends to happen with ideological change that has no foundation of clarity about it and as a consequence no clear sense of direction in terms of accessing the most appropriate resources for the job at hand. For example, goal setting to lose weight when secretly harbouring an intention to not challenge taste buds, reduces goal integrity with an almost tongue in cheek, self-induction into how to slide a change goal into a weight loss battle. Or, maybe the intention to lose weight is true to form, but the will power to forge the intention against unwanted peer pressure or cultural norms, is lacking. If you had the intention, will power, time, family support, peer support, cultural support, and an understanding work place, how long do you think it would take you to lose weight if you wanted to? More to the point, if you knew what your body’s dietary and/or exercise weight loss personable’s were, before committing to any weight loss goals, could this information help to speed up the achievement of weight loss goals? In my mind, the more knowledge I had about my naturopathy and dietetic tolerances, food chain morality, exercise physiology and work load reduction opportunities, the better prepared I could be to achieve my weight loss goal. However in the real world, this kind of knowledge aligns with wisdom and wisdom, as you know, can be a lost ambition when you're too busy to notice. A lack of learning resources in the desired goal area of change can be what feels slow in any process of changes as well as the lack of the desire, or the lack of a sense of time, to learn. Learning is the series of changes that can amount to one moment of difference at the end of the trial of learning endurance, should the learning not be acknowledged. When noticed, each moment of learning becomes a change that does not appear slow, but instantaneous with fresh perspective. A series of minute instantaneous changes of fresh perspectives is what furthers the chain of command, known simply as change, and the more laborious the process seems to be, the less capable those changes of growth are in shaping us into our goal of changing for the better. Could it be that learning how to achieve a desired final product labelled as change is what makes real changes disappear and the desired change appear to us as slow?
If learning is the reason why conscious change appears slow, then why not slow down the learning process to speed up the goal of change? It might well be that it is learning capability that determines how fast or slow a desired goal change takes, not the goal itself: And as learning and teaching specialist Dr. Howard Gardner says, people learn in a variety of ways and with a variety of multiple intelligences. What this essentially means is that for every weight loss goal there is an intelligence attached to it and that intelligence has its own unique way of learning something new. That is if the intelligence wants to learn something new. Sometimes, the task is so difficult, learning about it becomes prohibitive unless there is someone who can support its development, and even then there is no guarantee that the learning has a purpose, should the attention of the learner be on something other than the goal. So, if what is being classified as slow, is not slow at all, but an outcome of a process that contains within it a multitude of synapses, all with their own unique way of changing each other, what could this mean for the incumbent brain owner? Could it mean that the brain responds in accordance to the pressures placed upon it by its owner and if so, that the thinking of the owner has the linguistic power to influence itself with mood, emotion and attention in the direction, and for the benefit of the goal classified as the desired change? If yes, then this may mean that all of the time the change is in each and every moment of the intention of the thinking creature that is us. We are the change we are seeking and the only weight or habit loss that happens without thinking is the one that we all experience after we've died. So how can we speed up a consciously expressed goal of change? By recognising that everything we thinking doers do is part of an intrinsic learning process, and sometimes we can be busy thinking about a multitude of different things, every single day, depending on how busy living we are. Slowing down the process of learning also requires learning about how to manage everything on your plate, especially when there is far too much on your plate to palate. In this way, the first weight loss that needs to be thoughtfully and thoroughly sorted, when seeking to gain personal weight loss, is the unpalatable weight that is on your doing plate. Finding the time and peer support, when needing to learn how to learn about the intricate nature of your goal, could be the real reason why goal changes sometimes end up feeling despairingly slow. Inserting a Kaizen like, reflect and review, writing process into the achievement of any personal change goal, may be the key to slowing down those thoughts of change, effectively speeding up a weight loss program, if weight loss is truly the change that you want to see. Sometimes what we think and say we want can emerge as quite contrary to underlying intentions, particularly during stressful times. In the meantime, recognising that any goal of change needs lots of tiny changes to survive and thrive might help, in the understanding of change as not so much slow, but clicking in tempo with who we truly are at any given moment in time. For change not only exists when achieving a goal, but also when turning away from that goal and the way to go with your unique flow of learning, and not beat yourself up when expectation rears its ugly head, is through acceptance. No one is perfect and all anyone can only do is the best they are able with the resources they have at any given moment in time and this is okay. Feeling pressured or rushed leads to recognised and un-recognised mistakes and this is okay when the pressure is accepted, as one of the resources pushing down on the tiny changes one is learning to make sense of, in order to move a fraction closer to the truth of the expressed goal. No matter what any other person says, or how you may agree or disagree with their communication, what you think is more important to your sense of well being about how you are travelling along that challenging road toward the light that you have named change. While it may be true that your path to change is not one that you journey alone and those who journey with you may not share your vision, desire or intent to achieve whatever goal is set, I wish you well. I wish you fruitful learning and bountiful changes of mind for mood and passion; But most of all I wish you many ingenious changes in your synapses towards success, so you may achieve the reality of your goals, not slowly, but instantaneously, thoughtfully and creatively in time, until you reach the end. © Chris Tyne 24/04/2015
#changes #learning #growing #acceptance #kaisen #multiple intelligences #NLP
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