Change and Self Improvement

We encounter a lot of change in our lives, don't we? If you think about the last month of your life, numerous big and small changes took place. You can label them good, bad, or indifferent. Some of them were the result of your actions. Most of them were not. We live in a great big, hectic, busy world with 7 billion others, so much change will be outside our influence. We can't control it.

This means our relationships are constantly at risk of being impacted by the change. While we often see change as negative, embracing positive and negative change can make our relationships healthier.

Going Through Change Makes You More Open-Minded.

Relationships are all about give-and-take. You have to look at the other person in a relationship as possibly different from you. You learn their ideas and behaviors might not be similar to yours, but that doesn't make them bad. The more change you encounter, the more you look at the world open-mindedly.

You begin to understand that there are so many realities out there. Your viewpoint isn't the only one. While your values and beliefs are important and correct for you, other people have different ideas about how they should live. You learn that the people in your life can be vastly different than you when you experience and move past a lot of change.

Empathy Makes for Healthier Relationships.

Empathy is the ability to understand how someone else feels. You don't necessarily feel sympathy for them or judge them negatively. When you're empathetic, it just means you can feel what you imagine someone else would. You may not agree with their situation or how they got there. What you do understand is their viewpoint and how that view is attached to their feelings and emotions.

Think about the many changes you've had in your life where you had to interact with others. When you embrace change, you don't ignore these experiences. You jump right in and get the most you can out of them. The more you interact with others, the more empathetic you become.

This can help your relationships with loved ones, friends, and coworkers. You understand where they are coming from emotionally, giving you a better appreciation of who they are. When you express that you understand and accept their feelings, their appreciation for you and the relationship also improves.

Change equals difference. That's a basic definition, but it's truthfully what the change is. Something is different than it was before. This could be your job, a relationship, mother nature, or anything else. Where change is concerned, you come to grips with it before you've lived very long on this planet.

Almost all change is out of your control.

Even the most obsessively compulsive person who strives every minute of every day for control is taunted by this fact. Try as you may, your world will largely spin in any direction it wants. It doesn't stop and ask you what reality you'd like to experience.

You can try and influence it, and you might be successful in some ways. For instance, you can work really hard to get promoted. You can go out of your way to find out what your boss needs from you, and then you make sure that happens. You outwork your coworkers, take extra courses that help you move up the corporate ladder, and nail a big promotion.

While patting yourself on the back for your hard work and how it paid off, remember one thing ... your boss or someone above him still had the final say in whether you got promoted or not.

That's pretty humbling when you think about it.

Take a look at any area of your life. You'll see you don't always have as much influence as previously you thought you did. The best you can do is work on yourself, your relationships, and your environment to create a favorable reality.

Then when life steps in and throws some negative change in your face, remember to ask yourself this question.

"What Can I Control?"

Imagine you're going for a walk. It's a beautiful day. The world has treated you to a spectacular experience with sunny skies, birds chirping, and stress-relieving nature all around you.

Then immediately in your pathway, a brick wall appears out of nowhere. It wasn't there, and then it was. It's only a few feet wide, so you can easily walk around it. Instead, you repeatedly try to walk through it.

You can't control that this change has happened. What you can control is your response to it. Claim your sphere of control. Do what you can do, which is to move around the wall and continue your enjoyable walk.

Life will give you a lot of change you'd rather avoid. When this happens, don't waste a second of your time trying to influence something you have no control over. Determine what you can influence and what you can't. Then take action to turn something negative into the best possible outcome.

Focus on what you can control when you experience negative change. Trying to influence things that are blind to you is pointless. It wastes your time, cranks up your frustration, leads to anxiety and stress, and all of that can be avoided. You take away the power of negative change when you use your sphere of control to put it behind you as quickly as possible.

Change isn't always positive. When it is, that can be a pleasant surprise. We are so used to experiencing changes that we would rather avoid them, but it's a real treat when something wonderfully surprising happens.

Unfortunately, even someone who experiences almost nothing but positive change can be floored when something bad happens.

You might have a life of nothing but great change. Everything always goes your way. The change you plan and the change that catches you off guard are amazing. You move forward in life.

It's as if you live a dream existence. Then out of the blue, life decides to test you. A loved one dies. You lose your job. You're handed divorce papers. With this one significant change, you feel like your life is over.

As much as we would like to hope you never have to go through some change that's life-altering in a bad way, you know it'll happen. It might've already occurred in your life. When these changes give us no warning and we can't prepare for them, the onslaught of negative emotions, feelings, and thoughts can be crippling.

One way to best prepare yourself for these types of events that are going to happen is to start taking better care of yourself every day.

Simple Self-Care Tips That Help You Cope with Change.

You probably have some things you do to treat yourself occasionally. You have dinner at your favorite restaurant just because. You're not celebrating anything in particular. You decide to give yourself that wonderful experience because you deserve it.

Believe it or not, something as simple as that can help you deal with the ever-shifting life you'll experience. Here are a few other suggestions for activities that help you support emotional and mental well-being. These and other self-care practices can help you overcome the most difficult changes.

·        Take a 30-minute walk every day, no matter where you are.

·        Read a book.

·        Practice gratitude daily. Think about three things that you are grateful for in your life.

·        Learn to say "no" when it's the proper answer. This gives you more self-respect and a healthier self-image.

·        Take a day off from work and do nothing at all.

·        Join your best friend for lunch.

·        Perform a random act of kindness for a total stranger.

·        Laugh and smile.

Dress up. Get your hair done. Groom yourself. Get a massage. Take a long hot shower. Soak in a hot tub with your favorite essential oils. All of these are simple ways to take better care of yourself. They lead to stronger mental health. That can strengthen you, so you have the power to get through life's difficult moments.

Imagine that you're driving down a road. You're in your favorite vehicle. This is the car, truck, or SUV you really love. Sometimes merely getting in it and taking a ride going nowhere can put a positive spin on an otherwise tough day.

You play some music while you are driving. Your mood gets better still. You don't have a care in the world. You take the scenic route down a country road you have not traveled before. As you move down the road taking in all the scenery (while still driving carefully), you glance in your rearview mirror.

Good drivers do this regularly. It's important to know what's happening around you while piloting a vehicle. However, this time when you look, you see something weird.

It's not something that is going to affect you in any way. But it's strange nonetheless. You keep looking in your rearview mirror. You can't take your eyes off of that crazy thing. You know you should be focused on the road ahead of you and whatever changes you might have to deal with, but you're fixated on your rearview mirror.

Crash!

Your obsession with the object in your rearview mirror takes your eyes off the road ahead of you for too long. You veer off of the road and scrape a tree. Fortunately, you had decreased your speed enough that it's not too big of a deal. Still, there is a lesson to be learned.

What's Behind You Is Behind You.

Constantly obsessing about your past will never help you accept the change happening to you right now. It won't prepare you for any of the changes ahead of you either. You have to eventually take your eyes out of that rearview mirror, or something bad might happen.

When your life shifts negatively, it can be tough to get over it. That's just normal. Something may have been removed from your life that was very important. We're not here to say it will be easy to get over this event. We are saying that letting it rule your life is probably not the healthiest response.

Come to grips with whatever difficult change you have to accept. Let your emotions out. Don't hide them inside. Talk about the experience with someone. Then take whatever positives you can from experience, as hard as that may be.

Remember that as soon as anything happens, it quickly moves into your past.

If you have to deal with something negative, it will quickly be behind you. Don't keep staring at it in your rearview mirror. Accept what happened and put your attention on the road ahead of you as soon as you can.

Mantras are used to change your mindset. Some practices like yoga and meditation help you reprogram your brain and reach a better level of self-knowledge. They can also help you cope with change when you can't find a way to move on from something negative.

A mantra is simply a word or phrase that you repeat. That repetition tells your subconscious of a reality you want to create. This simple practice is incredibly powerful. It works because the subconscious cannot differentiate between reality and imagination.

The subconscious part of your mind believes whatever you tell it.

If you are walking in a park and see a dog chasing a butterfly, your vision sends that experience to your brain. The objective subconscious doesn't care one way or another about the dog, the butterfly, or the fact that this made you smile. It simply accepts the situation as real.

You can also convince it of something that is entirely fictitious. Imagine that the dog jumps onto the butterfly's back. The butterfly expands in size and flies the dog through the park. The dog and the butterfly morph into a dragon that leads you to his cave and shares all his gold and treasures with you.

That's reality to your subconscious. It's real because you told your subconscious it was real, even though it's obviously imagined. Whatever you tell it repeatedly is what it accepts as the truth.

This is why constantly engaging in negative self-talk creates a reality you would rather avoid. Whatever you tell your subconscious is what it will try to create in your reality.

Before, During, and After Some Important Change, Use Mantras to Help You Cope.

Change isn't always the greatest thing in the world. It can be downright nasty from time to time. It can also be wonderful. You build up the courage to ask your dream date out to dinner, and you are surprised that they would love to go. Parents have a child. You land that big promotion at work.

Those are all wonderfully positive things. Even so, they are still changes. If you're not careful, positive changes can be as disruptive in your life as their negative counterparts. Use the following mantras to help you cope with any type of change and how it may wreck your life.

·        "Things are changing around me, and that's okay."

·        "Not all change is good. That's okay. I can deal with this."

·        "I've experienced a lot of negative change in the past. And I'm still here. I am a survivor."

·        "This change is wonderful and positive. I'm worthy of good things happening to me."

Create your own mantra. Repeat it a few times each morning and each night. Don't wait for change to happen. Make this a daily practice. Then when some big change occurs, positive or negative, your mantra can help you balance your emotions and make the best out of the situation.

We usually think of change as bad, don't we? We have positive changes that roll into our lives from time to time, but by and large, we only tend to remember change as negative. It's the big scary monster hiding under our bed that comes out and interrupts our wonderful life from time to time.

One thing you probably understand about change is that it will happen. A lot of change we can't control.

Think about yourself as a child. Are you the same as that childhood version of yourself? Of course, you're not. Not only are you physically different, but emotionally, mentally, and in other ways, you have changed from that kid.

That's natural and normal. This is a simple way to show that change is necessary for growth. You can't move through a normal life cycle as a human without changing, and physiologically your body is changing millions of times every second.

If Change Is Normal and Natural, Why Do We See It as Bad?

Take some time to think about something difficult that you have overcome in your life. Choose an experience that caught you off-guard. You were not ready for it in any way. Fate just decided that your life was moving along too smoothly. So it threw you a curve when you thought a fastball was coming.

What were your feelings? If the negative change was big enough, you may have thought you wouldn't recover. Did you regret doing something that caused this unpredictable outcome? Many thoughts were flying around in your head at the time, and most weren't very positive.

Now, look at where you are today.

You survived that terrible change. You're still here. In what ways is your life better because you learned from that event? How did you grow as a person?

In many ways, you are probably in a much better place today than you were before that unsettling change occurred. It was normal and natural for you to see it as a bad thing. It ruined your life in some way.

What's also normal and natural is for your mind and emotions to figure out how to get past it. Sure, it probably took time. But you learned to move on. You think about that negative change now, which might still bother you slightly.

But you probably also move past it quickly when it pops up in your mind. That's why you shouldn't consider change as "bad" or "good." It's only change. It's going to happen.

Learn what lessons you can from the change that will inevitably occur in your life. Then take those lessons and shape a better life for yourself in the future, prepared to use change as a teacher rather than something you label as good or bad.

You use change as a classroom where you're the student. You take power out of negative change when you recognize it as something that happened. If you look at most change as bad or negative, you might fear it. That can keep you from growing as a person, which is the naturally healthy process that change offers us.

Trying to avoid change is silly when you really think about it. It's happening all the time around us. Foolhardy though it is, we often try to control everything happening. What a waste of time!

If we're honest with ourselves, we realize that we can barely control our actions, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. It's rather presumptuous of us to believe that we could control anything else, right?

Avoidance is a lack of acceptance. Think about it when you encounter that coworker who drives you crazy.

Your day is going fine, and your shift is almost over. You have plans for the evening and can't wait to leave work. Then your boss calls, and you feel you won't like what he says. Sure enough, the last part of your day has to be spent working on a project with Bob.

Bob drives you batty! He takes everything you say the wrong way. It seems like he goes out of his way to make interacting with you as difficult as possible. You're positive that he enjoys making you frustrated.

So you tell your boss you're not feeling well and must leave work early. Since there's only an hour left on your shift, he accepts that and tells you he hopes you feel better.

You avoided Bob rather than dealing with him. You end the call with your boss, smile, take a deep breath, clock out, and go home.

Bob Makes You Anxious, and You Avoided That Anxiety.

We picked the name Bob at random. There are probably many more great Bobs than people like the gentleman in this example. What we should've called him is Mr. Anxiety. Because that's what you're really avoiding here.

Dr. Edward A Selby is a contributor to Psychology Today. He wrote an article titled "Avoidance of Anxiety As Self-Sabotage. "

He talks about how it might be a normal knee-jerk reaction to avoid any change that makes us feel anxious. However, that doesn't mean it's the healthiest thing we can do. When you attack every change that makes you anxious, you can't grow.

When some difficult change enters your life, don't avoid it. You're sabotaging your growth. What if you talked to Bob about the situation and found that he was unaware of how you felt? Even if you suggested that Bob could be a better coworker, and he told you he enjoys making you feel that way, you feel better about yourself. You took a stand.

Whatever the outcome, you embraced the anxiety that came from change.

You were working by yourself, and the change was now you have to work with a coworker you can't stand. You learn much more about yourself by addressing the situation rather than avoiding it. And you never know. You might find that Bob feels the same way about you. Then the two of you can address what changes need to be made so you can create a healthier work environment.

When you think of the word "hug," what goes through your mind? You're probably not thinking of your enemies. Visions of a terrible monster or ravenously hungry predatory animal don't pop up. That's because you think of a hug as something positive you do with someone or something you care about.

You wouldn't hug a monster chasing you in your dreams or a lion in the wild looking at you like you're his next meal. You hug people and pets you love. It's an expression of affection and caring.

So why are we saying you should start hugging your failures?

Failures stink. You hate it when you lose, fail, or fall down. The last thing you want to do is embrace these experiences, right. Shouldn't you put them behind you as quickly as possible? If you give a great big bear hug to your failures, will they see that as a sign of encouragement and tell their friends to give you a visit?

While those are valid questions, maybe we're not being clear about the benefits of embracing your failures. This practice can help you deal with the negative life events you will inevitably experience.

How Failures Can Help You Cope with Change.

You might know someone who is stuck in life. Something terrible happened to them, and they couldn't move on. It might've occurred years ago. Yet they still haven't found a way to deal with it and continue their life.

This happens to some people. They experience a loss or failure of such magnitude that it paralyzes them. That person might go on living for several decades, but they are really just zombies walking through life. They're not mentally or emotionally present.

That's what can happen when you let change cripple you. It also reminds us why we need to be recognizing our failures.

You Can Learn A Lot When You Fall or Fail.

Whether it was your fault or not, being honest about your failure can help you grow stronger. You learn a lot about yourself as you move past it.

The next time you fall down or experience failure, brush yourself off. Learn what you can. Recognize the failure. See it as simply one of the many things that will happen in your life.

Then look at the changes it brings about. Don't be mad if you have to deal with some negative change. Look at it as a challenge. See how you can turn those changes into the best possible positive experience. This can turn negative change into a positive reality.