Conventional Wisdom Isn't Always Wisdom

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Is it hard to change? Perhaps there’s a change you’ve been wanting to make in your life, but you’ve been finding it to be difficult, if not impossible, to do so.

Conventional wisdom (which is a fancy way of saying “what everyone believes to be true”) would support the “truth” of the statement that “change is hard.” But I’d like you to consider the possibility that conventional wisdom is mistaken and that mistake is the reason change often seems so difficult.

I suggest you consider the possibility that any change (to take a risk you’ve been contemplating, to stop smoking, to go on a diet---fill in the blank with any resolution you’ve made at New Years or at other times) happens in an instant. You could, for example, before you finish reading this sentence, decide to do something you’ve been considering doing for a very long time.

Change seems difficult because of a distinction often missed by conventional wisdom: While it takes only an instant to decide to act, it may take a lifetime of deliberation before we actually do act. And it’s the deliberation, not the change itself, that causes us to think that change is hard.

Consider this unconventional possibility: Most of our change efforts are spent in just that...effort rather than real change. We struggle, strive, contemplate, obsess, worry and brood over a decision that we then make in an instant.

Change is like the Big Bang theory of how the world was created. It took only an instant for the massive explosion to occur that created our world. But no one knows how long it took the Big Bang to “decide” to explode.

Certainly, conventional wisdom offers us the bromide that “to decide in haste, is to repent in leisure,” suggesting that quick decisions are fatally flawed. But are they?

In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that we actually make our decisions very quickly. Most of the apparent difficulty of changing occurs because, instead of taking the action we’ve already decided upon, we spend our time searching for evidence to confirm the “rightness” of the decision we already made but have failed to act upon. This search looks like an attempt to discover rational “facts,” but is, in reality, an attempt to confirm the rightness of what we are going to do anyway. In fact, we can find evidence to confirm the rightness of any decision we make.

So I suggest you eliminate from your conversation the phrase “change is hard.” It isn’t. It’s the getting ourselves ready for change that causes us to mistakenly believe that. Obsessing is the struggle. And the more we obsess, the harder change appears to be and the harder change appears to be the more we obsess, etc.

But the change itself is quite easy. It is nothing more than a choice we make...or not. It’s the struggle that is difficult, not the change.

So the question to contemplate is not, “Why is change hard?” but rather, “Why are you struggling?”

With best wishes,
Larry