Why We Don't Change (and What You Can Do About It) | Being Well Podcast

hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forrest Hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back to start today's episode I just wanted to share that this is the podcast's five year anniversary which is just completely crazy to me and I'd like to start really by thanking everybody who's listening right now and everyone who's listened in the past for your support of the podcast over the years speaking personally I have learned so much from these podcasts I've learned so much from Rick from all of the guests and I've learned a lot from doing the work required to bring you conversations that I hope you'll really enjoy and learn from yourself and ones that I can be proud of too and I think I've become in some ways a kind of experiment a little a little personal growth petri dish over here because I've essentially submerged myself in Psychology and self-help and personal growth content over the last five years and as I've done that wow I I really do feel like I've changed in so many important ways that have really benefited me and of course almost anybody probably changes over a given five-year period but I think that the podcast has been a big part of that and at the same time man some things have been really hard to change and they remain really hard to change to this day and there are times where I'm kind of shocked by how I'm still wrestling with what feels like these same old problems and it can feel like I'm just pushing the same old rocks up the same old Hills and hey maybe this is a me problem maybe if somebody else had fitted this seat they would have overcome all of these various challenges but it comes up over and over again in the research as well change is just hard and even when interventions are really effective for people they're typically really effective at helping people improve 20 or 30 percent rather than improving a hundred percent and that's the question that we're going to be focusing on today what makes change so hard and what stops us from getting better and then alongside that what can we do about it and to help us explore that I'm joined today as usual by Dr Rick Hansen Rick is a clinical psychologist a best-selling author and he's also my dad so Dad how are you doing today I am feeling really great and I'm a little bit like forgive the metaphor you know a tiger who's looking at this huge slab of some kind of meat getting ready to dive into because this topic is just so I'm just doing three minutes of setup in the intro I could see you you're just ready to ready to jump on or I should say really you know like a vegetarian who's been on a silent Meditation Retreat in a juice fast for three weeks he sees a big pile of tofu on their table that's how I feel yeah you want to be a little bit more inclusive and Equitable with the framing I appreciate that about you Dad I really appreciate that so before we get into it today because we are going to explore all of that material I just want to give you a quick reminder about Rick's foundations of well-being 2.0 online program if you are interested in doing something that might help you change meaningful ways along the course of the next year you can find it at fwbprogram.com I would really recommend it it runs through the year it's it explores how you can grow 12 key inner strengths and practical ways and this year it's been entirely updated and refreshed and if you use the code being wow25 at checkout you can get an additional 25 off the purchase price and so this is really the best time to join because it's right at the start of the year and hey also Rick has a new book available for pre-order it's titled making great relationships and you can find it through his website or wherever books are sold so to get into the uh the content of our episode today as somebody who's been in as you like to call it the change business for about 45 years now what do you think about all this Dad well it's a huge setup the first thing I think about is a person wants to change their behavior and their inner experience for reasons and if the reasons are not present well there's no basis for even thinking about it why do we want to change so you start with the why what's your why and the why is usually some combination of suffering on the one hand and on the other hand a longing for a greater happiness more love being more effective in certain situations okay so that's right there where we start something is hurting or something is hopeful the combination of the two so in that frame then I'll just name that I've seen four fundamental strategies and the entirety of the psychospiritual toolbox in terms of how to do change so first strategy is reduce I'll call it the negative reduce the pain reduce the suffering reduce the dysfunctional ways of being with other people or toward yourself just reduce what's painful or harmful for yourself and for others second major strategy grow the good grow what is enjoyable or helpful what promotes happiness and Welfare of yourself and with others okay really good third major fundamental strategy is to shift your relationship to your own thoughts and feelings they may still be a rising but you're getting you're having a different relationship to them you're maybe not fighting with them so much you're not getting so angry with yourself about them maybe you have more of a the shock absorber of mindfulness some kind of spaciousness that can observe what's happening without being so hijacked by it you shift your relationship to it and then the fourth fundamental strategy is to step outside of those forms of we could say individual effort and surrender to give over to some some cause even some energy perhaps some Consciousness that is larger than your own so whether it's for example giving yourself over to some great mission in the world uh to help others or give yourself over to what for some people is in a religious context so those are the four major strategies right you kind of reduce what's painful and harmful you grow what's enjoyable and helpful you shift your relationship to what's there without changing it at all and then ultimately fourth you kind of give over to something that really transcends individual psychology in ways that are that are helpful to you and if you just think about all the different change strategies they tend to fit into one of those categories uh sometimes as a combination of two or more yeah totally and just as there are different strategies for approaching change there are different kinds of change that people might be going for so it can be helpful to get a sense of what someone the big options are here for people or what some of the common issues are that people are dealing with and to give a couple of typical examples let's say that I wanted to do one of changing a personality trait like let's say becoming less neurotic neuroticism is one of the Big Five personality traits and it's typically defined as a tendency toward things like anxiety or depression or self-doubt other negative feelings it's something that is often a source for a lot of a lot of suffering for people then second option you might want to change some kind of Behavioral thing like you're trying to build a new habit or maybe you release one that's no longer serving you so much and then the third one which was also your third Point basically dad changing your relationship to a piece of psychological material like an example of this could be processing the remnants of a messy childhood which then might have some kind of a benefit for a person in the present you're not changing what happened but you're changing your relationship to it related to those three categories dad I want to ask you kind of a big question which is how much change do you think is reasonable for a person to expect I think the typically third to half of the causes of our psychology that are baked into our DNA on average which is a really important you know qualifier that can't be changed so temperamentally in my own innate psychology I'm a fairly unaggressive introverted vulnerable to anxiety person I'm not particularly vulnerable to Melancholy or to bellicosity you know getting really angry that's kind of me now that's hardwired if you will the rest of it is really open to influence and there are many many examples both of kind of individual personal stories as well as research evidence that barring some kind of physical constraint including arguably in some cases potentially physical constraints in the brain having to do with terrible traumatic experiences in infancy you know there's a certain possibility that certain kinds of injuries can never be overcome but on the whole really I would have to say that the evidence is that the way I think about it is that with effort with skillfulness and with luck with Grace the combination of those three the sky's the limit in human potential and I would never want to underestimate the power of the human heart inside that context then realistically we have the question of um what's realistically available to people frankly efficiently like if you were to spend yeah nine to ten rule here yeah here's a metric for you if you are willing to spend 10 minutes a day in some kind of sustained effort or Focus what's realistically possible maybe that's a way to ask this question I don't know what how many minutes a day would you think about it it's kind of a reasonable effort level be like asking somebody how you know you want to be pretty fit well how many minutes a day are you willing to allocate to uh yeah yeah or you want to learn how to drive a tractor or play poker totally you do one of two of those really well we'll leave it to people to figure it out I don't drive a tractor very well so there you go that's the the spoiler how much time are you willing to give it and then what's a reasonable expectation based on a reasonable amount of time to try to interpret what you're saying in in my language I guess I think that you're highlighting two really important things here and the first thing that you're highlighting is just the presence of Tendencies for people yeah we have Tendencies and changing our Tendencies I think is really tough um it's really hard for me to change my tendency around um just as you were talking about having uh not really an angry temperament I also just don't really have an angry temperament it's some combination of Nature and nurtured but knowing you and knowing mom I suspect a lot of its nature that I just don't have that tendency and I would need to put a lot of deliberate effort into developing more of a tendency to be let's say combative or aggressive um and I don't know if I would even be able to do that in the course of my life with the application of an enormous amount of time and effort not just on the level of minutes a day but like a real deliberate thrust I just am the way that I am with regards to that um but I can also be aware of my tendency toward anxiety and do a lot inside of my own mind to relate to it differently and that's maybe where those minutes of effort start to come in and you're highlighting the importance of taking deliberate steps on a day-to-day basis um and I think it really depends uh an example that I think is can be really helpful to highlight is the example of substance abuse or alcoholism alcoholics continue to refer to themselves as alcoholics even when they haven't had a drink for 30 years and that's part of actually what supports their recovery process is the understanding that it doesn't matter the tendency is still there so how much effort does somebody with a persistent substance abuse issue have to put in on a day-to-day basis in order to reconcile that issue in a healthy way I think a lot I think a lot of effort that's my guess I haven't wrestled with that myself but talking to people a lot of effort um how much effort do you have to put in to develop the tendency of catching yourself before you say something a little bit unwise to somebody else which is what I've had to do a lot of work on a lot less effort so I think a lot of it just depends on the kind of issue we're wrestling with here I think about what makes the difference for different people and I've come to a stance really having worked with people around change honestly since my very first Year my freshman year at UCLA age 16 to 17 so if you really play it all the way back that's 55 years almost pretty wild you know and just what I've seen again and again and again first of all it's the individual right of a person whether they want to change or not and often they're good reasons why a person just sort of stays inside a way of being and a way of operating and they're just not ready to grow out of if you will or they're just not ready to heal it all kinds of reasons they don't want to give it the effort they don't have the effort to give because they're consumed with other things or maybe they're just not resourced enough really to open the doors to some inner rooms inside the Mansion of their own mind where a lot of their pain and some creepy crawlers are living so I've come to really be kind of a little I guess well very respectful of the autonomy of people around changing at all 0.1 .2 what I have seen is that there's some factors that people can enlist that are relatively wonderful kind of like Tailwinds or updrafts or Well Springs that can carry them along and one is to recognize clearly what is it that you're wanting to change just what is it and and know that you actually want to change it a second Tailwind is to be consistent day to day in your efforts really important third is to extend those efforts over time many kinds of fundamental change are a long-term process of think of it as a deepening spiral as you kind of move through material and then you think you're done with that but something happens and no there's a deeper layer to it and now you're moving more deeply through it so it's a long it's a long process and then the fourth headwind or Wellspring is depth getting at the depth getting at the deeper layers if if you've been engaging something and you're getting some progress with it but you're kind of plateauing around it or it just feels like an uphill slog consider whether there's a deeper level both in your personal psyche in terms of younger and more vulnerable pre-verbal nonverbal very very young material and also consider whether there's an underlying physical basis and of course all of that to finish those four things you can do to help yourself are occurring in a field of relationships and in the real world and if on any given day for example you are making the efforts I've described uh toward you know feeling better about yourself say while at the same time you're targeted routinely systemically perhaps around with bias and prejudice and discrimination or you're working with people or living with people or growing up with people who are just tearing you down every day well that's going to affect your your progress but independent of whatever's happening around you for sure From the Inside Out Clarity of commitment day-to-day consistency sustained effort over time and engaging depth are things that will really help you yeah I think what we're both really orbiting here is that changes is an ongoing process rather than a thing that you just achieve and you stop doing it like part of the reason that I think that I feel like occasionally I've been pushing the same old Boulders up the same old Hills is because I have because I have a tendency or I have a leaning in my own life and there are some things where I really do feel like I've gotten pretty close to fully completing around them um like I mean you know this very well Dad uh my tendency when I was a teenager was to be quite hypocritical and fairly rigid in terms of my perception of what the right way to do something was um and I would often get pretty bent out of shape when I felt like people weren't doing things that right way and it was quite frustrating and painful for me I think I've almost fully completed around that tendency not absolutely not a hundred percent but I think I've gotten to like 85 or 90 percent but even so I still have an awareness that that's my underlying tendency and if I can tap myself in a different direction on a day-to-day basis like you're indicating that's really worthwhile for me that really does improve my life and yeah sometimes it can be a little tiring to feel like I have to do that over and over again but it's also just kind of the reality of the thing a little bit here and in what you're saying a question that's coming up for me because you're talking about this different ways that people can engage a change process making the choice to change something itself being a big choice you've spent a lot of time working with people in your practice as a therapist and then just more broadly through talking to people books courses programs you get a lot of emails and all of that time being around people and working with them a lot of people have really improved and some people probably didn't improve and I'm wondering what you think the biggest difference was between those two groups first there's a lot of difference in terms of what's Happening from the outside so like I said you know effort skill and grace and grace includes uh you know how other people treat you and so uh from the outside I think one of the things that's just extraordinarily effective and helpful is to be with someone and to experience that you're with someone who recognizes the good in you just that it's incredible and so what a beautiful thing that we can offer to others and what an important thing to recognize when it's available to us just happening and even maybe with certain key people to be willing to stick our neck out and to ask for it um because if there is good inside you it can be really kind of odd if somebody that you're with in a significant relationship doesn't seem to appreciate it or recognize it in you so that's kind of from the outside end part from the inside out definitely there's a kind of mystery to it but to be blunt one of the things I've I've kind of seen is that um there are obstructions to people engaging one of the four headwinds or Tailwinds really Wellsprings that I was talking about such as consistency or depth or doing it over time or making a commitment and the two things that really stand out one is what in Psychology is called secondary gain the ways in wedge a maladaptive way of being has rewards baked into it of various kinds including the reward of avoiding the pain of stepping outside the bars of your invisible cage and thereby risking the dreaded experience so their payoffs and one of the things that I've found is an incredibly useful exercise that I learned way back in the 70s is when you're looking at something start out that you that you're considering to change start out with the payoffs what are the benefits to you what are all the functions that this way of being serves now rather than you know lambasting yourself for it or telling yourself oh you should X Y or Z just start with what are you getting out of it and that can be a really powerful inquiry yeah just to clarify that you're you're saying start with what you're getting from the behavior that you're trying to change like what the benefits are to you from some kind of quote unquote seemingly problematic Behavior yeah for example me recently I'm realizing that I have a tendency when I get under pressure and I'm trying to get something important done I speed up and when I see that other people are not being effective in accomplishing what there is to accomplish in a kind of irritable exasperated way I can be somewhat sharp in the way I talk and I apologize for the ways that you and your sister were on the receiving end of that so I'm into that sometimes when you were young especially when I was under a lot of pressure with grad school making a living and just getting stuff done um but I'm not defending it and that's an important thing you're not I'm not defending it I'm understanding it so lately I've been really tackling that so let's just use that as an example um what's the payoff and I say well I I feel energized I get the rewards of Feeling Righteous maybe even a little Superior and it is an effective way to operate on the short term although there often are significant long-term costs including relational costs yeah and you can wound and and hurt the people you you care about including your own children for example so I would do a Fearless in searching inventory borrowing that phrase from Alcoholics Anonymous and name the payoffs in a clear fearless and searching way and then also name the costs and then in a frame of complete autonomy look at the benefits look at the cost and decide what do you want to do about it and that decision is an existential sacred kind of decision and you may need to go back and remake that decision repeatedly but often what happens is when you make that decision you now if you imagine a pitched roof two sides the roof is this particular tendency you have which side of the roof are you on one side of the roof as soon as you get on in a millimeter on that side you're now reinforcing perpetuating strengthening that way of being on the other hand if you shift to the other side of the roof including in this fundamental initial commitment kind of sense it's downhill from there you just need to keep going you need you need to keep sliding you need to keep rolling you can help yourself along the way but that's a fundamental Turning Point so that's one thing I've seen which side of that roof are you on deep deep down deep in your heart of hearts where you make a Soulful existential Choice it reminds me of a little moment in a conversation that we had with Gabor before we talked with him for our interview together where you were talking with him about things going on in your life and how you felt very busy in a lot of different ways and he was sort of empathizing he was right around his book launch it was a big moment I'm sure he was incredibly busy and doing a million interviews but he took a little extra time with us which was very nice of him yeah and uh he asked you a question that's actually really stuck with me and it was well are you called or are you driven and I thought it was a like it was a really great you know with his he's such an incisive guy and it was really just like a moment of incisiveness from him um and you were like wow well I feel extremely cold and also these days I'm I'm feeling a little driven um and maybe there are some of the drivenness aspects of it that are causing me to feel more you know worn down this by this in various kinds of ways but I think that we can apply that idea to change in general are you are you called or are you driven and it's a subtle distinction but I think it's a really powerful one for people uh speaking of myself personally when we talk sometimes on the podcast about our uh our problematic Tendencies or the bits of our personality that we're still kind of wrestling with or whatever sometimes you can hear a almost um like joking tone in our voices and it's not because we're like laughing at it or laughing at ourselves or even like trying to make light of it it's because I think that sometimes over time when you really work with a A Part of Yourself you sort of lighten up about it and you can move to this more almost affectionate place with it and I don't know if that's quite the right word but it's the one that's coming to me right now like this sort of affection for a part of myself that has absolutely caused some suffering in my life but it used to be that I would really beat myself up about it I would be driven to change it you know I would push it down or smack myself around about it I mean I spent frankly the better part of a decade going to bed almost every single night and beating myself up for feeling like I hadn't done enough that day you know that was like 10 years probably from 20s from 16 ish to like 26-ish I would say um if not even a little longer than that and that was my process and it just never got better and then something happened and I'm not quite sure what that something was and I was able to change my orientation toward it being feeling like I was more called toward changing this thing and I think that part of that was that fearless and searching inventory that you're talking about Dad where I just had a real moment of reflection with myself where I went wow do I want to keep doing this for the rest of my life and if I'm planning on changing it ever why not change it now so I think of the driven as sort of should saturated yeah should beating yourself up you're pushing it up the hill you know all of that stuff yeah where it's called you're on the other side of the pitched roof and you're you're drawn in a certain direction and I find that kind of Underneath It All in effect we're talking about uh people who want to want something I want to want to stay sober I want to want to work in a diligent daily way do you actually want it if you want to want that yeah totally and I just think we always have to start with the truth why you know and in other words and and own it that's an interesting thing too as a kind of an effective you call it might call it a trick but it's very effective where almost like an inner Aikido or Jiu Jitsu you choose to not want it let's say so I choose to keep smoking cigarettes today I choose to uh just dump my temper on my kids let's say or I you see what I'm saying and it's paradoxical because if you choose I choose to keep biting my nails whatever it might be by choosing what the quote-unquote problematic Behavior or thought pattern might be you then are beginning to exercise responsibility for it you're taking responsibility for it and you're beginning to exercise power over it dominion over it because you're choosing it right yeah no I thought that was a huge or orientation change for me actually I think you're highlighting something that was really important in the process yeah you start by disowning like yeah I choose to be irritable and as soon as you start talking about it I choose to be a grouch when I get home from work whoa you know suddenly you know suddenly it opens up a space in which you could choose something different but really fundamentally um I've worked with lots and lots of people who come in and they're describing their suffering they're describing the costs of various things and what we get to fairly quickly particularly if you know my suggestions are just not taken up at all or they're just not really willing to do anything we need to surface the fact that the truth is they haven't yet chosen to change um they want to want to change but actually they don't want to change or they haven't yet wanted to change and that's where you have to tell the truth so that's a really really important thing people can resist facing that because then they feel like oh it's my fault well it's not your fault but it's your responsibility have you taken responsibility for changing and for them that can often get sucked into feeling criticized by their therapist let's say or their friends so as a therapist type to be you know delicate and appropriate about that but at the end of the day um I I feel I have a higher duty to what my client has said they want in their life than to their comfort in the moment in some ways I can't make them so uncomfortable that they quit right but it's a fine art in which you balance your duty to uh what this person you can tell is longing to become or is your duty to the 80 percent of them that's clamping on the brakes and clutching to the bars of their cage and refusing to move forward yeah I'd like to spend a little bit of time here on that 80 percent like the parts of us that don't want to change because I think it's such an interesting part of this whole thing we have this maybe kind of top down part of us at least I do it's more top down that's very clear about wanting to want to change you know but then there's this other murky part that just seems to resist it in some kind of a way even when we even when we know intellectually at least that there are are aspects of that change that would be really good for us and we've talked about this a lot on the podcast in the past um but I don't know if it's possible for you to do kind of a Brisk overview here of what those parts are or what they're doing or why we are that way just wherever you want to kind of take that question oh yeah well they're all there for a good reason that is right our friend and podcast guest Dr Richard Schwartz talks about no bad parts they're all there for a reason they're all trying to help you know I've done lots of different forms of Parts work uh in different kind of frames but the essence of it is you're you're listening to a part and at bottom they all are trying to promote the survival of the individual maybe in misguided ways ways that are over the top ways that have a lot of collateral damage but they're all there to help you so that's a really important thing and there are a number of psychological methods that do get to the depth factor of the four factors I was describing of change you know the four the four updrafts a depth being the last one I said um going into the depth of these sub personalities these parts and engaging with them in a respectful way and listening to them is a can really shift the interior ecosystem of the Mind altogether the Ecology of mind so that's really really really really really useful stuff and sometimes what happens is that you you listen to a part and it's by these parts I'm not just talking about parts that are for example just you know a terrified inner child or a part that will not give up the grievance about another person even though you know it's really time to move on there are other parts when you start opening up to yourself that can tell you can it can give you a good reason for not making this change right now or can help you understand that this thing that you think is problematic is just you know like an overly Amplified beautiful part of yourself like I'll use myself as an example I you know I grew up very shy and awkward and um I felt weak and small because I was a year and a half or more younger than other kids so to discover that I have this capability of a kind of intense pointed effort it's a wonderful thing you want a guy like me on your team but it's just too much sometimes you know so to to reclaim it as okay and in a way that really touches my own sense of worth as a kind of strength or potency or don't mess with Rick when he's you know protecting his family or pursuing an important cause or getting down off the mountain before we get killed um you know I'm glad I have that yeah right and it's in the gladness of it that it opens it up to just a little bit of that goes a long way at an appropriate moment I think the framing of this is always so such an important part of it where whether it's the parts of our nature or the aspects of ourself that we're we're in conflict with at a given moment which is kind of part of what you're describing here um you know just thinking about my own nature like I can we can relate to those those tendencies that we have particularly the ones that are kind of hard to change through two lenses right we can either think of them as being we're a prisoner to this thing you know we're trapped where we can feel in some ways almost freed by it this is my tendency it is what it is you know and then um it doesn't have to be our fault so much uh because I think that that Fault part of it is a big limitation for people um I've talked about this a little bit on the podcast in the past but I just really think that one of the things that often gets in the way of people changing is feeling like if I change now it's an admission of guilt yeah for all of the times that I did the thing in the past but it's also an admission of guilt for all of the times that I didn't change in the past yeah so it's it's both sides of it right um and that can be really painful for people it was really I mean it's been really painful for me um at times where you know you look back at it and you have this reflection that if you're not careful can really be suffused with a lot of Shame around like oh my God I can't believe that I did that back then that's why that approach of starting with the benefits was really useful and you can the benefits include various forms of payoffs that frankly can feel not in not that good when you really name them all right yeah but totally but the benefits also include the gifts so for example if I could you know put you into the petri dish for a moment here yeah I agree with that okay so that's what we do here yeah so let's just take the the thing you talked about which I'll I'll just call it work avoidance or we could also call it um uh pleasure seeking you know relaxed comfortable effort avoidance yeah pretty common one okay great so I would say well first when you look back or even if you see that capability or tendency in yourself what are the gifts in that way of being wow it's actually hard for me to answer um this is good yeah because I guess to me it feels it feels like there are there are so few of well I try to put my positivity hat on over here yeah well I would say that I I do have a pleasure seeking sensibility and that has absolutely led to a lot of really enjoyable experiences in my life yeah um and maybe even narrowing in specifically on some aspects of the effort avoidance part of it I think that maybe it led to me getting really good at the 90 10 rule in some ways and becoming very capable about being quite efficient around where I chose to uh to spend my effort and that had some consequences for me for sure uh but also created a lot of space for um a lot of enjoyable experiences and then of course you get on the rabbit hole a lair and you go to like I'm not sure if I really took advantage of the opportunity for all of those things uh but that's kind of a different question right yeah or another one actually that that kind of quality of you know focusing on what's enjoyable over what's functional let's say or focusing on near-term rewards versus long-term Awards uh another gift in that I think is that it can create a kind of buffer between the inner Chooser as it were and demands from society external demands from high school teachers parents or you know demands you know role cultural role models models I still remember you telling me one time dad you know I've never wanted to be a fireman or a doctor lawyer for whatever it all is and in fact in hunter-gatherer bands nobody had a job per se and our modern insistence on knowing what do you want to be when you grow up when you're like five 15 years old let alone five years old which is crazy well so your way of being created the space of a kind of inner Freedom that would enable you to actually choose what's really worth it to you based on what you care about rather than just submitting to the task-oriented expectations of society's institutions I think that's really fair yeah and that's a great uh a great finessing of the whole thing there dad well is it true yeah and if something happens like I don't know you might even be experiencing it a kind of weird softening and a sweetness and even almost like a lovingness toward ourselves starts to waft through the inner atmosphere of the mind when we make this shift into looking at what are the benefits what are the including what are the gifts really truly the gifts of some way of being and it then opens up to the following question when you've stared at the benefits and the costs okay netting all this out is there a better way is there a Better Way which might simply be a one percent shift of nuance or time spent each day is there a better way to gain these wholesome benefits you know benefits really worth pursuing without paying the costs so much and then you're down the road you're on the you're on I'll call it the right side of the pitch of the roof of the house you know where you're moving into positive healing and development and evolution and Awakening I I think there's something um that's been a subtext to this whole conversation that's really interesting we have spent almost no time here talking about tactics really interesting we've spent the entire time talking about strategy if you want to kind of break it down that way and I think that that that points to something really important here which is that there are a million tactics out there and different tactics can work for different people it's really hard for us to say what kind of tactics will work for you because we're all individuals and we have our own leanings you know maybe you're an ifs person maybe you're a DBT person maybe you're something else person I don't know um but these broad stroke feelings and strategies and like orientations do feel to me would often really distinguish us because what you see in in the research at least over and over is that a lot of tactics are like pretty effective yeah um there's some research that suggests that CBT is kind of like the gold standard therapy particularly for certain kinds of problems on average in other words some people it's not but on average yes it is okay go on yeah yeah so um but that points to you exactly what we're saying here which is that for some people it's not yeah and if you line up 10 different approaches to therapy and do a study looking at all of them the differences between them are pretty Minor by and large they all kind of work and they all work about the same um and that really indicates that it's not the specific tactic that makes a difference right something else I think you're getting at and very astutely observing a very important thing which is that there are 10 000 available tools throughout the domain of modern psychology then if you broaden it out into the humanities so you broaden it down into the first people First Nations Traditions you broaden it down into the contemplative Traditions ten thousand tools all the tools are there all the tactics are there and at the end of the day it's not for lack of the proper tools that we're not building the the house let's say it's because there are issues around strategy and and the bottom line that I've seen that I really want to say from my heart including for any and everyone listening here is that if people are are in fact willing to engage one or more of these four Tailwinds I've named these four Wellsprings of change which is choice consistency day-to-day sustained over time and depth if you're willing to engage one or more of those four fundamental strategies there's no shortage of tools and you truly can heal you really can transform the most fundamental things I come back to probably my favorite quote in Psychology at least I've shared it on the podcast in the past it comes from Carl Rogers and the quote is the Curious Paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am then I change and that relates back to this idea of tendencies that we started the conversation with I think it's really okay to accept 60 change around an issue or to accept 70 change around an issue or man sometimes 30 change is big change you know sometimes that really moves something from being just a huge point of friction in your life to being okay maybe it's not perfect but it's okay and going from this is ruining my life to this is an inconvenience is huge change and sometimes I think that it's it's easy for us to look at um the city on the hill so to speak and really aspire to it and lose sight of all the distance that we've covered in our lives already I want to say something for us that you're welcome to edit out of the podcast okay which is I think many many people aim too small hmm yeah and they they in Durham is too short you know you know they they don't imagine the kind of inner freedom and healing that actually they could have for me the point of my bloodness is to really communicate a sense of possibility and most fundamentally I just want to really make the communication as a licensed psychologist and a guy who's deeply knowledgeable about the change process that you really can't be more healed be happier be more competent with your own thoughts and feelings and more capable in the world around you you really can't develop that five to ten minutes a day day after day after day yeah and it might be annoying to hear it because then you're faced with oh gee I'm sitting on the couch and I'm just not doing it today okay I got it but what can you do tomorrow and that can set you on the right way and I think the fundamental tactic of all tactics is to make a little easy change that starts you on the road to big change over time look for that easy little thing that's catalytic which often starts with a with so a little bit of inner practice like spending a minute calming and kind of quieting yourself and listening to the innermost longings of your own heart or your own way of talking about that maybe less woo-woo somehow like that alone if you just start your day like that will shift your day or pick some one simple easy behavioral change you're going to make which is you're going to brush your teeth twice a day instead of just once let's say or you are going to stop interrupting other people when they're talking and then that change can take you into all kinds of stuff but whatever it is the point is you really can't change for the better I've seen it I've lived it I've seen it in New Forest um you know I've seen it in so many other people wow why why settle why not go for it at the level of five to ten minutes a day well I think that is a great place to end today's conversation on and I I love this one I think it's one of the one of the best ones we've done honestly um in terms of the the summary of of so much stuff and talking about something that I think is just really important if you're gonna do if you're gonna be in this mental healthy personal growthy self-helpie world this is really one of the fundamental questions and it's one that I wish more more content creators spent more time talking about right instead of offering get one more shiny tactic exactly yeah instead of focusing again on just like this different tactic today today's tactic you know like this is I think the stuff that really makes a big difference for people so I had a great time talking today with Rick about what stops us from getting better and how we can change in the ways that are really meaningful to us I really enjoyed today's conversation with Rick which focused on how we can change in meaningful ways and particularly the things that tend to get in the way of that change and I began by just asking Rick for his General perspective on what it is that he believes prevents people from really changing in the ways that they want to and we can break this up into different categories first of all we have our often genetically inherited Tendencies and those are really hard to change that is the clay that we are are dealing with but what we can really shift is our relationship to those Tendencies to use myself as an example I'm not a very angry person by temperament it's just not my temperament in much the same way I am sometimes more of an anxious person by temperament that's my orientation it would take an enormous amount of work for me to go from being a little bit more sad anxious to being a little bit more angry just in terms of my nature it's possible that I could but I kind of doubt that I could that just feels like an aspect of who I am but what I can really shift is my relationship to those Tendencies I can go through a lot of deliberate effort focused on working with some of my more anxious Tendencies on the one hand and then maybe getting a bit better at asserting myself with other people on the other and this became a bit of a theme throughout our conversation the reality is that complete transformation of an issue is just uncommon it's very rare for people to go from something being a enormous issue inside of their lives to being fully resolved where they just never have to think about it again and Rick in his very positive and uplifting way did emphasize throughout the conversation that real change is absolutely possible for people and some people if anything play a little too small in terms of the change that they that they could dream of if they just dreamed a little bit bigger that they could aspire to so much more inside of their lives but that aspiration is driven by ongoing processes and changes a process it is rarely a finalized result even in the things that I feel like I've really gotten a lot of completion around I'm still working with them they still show up sometimes um and there are even times where I feel like I've backslid a little bit in terms of my relationship with them and it's easy for me to get down on myself in the moment about that backsliding but then I can just return to the reality that you know what you gotta do the dishes every day whatever the dishes are for you in your life whatever your psychological dishes are you can put them off for maybe a couple of days but then the sink gets full it starts overflowing it gets really inconvenient and man you gotta do the dishes and maybe you don't want to but it's just part of life we talked about a lot of really interesting at least to me material during this conversation and one of the things that Rick highlighted that I think is just so interesting is this idea of secondary gains this is an idea from psychology which is that the behaviors that we might think of as being problematic behaviors for us we're often getting something from and it can be really helpful to identify what we are getting from the behavior that we're seeking to change because it supports Us in seeing that behavior more clearly which can then you know support us in changing it more effectively and so we worked with an example of my tendency to avoid focused effort for a big chunk of my life that still shows up for me a little bit these days it's not that I'm lazy exactly it's just that I'm not somebody who gets out of bed in the morning and feels like I'm just fired out of a cannon and into the day I need to apply a lot of deliberate pop-down effort in order to get myself to do the stuff that's really in my best interest and Rick kind of pulled that out and looked at it and went huh well Forest what are you getting out of this and so we did an exploration of what the secondary gains of that might be for me and the things that had come about in my life that were maybe kind of positive as a result of that tendency and then we could move into a relationship with it after we have seen it fully where a person can make a deliberate choice they can say do I choose to continue this Behavior or not because a lot of the time with the things that we're trying to change we come into a relationship with them where they're just this thing that happens to us almost where we're kind of victimized by our own tendencies in a way and the reality is that sometimes we are kind of a victim we do not get to pick our Tendencies we do not get to choose what happens to us early in life that can set the stage for so much else that happens something that Rick emphasized several times throughout the conversation is the role of external factors or external supports or the lack of external supports and our ability to change so it is really important to take all of this into consideration and at the same time what we have the most influence over is what we do and if it's possible for you to come into a relationship with some Behavior that's you know cast a long Shadow over your life something that is just not serving you anymore these days where you can look at it and go I am choosing this and it's up to me to choose something different or not because another thing that we talked about in the conversation was how we often want to want something but we don't actually really want it or maybe there's a big chunk of us that doesn't actually really want it but the top down Parts want to want it so we can get into this internal tumult where we go I know that this would be so much better for me and I I feel like I want it why can't I just do it and the answer often is because we want to want it and there's some part of us that's holding us back and that's where the depth piece of this comes in and that was also something that Rick emphasized how it can be really powerful for people to do what they can and this is often cyclical where we peel back one layer and then we peel back another layer and then we peel back the layer that Lies Beneath that to go huh can I drill down here can I get to the bottom of this inside of myself what lies underneath this Behavior or this desire or this tendency that I have it's the real drive that's pushing me in this direction those are all really useful questions they've been really really powerful in my own life like extremely useful for me and I would really recommend them if you're trying to make a big change and you're struggling to do so I love this conversation uh it's one of my favorite ones that we've done on the podcast recently I hope you did as well if you've been enjoying the show we'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to subscribe to it wherever you're listening to it now on maybe leave a rating and a positive review if that's something that you can do on the platform that you use and hey you can always tell a friend about it it's probably the best way that we have to reach new people if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon that's patreon.com beingwell podcast and I also want to give you a quick reminder about Rick's new and improved foundations of well-being online program you can find that at fwbprogram.com it's in my opinion simply the single most thorough actually useful actually researched based online program that you can find in this territory and it explores 12 key inner strengths over the course of the Year Rick talks in detail about how to build all of these practically there are a ton of supplementary materials it's just really thoughtful stuff and now is the best time to join because it's a year-long program and here we are at the start of the year and if you want to do that again it's fwbprogram.com and you can use the code beingwell 25 that's the name of the show and then 2-5 at checkout for an additional 25 off the purchase price and as we get to the end here thanks for joining us for another year it's so crazy to me that I've been doing this for five years and it's become my job such a huge part of my life and I just feel so grateful like really truly um that we have such an amazing group of people who listen to the show and who really care about these topics and who support us in ways large and small and it's totally transformed my life and so again thank you thank you for listening and we'll talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 15,474

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, Why We Don't Get Better, Why We Don't Get Better (and What You Can Do About It), get better, improve, why is change hard, why change is hard, change, change myself, 2023 resolutions, new years resolutions, change for good, I want to get better, how can i get better, bpd, borderline personality

Id: YimcjlmDVH4

Length: 57min 7sec (3427 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 02 2023