It’s traditional at the start of a new year to think about making changes in one’s life, but it’s been my experience that people seem to concentrate on relatively trivial things when the last digit on the date changes. The big changes, the ones that redirect lives, aren’t likely to be limited to the new year. And often, people seem to want to make them all at once, in a wrenching cataclysm that upturns their entire life. they say things like “I want to make a fresh start,” or “I need to re-invent myself,” then they systematically upturn everything they have build their lives upon so far, so they can do, or be, something different.
In 1965, Eliot Jaques coined the term “midlife crisis” in his article for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis titled, “Death and the Midlife Crisis”. We don’t hear much on the topic these days, but I remember it being a hot topic in the 80’s and 90’s. I knew a man at the time who had a beautiful young wife and a new baby. He had just built their dream home, completely customized exactly how they wanted it. Only a few years later, I found that he had abandoned it all and was living in a trailer. He had a new sports car (a Ferrari, no less), but his wife he left struggling to raise their child and pay for the house on her own. When I talked to him about it (I never asked, he volunteered the information), he never tried to justify his actions or even explain them, he only said that he needed to make a change. He clearly thought that was justification enough. To me, it exemplified what people are talking about when they speak of midlife crises, and I have thought about him a lot.
The conclusion I came to is a bit different than what the psychologists believe. I think this man had built his life around a whole set of expectations and cultural pressures: he married, started a family, and built his home based on what he believed was right and proper for a person of his station to do. But once he had it all, he realized it wasn’t what he wanted, and he wasn’t happy with any of it. So he tossed it all aside, not knowing any better way to change things, and started over. It only happened to occur in his “midlife” years because that’s how long it took for him to realize how miserable he was living what amounted to a life constructed around things that didn’t actually matter to him. This is common. Well-meaning parents, teachers, and mentors impose on their charges the things that worked for them, without considering how different both the person and their circumstances are, or how different the times are that they live in.
What is more in vogue today is to talk about “re-inventing” yourself. Browse the Internet on issues of self-help, stress management, or anxiety disorders, and you will find story after story of people who gave up good careers and high-rolling lifestyles to pursue their “real” dreams. Maybe they became artists or craftsmen instead of bankers and executives, but they all amount to the same thing: they were unhappy and made a change. All these stories have a similar theme: “be true to yourself.” But I think all of it is exactly the same as the “midlife” crisis I described. People spend their formative years and early adulthood trying to attain the lifestyle they were taught was good for them. When they have it, they realize they were taught wrong, and they want to change course. It doesn’t strictly apply to career and lifestyle changes either, it could be religious practices or relationships, it could be dealing with a health issue. But they have come to the conclusion that what they have isn’t working, and they want or need something different.
Change is not a bad thing, and, in fact, it’s, more often than not, a necessary thing. But I can’t believe that it always needs to be a cataclysmic thing. There are times when a person needs to make a clean and complete break from the life they have in order to start a new one, but that circumstance doesn’t describe most people’s lives. In fact, it’s rare, unless the situation is dangerous or abusive. Most life changes only require a measured and incremental response … and even more so when others are involved. I’m willing to bet the man I described who abandoned his family could have found a happy and fulfilling life without running away from those who depended on him (and the jury is out whether he ever found it at all, I lost contact with him years ago). It would have taken more time, and more work on his part, and there would have been no instant gratification, but he could have done it. Most of the time, when a person thinks the change they want must be dramatic and must be complete, what is really happening is they lack the knowledge and skills to change any other way. And that, in turn, almost guarantees that they will either make the wrong changes, hurt themselves in the process, hurt others in the process, or any combination of the three (the exception, of course, being that when not making an immediate and complete change will hurt themselves or others). And more likely than not, it won’t be a real change, and the things they thought they were leaving behind wind up following them in every endeavor they engage in afterwards.
So then, how do we change our lives? I don’t claim expertise on this subject, but I do have some ideas I think are valid. And I am very convinced that meaningful change can only happen if we do it carefully and responsibly.
First, we have to change how we think. I had a dog when I was a teenager that we kept in a fenced pen along the back of the house. There was an eight-foot fence at the edge of that pen, and that dog could make a standing jump and be head and shoulders over the top of the fence. Our yard, on the the other hand, had a four-foot fence around it. On the occasions that we let him out of the pen to have the run of the yard, he never once tried to jump the smaller fence. If he could almost clear an eight-foot fence from a standing jump, he could have certainly, and easily, cleared a four-foot fence from a running start. But he never tried. He sometimes put his front paws on the edge and leaned over it to bark at the neighbor, but he never tried to jump it. He didn’t believe he could. Likewise, we often limit the things we attempt in life because somewhere along the line we determined we could not succeed. Now matter how badly we want to get To change that, we have to carefully and reasonably measure what we really can do, and what is just a false belief that we can’t. We are never going to get over the small fence if we refuse to consider it’s any different from the big one. If we can’t change how we think about our ability to succeed, we will never change that the facts of our success either. That goes for less lofty goals too. We can never be successful at anything at all if we never attempt it because we are defeated before we even try.
I feel it’s important to add that I am definitely not saying that you can do anything you set your heart on if you just believe in yourself. Hollywood would have you believe that, and it’s escapist fantasy. I’m talking about the way you look at yourself, and the actions that grow out of it. My dog probably could have learned to get over both of those fences with a bit of guidance, but he never would have learned how to open the gate that I strapped closed with one of his old collars. His paws did not have the dexterity to undo the buckle, and it was in too tight of a space for him to get his jaws around to chew through it. No amount of belief would have overcome those things. When it comes to what you can do, your beliefs have to be based in fact. How you feel and act, however, you have much more control over.
Second, we have to change the way we react to things. This is a bit more subtle, but I think it’s closely related to the change of thinking. It isn’t enough to tell yourself you are capable of succeeding in an endeavor, no matter how true it is that you can, if every time you are faced with an opportunity to do so, you turn away. Consider a person with a volatile temper, and let’s say they have gotten far enough to understand that they will be more pleasant to be around if they stop snapping at people. That’s a necessary start, but every time someone annoys them, their engrained reaction is going to be to blow up at them. When that happens, it reinforces the old thought habits, and pretty soon they are back to believing they just can’t do it. Personally, I think this is the hardest stage, but when the temper flares, they have to recognize what is happening and shut that reaction down before it takes hold. There are going to be a lot of failures here, but a person with a temper has to fully understand that their reaction isn’t always appropriate, and trust themselves that they really can deal with it in a better way. It’s doubly hard when anger is the appropriate reaction, and they need to go ahead and be angry, but still not lash out at the things that don’t warrant it. But when you can learn to change the way you react to situations, you know you have truly learned to think about them a different way.
Last, we have to change what we do. If it’s a behavioral change we are looking for, we change how we act. If it’s a life change we want, we carefully plan how to make the change and start doing the things it requires. If we get the cart before the horse and start changing actions before changing our thoughts and reactions, it’s possible to manage the change, but it’s much more likely we will only change our circumstances, and not what we didn’t like about them in the first place. But the converse is also true … if we only change our thoughts, but not our actions or circumstances, then we haven’t really changed, have we?
Another essential consideration is that many changes, especially the big ones, require us to have help: good counsel (sometimes professional counsel), support, encouragement, etc. No one on this planet can do anything more than simply survive, and often not even that, without the aid of others. We are social creatures, and we need each other (some more, and some less, and as a person who tends very strongly towards being solitary, I do not say that lightly). Many, many, times a person won’t even consider changing if not for the influence of someone they love or respect. Very often, an objective perspective is what is needed to overcome a personal roadblock, and your own view of it, by definition, can never be objective. Even more often, others have resources that you do not, but you need to accomplish your goal. The list goes on and on, but I can’t emphasize this enough: don’t try to go it alone, or you’ll almost certainly fail.
The bottom line is, we have to be smart about making changes. Thoughtful and gradual changes are most likely to be effective in the long term, and less traumatic to get through. We can all be better than we are, and no one is going to get there who is unwilling to change. But no one is going to get there by doing it badly either.