The Secret Sauce for Lasting Change

There’s something important I want you to know: there’s nothing wrong with you. If you’re feeling stuck and struggling to change, your struggle isn’t because you’re broken or not doing enough. You don’t need to be better. You just need better processes, systems, and support.

Most of us have something in our lives we’ve been trying to change, something we want to do differently that we believe will help us feel different about ourselves. Grind culture tells us the answer is to work harder, never resting for a moment until we achieve every single thing we want. Missing something? Not changing that thing about yourself that drives you crazy? Just power through!

Here’s my question: where has powering through gotten you so far with that stubborn thing? I imagine in a number of areas of your life it’s helped you achieve a lot, and I celebrate those accomplishments with you! Great work!

And still…for many of us there’s that lingering thing, that one area where we never seem to be able to make – and sustain – the change we want to. When powering through doesn’t work, we can start to internalize the negative messages we may hear all around us, and we may begin to believe that if we can’t force change to happen, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with us. This can start a painful cycle that leads to trying to shame ourselves into change, which never works or lasts. It turns out, when resistance to change persists there’s only one thing that can get the job done: the secret sauce of compassion, kindness, and gratitude.

I know, I know…it sounds like I’m offering you a Hallmark card-sized answer to a massive credit card debt-sized problem, but stick with me. The reality is that somewhere along the way a part of you learned the behavior you’re struggling with, not because there’s something wrong with you, but because for an important reason you needed that exact behavior at that time. Doing that thing, building that pattern, served you…for a time. And now there’s a part of you still working really hard to sustain that old way of being because it fears what happens if it doesn’t. I’m betting if you sit with it a minute, you can feel how exhausted that part of you is. And with that in mind, you can see, if you’ll forgive me a nerdy Star Trek reference, the futility of resistance. Trying to compel that weary part of you to power through harder? Ugh, no thank you. So how about trying something completely different?

How about trying the secret sauce? As you think about how and when and where the thing you’re now trying to change started, can you see more clearly how it helped you – maybe even saved you from something harmful at one point in your life? A younger version of you built that way to cope for a reason, and part of you may still believe it needs to keep doing what it’s doing to keep you safe. For many folks, using tools from the Internal Family Systems model of our how our minds work can bring much more empathy for our younger selves, and it can help us see our current behaviors with greater compassion and understanding. It can even evoke a sense of gratitude for the parts of ourselves that kept us protected, and that have kept working to protect us all these years. In this light, asking those bone-tired parts of ourselves to power through more can honestly seem pretty silly. Instead, it just makes good sense to offer ourselves gratitude for their protection, compassion for what hard work it’s been continuing to try to protect us for so long, and the deep kindness of allowing – not forcing – that part of ourselves to finally get some rest.

This process can seem counterintuitive at first, but with practice and solid guidance it truly can bring real, lasting change. Stephen Levine wrote one of my favorite poems about this kind of moment when a person recognizes that some things simply can’t be pushed through. Some things can only be moved by the sometimes harder but always more rewarding work of freeing yourself with love.

If Prayer Would Do It

If prayer would do it
I’d pray.

If reading esteemed thinkers would do it
I’d be halfway through the Patriarchs.

If discourse would do it
I’d be sitting with His Holiness
every moment he was free.

If contemplation would do it
I’d have translated the Periodic Table
to hermit poems, converting
matter to spirit.

If even fighting would do it
I’d already be a black belt.

If anything other than love could do it
I’d have done it already
and left the hardest for last.