THE WHITE TIGER: REPLACING THE MOTHERBOARD - The Factory Default Setting
The Owner's Manual - Practicum One
The New Year’s Resolution
Sweeping change - sounds amazing! Let me just make a decision to change my whole life, and the way I engage with Others. Voila! My Psyche is healed! This is the equivalent of what is being asked of a client when a therapist suggests a behavior change for the client that is too big, too much, or too scary. This is the mindset of the New Year’s Resolution. It also has the same amount of longevity and statistical outcomes.
Why can you not just make a decision to change this or that, and have it happen? The answer is - the Hardwiring is now the Factory Default Setting. When you were produced on the line of life, beginning with birth through eighteen years of age, your circuits were soldered into place. The intention was survival, and survive you did. Herein lies the great barrier to change for the human psyche - what worked for your survival is now the Default Setting.
If you want a new Default Setting - you are definitively going to need a proper Rewiring!
The Set Up
Offering, even the idea, such as The New Year’s Resolution, is so incorrect, as to be a bit disturbing. The idea of sweeping change without the New Learning required, virtually 100 percent of the time, ends in the single thing that is the greatest barrier to Motivation - Failure.
It is the Anti-Reward. It is a negative feedback loop. It is the hamster wheel to frustration, irritation, self deprecation, and eventually, the old throwing the hands up in the air followed by the, “oh well - this is me.” What has been accomplished is total defeat, and a return to living under the subconscious, unconscious mandate of the Factory Default Setting, ie No Change. And…guess what?…it is the wrong kind of new learning…now we have just been so incorrectly taught that we cannot change - ugh! This is the worst kind of Set Up for the human psyche.
We need an Owner’s Manual!
The Owner’s Manual
Introducing…The Practical Manual for Replacing the Motherboard - (Subtitle) ReWiring Your 90 percent
Page One - Lesson One
Lesson One: There is no journey without the Intention to take the journey.
Desire is misconstrued as so many things. In this case Desire is misconstrued as Intention. Desire is so not intention. Desire is fully passive. It is purely based in emotion. At no point does it require, or indicate, any kind of action.
Example: New Year’s Resolution(s) — I am going to quit smoking, drinking, spending too much time on my phone, spending money on things I don’t need — this list can run on into infinity.
All that a New Year’s Resolution is - is an expressed desire for something. It starts and ends there. This is why the statistics of success are so very low. Desire changes nothing. It is CORTICAL/of the Cortex. Your intellect (cortex) knows that smoking is bad for you, and you probably should not be doing it. You just articulated that in the form of a desire labeled - New Year’s Resolution. Desire merely expresses the emotion or intellectual understanding. It is associated with no action.
You may desire to react differently in this situation or that situation. You may desire to have control over your emotions. You may desire to stop repeating behaviors that self sabotage. You may desire to stop being reactive and cramping up your relationships. You may desire _________(fill in the blank). All of the desire in the world will not move a grain of sand.
The Stages of Change - Renamed
There are Five Stages of Change. These have been well researched, documented and published. (Prochaska, DiClemente, 1984, ISBN 9780870944383)
The Stages of Change are as follows: Pre-Contemplation, Contemplation, Planning, Action, Maintenance. Depending on the resource that you may use, you may find slightly different word choices for each stage.
For the purposes of this Practical Manual - the Stages will be renamed. Our Stages of Change will be called: Pre-Intention, Intention, Planning Implementation, Implementation, Celebration.
Pre-Intention - Desire. Which we have just discussed at some length.
Intention - the first Act of Doing - true change begins here. The next post will be fully devoted to this CRITCAL STEP. This is not a “skippable” step.
Planning Implementation - Putting the Plan in Place to make the Change - this is how I am going to do it!
Implementation - Taking the 90 percent to School!
Celebration - Celebrating the successful change! Size DOES NOT matter - we celebrate pee pee steps!
Practicum One - Step One
It is forever wise to always start at the beginning, ie., the first step. Pages could be devoted to the lack of success in psychotherapy due to the failure of understanding this basic concept.
Identifying the areas of desire - Pre-Intention
Pick a single thing that you would like to change. Make it small and completely achieveable. Something simple in your daily life. Today you will simply, only, identify the thing.
In terms of writing this manual, and to be equally participatory, I am going to pick something that I would like to change in my daily life. It is lifting weights. I walk by the weights every day. I have a very easy routine that I do with them, the very rare times that I do it. It takes 10 minutes of my day. I would like to actually pick them up and use them on a consistent, or somewhat consistent, basis. As we move through this Owner’s Manual for life, I am identifying the desire to change this behavior for myself. This is my Pre-Intention.
You do not have to do anything else before Lesson Two - Practicum Two.
Rewiring!
The goal is to begin the process of teaching your 90 percent a new way of problem solving. A way that is successful.
Choosing something small, perhaps even seemingly insignificant, and being successful in it, is called - Practice (aka Repetition - Repetition - Repetition). It is absolutely no different than teaching a kid, new to music, the notes on the scale. You must begin at the beginning, and you must Practice the basic steps. You do not hand a kid a musical instrument, and expect them to play a symphony.
Practice applies to all new skills in life, including psychological skills. This creates New Templates, aka Rewiring! You are proving to your Self, and the 90 percent, that Rewiring is possible. Once your Self, and the 90 percent, grasp this reality - it will be time to move on to the psychological and behavioral issues that you would like to (also have a Desire to) change.
If you don't want your life to be the same moving forward - if you want your life, or some aspect of it, to be different, or go differently - there is only a single variable in the equation —It is not your boss, your work, your kid, your partner, your spouse, your annoying co-worker, your wishy washy friend - It Is YOU!