A: You can spend your entire life making promises about changing your behavior, and it won’t make a difference if you don’t first change your perspective.
Perspective drives action, which drives results; to make a change, you must make it at the source, starting with the idea where the action was born. Change that originates at the action or results levels–change made independent of a shift in your thinking–won’t stick because the action is in conflict with your fundamental belief system.
In other words, what you do is a manifestation of what you believe. Change what you believe, and your actions will change as a matter of course. Leave your belief system in place, however, and your actions will eventually revert to old habits because the new behaviors won’t mesh with what you believe.Maintaining dissonance between what you believe and how you act is impossible. Eating right, managing well, and even fiscal responsibility won’t happen just because you’d like them to. These are habits that are born out of world views and are behaviors–like them or not–that are required for consistency’s sake. For instance, if part of your belief system is that someone will always be there to bail you out of a financial jam, then you will be hard pressed to develop financial discipline, because doing so is not in alignment with the fundamental belief that you will be OK without the discipline. Likewise, a belief that you are totally on your own will cause you to tighten up the money belt PDQ.
Understand, too, when I talk about “perspective,”"world view,” and “thinking,” I’m not talking about what you say to others (or what you tell yourself, for that matter). I’m talking about what’s in your heart; what you feel is True, what you Know in the little reptilian part of your brain where you hide your innermost secrets. Very few would admit, “I think it’s wise to go through life without any inkling at all of how money works.” However, if someone were to harbor a desire to be taken care of by another, more financially savvy individual, then a lack of fiscal responsibility would result, because it would be a manifestation of the person’s belief that others are more capable at handling money… the person would quite literally create financial ineptitude in order to put him/herself in a position to *have to give up* control over his or her personal finances.
If you want to make a change, look at the world differently. See it as how you would like it to be for a moment, and how it is. Take responsibility for making the change. When you truly can accept that responsibility, your perspective will shift, and change will come… effortlessly. Not just little change, either, but big, life-altering change that would have taken a Herculean effort before.
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I'm Jason. I make people shine. My mission is to help 1 million people tell their stories better. 