Four Keys to Changing Your Life That I Wish I Knew Before I Changed Mine
What does it really take to change your life?
Four years ago, I desperately needed the answer to that question. I was overweight, drinking too much, stuck in an unhappy marriage, miserable and angry all the time and I didn’t know why or how to change it.
Finally, I’d had enough.
I was going to change or die trying.
So I set everything in my life on fire.
I got divorced and set off on a wild adventure to see the world, touching down in city after city, trying to find myself and losing myself along the way. I didn’t even have an apartment anymore. All I had were the clothes in my one suitcase and the endless motion of airplanes and AirBnB’s and new cities. I got lost in lands near and far, found love and lost it, got rich and then poor again and then kind of rich again, lost friends, lovers, family and everything else along the way, got stabbed in the back, had friends die and other friends destroy their lives because they made the worst decisions possible from overdoses to eating and smoking until their heart gave out suddenly.
And now that I’m on the other side of it, I can tell you one thing.
It was worth it.
For everything I lost, I gained 100X.
If you paid me a billion dollars in Bitcoin right now, I’d never go back to my old life, my old friends, my old lovers, and my old way of seeing the world.
I live overseas now and next year I’m going back to the US to finally pick through the wreckage of my old life: my storage unit.
It’s a big concrete room, filled with stuff I once loved. Now I have no idea what’s in it anymore except a lot of books and some old machines and furniture. It all seemed so very important and now I realize it’s just stuff. It’s a bunch of things I collected along the journey of life, no more important than dust scattered by the wind.
Along the way I’ve discovered four keys to changing your life that I wish I knew before I changed mine.
Change Ain’t Easy
The first is, whoever tells you change is easy is lying to you.
Quick and easy program that anyone can do? Six easy steps to a better life? One simple tweak you’re a happy, hot millionaire?
Anyone selling you a cure-all with easy in the tagline is selling you a big fat, steaming pile of shit. It won’t change your life. It won’t even make a dent in your life. You’ll read it/watch it and forget it. That’s 100% guaranteed.
Of course, they might manage to fool you for a while. You’ll swear the weekend hustle culture seminar worked wonders. You’re cleansed, born again, brand new and ready to be rich and happy and healthy forever. They might even turn you into an evangelist for a time. You’ll run around selling everyone on the mindfulness retreat on love and healing.
You already know the nagging truth. It’s an illusion. It’s like a doomsday cult. When a doomsday cult gets the end of the world wrong, 95% of the cult members stick around and start preaching: “We’re saved from the apocalypse because of our faith and good deeds!”
You know why?
Because we hate to be wrong once we’ve bought into an idea. It’s called sunken cost fallacy. Once we’ve sunk time and money into something we hate to say it didn’t work out.
If we admit mindfulness never helped us when we got fired or when our partner cheated on us then we might have to admit we’re back at the beginning.
No one wants to start back at square one. No one wants to admit we got sold a bag of painted dogshit when we wanted a box of chocolates.
But I want you to admit it to yourself.
I want you to start back at square one.
I want you to empty your cup of nonsense and get ready to start over. The faster you empty your mind of easy, push-button answers, the quicker you can start getting to real answers.
And don’t feel bad. We’ve all been there. I can’t tell you how many self-help books I read and wrong turns I took, hoping it would change my life.
We’ve all bought the five-part lecture series, went to the seminar, did the fire walk, lit incense to cleanse our house of evil, tried to open our third eye and ended up right back at step one.
What I was really looking for was what everyone is looking for: a magical solution.
I wanted the author to tell me I didn’t have to change anything and I could keep right on doing what I was doing, but just add a little meditation or a spirit cleansing exercise. And there’s an endless array of folks who will sell you that because we all want to buy it. They don’t even need to sell it because that shit sells itself.
The worst part is these snake oil seminar salespeople are often really, really sincere. They believe their seminar will save you or that all you need to do is sit in a circle and turn off your mind and all will be right with the world. They don’t even know they’re swindling you because they’ve swindled themselves.
But mostly the book jacket tells you change is easy because the truth doesn’t sell.
Change is fucking hard.
Real hard.
It’s hard to let go of shitty life choices. It feels a lot easier to stay in that job we hate or that marriage that isn’t working out because it feels so familiar and maybe what’s out there is worse.
So what is real change?
Facing the truth.
When we finally face the fact that we’re still stuck in the job we hate, married to a person we married too soon, drinking too much, overweight, and that we never took that trip we wanted to take around the world then we can actually start changing our life.
Now we’re ready to take the first big step.
This is the End of Everything that Stands
The second thing I wished I knew was that to change your life, you’ve got to destroy your old life.
Change is destruction. It’s annihilation.
It’s clearing the field so you can build something new. It’s a bonfire that rips through everything in your existence. A few things may last but most won’t. Marriage. Friends. Life. Money. Mental stability. Work. Family.
Real change means letting broken shit go. It means not calling a lover who abused you ever again. Blocking someone’s number. Moving out. Moving on. Losing money. Losing time. Fighting over lamps and chairs in a divorce. It means leaving things behind and never seeing them again, even things you love more than most people, like pets. It takes courage and grit and wading through pain.
If you were meant to be a veterinarian and you went to law school instead, then no amount of mindfulness and meditating will change that for you. You’ve got to make the hard choice to change your career. That means going to night school and studying hard and starting at the bottom again, probably for less money.
And who the hell wants to do that?
Just give me some weekend chanting and wellness circles that make me feel like I did something instead. Most self-help is nothing but a pain killer. It’s there to take the edge off your life. It’s no better than dope or a glass of wine. It works for a little while but when you wake up the next day you’re still stuck in the same old place.
Annihilation is painful. It’s hard. You’ll screw up. Make mistakes. Get lost and not know who’s a friend and who’s an enemy at times. You’ll need incredible strength to get through it but when you do it’s worth it.
When you finally cast off your old life for good and untangle yourself from it you really won’t miss what you were. You’ll be different, someone new, someone you’re proud of when you look in the mirror.
To really change, it takes time. Usually a few years of dedicated effort, with a lot of wrong turns, heartache and pain along the way.
As you go through that you’ll change externally and internally. If you don’t change what’s inside, as well as your external situation, then you’ll wind up right back in the same kind of life with a few twists.
That’s exactly what happened to me. I traded one kind of horrible life for another, dating exactly the wrong kind of people and getting a black mirror of my old relationship and life. If my marriage was a soulless, boring and sexless disaster, my relationships after that were a wild roller coaster of instability and pain, even if they were better stories and grand adventures too.
To fix that I had to change my mind.
And to my surprise that was even harder than putting all my stuff in storage and taking off around the world.
And that’s because to really change my life I had to change one of the things I held most sacred.
My beliefs.
Question Everything
The third thing I wish I knew was that the enemy was inside me all along.
You’re both the protagonist and the antagonist in your story. You’re at war with yourself and most of the external barriers are just an illusion. The real bars are behind your eyes.
And that’s because you probably think that what you believe is real but it’s not.
Our beliefs are nothing but a model of reality. They’re a map in our head of how we think life works.
And how we got those beliefs is mess.
We’re born in a random location, with random intelligence and appearance, and we grow up under a random government, in a random time. That randomness shapes who we are and what we believe.
Grew up in the US, down south in the rural country? You’re more likely to vote red. Grew up in a big city, with lots of different people? You’re more likely to vote blue. Grew up in the bureaucracy of Germany then you’re more likely to see the world as a series of top down rules that must be observed in an orderly fashion. Grew up in the church or out of it and it shapes how you see the divine or whether you see anything divine at all.
Good-looking? The world responds to you one way, giving you lots of things for nothing because you’ve got a pretty smile. At least until that smile fades. Not so good-looking? World responds to you differently and maybe you don’t get to charm your way out of a speeding ticket.
Grew up poor and always wondered whether the electricity would get turned off this month because you couldn’t pay your bill? That effects how you think of time and money, scarcity and abundance.
All of these inputs shape us and form a model in our head about how we think the world works, which congeal into beliefs.
If we never stop to look at those beliefs, we’re no better than a non-player character in a video game. We end up with a limited set of predictable, pre-programmed responses based on our experiences. We’re at the mercy of life and everyone around us.
If it sounds like you’re a random set of toggle switches flipped throughout your life, that’s because you are a random set of toggle switches set throughout your life.
The key to changing your life is to become less random.
We do that by questioning everything.
We have to reflect on our life and look deeply at it to understand how we got to where we are right now. By dissecting your life, you can start to unravel what you’ve become and then rebuild yourself into something different, something that works better for you and everyone around you.
To question our beliefs, we have to understand where they came from in the first place. We need to trace their lineage.
Where did they start?
Mostly joy and pain are our greatest teachers.
Joy and Pain in the Maze of Our Mind
The fourth thing I wish I knew is that how we form beliefs is inherently broken.
Understanding that is the key to shedding broken beliefs that hold you back, limit you and destroy your life.
To change you’ve got to understand that your beliefs aren’t just good because you have them. Your head, my head, and everyone else’s head are stuffed with inherently broken and self-destructive beliefs that have no business being there. Until you understand that, you can’t begin to let them go because you mistake your beliefs for actual reality. There’s objective reality and how you perceive it and they aren’t the same thing.
If we mistake our beliefs for actual reality, those beliefs run us like rats through an invisible maze. They limit our actions and our range of responses. Sometimes that’s a good thing. If our belief matches objective reality, such as believing smoking causes cancer, then our response to someone offering us a cigarette is no thank you and we live longer. But when it comes to negative and limiting beliefs, which don’t match objective reality, then it hurts us.
If you believe people are out to get you, then you’ll mistakenly see people trying to hurt you everywhere you go. You’ll take actions designed to protect you but that end up backfiring and hurting you instead, leaving you cut off from people who might otherwise get close to you and love you. That’s not a belief you want to keep, but to your mind losing that belief is as terrible as losing your most cherished beliefs.
Why?
Because of how beliefs form in the first place.
Here’s how we think we form beliefs, according to Annie Duke in her book Thinking in Bets:
- We hear something.
- We carefully evaluate it and consider it.
- After that careful consideration, we adopt the belief as our own.
Here’s how we actually form beliefs:
- We hear something.
- We automatically believe it without question.
- If we have the time or desire later, we go back and examine that belief.
For way too many people, guess what step never happens at all?
You got it. Step three.
And if step three never happens you’ve got a 0.0% chance of really changing your life.
But why would we just hear something and believe it?
Because evolutionarily it worked. If you heard the tiger in the bushes it made sense to believe that tiger was really there because it might eat you. Everyone who doubted the tiger is dead and the people who believed it survived.
Our beliefs are resilient by design. They help us survive.
But surviving tigers and surviving the modern world of social media and tremendous abundance are two very different things. And the resilience of our beliefs can really hurt us because they tell us not to look to closely. At the deepest level we don’t want to change our beliefs because it feels like we might die. That helps us when we believe looking both ways before crossing the street is a good idea but it’s not so good when we think we’re worthless or that we’ll never find someone who loves us how we want to be loved.
The farther afield from objective reality our beliefs are the more we suffer in life. Much of our suffering is self-created. There’s real suffering, like the loss of a loved one, or a pet dying, or getting cancer, but most of our suffering is entirely unnecessary and self-created. And that suffering comes from wrong understanding, aka wrong beliefs.
Wrong understanding leads to wrong thinking, which leads to wrong actions.
It’s just like those long division math problems in school. If you get the first step wrong then every other step is wrong.
We believe things that hurt us because there’s no limitation on what people can believe no matter how far from reality that belief really is now. If you want to believe gravity doesn’t exist, you can believe it. You will learn a very hard lesson if you step out of a 100-story window, but you are free to believe gravity is a lie made up by the mass media to control you if you want.
That last example may sound crazy but people cling to crazy ideas that don’t match the real world all the time. That’s how people can hold onto the idea that smoking won’t kill them despite overwhelming evidence that it gives you cancer. I watched a close friend light up after a month of throat cancer therapy. It really wasn’t a surprise because her whole life she chose to believe smoking wouldn’t kill her.
In Europe, every pack of cigarettes has nasty pictures of dying people on the box and it doesn’t make the least bit of difference. People buy cigarettes adorned with images of rotting lungs and people breathing through a hole in their neck and they keep right on smoking.
Belief systems are so strong that many people would rather die than give up their beliefs, which is why men and women have died on battlefields since the beginning of civilization and terrorists blow themselves up in explosions and why people chain smoke two packs a day no matter what horrific picture is on the package.
But it’s not just extreme beliefs that are resilient. All our beliefs are resilient, as if carved in stone in our mind. That makes changing them the hardest task of changing our life.
Our heads get filled in equal measure with useless and useful beliefs as we randomly experience the world around us. Negative/limiting beliefs are just as powerful, if not more so, than positive beliefs.
Our brain latches onto a negative belief because it believes it’s helping us. If the kids made fun of us in school when we sang on stage and we form a belief that we’re a terrible singer and it’s not even worth trying then it saves us from short term pain. We don’t have to hear those kids laughing again and see them pointing at us.
But it ruins our ability to grow and change over time. If we never take that chance to sing again, then maybe we never realize we can learn to sing over time and that it was something we’d come to love.
If we go on a dozen dates and then give up, thinking we’ll never find someone because we’re ugly and worthless, then we may never have that magical experience of sitting across the table from someone who looks at us with delight and love in their eyes.
Changing Your Life Without An Easy Button
So now that you know the keys, how do you open the door?
How do you make a real change in your life? How do you live a life you’re proud of now?
Start by writing down everything you think and believe. Write it all out. Let is spew. Take a close look at it from every angle. Does it make sense? Is it working for me? Is it helping me? Is it hurting me? How? Why?
Leave no stone unturned. How the heck did you get where you are now? What do you think? How is that limiting you or helping you?
Write it all down in as much detail as you can. Don’t let anything stay hidden in your unconscious. Expose it all to the light. Poke it. Probe it. Make sure you understand why it’s there and who put it there and why.
Start by changing one belief: Stop imagining that who you are is set in stone.
You are not a statue. You can change.
The more you realize that who you are and what you believe are fluid, the more you can shed old beliefs that are holding you back and keeping you trapped instead of letting you live your life.
All of this takes time. It’s not done in a weekend journaling session or between meetings or while you’re watching TV. It requires patient, diligent effort over time. Maybe it takes months, maybe years, but everything you expose to the light will let you peel away layers of not-you. It will let you strip out the thoughts and ideas that no longer work for you.
When you’ve opened a gap in your mind and started to change your mind, it will almost certainly mean you have to change things in the real world too.
You might journal out everything in your head and realize you only went to law school because your parents pushed you towards it because vets don’t make as much money. Or maybe you did it because you didn’t have the courage and conviction to really follow what you wanted to do in life because your self-esteem took a battering as a kid and you never recovered.
The next step is the most important.
Now you’ve got to change things in the real world too.
You’ve got to research schools, sign up, pay the money, go to classes at night, study, pass exams, juggle a current job and responsibilities and then change careers. If you’ve got a lot of other responsibilities, like a partner and kids and debt then it’s all that much harder but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. We’ve all got something to lose. If you start with “I can’t” or “it’s impossible” or “it’s possible for other people but not me” then you’re doomed from the start.
Instead of thinking about everything we have to lose, we have to take a big leap of faith. We have to think of all the possibilities that open to us. When we start to make changes, we can’t see all of the ways our life will unfold for the better.
After my divorce I had a number of unstable and wild relationships that caused me even more pain. I could have given up and then I never would have gone on that random date last year where I met the perfect person for me and who now makes my life better every day.
As we get closer to what we’re really meant to do and we start doing the things we love then things start to work out for the better too.
Maybe we don’t make as much money being a vet, but because we love our work, we feel more calm and content and that reflects in our home life. We start spending more time with our kids and our partner and that time becomes quality time instead of rushed time. Instead of us feeling constant fury and resentment because we hate being a lawyer, which we then take out on our family, we feel joy because we saved the life of a puppy and that joy carries over into how we raise our kids and treat our partner.
Joy and hatred ripple out into our lives and effect everything around us. If we keep focusing obsessively on the people from our past then that pain continues to boil over in our current life. Every choice we make effects everything else we do. It’s all connected in an endless chain.
Even a few small choices for the better have a long-term ripple effect that we can’t see until much later. If we put that cigarette down then we have a much better chance of our lungs repairing themselves. If we start working out five days a week we live longer. If we shed the belief that we’re not good enough for this or that, then we start taking chances and learning something we never thought we could learn, like a new language or a new skill or a new way of thinking.
The positive effects multiple and reverberate into every other area of our life.
So, who do you want to be? What do you want in life?
Do you want to travel? See the world? Do you want an incredible partner who you’re happy to go to bed with and happy to wake up to the next day?
Do you want wealth and power? Or do you want to become an artist and paint all day?
Or maybe you want raise a family? Change jobs? Change careers? Climb a mountain? Swim in the ocean more often? See another country? Start a company? Move to the country and get away from the big city life?
Life is filled with endless possibilities but too often we’ve preprogrammed ourselves to miss them. Our beliefs are a filter on the world. They change the way we see and process information. They tell us we can’t when we can. They tell us we’ve failed when we’re really just learning the next step.
If you want to change your life, you can do it. You just have to take the first step. And then the next and the next.
You’ll start tearing apart everything and taking a deeper look. You’ll understand yourself better and see yourself and the world more clearly. Then you’ll start making the big changes and see that who you were before was nothing to cling to in the first place. You’ll shed the old you and never look back.
And you’ll realize that it wasn’t really the end.
It was just the beginning of a life of wild possibility and adventure.
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I’m an author, engineer, pro-blogger, podcaster, and public speaker.
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