13 Reasons You're Not Making the Changes You Want To

Most of us have changes we would like to make in our lives—myself included. Yet, doing so can feel hard. So hard, there are books, workshops, programmes, and whole industries dedicated to unpacking and exploring making changes. And we still struggle!

                                   

In this post, sharing some of the most common reasons we aren’t making changes we want to make (and what to do about them). I’m a big believer in the idea that understanding leads to clarity and action. When we’re struggling to make changes we want to make and don’t understand why this can leave us feeling even more out of control and helpless. We don’t want to stop and pitch our tent in the “understanding” phase, but it is an important stepping stone towards action and becoming who we are.  Let’s go:

1. You’re avoiding discomfort

Making changes comes with discomfort. Change can feel risky, the outcome uncertain, and making the change might require us to face all kinds of experiences we’d rather avoid: judgement, rejection, failure, feeling our feelings rather than numbing them, and so on. I’ve found it useful to think about change from a perspective described by writer Srinivas Rao: change isn’t about how much you want it, it’s about how uncomfortable you’re willing to be to make it happen.

2. Change takes energy

Doing what we’ve always done is the path of least resistance, even if it’s making us miserable. Making changes to habits and patterns in our life requires conscious effort and energy. If you’re not willing to expend that energy, you won’t change. Recognize that making any changes requires effort and help yourself out. Set up habits in other areas of your life that support you. Create a “When Life Works” list, get support , and put the same energy into making this change as you would into any important, life-defining project.

3. You’re experiencing fear of the unknown.

What will happen if you make this change? We often focus on the potential downside: what if I fail? What if this doesn’t work out? But alongside this, we can also have fears based on a very different outcome too: What if I succeed? What if this changes other areas of my life? What if I make the change then don’t enjoy it? What if I make the change, then screw it up, lose everything, and end up back where I started? What if my partner/girlfriend/boyfriend/parents/siblings/co-workers/pets don’t like this change? As well as paying attention to your fears of the unknown around negative outcomes, give voice to your fears of success too. Every change—even the best, most life-enhancing changes—come with some degree of loss and grieving for the path not taken. Get conscious of all the ways you are experiencing fear of the unknown, whatever the outcome, and give these feelings and fears a voice before moving forward.

4. You’re trying to change too many things at once

As the saying goes, “You can do anything, but not everything.” If we have multiple changes we want to make in our lives, we might feel internal pressure to do all the things right now. In reality, this isn’t sustainable (see the point above about energy). Making one change, even a small one, can require all the mindfulness and effort we have to spare. Having self-awareness around the things we want to change and the aspirations to do so is valuable, however, it’s also important to remember: you have time. Slow, steady, and sustainable progress that takes you towards where you want to be in the long-term is much better than a flurry of activity that burns out and leaves you feeling despondent and self-critical.

5. You’re seeking support and validation from the wrong people.

Support is crucial for making changes. The bigger the change, the more support we need. When we’re changing something meaningful about our lifestyle, health, career, finances, or any other big aspect of our lives, we want to make sure we’re getting the right support.

By default, most of us turn to family and close friends. However, this isn’t always the best source of support, especially if they are engaging in the patterns, activities, or dynamics you’d like to change. If your friends are all smokers and you decide you want to quit, they won’t be the best people to support you (unless they are willing to join you). This doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them about your decision, but it’s worth being mindful that they might have their own feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and fears about the change—conscious or unconscious—that colour their response.

Support might not even come in the form of people we know. A role model doesn’t have to be someone we have a personal relationship with. Instead, they might be someone who has trodden a similar path before us and is sharing their journey in public.

Finding the right support doesn’t mean shunning anyone who disagrees with you. Disagreements can be valuable, throw up helpful questions we might not have considered, and force us to think through how this change fits with our principles and values. But we want to make sure we’re disagreeing with people who will respect our individuality and autonomy and are committed to helping us grow.

6. You are expecting change to be easy or instantaneous.

Some changes are easy, but most are not, and it’s often difficult to predict which changes will fall into either category. Making changes that might seem like a piece of cake, in theory, might actually be teeth-grittingly difficult in practice. And that’s OK. This is why it’s important to hope for the best and plan for the worst. If we begin from a place of certainty that it’s going to be hard, it will be. So we want to approach change believing we can do it, without expecting it to be quick and easy. You will slip up and it takes grit and perseverance to continue. That’s where planning for the worst can be useful.

As you approach your change, consider: what will you do when you slip up? What will your next step be? How will you respond when you’re tempted to revert to your old pattern/behavior? How will you stick to the path you’ve chosen? Returning to the example of quitting smoking, you’ll find it useful to ask yourself: How will I respond when I’m in a situation where other people are smoking? When I’m craving a cigarette, what will I do instead? What other activities can I engage in during those times until the craving passes? Hope for the best, plan for the worst, and you’ll find reality often lands somewhere in the middle 🙂

7. Making changes from a place of “not good enough”

How you think about yourself matters, including what you make a change mean about you as a person. When we decide it’s time to change, we often do so through realizing something in our lives isn’t working or we’re no longer happy with the way things are. We might have reached rock bottom, or we might simply have arrived at a place of thinking to ourselves “OK, that’s enough now.” If we’re wanting to change something we don’t feel good about, it’s easy to slip into scarcity-based thinking and motivation. Perhaps we believe we’re not good enough until we make a change, perhaps we believe other people would judge and reject us if they knew how hard this change was for us to make, or perhaps we are engaging in “when…then…” thinking (e.g. “When I lost 10 pounds, then I’ll feel confident enough to start dating.”)

Needless to say, setting goals and aspirations out of fear and scarcity is not conducive to happiness and life satisfaction. Here’s something we tend to forget when it comes to change and self-kindness:

We can be self-accepting and still have things we want to do and ways in which we want to grow. We can believe we are enough and also want to explore our capabilities and potential further.

The changes we make from a place of believing we are already enough are a lot more fulfilling, life-enriching and worthwhile than the changes we strive to achieve because we think we need those changes to feel good about ourselves.

8. You’re letting your inner critics rule the show

Let’s cast our attention over to our inner critics for a few moments.

Although our inner critics mean well and are trying to protect us in their own ways, they end up doing more harm than good. When we listen to the voices telling us we’re useless, we’ll never change, it’s hopeless, why bother, there’s something wrong with us if we’re finding it this hard, etc., this won’t help us change. It’s more likely to cause us to slip into the “not enough” thinking I described above.

While there is no single solution to dealing with our inner critics, if yours are ruling the show, I invite you to start gently challenging them. I don’t believe in telling our inner critics to shut up or calling them names (do you like it when someone does that to you? I don’t…), but it is important to set boundaries with them. So if your inner critic is telling you how useless you are, encourage it to be a little more constructive by asking questions like “So what would it look like to not be useless in this situation? What would you do instead?” Keep persevering with your questions and see what they offer in response.

8. You’re experiencing confirmation bias

We view new information, situations, and opportunities through the lens of what we already believe. In some situations, this can be helpful (for example, “assuming the best” is a lens I endeavor to use). It can also be unhelpful. If we believe we aren’t good enough, we will unconsciously hone in on experiences that (from our perspective) prove this belief, while filtering out experiences that contradict it. This means if deep down we don’t think we can make the changes we want to make, we will look for information that confirms that hypothesis, and reject information that suggests otherwise.

The first step to overcoming confirmation bias is to notice it and to open ourselves up to all information: that which confirms our existing beliefs and that which encourages us to create new ones. The next time you notice yourself spotlighting all the evidence you can’t make the change you want to make, ask yourself: “What’s the evidence I can do this?”

9. You’re using an external locus of control

Our “locus of control” describes the degree to which we feel we’re in control over the events of our lives and what causes our actions. An internal locus of control means we believe we have more control, and external locus of control means we believe we have less control (note: this isn’t determined how much control we say we think we have, but how we actually behave).

We don’t inhabit a fixed point on the internal-external scale: our sense of control and agency shifts from experience to experience. Most situations contain elements we can control and elements we can’t, and it benefits us to pay attention to those we can. If someone rear-ends us at a set of traffic lights because they’re busy texting, that’s not something we can control, but making sure we have adequate insurance to cover incidents like that is.

When we have an external locus of control, we feel at the mercy of other people, our environment, and other external forces. This mindset makes it harder to make the changes we want to make because we feel like we’re always being blown off course by things outside of our control. This can leave us feeling helpless, demotivated, and stuck. If we have an external locus of control, we’re more likely to blame our failure to make changes we want to make on things like being too busy, a lack of support from other people, it was too rainy to go running, etc.

With an internal locus of control, we’re more likely to explore what we can control and influence in the situation. If we’re too busy, how can we free up more time to focus on our desired change? If our partner isn’t giving us the support we want, can we try talking to them about it, or seeking support elsewhere? If it’s raining all week, can we go running indoors or invest in some wet weather gear?

10. You’re doing what worked for someone else, not what works for you

As mentioned , having a role model for your change can be helpful. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that what works for them won’t always yield the same results for you. Besides, what works for someone who is two steps ahead of you at this stage of their journey might not work for you where you are on your journey.

Knowing when to heed the advice and when to say “thank you!” before going your own merry way is an important part of becoming who you are. Trying to fit ourselves into a mold that just isn’t right for us will leave us feeling anxious, out of place, and stuck. I’ve found this hard in the past. Part of me feels deferential to authority figures so, if someone sounds like they know what they’re talking about, I think they must know better than me. Not always the case! I often have to remind myself that I’m the one living my life, no one else, so I have permission to go my way, in my style, and in my timeframe.

11. You have a fixed mindset

Growing up, I believed I was unrealistic. This belief was rooted in a fixed mindset: I thought you either were  or you weren’t, and I was in the “not” camp. That belief also came with a smidgen of shame. So I would avoid any situation that came with the potential to show my so-called innate lack  and stay in my comfort zone.

As an adult, I’ve done many things that contradict that belief, But until I changed my thinking about this from “you either have it or you don’t” to “this is something I can improve over time,” I didn’t give myself the chance to try all these new experiences. The truth is most things we believe to be “fixed” about ourselves aren’t. Intelligence, optimism, skills—these are all things we can influence and change. Before we can do that, though, we need to accept they are changeable. As long as we are holding on to beliefs we’re “Just not someone who is X” (athletic/creative/good with money/can lose weight/insert your own desired change here), we won’t make the changes we want to make.

12. You don’t really want to change (yet?)

Sometimes, we kinda sorta want to change but we don’t want to want to. And, if that’s where you are, that’s a fine place to be.

The saying “if you’re not changing, you just don’t want it enough” is popular in the personal growth and coaching worlds. It’s a statement thrown around as fact when the reality is often far more nuanced and complicated. As shown, there are many reasons we might encounter stumbling blocks when changing our lives. Suggesting that any time we find change hard it’s because we don’t want it enough lacks understanding and, at worst, is shaming.

But, while I don’t agree with that theory as a blanket statement, there are certain situations in which it applies. Sometimes we think we want to make a change because that’s what other people have told us we should do, or because we’re listening to old internal scripts about the way we should live and the person we should be. But we—our true selves—don’t actually want to make that change. And not wanting to change isn’t a sign you’re lazy/a coward/a loser, but a sign you’re listening to yourself and challenging those “should.”

We also might not have reached that point where the pain of staying where we are is greater than the pain of making the change . In this case why would we trade less pain for more pain? That doesn’t mean we can’t make the change, but if we’re struggling and this is the reason, it’s important to acknowledge and accept this is where we are right now.

A useful line of questioning in this situation is: If, one year from now, I haven’t made this change, how am I going to feel? What is my life going to look like? What impact will it have on other areas of my life? What about five years from now? What about 10 years?

And, if I make this change, how am I going to feel one year from now? What is my life going to look like? What impact will it have on other areas of my life? What about five years from now? What about 10 years? As well as thinking about your responses to these questions, allow yourself to feel your emotional response too. Put yourself in the shoes of Future You one, five and 10 years from now. Imagine what it would be like to be him or her.

How does that shift your perspective in the present?

13. You’re looking for a magic bullet

Change takes time, and anyone from the “you can just decide to be happy!” school of thought who tries to sell you on the idea there is one thing that will transform your life and make all your troubles disappear is deceiving themselves and you. This is a common mindset and one that is enticing. The dark side of this is that a) it’s not true, and b) if you’re someone for whom change doesn’t come easy (most of us), it can leave you wondering whether there’s something wrong with you given other people manage to spirit away their issues and your journey is taking longer. The good news is wherever you’re starting from, change can happen. There won’t be one magic bullet that will solve your problems and drastically improve your life for the better. It’s likely to be a combination of things, plus dedicated effort on your part. But it is possible and yours for the taking.