In pursuit of change
Ask yourself this question:
Have you ever had an experience so profound that a sound or smell or sight could bring you back to that experience fully?
I’ve had an experience with a former boss, I still hear her footsteps on the corridor, fast, calculated, and with a rising crescendo. Occasionally, when I hear the clang heel footsteps I remember my boss, when I read a news piece about the organization I hear the footsteps.
One of my ex-girlfriends wore a very distinctive perfume that smelled to me like custard apple. She is the sort who used expletives in her language. I loved the perfume but disliked her spoken words. I’d get a whiff of that perfume and recall my ex, I hear expletives and feel the smell.
I had another aunt who I associated with a certain song, she was the first adult I saw dancing. Back then Kimangu songs, traditional brew, weed, and tobacco were meant for young men during mwethya. They used to come together during planting, weeding, or harvesting. The evening after the hard work was the moment of merrymaking. Kids were put to sleep early, shielded from the bad influence, there were no evening tales from grandma. We would pretend to go to pee just to catch a glimpse of happiness. Every time I hear that song i “feel” her presence. I see her gracefully swaying away, besides a huge bonfire, with flickers of light reflecting on her dark hue skin, the arduous smelling smoke of burning weed and tobacco enveloping her as it permeated the enlivened night. She has since passed on, but her memory lives on.
Another less desirable one, I once hit a car from behind on one of our potholed roads during a rainy blurred evening. The pothole was so deep it could fit a banana stump. The impact was so profound that my airbags almost came off, a Toyota squaring against a German machine is the ultimate mark of inequality. Luckily I never saw a flashback of my entire life going over my dazed mind in 7 seconds, I never felt numb and cold ready for an appointment with the mortician, that’s how I knew I was alive. For years now if I’d need to make a journey in rain or in the evening tide, I feel panic and would pray fervently. I plan accordingly to avoid driving during a rainy evening or night.
In the book, Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny, Tony Robbins shares skills and techniques you can develop to master emotional intelligence.
That is all behind Neuro Associative Conditioning (NAC) by Tonny Robins, it is about changing your conditioned responses. You need to create such a strong negative emotional state in you and associate that negative state with the thing you want to change. Once fully associated you shake it out then create an intense positive emotional state associated with your new experience without that old pattern. So long as the emotional states are strong enough and associated well enough you’ll gravitate away from the old pattern to the new one.
Albeit there are several disputes on the scientific backing of the approach i believe it is worth a try.
Robin Sharma in the Book, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari implicitly defines the change approach through the 21 Day Rule: It takes about 21 days to develop a new habit. Yet most people give up on creating a positive life change after only the first few days when they experience the stress and pain that is always associated with replacing old behaviors with new ones. New habits are much like a new pair of shoes: for the first few days, they will feel uncomfortable. But if you break them in for about three weeks, they will fit like a second skin.
Here are the 7 steps
- Decide what you really want and what’s preventing you from having it now.
- Get leverage: Associate massive pain to not changing now, and massive pleasure to the experience of changing now.
- Interrupt the limiting pattern.
- Create a new empowering alternative.
- Condition the pattern until it’s consistent.
- Test it.
- Keep at it for at least 21 days.
You can use it to get fit, lose weight, get over an addiction, an heartbreak, become more productive. Yes, and stop hitting that snooze button, get out of bed, you are inculcating bad habits.
It is not a one size fits all because you will still need a positive attitude, hard work, and determination but it is still worth a try.
Originally published at http://cafemaarifa.wordpress.com on June 6, 2020.
