Jill Goldson: 10 rules for reinventing yourself

We need to learn to accept that change is frightening. Photo / 123RF

If the very thought of self change is enough to make you reach for your most ingrained bad habit, take heart: Stan Goldberg, PhD and change expert tells us that whilst it can be tough, it is certainly not traumatic to create some changes.

Many of us want to change but we simply don't know how to do it, says Goldberg. After 25 years of researching how people change, he has isolated 10 major rules and explained the strategies for each rule.

Backed by research by James O Prochaska, another renowned expert on planned change, both argue that change occurs in stages.

All well and good - but what about those of us who say we want things to be different - but actually would rather eat our socks than tackle the steep slope of the new exercise regime, the different social life or the sending out of resumes in a hunt for an alternative career?

'Waiting, Wishing and Blaming'

These are the reasons Jonathon Alpert believes cause us to stay stuck. Psychotherapist and author of Be Fearless: Change your life in 28 days, he advises that waiting, wishing and blaming take the place of action. According to this author, we can 'break our fear pattern, rewrite our inner narrative and live our dream'. And he devotes chapters in his book to these outcomes. Alpert's message echoes fellow author, the late Susan Jeffers in her acclaimed best seller, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

Say these experts, you can't think yourself through the fear of change - you have to act your way through it. There is no wrong decision - just different opportunities.

Fear.

All well and good, but is this knowledge enough to quell the anxiety of making a mistake? Or to even go anywhere near shifting a deeply held belief that we fundamentally lack the capacity to change things about ourselves?

Alpert's response to naysayers is that it is fear that is the epicentre of all unhappiness. Which must make doubt its dark twin.

But then again it is not always very clear what exactly it is that we should be changing. We can just feel stuck in a rut of discontentment - and even more so when hearing others describe themselves as 'passionate' - when it seems somehow to have no application to how we feel about much of anything in our own lives. A bit different from the fear of making a decision with the Sword of Damocles over our head, but equally sapping of an enthusiasm for life.

Neurons that fire together wire together

Sounding like a recipe for a team building retreat at work, this slogan in fact results from the research of Canadian acclaimed psychologist, Donald Hebb described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks, Hebb in 1949 demonstrated that brain connections which are active at the same moment - and then repeat the pattern over and over - will make the connections stronger. This discovery has been fundamental in understanding how the brain tackles change.

So whilst we may not be able to visualise the big changes, Alpert comfortingly - and it would seem scientifically - tells us to just start with small goals. Perhaps to be a bit fitter, a bit more sociable or a bit less prone to jousting with deadlines.

Change will then lead to more change.

And knowing, as we do, that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour - then we also know that we have to put something different in the test tube when we want to get a different result.

Goldberg's 10 rules for change

• Behaviours are complex - break them into small chunks
• Accept that change is frightening - look for the positives in altering habits
• Remember to reward yourself regularly - look at the benefits
• Take very small steps - keep it simple
• And very slowly - there is no rush
• Use failure as a learning tool - and learn what it tells you
• Keep to a structure - timetabling really helps
• Practice - keep those neurons limbered up
• Protect your new habits - make arrangements which fit as much as possible
• Celebrate the small successes - they are huge

And here are 4 even simpler rules

Remind - trainers by the door
Routine - every day - even for 8 minutes
Reward - enjoy the walk, the run, the dawn, or the dusk
Repeat - and feel those neurons getting together

As Zen Habits writer Leo Babauta said, "Make it so easy that you just can't say no."