Change gon come....

I made an important discovery about change today...not the pennies, nickles and dimes, but people making amendments or adjustments to their character.

I realized today that most of the time people don't change, and I don't even think it's because they don't want to. Change is hard. You didn't acquire the undesired behavior over night so what makes you think that it should take any less time to alter it? Most of the time when people want to change they remove themselves from the situations that caused them to be the way they don't want to be; i.e they want to stop drinking, they usually stop going to bars/clubs/parties and hanging out with the friends who are enablers because this is usually the easiest thing to do. The thing I realized today is that you may think you've changed because you haven't been in these situations so you haven't displayed the undesired behavior...but you don't ever really know until you can put yourself into the same situation as before, and ACT differently.

Since the mind basically involuntarily acts in these situations because of what it is so used to doing, it takes A LOT to alter behaviors: a mind strong enough to resist the temptation to fall back into the same patterns, the desire to remain true to your change, the ability to clearly communicate your alteration in any situation when necessary, the capacity to consciously calculate the consequences of indulging in the old behavior, and overcoming whatever other personal battles that elicited the unwanted behavior in the first place, all in a very brief time, usually a matter of seconds. Truth be told, people today are usually much more interested in instant gratification, so even though they may put up this front for a long time that they've changed, it's not until they're atually put to the test that you can more clearly see that they haven't changed at all.

So what does it take to change? Is it possible for people to actually change? Can you change one thing without changing another or is your character like a puzzle where if you manipulate one piece (of you) that you're forced to change another in order to for the pieces to still fit together? I honestly do believe that change is possible but it takes a conscious amount of continual effort that most people aren't willing to put forth....