As many of us have experienced, knowing the path is very different from walking the path. Often we find ourselves feeling like we “should” do things differently but don’t feel ready to make the necessary changes to take that fork in the road onto a new path.
And change doesn’t happen quickly. It takes practice and commitment. It’s a journey, not a sprint, with the goal being progress, not perfection. It’s up and down like a sine wave, not linear. We may be ready for one kind of change but not another, or we find ourselves at various stages of readiness for change at different times in our lives.
In general, we need to get to that point when the pain and difficulty of changing is easier than the pain itself. When that balance switches, we find ourselves more willing to do the hard work to build new habits and let go of those that no longer serve us. We choose our hard… the pain of continuing or the pain of changing.
And change is always hardest in the beginning. Once we practice with consistency, over time, we build automaticity. Our brains don’t have to think about it so much anymore, we are just doing it and our brains are freed to focus on other tasks.
To assess your readiness for change, you can start by getting really clear and honest with yourself about which phase you’re in. Below are the stages of readiness for change identified by James O. Prochaska, PhD, and Carlo DiClemente, PhD (also called the Transtheoretical Model of Change, or TTM). Note that rarely is our progression through these phases straightforward. We regress, slip, and repeat.
Precontemplation: In this stage, we aren’t ready to consider making a change. We may not even have awareness that our choices and habits are causing harm. We don’t intend to take action.
Contemplation: We are feeling that “niggle,” beginning to recognize the benefits of making a change. We may consider taking action sometime in the future, but the cons of changing may still seem greater than the pros, so we remain uncertain and ambivalent.
Preparation (Determination): We are ready! We really understand the benefits and have begun to do our research, explore options and plan action steps.
Action: We begin implementing change… but it still feels new. We experience hurdles and roadblocks, challenges and obstacles. We make adjustments and learn lessons. We build new skills, take in awareness and knowledge, and figure out what tools work best for us. We then practice those with discipline and consistency. This is when we put in the work.
Maintenance: The new habits we’ve built are feeling really automatic and become a natural part of our lives. We have sustained our new healthy routines for more than six months and discontinued the unhealthy behaviors that started us on this journey.
Termination: This is when our brains have truly healed… from a neurological perspective, we have dried out the old neural pathways and reinforced the new ones. We no longer wonder if we can continue our new way of life. We are confident that the changes we’ve made are long-term and we have no desire to return to our old patterns.
Recycling: At any point on the path to change we may find ourselves back at a previous stage. This is a normal part of the change process.
To really achieve success and make these changes, we need support, community, the knowledge, skills and tools, and the ability to notice when we make small slips off the path, so we can step back in before getting too far off.
But it’s possible… we just have to be in the stage of readiness to take on the hard work of Real Forking Change.
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