Creating Lasting Changes

Have you ever wanted to make changes in your life, and found yourself staying in the same place struggling, stressing and getting more overwhelmed? Like a car stuck in the mud you push harder on the gas pedal doing the same thing and getting no where, except deeper and deeper in the mud! The insane part of this is we want to change, but keep doing the same thing hoping for a different result. Spiritually, I’m reminded that we need to persevere through our struggles, and that they must finish their work to build our character and strength. God also keeps you in struggles so you will learn what not to keep doing and realize you need to make changes, to get a different result. Years ago, I heard six simple steps developed by Tony Robbins that could enable a person to make empowering changes in their life. Whether you want to lose weight, change your attitude, change spiritually, be more organized, improve relationships, or build your practice, these six steps will put enough leverage on you to make the changes and make them stick.

Once you use these and become proficient at them, you will be able to facilitate changes in people around you to help them overcome the stuck in the mud life they are leading. Applied to your practice this will increase patient starts, family referrals and retention for wellness programs.

1) The first point may seem simple but it’s the most important of all. Decide. Decide what you want to change, and be specific! Next, ask yourself what you want to change to. What do you want to get rid of and what do you want instead? How bad do you want to change? If you had to stay where you’re at, how would you feel now and in the next few years? Now think of what you want to change to. How would you see your life changing? How would you feel then?

Now ask yourself what is preventing you from changing? I guarantee you either have some limiting belief, fear or uncertainty that links more pain to changing then staying where you are at.

The reason we don’t change is we have mixed neuro-associations. This means you aren’t associating enough pain to staying where you are at and enough pleasure to where you could be.

2) Therefore, the second key is to get leverage on yourself by linking more pain to where you are, than changing. How have you been robbing yourself by not changing? Are your beliefs consistent with the way you’ve been living? Most of the time they are not. Therefore, you must raise your standards. We tend to compartmentalize our behaviors so we make certain actions okay, but they are out of character for who we are or how we really believe. This drives us crazy!! An example is a doctor who smokes and drinks but, tries to tell his patients about good nutrition. To leverage yourself list your values. Ask yourself what’s most important to me in my life, marriage, business, etc. Set boundaries in your life based on who you really are. Are your current actions ripping you off of the life you want to live? Are you getting secondary gain from not changing i.e. some secondary pleasure, comfort, support or attention that you would not get if you changed? Think of more ways it would be pleasurable to make the change.

3) Next make a list of the things you are doing or lack there of to stay where you are at. Identify the “patterns” you follow, for example when you get pressured, you may be quick to anger, or you turn to a bad habit like drinking or smoking, or taking it out on your spouse by arguing. What you need to do is write down pattern interrupts to do when you start to get into these states. For example, if you trust God, pray for His help to help you change and think of a prayer or Bible verse to repeat and turn to when you begin to get into the state you want to change. Ask yourself certain questions to focus the mind in another direction, exercise, do certain movements, think of certain pictures, thoughts or events that will force you to change your association. Sing a specific song. Scramble words or pictures, so everything around you looks like a cartoon. The point is INTERRUPT your pattern. Practice this by thinking of the thing you want to change and as soon as you associate to it or start to get the feeling from it – go immediately into your pattern interrupt, until the feeling subsides. For more techniques refer to Tony Robbins, Personal Power and Awaken The Giant Within.

4) Create an empowering alternative to the thing you are changing. You must know where you want to be or what you want to change to, and you must stack pleasure to it. For example, exercise briskly and drink a lot of water every time you want to smoke or drink alcohol. Every time you abstain from going to the mall to spend money you don’t have, and you put it in your savings plan instead, celebrate with a romantic evening with your spouse at home! You’ll begin to see that spending quality time with each other is more endearing than trying to buy your happiness thru material things. You must create an empowering alternative or your change won’t stick.

5) Condition the new pattern by making it a habit. Set up a “system” to change your “pattern” of doing things until it’s a “habit” and you do it automatically. Conditioning means reinforcing a pattern to change your behavior. If you have a system you will condition a pattern of doing things. This is why our seminar and home study course works so well. It’s a “system” of communication strategies to reposition patients to wellness thinking. The system conditions the doctors and staff to a new communication pattern until it’s engrained in you and it becomes habit. Your repositioning of patients from using chiropractic for back pain to seeing you as part of the health care team for wellness becomes easy. Conditioning your pattern also involves anchoring it to something that will trigger that state or feeling. When you get in an empowering state where you feel emotionally strong do something like snap your finger, clench your fist, stand a certain way, say a phrase, scream “yes” or “praise God!” A good example is what you do when your favorite sport team makes the winning shot, goal or touchdown. What do you do or say? How do you stand? That’s a position anchor. If you do that same thing when you are making your change your neuro-association will be pleasure to the change and you will feel pleasure in doing it. Then, by firing that anchor voluntarily you should be able to reproduce your positive state or at least neutralize the negative one.

6) The last thing is to test your change by future pacing it. Imagine your change and how your life will be with that change. Fire your anchor as you think of yourself in an old pattern and see if it changes your state to your new feelings of pleasure. If not, repeat steps one thru five. My favorite anchors are prayers and Bible verses. Choose something that moves you, or you won’t change.

Once you’ve gotten good at these six steps, write down your patient’s obstacles and apply the six steps to facilitate them to change. My audio tapes will help you with these communication strategies. Good luck.