This Is Why You Can't Change
The more effort we put into trying to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring
I've spent well over a hundred thousand dollars trying to change myself.
I’ve lived with shamans in the jungle drinking cup after cup of ayahuasca, I've flown all over the world attending personal development retreats, spent hundreds of hours in deep meditation, invested thousands of dollars in online courses, and hired numerous coaches, therapists, and mentors, all with the intention of becoming someone I could actually be proud of.
After ten years of trying really hard, I realized it was an utterly pointless pursuit.
The more effort we put into trying to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring.
True transformation doesn't happen by trying to be better.
It doesn't happen by reading a bunch of books, listening to self-help influencers, and investing in online courses.
If you are really committed to change, you have to do the exact opposite of what 99% of people advise.
You need to take a few simple principles and apply consistently, day in and day out, year after year.
These are principles are not novel - wise sages have been speaking teaching about them for thousands of years.
We’re going to dive into these principles today.
If applied with courage, humility, and levity, they have the potential to transform your life immediately - without all the suffering that most people believe is required to grow.
Let’s dive in…
1) Learn How To Accept Reality Exactly As It Is
Every week, I talk to dozens of men in my community and coaching containers who are trying so hard to change themselves.
“If only I had a better work ethic, were more attractive, felt less anxious, or hit the gym more, then I would get all the money, love, respect, and status I desire.”
These men are living in a fantasy.
They're so enamored by who they could potentially be, they are completely blind to who they actually are.
They’re resisting reality.
Most people spend the majority of their time and energy resisting who they are.
You resist the part of yourself that is lazy.
You resist the part of yourself that is anxious.
Your resist the part of yourself that feels awkward around women.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to change anything in your life that you are actively resisting.
Trying to change yourself by ignoring who you really are, or pretending you’re not that way, only turns up the volume on the unwanted parts of yourself.
For example, if you're naturally shy and you try to force yourself to be outgoing without accepting your shyness, you'll likely end up feeling even more awkward and shy in social situations.
This is why 99% of self-improvement doesn't work.
Some guy on the internet, with his own personality, quirks, experiences, and history, tries to apply his framework to teach everyone how to change themselves.
What this creates is a bunch of delusional people running around pretending to be someone else, completely disassociated from who they actually are.
The first step in changing anything in your life is to fully accept reality as it is.
If you’re shy, you’re shy.
If you’re anxious, you’re anxious.
You don't try to pretend that you’re not anxious and operate on top of your anxiety with some persona we picked up online.
Only after you fully accept reality do you have a chance at changing anything.
Let me tell you a story: When I was 17 years old, I developed severe anxiety as a result of abusing my body with party drugs and alcohol.
My anxiety was so bad I had a hard time leaving my house without going into a full-blown panic attack.
My palms and armpits were constantly sweaty, I would check my pulse all the time because I was afraid my heart was going to stop, and I felt completely disassociated the majority of the day.
When I resisted that I had this severe, debilitating anxiety, do you know what happened?
The anxiety got louder.
The more I resisted my anxiety, the more intense it got.
Instead of accepting that I was anxious, I numbed it with more alcohol, weed, and drugs - the same things that created it in the first place.
I tried to do everything I could to shift the world around me so I could feel secure. As long as I could distract myself long enough, I could make it through the day.
My whole life revolved around strategizing how not to feel anxious.
Controlling my anxiety dictated every choice I made.
It controlled the way I ate. It controlled the way I exercised. It controlled the clothing I wore and who I spent my time around.
Everything I did was controlled by my resistance to being with the discomfort of my anxiety.
After many years of struggling with anxiety, I went on my first 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat.
If you're not familiar with Vipassana - imagine going to meditative prison.
Waking up at 4 AM every day, being told exactly what to do and when to do it, and spending 10-12 hours a day in deep meditation.
The word Vipassana roughly translates into insight.
The whole point of the practice is to observe reality as it is, without judging or trying to change the experience.
It is the ultimate practice of not trying to change yourself - all you do is observe everything happening within your body objectively.
I had to sit and observe my anxiety for 10-12 hours a day without reacting.
At first, it felt impossible.
I wanted to fidget, open my eyes, scream out loud, and run out of the room.
I could barely make it through a meditation session without nearly melting down.
But, something deeper in me knew it was exactly what I needed.
So, I stayed with the practice.
By the fifth day, something began to shift internally.
The anxiety I had felt for years began to loosen its grip on me.
All of the physical sensations - sweating, nervous tics, racing heart - stopped triggering me into a downward spiral.
It was like I finally hit the brakes on a loop I was stuck in for years.
Simply by sitting and observing without judgment, "my heart is racing." or, "my palms are sweaty." I was no longer struggling to change, ignore, or disassociate from whatever was actually happening.
For the first time, I just accepted myself.
By the end of the retreat, it felt like thousands of pounds had been lifted off of my shoulders.
It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.
I walked away from Vipassana with two major insights:
The only way to deal with any problem is to accept it and face it head-on.
99% of our suffering is not because of what is happening, but because of the story we make about what is happening.
This second insight is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to change, and leads us to the next principle…
2) Learn How To Distinguish Content From Context
There are two aspects of how you perceive life: The content and the context.
The content is what is actually happening.
The context is the set of beliefs you hold in relation to the content.
Sweaty armpits, a racing mind, and an elevated heart rate were the content of my anxiety.
The context is the meaning I made when I felt these sensations.
I have a neurochemical imbalance. I'm dying. I'm a weak man. People won't like me.
Most people are stuck trying to control the content of their life.
You want more of this, and less of that.
You misinterpret someone's feedback, so you react with defensiveness.
You like how alcohol opens you up, so you drink more often.
You’re sick of your inner critic, so you recite positive affirmations every morning.
None of these strategies ever lead to lasting change, because you’re only addressing surface-level issues.
It's like having a chronic oozing infection and putting a bandage on it - you will never heal the underlying infection by covering it with a bandage.
Change only happens when you let go content and focus on the context.
If you're always wearing rose-colored glasses, it doesn't matter what color the world actually is - you only see red.
The only way to have a different experience is by removing the glasses.
Most people don't even know they’re wearing these glasses.
You think you are responding to life from a logical place, based on facts.
You don’t realize your entire life is filtered through your personal history.
The family, religion, institutions, culture, and laws you grew up around create your context and influence all your decision making.
For example, less than 1% of people in India get divorced.
Contrast that with the US divorce rate of 44%.
The act of divorce is the same everywhere in the world - two married people becoming unmarried.
The context, however, is wildly different.
In India, getting divorced potentially ruins your life. You are ostracized from your community and it comes with a massive social stigma.
In the US, it's not unusual to be married 2-3 times throughout your life.
Context not only dictates how you relate to the world, but also how you relate to yourself.
If you’re feeling anxious, insecure, or shy and were taught that these emotions are unacceptable, you will deem these emotions as wrong and do everything you can to avoid or change them.
Have you ever tried to will yourself into feeling differently?
It doesn’t work.
Once you become aware of your contexts (this is a lifelong process), you begin to understand that life’s content is meaningless.
There is no such thing as a right or wrong emotion.
They’re only become right, wrong, good, or bad in relation to your context.
If you don’t address this reality, it can have devastating consequences in your life.
You see this all the time.
A young boy is punished expressing anger.
He internalizes that anger is wrong and vows to never express it.
Since he can’t be with his own anger, he can’t be with anyone else’s, either.
When other people express anger, he is quick to shut them down.
He spends his whole life appearing nice, calm, and never overreacting.
But inside, this man is seething with rage.
By going to war with his anger, he only amplifies its hold on his consciousness.
This rage slowly builds until one day he shoots up a school, or beats his wife, or gets into a road rage incident.
Or maybe points that rage at himself and becomes an addict, self-abuser, or suicidal.
All the while, everyone around him remarks on how he was such a nice guy and they never believed he was capable of those things.
A quick way to discover the contexts you are operating from is by identifying where you have a strong good/bad, either/or, all/nothing belief around something in your life.
If you hate how lazy you can be, and believe you’re only worthy if your industrious, that is a pretty powerful context to work with.
Still, this can be extremely hard to identify - which is why having a coach, mentor, or belonging to a men's group is so powerful.
You need to be receiving regular reflection from people you trust, because most people can easily see when we’re stuck in a rigid belief system.
Once you’re able to identify a context, you can begin to make choices beyond the binary options you often find yourself trapped in.
This is how you access authentic power beyond your conditioning, and when true change begins.
But only focusing on the things that need to shift is not enough, you also need to create a compelling vision of who you’re becoming.
3) Learn How To Focus On What You Want, Not What You Don't Want
If you’ve ever driven a motorcycle, you know that the bike will go wherever you are looking.
If you try to avoid a ditch by staring at it, you will 100% end up in that ditch.
Our life is no different - by focusing on what we don’t want, we will inevitably end up with more of it.
The first question I ask the men I coach is "What do you want?"
Nearly all of them go off on a long tangent about what they don't want - all the things in their life that aren't working and every negative aspect of themselves that needs to change.
They criticize their flaws, obsess over their shortcomings, and dwell on the mistakes they've made in the past.
Focusing on what you don't want will never lead you to what you do want.
It will only keep you really close to what you don’t want.
Trying to change yourself with negative self-judgment only reinforces these aspects of yourself.
Without a clear vision of the life you want live and the person you want to be, you have nothing to move toward.
You will always wrestling with running away from something you don’t want, rather than towards something you do.
A vision doesn't make the negative self-talk go away (we can never get rid of our inner critic - that would be another instance of denying reality), but it does give you something to work towards that is more compelling than all the bullshit in your head.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is a fact of life.
You can either let the pain will push you or let the vision pull you.
A powerful vision gives meaning to the suffering, pain, and heartache that you are destined to experience.
Recently, I started training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu two to three times a week.
I'm new enough that I basically get beat up for 60-90 minutes every single class.
Even though I have lost hundreds of times in a row for months, I have not once wavered in my commitment or regretted going to a class.
The reason I don't care about losing over and over again is because I am committed to a bigger vision - entering a competition before my 35th birthday (which is coming up in 3 months.)
If I was focused on making sure I didn't lose, I would just spazz out in every single roll.
I would learn nothing and my technique would be trash.
It's because I'm committed to something bigger that I have absolutely no ego around getting submitted hundreds of times.
Each failure is a learning experience that forces me to learn escapes, reversals, and attacks from every position
Men that come to the gym solely focused on not losing either quit, or their progress plateaus because they’re so committed to not losing, they have no capacity to learn how to win.
You can’t focus on everything you dislike about yourself and expect to be happy, healthy, and inspired.
Life gives us more of whatever we focus on, positive or negative.
If you know you're socially awkward and don't want to be that way anymore, you only need to tell yourself that once.
Acknowledging it more than once is self-punishment and completely pointless.
Knowing how not to act will never teach you how to act.
You need to channel your energy into building and nurturing the qualities and situations you desire.
Get crystal clear on the vision of the type of person you want to be. Spend all your energy focusing on what you want to become, rather than what you want to leave behind.
The more specific the vision of who you want to be is, the easier it will be to begin to embody those qualities.
Final Thoughts
Change does not have to be a grind born of self-loathing.
There has never been a child born with inherent flaws that needed to be changed.
You came into this world a innocent little cherub.
Then you picked up a bunch of bullshit throughout your life, decided to believe it, and now it runs your life.
These principles will not fix you. They are simply tactics to reduce the friction.
You are changing whether you like it or not.
Trust that your evolution is unfolding naturally.
You can't speed it up, slow it down, or bring it to a halt - but you can learn to relax a little more and enjoy the ride.