Nothing Changes Until We Do

“The fly in your eye is keeping you from seeing the fly in your eye”

         from Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Think of a change you want to make in your life. Now consider five action steps to make that change.

See. I knew you didn’t need any advice. Neither do most people.

For example, if you don’t know how to lose weight, stop smoking, make more money and/or have more intimate relationships, you certainly know where to go to get the information (just for fun, I Googled “make more money” and got 304 million potential searches).

Yes, it’s often difficult to know what advice to believe, but the real difficulty arises in that word “believe.”

Breakthroughs into new ways of acting occur in one of two ways: Either we have to see what we haven’t seen before or we have to stop seeing what we think is there. Doing either of those requires taking a hard look at what we believe to be true.

A friend told me the other day of a Nobel prize winning physicist who, when asked why he won the prize when so many others were working towards the same breakthrough responded, “They believed their assumptions.” In other words, they wouldn’t stop seeing what they thought was there.

The classic example that we’re all familiar with occurred when it was observed that the earth revolved around the sun. This flew in the face of the previous observation that the sun revolved around the earth. The earth, of course, had always revolved around the sun. This fact wasn’t immediately accepted because people had spent centuries believing the opposite. In other words, they were seeing what wasn’t there and had a difficult time seeing otherwise.

The observation of gravity by Isaac Newton is another example. Gravity obviously existed before Newton “discovered” it. But it took awhile to see what had always been there.

I use the word “observation” rather than “discovery” because the history of human progress is nothing more than finally seeing what has always been there.

This has profound ramifications for why we don’t change when we say we want to. No matter how many times I may coach someone that there is nothing to fear when delivering a presentation, it makes no difference if the person believes there’s plenty to fear. In other words, they continue to be fearful because they see something that isn’t there or don’t see something that is.

I know that resolving conflict is easy: Simply give up being right and making others wrong. Refusing to do so is the source of all wars, violence and unhappy relationships.

But knowing this makes no difference when we are sure that we’re right and the other person is wrong. In other words, when we are committed to seeing what isn’t there.

There are many people afraid to call someone and ask for a date, a job, a sale, etc. That fear is a product of seeing something that isn’t there or not seeing something that is.

The other day, I asked a friend who is in the pool remodeling business why he was so successful. He said he makes dozens of cold calls per day. I asked if he was afraid to do so. “Why should I be?” he said. “I’m not getting any business from them now. The worst that can happen is that they’ll say no and I still won’t have any business from them.’

My friend was seeing what was there, not what wasn’t.

Consider the possibility that if you’re not getting what you want it’s because some blind spot is keeping you from seeing the obvious. This is why we all need people in our lives who will tell us the truth about reality. Or at least a different version of the truth than the one we are believing.

Then the really hard part occurs: We have to give up our belief so that we can see what’s always been there. If we don’t do that, we are doomed to keep repeating the same behavior over and over and over again, looking for something that isn’t there or believing that something is there that isn’t.