How to Change Yourself Immediately

From: http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/how-to-change-yourself-immediately
By Victor Chan Wai-To

At the beginning of every year, millions of people swear that they would change one habit or another for the betterment of their lives, yet they ended up staying the same no matter how many times they have attempted to change themselves. As a result, some of them simply give up altogether, and I hope you are not one of them. After all, who would love to see themselves failing year after year? I am sure that sometimes you are determined to start a plan or stop a habit, but you just cannot quite maintain your attention long enough to see the change materializes. Is it really that hard to change yourself?

Commitment And Consistency.

It is certainly possible to change yourself today, but you must first understand one very important principle in human psychology, which is a tendency for people to keep their thoughts consistent with their actions, so that once they have behaved in certain ways, they tend to rationalize for their habits rather than to query them. For example, once you get used to driving to work by a certain route, you would convince yourself that the usual route is good enough, instead of looking up the map to see if you could save time with a shortcut.

In social psychology, this is called the principle of commitment and consistency. Evolutionarily speaking, this is usually beneficial in the way that you’d probably waste more effort in searching for a new route than just following your habit, and since it is so taxing to examine new information every time, why not just follow the same procedure in a previous situation if it had worked before? As a result, when you remember that last time you got to work by this route, you just proceed to take the same route again.

However, this principle is often used by marketers, advertisers and politicians to their advantage. One prominent example is the Bush-Cheney campaign rallies in the 2004 US election, where attendees were forced to sign an affirmative statement for Bush, and it turned out that most attendees, having performed the action of loyalty, ended up voting for Bush, simply because once a person has committed himself to an action in favor of another person, he feels a strong need to justify the action, and continues to favor the other person.

Putting It into Practice.

Nevertheless, you can also apply this principle positively for yourself. On one hand, the principle implies that you tend to project onto yourself with qualities that are consistent to the way you have been treated, for when others do you a favor, you would rationalize to yourself that you must be worthy of it, and therefore you should never stop others from being generous towards you, so that if someone offers to pay something for you, thank him, but never say, “Oh no, I’ll pay for it,” or, if you make a profit in the stock market, don’t say, “It is not honest to earn money like that,” but instead adopt the mindset that you deserve them all.

On the other hand, it is also important for you to behave consistently to your ideal qualities. One way of doing this is called role-playing, a popular technique advocated by famous tennis coach Tim Gallwey, who often instructs his students as follows, “Imagine that I am the director of a television series. Knowing that you are an actor that plays tennis, I ask if you would like to do a bit part as a top-flight tennis player. I assure you that you needn't worry about hitting the ball out or into the net because the camera will only be focused on you and will not follow the ball. What I’m mainly interested in is that you adapt professional mannerisms, and that you swing your racket with supreme self-assurance. Above all, your face must express no self-doubt. You should look as if you are hitting every ball exactly where you want to. Really get into the role, hit as hard as you like and ignore where the ball is actually going.”

And Gallwey pointed out that whenever a player succeeds in acting in a confident and “professional” way, remarkable or even dramatic changes often take place in his game, which evidently shows that when you can change your behavior, so will the result and your confidence. This is also applicable in other areas, for example, the author of this article is an active trader in currencies, metals and indices who, when facing an occasional losing streaks, would identify himself as a logical and successful trader, and approach his trading calmly as if he were just trading a demo account.

Making the Change Happen.

Sometimes a beginner may find his new state of positivity being undermined when his confidence is shaken by a challenge, to which the only way to combat is to mentally yell “Stop!” and disrupt the feeling whenever those insecurities try to steal your game away from you, and you have to feel repugnant to your old self, so that you can’t wait to get rid of it, and regain your composure by resuming role-playing your confident behaviors which, after enough repetitions, will take hold of your new positive state.

It is suggested that changing behaviors is best to be gradual and incremental, because of the relative ease of taking one step at a time, which is a logic I cannot argue against, but I believe it is not the most efficient way, as my currency trading mentor Dirk du Toit said, the best way to learn is to jump deep into the water right away and start swimming. Even though a change is usually uncomfortable, but once you get used to it, the new habit will be just as comfortable as your old one. Moreover, a plan of many small steps takes a long time, which might make you give up halfway through. Surely, the larger the step you make, the less likely you may get everything right at the start, but at the same time, the process of making mistakes puts the necessary pressure on you to improve.

Conclusion.

As a conclusion, changing yourself is simple and it involves four steps:

1. Visualize the behaviors of a successful person and imitate them.
2. When others favor you, be polite and gladly accept them.
3. Gracefully admit your mistakes and remain confident dispite of them.
4. Be bold in making progress, and always challenge your comfort zone.

Although changing yourself looks simple, it is seldom smooth and straightforward. You’ll slip back from time to time, but each time you will be closer to your destination, and you won’t fall back to where you were anymore. And when you have finally got there, you may proceed to jump further. Self improvement, after all, is a never-ending process.