At least three possibilities
First, sorry for the long blog silence: I was a trainer at a week-long conference, then on vacation. At the conference—which was about organizational development—we talked a lot about three possible reasons why change doesn’t happen in organizations: dissatisfaction isn’t high enough, the people don’t have a strong enough vision, or there isn’t enough awareness of the first steps they need to make for change to happen.
Naturally, I thought about this in my work with clients (and, as it happens, in my own personal goal-setting). Here’s how you can apply it to yourself and your relationship:
1. Is change not happening because you’re not dissatisfied enough? As much as you might be upset about the state of your relationship, your health, or your career, you might also feel comfortable with the overall state of things, and therefore unwilling to change. An obvious example of this is the frustration people suffer around weight loss: it’s hard to not eat the French fries because as much as you want to look and feel better, you’re not so dissatisfied with how you look and feel that you’re willing to push the plate away from you.
2. Do you lack a strong vision of the future you want? I got some good advice when I started my private practice a few years ago: I was told to envision my ideal client, the person (or persons) with whom I most want to work. I’m not everyone’s therapist, and not everyone is my client, so to design my business successfully, I had to clarify my vision.
3. Are you having trouble identifying first steps for change? Maybe you’re frustrated in your career, but you’re stuck because you’ve never been in this particular situation before, and you can’t figure out what to do today and tomorrow to change it. You feel the dull drag of your daily tasks, or the pressure of a difficult boss, and you sit at your desk, thinking, “Now what?”
If any of these three situations is a problem for you, then it’s going to be hard to overcome your natural (and even healthy) resistance to change. In counseling, I’ve worked with clients on all three problems, depending on the situation. (Often enough, the typical person—myself included—is working on at least two of them.) Which one is bogging you down?
And if you want some background on the organizational-development theory behind all this, here it is!
