The Power Of Change
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Changing Why for Why Not Can Change Your Life
The most frequent complaint that many people have about the way their life is going just has to be “nothing ever changes”. People are sick and tired of their lives going the same way day after day. Most of us have probably had the feeling that we are living out the film “Groundhog Day” with ourselves in the Bill Murray role. Get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, with little changing in between. And the effect of this is, all too often, to make us discontented and fed up with our lot in life. And what do we do? Well, we get up, go to work, come home and go to bed. As a wise man once said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
If we want our lives to change, it is we ourselves who need to take the first step in changing them. Life is not easy. Nor is it always exciting. And changing things is certainly not something that will happen overnight. But one thing that is undeniable is that too many of us shy away from changing things because we are concerned about how a change will affect our lives. Often the suggestion of doing something new is met by a response of “Why?”. “I could look for a new job, but why? I already have one!” “I could take up a hobby, but why? I have little enough time to myself as it is!” These same people will then complain about boredom at least once a day. The responsibility for changing things lies with individuals, not with anyone else.
When the idea of doing something different is floated, don’t just think “Why should I?”. This just makes it easy to back out of changing your life. Not having enough reasons to do something is not an excuse – why not do it because it’s different? If it turns out you don’t like it, well, you live and learn. If it turns out that you love it, then you have added a new string to your bow, a new colour to your spectrum. In short, it makes your life a great deal richer. You could sit around for ever waiting for someone to convince you of the worthiness of an idea – or you could test it for yourself. You could go on forever asking “Why?” and all the person will be able to give you are their own reasons. Asking “Why not?” means finding out for yourself.
Sometimes people are scared of change – that’s normal. There is no guarantee that a change is going to bring all the joy you hoped it would. But opening yourself up to the possibilities out there is the only way you are going to experience the things you feel you are missing out on right now. It may sound like a naïve and wide-eyed interpretation of the world, but unless you give yourself the chance to do something different, you will carry on cursing the status quo. Better to light an candle than curse the darkness.
To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Entrepreneur Journey site. This article originally published on the above website on Mar 24, 2009.
