Transforming hidden patterns for personal growth starts with the courage to tell yourself the truth.
What’s stopping you from changing might be under the surface. In this episode of Stories of Change with Kim Harris which was aired live on Yarra Valley FM we discover the less well known reasons we won’t change or are afraid to face change. Listen or read the transcript below to learn more.
Key Takeaways
- Fear and Change: Fear often stops us from embarking upon a change project. Understanding and handling our emotions, particularly fear, is crucial in navigating change effectively.
- Self-Defeating Behaviours: Unconscious assumptions, beliefs, and hidden commitments can sabotage our efforts towards change. Identifying and challenging these behaviours is essential.
- The Power of Language: Language shapes our perceptions and behaviors. Developing emotional and evaluative richness in our language can support us in navigating change more effectively.
- Openness to Change: Embracing change requires openness and envisioning a better future for oneself. It’s a process that starts with understanding oneself and being true to one’s desires and values.
- Community and Togetherness: Significant change often requires collective effort. Building a supportive community can facilitate the change process and provide encouragement and resources along the way.
What stops you from changing?
First you need to point out what the real problem is, but not just for the purpose of pointing it out, to respond to what you see.
How are you this morning? My name is Kim Harris. This is Stories of Change on Yarra Valley FM. Glad that you could join me. Today I’m going to be talking about change. This is what we are embarking on together because recently we’ve all been going through quite a significant change in society.
In our response lies our growth and freedom, so it’s how we respond to events that often helps us to grow and feel that sense of freedom around what’s happening.
So I’m going to be talking about change and what stops you from actually creating change in your life. Wouldn’t you like to know?
What is that mechanism that just gets in the way and sometimes sabotages us? So we’re going to unpack that this morning. First up, I’m going to play a bit of a song here. We’ve got Phil Collins with Don’t Lose My Number.
In our response lies our growth and freedom.
Kim Harris
That was Phil Collins, Don’t Lose My Number and some really great lyrics there on the subject of change. It’s going to get worse if we wait too long.
What stops you?
What are your self-defeating behaviours when it comes to change?
Well, I’ll tell you what, there’s a bit of a big word I’m going to sound it out for you and if you can say it, good luck. It’s called metathesiophobia and it’s literally the fear of change and it is an actual phobia.
So there is a big difference between fears, just our normal garden variety type of fears which is driven by a real biological response to keep us safe and actual full-blown phobias.
I’m going to talk about that in another show but there is a difference between fear and phobias but metathesiophobia is the fear of change and some people definitely do have this as a phobia. That could be you as you’re listening and this is why we need to start talking about this because we are all facing significant changes in the future and the Community Enterprise FoundationTM got together and asked me to put forward this project for you guys called which we’re calling Togetherness FX and it’s all about the effects of being together, the effects of coming out and literally being in the flesh with one another face to face, getting into some good conversations and just getting involved again back in the world. Very, very, very important for so many reasons for our mental health, for our well-being, for our physical health, our social capital as well, which is another great concept which is around how successful you are based on the connections that you’re making in your world, but we do have some fear!
We definitely have some fears around change so that could be in this situation the change from being maybe being a bit of a home-body and coming out into the community and starting to connect again. There could be a few little triggers in there of fear so that’s what I’m going to be talking about now.
That’s one of the number one things that stops us from embarking upon a change project for ourselves.
So what do we do about this?
What do we do about our self-defeating behaviours?
What do we do about our natural biological responses because fear essentially is a biological response?
Well, good to know there is lots of really, really good things we can do.
So fear is really an emotion-based issue so if you notice that you’re having a bit of a fear response being triggered like you’re a bit scared, a bit nervous, then you need to get good at handling your emotions and thankfully there is definitely some frameworks that we can use to get really good at handling our emotions.
So that’s one of our self-defeating behaviours and I thought I would trigger maybe some fear and trepidation in myself as a bit of an experiment while you’re listening. So I’ve got some songs here that I’ve chosen this morning that I’ve never heard before and I quite often pre-listen to music and prepare my music very intentionally for the purpose of elevating your mood as you listen along.
But this morning I’ve decided I’m going to go off the reservation, promote a little bit of fear and then talk through what that experience is like just so that you can see that I’m the kind of person that really walks my talk. I actually really do look for things that will trigger a fear response in me so that I can practice and get really good at handling some of these stronger emotions. So here we go. I’ve got a song here by Ron Pope. It’s called “A Drop in the Ocean”. I’ve never heard it before. I hope it’s a good one. Fingers crossed. Enjoy this.
Change doesn’t always have to be scary, but sometimes it is.
Kim Harris
Well, that was a bit of a failed experiment. I actually did know that song so the Ron Pope song just before our sponsors there “A Drop in the Ocean”. I love that song actually and that’s my mushy brain. I’m really good at remembering lyrics and songs when I’m listening to them but I’m terrible at artist names and terrible at names of songs.
Anyway, we progress! And I guess the point I’m trying to make is that change (in that example) I was changing from being quite prepared to kind of being a bit more spontaneous and going with the flow and nothing bad happened! We didn’t burst into flames. Everything is okay. I’m okay. You’re okay. It was a beautiful song.
So change doesn’t always have to be scary but sometimes it is scary. Sometimes it’s fun and we can experiment and it’s all well and good but sometimes it really is scary. So I’m going to be talking about some of the underlying reasons why we defeat ourselves when it comes to change.
What’s happening under the surface?
We talked about and touched on fear which is an emotion. It’s a very normal emotion and you can learn to work with fear in really powerful ways and I’m going to be talking about that in some other shows.
Just how do we regulate our emotions and how can we get some helping partners to co-regulate with us and go through that experience with us so that we’re not alone?
When it comes to fear you don’t have to go through it alone.
So I did just went through my fear with company. I went through that with you. I played a song that I wasn’t sure about. I’m going to play a few more just to really test myself today and maybe we will find one that I’ve not heard. Maybe we won’t and that’s part of the fun. But this is another self-defeating behaviour.
So under the surface we have a few things that are driving the show when we actually know that we want to make a change. But for some reason we just won’t. We won’t do the thing that will help and take us forward on that change process.
So sometimes what’s underneath the surface is called an assumption or a belief. So we have these convenient assumptions that kind of they’re almost like a set of rules that dictate our behaviour and how we’re going to think about things and what we believe to be true and because on them sometimes we don’t act on things.
We only ever act on things that we believe are true.
A really simple example of one, to illustrate this concept is if I believe the floor is going to hold me up then I’m going to jump out of bed each morning, and I’m not even going to think about the floor. I’m just going to walk across the room. But if I had a belief that that floor was not going to sustain my weight I might stay in bed all day because I might be afraid to just step out because I’d be thinking “Oh my god I believe that floor is unstable”.
I assume if I jump out of bed and jump onto that that floor, I’m not going to be able to safely make it across the room. So it’s a kind of silly example but it’s that kind of thing. We have these unconscious assumptions all of the time driving a lot of our behaviour.
They’re just things that we believe to be true, and we’ve gotten to the point where we don’t even really question them anymore.
These are our assumptions.
So when we start to do change work it’s really cool to start to look at some of these self-defeating behaviours and holding assumptions is one of them.
So it’s a good idea to slow down and start to even ask yourself that kind of question sometimes. Like I assume if I play this song that I don’t know, maybe it’s going to be a really terrible song. Maybe it’s going to – I don’t know because there are some bad songs out there! There’s lots of good songs but there are some bad ones out there too that I don’t really like and I’m assuming you know other people might not like them either and so yeah I can have these unconscious beliefs that are really a story that we tell ourselves.
So how good are the stories that you are telling yourself?
Is there a change that you’ve been thinking about making?
All progress starts by telling the truth to yourself.
Kim Harris
Could be there’s some really obvious ones like quitting smoking or getting healthier or giving up alcohol. There are some more I guess conceptual ones like what I started talking about this morning fear, overcoming emotional distress. You might want to change some emotional distress or change your emotional experience of your life and your world.
Same thing. It’s the same process whether you want to quit smoking or you want to eliminate distress from your life.
The process is exactly the same and so as I go, I’m going to play another song in a second, but I guess I just want to leave you with this idea of what got you here won’t get you there.
So we’re going to need to start to challenge something around our self-defeating behaviours and just like any good doctor, for example, if you had a bit of a twinge in your neck and I said “Just come down to the studio now and I’ll just get my scalpel out, and I’ll just operate on you and I’ll alleviate that pain”. I don’t know if you’d be really trusting me, and you should not trust me because any kind of prescription without diagnosis is a malpractice.
It works the same here. We want to diagnose what is really going on with you. What is stopping you? What have you been doing up until now? Understanding that maybe there’s some things we’ll need to change to move you on from where you are now if what you’re getting as a result is not really what you want.
So we’re going to be talking about some other of these hidden patterns and I’m going to play another song that I’m not sure about. I’m not sure if I’ve heard this one so it could be wrong again but it’s Taylor Swift Anti-Hero so let’s play this one and see if it’s another one I know.
Well, I’m absolutely curious how are you finding this experiment me playing songs that I don’t know? I wonder if you knew that song? That was Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero.
I have never heard that song, but I did particularly like the lyrics. I am very much a lyric kind of girl. I don’t know if you’ve taken the time to listen to music in headphones lately, but I tell you what some songs have been completely rejuvenated in my listening just from listening through headphones. Obviously here in the studio we’ve got some magnificent equipment so you can really, I’ve got some really nice top of the line kind of headphones to use and just the music in the background and some of those melodies really come out and likewise I can really hear the lyrics sometimes much more clearly than if I were just listening through some speakers.
So yeah maybe that’s a change you might like to make. Listening to your music through some headphones, and oh it’s so much fun. Go down to a store where they sell a lot of headphones, the real fancy pants headphones, they’re on display and you can listen. I do that quite frequently and love the goose bumps that I get as a result of doing that. There are some amazing quality headphones out there. If you like your music you might like that too.
Empower yourself to overcome self-defeating behaviours
Let’s talk about some of the self-defeating behaviours, some of the hidden things that are going on under the surface that stop you from making a change because how can we change if we’re afraid to change? How can we change if we have one of those actual phobias, the metathesiophobia type, which is actually literally the fear of change?
Well there’s a lot we can do fortunately but one of the other things that are worth exploring is our hidden commitments. So what happens is when we form a belief, like I mentioned earlier, when we have a belief like the ground is going to hold me up, then we can make a commitment which might be well I’m going to get out of bed every morning at 7.30 and I’ll leap out of bed and I’m going to get my running shoes on and I’m going to go for a nice walk or something like that. So there might be a commitment underneath a belief that I have made that feeds onto the belief.
So it’s sort of like in this kind of situation we can have this, it’s almost like a stacking effect. So we have fears and they are often driven by our assumptions or our beliefs or the stories that we’re telling ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves scary stories that make us fearful and drive our fear levels higher and higher and then underneath the belief sometimes we have these hidden commitments as well.
I actually realized a hidden commitment that I hadn’t like logically or consciously kind of twigged on just recently and it was after the breakdown of my marriage, it was quite a painful experience. I really grieved that loss of my previous husband and so I had this hidden commitment to myself. I just remembered really distinctly the other day it was like never again, never again, never again will I be romantically involved with anybody, and it was such a strong commitment born out of the pain of that situation and I’ve realized wow that has really been a self-defeating commitment I made all those years ago.
So that’s an example and yeah if you’re in that situation now my heart really goes out to you because it’s yeah really hard to go through a separation or a divorce or a relationship breakdown.
So yeah and in that perhaps you’ve made a few commitments and maybe they’ve been a little bit unconscious to you and the reason we want to shine a light on some of these hidden things is because we want to diagnose properly what is going on for us.
What are those self-defeating behaviours?
What are those self-defeating commitments that you’ve made?
Because we can kind of have these counter or these anti-behaviours that’s why I like that song that I just played the “Anti-hero”. You know sometimes we do these contradictory things that aren’t really going to get us where we want to go and sometimes we don’t even know why and it’s usually because underneath the surface you’ve made a commitment that is in contradiction to what you’re really wanting.
I should not be left to my own devices, they come with prices and vices, I end up in crisis (tale as old as time)
Taylor Swift – Anti-Hero
Yeah so all progress starts by telling the truth, so we want to start looking at some of these some of these things under the surface.
In the same way we can get really good at handling emotions so if it’s a fear that’s being triggered in you and you notice you just feel a little bit trepidatious or a little bit uncertain that’s okay.
We can get really good at handling that emotion and then all of these stories that we tell ourselves and these hidden commitments that we make these are the ways that we talk to ourselves, right? And we talk ourselves in and out of things.
So sometimes we need to improve the way that we talk to ourselves.
We have to get good at talking to ourselves and obviously talking involves language and I’m going to talk about language in a minute because it’s one of the foundational I guess principles like of how quickly you can actually turn your life around just by using different words.
So we’re going to talk about that but I’m going to play another song now that I do not know. So let’s see if this one’s a good one. This one’s called Paramore and it’s called sorry it’s by Paramore and it’s called Brick by Boring Brick.
Are you good at talking to yourself? I am one of those people that does talk to myself quite a bit especially when I take a quick break and I’m trying and nut something out at home I will like pace from one side of my house to the other talking out loud to myself talking my way through something.
I don’t know if you’re good at talking to yourself and you know some people might think that’s a bit odd, but I find it actually quite helpful sometimes. But sometimes it’s not so helpful and of course that’s when our inner critic comes out to play and that inner critic can be tough to you know to quell sometimes.
I actually like to imagine that I’ve got like a little dial in my brain that’s got the volume for the inner critic, and I just like to turn it all the way down when it’s being a little bit problematic that can be really helpful. Turn the inner critic down and then get good at talking to myself in more positive ways in more helpful ways and it’s not to say that we don’t need to notice our self-defeating behaviours, that we don’t need to notice the things that we’re doing that we know aren’t going to get us ideally where we want to go, so we do need to know – I love that idea – that all progress starts by telling the truth.
We need to get good at talking to ourselves we need to get good at noticing and language-ing what’s really going on for us so that’s what I’m really talking about today. The power of language, so we have I think we have ways that we can improve our “emotional richness” as I call it.
That is good at language-ing our emotions and I think when we level up our emotional vocabulary it’s a really good thing to do because we want to get really good at explaining to ourselves what’s actually happening and as we take this study of language even further than that, we can understand that within language, language is also hierarchical.
So there are kind of energetic signatures of words which is really fascinating, so if we for example, we can be absolutely enraged and you can hear that’s a lot more intense than if I was just a little bit miffed. If I’m a bit miffed “Oh well, whatever” I’m a bit miffed, but if I’m absolutely enraged you can see that those words connotate a completely different kind of energetic weight. So our emotional vocabulary, the ways that we describe our emotions can be really important. When we get good at language-ing how we’re feeling we can talk to ourselves on an emotional way that’s really self-supporting.
Watch Your Language!
The other side of it, when it comes to language is also what I call developing our “evaluative richness” so another feature of our wonderful human brains is that we can judge things and we need to be able to judge things and people. We have the ability to judge for this reason and some people think they are not judgmental at all, but no we really are. We have to be. We have to be able to judge you know the dark shadow behind the bush, is it a sabre-toothed tiger or is it just a bush? Our brains are on the alert always looking to keep us ourselves safe.
Language shapes our perceptions and behaviors. Developing emotional and evaluative richness in our language can support us in navigating change more effectively.
Kim Harris
So we ought to get really good at evaluating things. Evaluating our surroundings, evaluating our behaviours, evaluating our relationships, evaluating the words that we use, evaluating the way that we talk to ourselves.
All of these things are skills that we can develop which really set us up to create what I call “generative language patterns”. A generative language pattern is one that gives us a feeling of life, of love, of energy, of enthusiasm, of joy.
We are generating things that actually support us just in the language that we speak.
Our language shapes our perceptions of things, in the same way that I talk about, we can be absolutely enraged, or we can be a bit miffed it’s a completely different perception.
It’s a different perceptual position. We might be looking at the same thing but see it in those two different completely different ways one will being more intense than the other so in that way we can also explain to ourselves what we are seeing and start to use the questioning types of methods that I’m talking about asking yourself what am I doing to trip myself up right now, what is stopping me from getting where I want to go?
And courageously looking at what comes to your mind when you ask yourself these questions. Very cool. And as I talked about my hidden commitment to myself I would never again get involved with anyone romantically that’s a great example of a commitment I made to myself that has been tripping me up and I have to let go. Sometimes we, not just me, all of us need to let go of a commitment our past self, made.
At the time I made that commitment to myself because I was in extraordinary levels of pain emotional distress, right? But it’s not really who I’m committed to being.
I do love, love.
The subject of love. I like being in love. I like love. I like watching other people who are in love. So you can see how all of these things I’m talking about in the way that we language our thoughts, in the way that we language our feelings, in the way that we language our commitments to ourselves, and in within those commitments that’s kind of like a decision that we make, like I made a decision in that moment I was never going to love again and then as a consequence of that decision or that commitment I made to myself it certainly has made me take certain actions in life.
I talked about the example of the floor you know if I if I really decide that the floor is not going to hold me up then I’m never going to step on that floor particularly if I’m assuming that it’s going to break apart if I stand on it, right? So yeah we need to look at these I guess mechanisms underneath.
This is what is stopping you.
It’s absolutely okay to explore it and very important to explore it before you even begin to think about “Okay. Well, where to from here?”
As part of the change process, the six stages of change, the first couple are pre-contemplation and contemplation, so this is very much what we’re talking about when we’re talking about what is stopping you.
What are your self-defeating behaviours? We’re really looking at what is underneath the surface, what can we contemplate about what’s happening, what can we diagnose, what is going on under the surface?
Because we want to see, and we want to understand if there is a need for change because ultimately there’s no point you know jumping to change something if you don’t know what it is that you’re actually changing in the first place. So, contemplation is a really good undertaking and I hope this is all making beautiful sense to you.
I’m going to play another song now one I do know.
One of the ways that we improve as a community is by going through significant changes together.
Some of the changes involve us getting out and together because it’s just my belief that progress is never achieved alone or sometimes without a group of people, it can never be achieved.
Achieved with a group of people – a good example of that is the project of the relocation of this station back to Healesville – it could not happen without the CBAA, the Lions Club, the Bendigo Bank without Yarra Valley FM Sponsors, there’s a lot of groups of people that have all come together to achieve this progress together.
It can’t be achieved alone or with only one group of people there’s lots to be done in the world and the way to do it is together. When significant change is required, the way to get there is together.
One of those things to change in contemplation, is first being open. Open ourselves to that change process. Understanding even relocating this studio we all had to sort of come to terms with, okay well we’re going to change, and we’ve got to be open to this change, and we’re going to go with it, and it’s going to be fabulous. The new station is going to be top of the line which is just incredible the work that Phil and the team have been putting into it, but it’s it has been a process, and it was a process that started quite a while ago.
When this idea first started to take shape in the hearts and minds of a few people in our community, just an example of how we actually go about changing and this topic we’ve talked about today, is what is it that stops you.
The answer to how we sabotage ourselves is not a mystery – you can learn it, and break the pattern.
We’ve talked about that sometimes it’s fear that stops you. Sometimes it’s your assumptions or the beliefs that you have underneath the surface. Sometimes some of those hidden commitments perhaps that you’ve made to actually maintain some of the anti-behaviours that aren’t actually supporting you.
And that’s how we sabotage ourselves.
And of course, all of this is built upon this foundation of language. How we talk to ourselves how we explain ourselves to ourselves, how do we explain how we’re feeling to ourselves, how do we explain when we’re evaluating things, whether they’re fearful or not. What’s really building this whole way that we are perceiving our experiences.
So yeah it all starts with telling the truth to yourself and opening yourself up to change. And that’s just the first couple of phases.
So how we do this as we slow down we just take our time to go through this, understanding change is a process. First things first, we want to envision a better future for ourselves and open ourselves that actually we can have it.
We can make some changes that would make things better, or even better than they are now, and how cool would that be?
Sometimes it’s remembering who we are and who we really want to be.
Kim Harris
Sometimes it’s remembering who we are and who we really want to be. We all know deep down, who we really like to be. If you like to be known as a loving person, for example, that’s who you want to be, but does that mean that your behaviour and the decisions you’ve made, and how you choose to act, and what you commit to, are always loving or self-supporting? Not necessarily. Sometimes there’s something else going on there so we need to be reminded and we need to remind ourselves of who we want to be.
Understand what is driving those current decisions, what is driving those current behaviours, what is driving our current feelings, our thoughts, and that’s part of this program. It is all about informing you and educating you on what it takes to create change, because we want people to be supported in the change process.
I would love it if you got to that point where the change is 100% integrated. I am very much here for you, and we are doing this together as a community and this is the effect of togetherness.
On that note I shall depart for the morning.
A couple of reminders, if you are looking for some resources around change you can check out my website kimmharris.com, there’s information there on Stories of Change and also Togetherness FX.
There are things that you can work through to start to unravel some of these hidden things that are underneath the surface and in your unconscious awareness. You can also check out and re-listen to this series as a podcast.
Please connect with us on Facebook, Yarra Valley FM. We’ve got lots of information there about the upcoming opening on Friday, we would love to see you there it’s a free community event, very much promoting togetherness.
We want to get out and about and start coming together again so look forward to seeing you there. Come say hello and introduce yourself I’d love to meet you and talk.
You are the reason for this show.
Kim Harris
Now I’m going to play my final song for today it’s called “You Are The Reason” and you very much are the reason for this show. So I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and I’ll see you next week.
In Summary
I’m reminded of the power of togetherness in navigating change. We’ve explored the fears and self-defeating behaviors that often hinder our progress and discovered the importance of language in shaping our perceptions and actions. Remember, all progress starts with telling the truth to ourselves and being open to change.
I invite you to continue this journey of self-discovery and transformation with me. Whether it’s revisiting this episode as a podcast, exploring resources on my website, or joining us at upcoming community events, know that you’re not alone in this journey. Together, we can create the change we seek.
Thank you for being the reason for this show. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other, and keep embracing the possibilities of change.
