One of the interesting things about working on yourself is that sometimes the biggest changes don’t announce themselves.
There isn’t necessarily a dramatic moment when you suddenly realize, I’ve changed! More often, life simply presents you with something familiar—and this time you respond differently. You speak up when you might once have remained quiet. You try something you would once have assumed you couldn’t do. You handle a setback without letting it derail you. You remember someone’s name. You finally tackle the job you’ve been putting off. Or perhaps you suddenly realize that something which once had enormous power over you simply doesn’t anymore.
After using InnerTalk for more than 35 years, I’ve come to think that these quiet changes can tell us something very important about the way personal change actually happens.
We Don’t Always See What Is Holding Us Back
One of the first InnerTalk programs Eldon ever gave me was Soaring Self-Esteem. At the time, I thought he was joking. I didn’t dislike myself. I certainly didn’t walk around thinking, I have terrible self-esteem. I thought I had a perfectly realistic understanding of who I was, what I was good at, and what I wasn’t. It was only later that I began recognizing some of the little decisions I was making because I didn’t think I was good enough. There were things I wouldn’t attempt because I assumed I wouldn’t succeed. Situations I avoided because I didn’t want to compete. And public speaking? Absolutely not. I was convinced I could never do that.
Sometimes today I look at my life and I’m genuinely amazed by what I’ve achieved. It can almost feel as though I’m looking at someone else’s life. I look at Mind Training and think, OMG—I really wrote that! Or I think about being interviewed by George Noory, speaking to an audience of millions, and wonder how the person I once was—the person who was certain she could never be a public speaker—could possibly have done that.
Today, people frequently describe me as confident and strong. The funny thing is, I don’t overtly feel that way. I don’t walk around thinking, I’m a super-confident person. But when I look at my actions, I realize they’re completely consistent with confidence. I know what I want. I know what I know. I know what I’m entitled to expect from myself and from other people. And I’m willing to act accordingly.
So perhaps confidence isn’t always something we feel. Sometimes it’s simply something we’ve quietly learned to live.
And that makes me wonder how many possibilities we surrender simply because somewhere along the way we learned, I can’t. I don’t believe that positive thinking means we can suddenly do absolutely anything. We all have different talents, circumstances, opportunities, and limitations. But I do think it’s terribly easy to surrender possibilities that life never actually took away from us. There is an enormous difference between discovering that you can’t do something and never discovering what you can do because you were too certain you would fail. I know that because, in many ways, I’ve been both of those people.
Sometimes Change Becomes Automatic
Another example surprised me much more recently.
For years, I described myself as being terrible at remembering names. I wasn’t particularly worried about it. It was simply something I “knew” about myself. Then, after working with both Maximizing Brain Power and Releasing Mental Blocks, I began noticing that some of my behaviors had changed without any conscious decision or effort on my part. Nowadays, when I’m introduced to someone, I automatically repeat their name in my head. As Eldon and I walk away, I might use the person’s name while talking about the interaction. Later, when I think about meeting them, their name comes back into my thoughts. I never sat down and decided, This is my new strategy for remembering names. I don’t have to remind myself to do any of it. It simply happens. And apparently it works.
About three months after we moved into our new neighborhood, I suddenly realized that I knew my neighbors’ names. Some of those introductions had happened months earlier, but there the names were—just waiting for me when I needed them. That fascinates me because the change wasn’t simply, Now I can remember names. My behavior had actually changed in ways that made remembering names easier—and those behaviors had become automatic.
This is one of the reasons I find subconscious change so interesting. A belief doesn’t necessarily announce itself as a belief, and a change in that belief doesn’t necessarily announce itself as a change. Sometimes we only recognize it because one day we notice that we’re behaving differently. And that makes me wonder: How many things do we continue doing—or not doing—because of conclusions we reached about ourselves years ago?
Life Gives Us Plenty to Work On
Of course, sometimes I know exactly what I want help with. A health issue appears and I reach for Accelerated Healing. I realize I’m upset about circumstances I can’t change and I reach for Coherent Emotion. Why waste time being sad and emotionally off balance if there’s something I can do to help myself regain my equilibrium?
Recently, Eldon and I moved after living in our previous home for more than 30 years. Our new home has everything I wanted. I chose it. I was excited about it. And yet I kept finding myself missing the home I’d left behind. Logically, I knew I’d gained so much. Emotionally, I was struggling with what I’d lost. So I reached for Accepting Change. I can’t tell you how much this improved my outlook. Instead of continually looking backward at what I’d left behind, I found myself increasingly able to focus on everything I’d gained. Nothing about the move had changed. The old home was still gone, and nothing about the new home itself had changed. What had changed was my relationship with the circumstances. And sometimes that’s the only part we actually have the power to change.
When You Can’t Change What Happened
Over the past few years, I’ve also had to deal with some very difficult family situations. Certain family members took advantage of a vulnerable elder, and I was so very upset by what happened. I did everything I reasonably could to address the situation. But eventually I reached the point where there was nothing more I could do about what had already happened. What I could do was decide what I was going to allow those circumstances to continue doing to me. I leaned heavily on Releasing Anger and Forgiving and Letting Go.
For me, forgiving and letting go didn’t mean deciding that what happened was okay. It didn’t mean pretending I wasn’t angry or abandoning my judgment about what had occurred. It meant recognizing that continuing to carry all that anger wasn’t changing anyone else. It was only continuing to affect me. And when I look back, I think working my way through that experience strengthened something in my inner character. Perhaps that’s another kind of change we don’t always notice while it’s happening.
Life isn’t going to give us a world in which nothing difficult ever happens. We’re going to be disappointed. We’re going to encounter people who behave badly. We’ll lose things we value. We’ll make mistakes. Circumstances will change in ways we didn’t ask for. We don’t get to control all of that, but we do have some say in who we become in response to it. And isn’t that, in many ways, what life is about? Becoming the highest and best versions of ourselves—not because life has become perfect, but because we’re continually becoming better equipped to meet it.
Not Everything Needs Fixing
I think this is why my relationship with InnerTalk has changed over the years.
There was probably a time when I thought of self-improvement primarily in terms of problems: What’s wrong? What needs fixing? What do I need to overcome? And certainly, sometimes that’s exactly why I reach for a program. If I have a project sitting on my desk that I know perfectly well how to do but somehow keep finding reasons not to do it, I reach for Strategic Planning and Peak Performance. I don’t need to learn how to do the job. Sometimes knowing what to do and actually getting yourself to do it are two very different things.
But not everything needs fixing. Sometimes nothing is particularly wrong. There’s simply something I’d like to become better at.
That was very much how I approached Creative Thinking. I wasn’t trying to turn myself into an artist. I wanted to become better at seeing possibilities—at looking at a problem and not assuming that the obvious answers were the only answers available.
So these days I’m just as likely to ask myself, What would I like to strengthen next? That’s a very different question from What’s wrong with me? And I think it may actually be a much more interesting one.
Who Are You Becoming?
Perhaps this is ultimately what all these little stories have in common.
I started with self-esteem because I was holding myself back without realizing it. I worked with my memory and discovered that my everyday behaviors began changing almost without my noticing. I struggled with leaving a home I’d loved for more than 30 years and learned to focus more on what I’d gained. I went through an experience that made me deeply angry and had to decide how much more of myself I was willing to give to something I couldn’t change. Different issues. Different times in my life. Different programs. But underneath all of them is the same question: Who am I becoming?
And perhaps even more importantly: Who do I want to become?
For me, the answer isn’t about becoming perfect. It’s about continuing to become the highest and best version of myself that I’m capable of becoming. When I look back at the person I was when Eldon first introduced me to InnerTalk and compare her with the person I am today, the difference is enormous. But I can’t point to one dramatic moment when it happened. It happened one belief, one choice, one challenge and one small success at a time.
Perhaps that’s why I still find this work so fascinating after all these years. There’s always something else to learn about ourselves. Something we can strengthen. Something we can let go of. Something we can question. Or perhaps simply another possibility we haven’t considered yet.
You don’t have to change everything today. You just have to stop letting yesterday’s beliefs automatically decide what might be possible tomorrow.
Warmly
Ravinder Taylor