Did you ever wake up one day and realize that you’ve been working way too hard at something? That there is a much better way to accomplish the exact same thing, with much less effort and struggle?

This waking up happened when I was listening to a recording of a relationship therapist talking about how he gets people back on track. He mentioned that they have to “do the work” and how it took a lot of commitment, and one had to be in this “for the long haul”. I was not exactly thrilled by this labour-intensive approach, to say the least.

Overall, his approach was one which contained a lot of concepts that I hear commonly promoted:

– success is the result of persistence and much hard work,
– having a better life takes a lot of effort,
– changing your behaviours requires serious, long term work, and
– the process of personal change takes place over a long time.

My well-considered, totally scientific, and peer-reviewed reply to these concepts is “phooey”. Now, before you think I’ve jumped ship into the camp of “all you need is to think positive thoughts, say some affirmations and invoke the all-powerful Law of Attraction” crowd, relax. Having created a couple of rather successful companies in my former life as an entrepreneur, I know from personal experience (and a fair amount of related research) that neither the “work long and hard for many years” nor the “magic wishing bean” formula is what is really happening when people get more of what they want in their lives.

In a nutshell, what I have observed is that when people are able to achieve personal and business success, it is a result of several factors, including:

– doing the right things in the right order at the right time
– making appropriate mid-course corrections when needed
– having a vision of where they want to go, and some solid plans on how to get there
– being mainly free of any internal blocks to success.

This last factor is a key one, as anyone who has self destructive bad habits and/or beliefs will not be able to succeed, no matter how much effort they invest. They will continually find ways to stop themselves from obtaining that success, often at the last minute. More information on this can be found here.

The importance of altering the influence of self-sabotaging habits, thoughts and beliefs is not new – people have been talking about this for many years. In fact, one of the most famous books of the past century was Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, a work with much influence on many of the modern approaches to self improvement and success. While it certainly contains many useful and empowering concepts, this book, and much of the self-improvement industry, concentrates mainly on cerebral changes without giving much consideration for the rest of our being. It is sort of like trying to improve a car’s ride by properly inflating one of the four tires, and neglecting the other three. It is possible that the car will drive a little better with that one properly inflated tire, but the goal of a better ride is unlikely to be achieved if the other tires are under or over inflated. The same thing happens when we only focus on improving our minds, and neglect to take care of our bodies and our hearts.

The other potential problem that arises when one focuses exclusively on improving one’s thought processes in order to institute personal or professional change is that the likelihood of disappointment is higher – all the eggs are in one basket. If those efforts to improve thought processes are not successful, then one could feel more like a failure than a success.

Must… Work… Harder…

There is a phenomenon in which people often re-double their efforts when what they are doing does not produce the results they want. They see no other option than to “try harder”.  I was in that place at times during my life, so I know what frustration can arise when one tries and tries and still doesn’t reach a goal.

The paradigm guiding these sorts of approaches can be expressed as

Awareness + Effort = Success

We become aware of something such as a bad habit that we have, and we then expend a lot of effort trying to either suppress it or convert that habit into something useful. Maybe we put up notes around the house or office, reminding ourselves to not do “X” or to always do “Y”. Maybe we create some home-brew aversion therapy, punishing ourselves each time we catch ourselves doing something we decided not to do any more. Or maybe we tell ourselves what we want to be, trying to visualize it and repeating these affirmations day after day. And, to add to our self-inflicted labours, we analyze and study relentlessly our habits, beliefs and thoughts, trying to figure our why we do “X”. No matter what particular approach we adopt under this paradigm, the underlying principle is the same: change takes much effort and time and is a struggle.

For many years, I laboured under that illusion, like so many others. I “worked’ at change. I used many techniques and “tools of the personal development trade” to try to shape my thoughts, to attempt to convert them, to instill what I wanted in place of what was there. It was a lot of work. It was often a struggle, and it generated disappointment any time I was not able to advance as fast or as fully as I wanted.

The funny thing is that I was following the script that so many personal growth systems claim is the answer: work at altering your thought patterns to match those of the successful people and you will become successful. What is rarely, if ever, mentioned is that this sort of struggle against our existing beliefs and patterns not only wears on us, it is expensive in terms of emotional and physic energy. It is almost like having a tug-of-war between your two arms – how can that result in a real victory?

Fortunately, all this “work” taught me something very valuable – success was not obtained through the sole application of awareness and effort and that struggling with myself was actually counter-productive.   I discovered that rather than trying to use force and willpower to get myself somewhere, I could get there doing something rather different – I could relax.

Let go and flourish

After trying so many of the effort-based approaches, I came across a path that is so simple and yet so effective. This paradigm can be expressed as:

Awareness Deepened + Intentional Release = Possibility = Success

In this paradigm, when we become aware of something about ourselves that we want to be different, such as a habit or belief that does not serve us, we deepen into a full awareness of the experiences around that situation. We notice how we are when we are involved with it, paying attention to our body sensations, our feelings and emotions, our thoughts, etc. Having noticed what goes on for us, we then intentionally release any of the emotional and mental glue that holds that unresourceful habit, belief or thought in place. At the beginning, it may be a bit hard to figure out how to release this glue, and that is where a system like AER can help a lot. Once we intentionally release any emotional and/or mental glue, it suddenly becomes possible to consider all sorts of new possible approaches to our projects and even to our beliefs and worldview. Projects which were hard become easier. Motivation is easier to find and resistance to success and change lessen, often dramatically.

For example, if I was considering applying for a new job, and I was very nervous about it, the old paradigm would have me trying to psyche myself up for the interview, perhaps cajoling myself into a sense of false confidence.  I might have talks with myself, rationalizing my fear in an attempt to minimize them. I might repeat over and over some sort of mantra-like affirmation such as “I am worthy of this job”. These are all common coping mechanisms being applied to try to wrestle feelings into submission using mental processes. This could be an exhausting tug-of-war, with much expenditure of effort and time and great potential for stress to be stored up from the process.

With the Intentional Releasing paradigm, one would simply start by noticing any tension in the body that arose upon contemplating the interview, set the intention to allow that normal human feeling to flow out, and then use an integral release technique such as AER to facilitate the release of the tension. If anything else arose, such as thoughts of self-doubt, these too would be released in turn until all the “stuff” that was coming up and bothering us when we contemplated the job interview was released out of our system. This releasing process is not one of struggle or effort, but one of allowing normal accumulated stress and feelings to flow out. Instead of feeling worn down by the effort, one feels relieved to have let go of the blocks.

While there are a few things that can slow down this release process, such as any attachment to beliefs and feelings, etc., most people quickly distinguish between themselves and their feelings, thoughts and beliefs, and are quite happy to let those that do not serve them any longer to flow out.

So, if you have been trying hard to shape yourself into a better person or achieve a challenging goal and have found it a tiring and stressful process, consider using the new paradigm of releasing instead.

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved