Are you hungry enough? Do you dream of spending more time and energy pursuing your particular brand of creativity? Or of making creativity a bigger part of your work life? For many of us, it seems like all the space is taken up by everyday demands, the realities of making a living, taking care of relationships and other responsibilities. But often we are just too comfortable with the status quo to make room for those specific creative expressions that might offer us increased life satisfaction and joy.
One of the great truths of life is that change is inevitable. Change is hard on many levels, hard for any one. Especially the changes in circumstances that we don’t choose.
Today I want to tell a story focusing on a particular area of change, that is, changing ourselves. While it is a far more fruitful place to spend our time and energy than the more popular pastime of trying to change others, changing ourselves is nonetheless a daunting task.
Yet people tend to think self- change will be far easier than it is. We hope it will be easy, that once we can envision the desired new self, that we will wake up to that new self essentially overnight. We tend to think that it is about will power alone and that failure to change is a weakness. We tend to think that we haven’t changed because we haven’t found the right self-help book yet or haven’t had time to really focus on changing. Maybe we think, I’ll make that change later, some day, when the circumstances are better in certain ways. And time goes by while we wait for the auspicious signs.People especially tend to give up easily on creative pursuits because of confusions about talent and skill or because we have conflicts between the call of the practical and longings we deny or deem frivolous or self-indulgent.
I am not saying there are no instances of transformative experiences. There are epiphanies, there are quantum leaps of growth, there are events that strike like lightning and alter our internal realities. But even those things we call life- altering tend to change us in incremental ways, as the impact of peak moments quickly settles back into our familiar selves, leaving rich but fading memories. And sometimes we acquire a lingering dissatisfaction with what is. We look around thinking, “I thought it would all be different after that, that I would be different … what happened? Can I ever get back to the mountain top?”
Transformation is slow for most of us. It is a plugger’s path, step by step moving to a new way of being, step by step to being wiser, healthier, more creative, more doing what we long to do.
The best change model I know comes from a study of self-changers, particularly people changing habits and addictions, such as smokers, alcoholics, dieters and so on. In their book Changing for Good; James Prochaska, John Norcross and Carlo DiClemente delineate what they found that worked for those folk into 6 stages.
The first stage the authors name Pre-contemplation. In this stage a person may not even be aware of a need to change, or is only dimly so. As new information comes in, awareness of desire to change begins to spark and a person may move to stage 2, Contemplation. In this stage a person is beginning to consider a desire to change, beginning to notice the pros and cons of change, to consider a commitment.
As the pros for change gradually get stronger than the cons, a person moves into stage 3, Preparation. In this stage the commitment gets stronger, and the person begins to make plans for how to bring about the change, asking questions such as “what are the replacement behaviors going to be? Who is in the support network? How will falling into old patterns be dealt with? What are environmental cues and supports?
Finally, when the planning for all contingencies that can be predicted has happened, only now, in the 4th stage, does the actual action of change begin. In this Action stage, a person implements changes, follows through with the planning and achieves a level of consistent change.
Then comes Stage 5 Maintenance. This is the time to deepen the commitment to the new behavior, in thought and deed, and to begin to trust that change will last, to deal with relapses if they occur. In the 6th stage, Termination, the change process is considered to be completed, a person is confident of the new way of being and new behaviors are automatic, fully integrated into one’s way of life.
Like most stage models, these stages are not experienced as discrete linear steps, but more as a spiral of experience. Many people recycle through the stages, the first 4 in particular. They may linger in one stage much longer than another. The length of time to move through the process is intensely individual. And some people would argue that there is no Termination stage, because maintaining a change always requires a certain amount of vigilance. With what we know now about the ways even the brain changes, we do have hope that many of the changes we make will endure.
Why talk about change today? Because living a more creative life, particularly pursuing an activity where mastery is desired, requires an intentional, focused process of change. Making art, writing, mindful living, making music, all these things require practice, persistence through failure, commitment to keep going when it would be easier to stop.
The decision to commit to the change is key. When you decide there are more pros than cons to incorporating creative practices into your life, the small steps matter, they accumulate and build toward change. If you want to write, and don’t have time to write, commit to 250 words a day, about one double spaced page of 12 point font. In a month you will have written 7500 words, 30 pages about one or many things. Not the novel you hope to write, but it is 7500 words you have now put on paper. 7500 words that express your thoughts, through a process that taught you something about how you like to write sentences, a process that made you begin to think of yourself as a writing person, a slight shift of identity towards claiming the title “writer”. 7500 words, instead of zero words if you had lived through the month with only the thought, “I don’t have time to write.”
And who knows? Maybe the next month you find yourself writing 500 words a day.
* fishbowl photo from iStockPhoto
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FYI About Corey Blake, March 3 episode
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