How To Change Your Life In One Easy Step
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Folks, occasionally people come into my apartment / office looking for a change. Sometimes it’s a relationship change, or a job change, or a living situation change, or a sex change. Inevitably, in every case, what someone is actually looking for is a way to change something about themselves by changing something else.
Let me say that again. All of these things that you want to change are probably not the thing you’re actually wanting to change.
The person who wants to change their relationship isn’t coming to me for help in changing their relationship. If they were, I could just have an actor call up their partner and pretend to be the mistress or manstress who is confessing a secret affair, and well, things would probably change lickety split.
But, after I did that one or two times, I realized it wasn’t really what people are after.
You see, people aren’t looking for help in changing their relationship. Oh, sure, they may say that they are. But that’s not where they’re stuck. Where they’re stuck is their relationship to the relationship, or their relationship to their job, or their town, or to their genitals.
Now, I’m not saying that none of those external things are worthy of change, and you can go ahead and change all of them, although with that last one I’d highly advise consulting a physician.
What I’m saying is that step one is recognizing that what you’re really talking about changing is you. Or maybe you instinctively know that you’ve already changed, and you don’t match up nicely with what’s around you or dangling from you.
The point is, folks, that by making your change about one or more of those things around you, you may be over-complicating what it is that you actually need. In fact, based on the people I meet with regularly, I guarantee you’re making it more complicated than it is. Because compared to all of those other things, changing yourself is a heck of a lot easier.
Pop used to say, “The difference between people and cows is that cows know that it’s a lot easier to leap forward once you let go of your milk.” I’m not sure what that has to do with change, but he seemed to always say that cow thing when I wanted things to be different.
Anyway, instead of trying to first change the things around you that have a relationship to you, do the easy and lazy way, which is to change your relationship to those things. You can change the rest after that, but chances are, they’ll change anyway.
Except your genitals. They tend to sort of stay the same, unfortunately.
Just My Thoughts,
Dr. Matt
