NAC MASTER STEP 2
Get Leverage: Associate Massive Pain to Not Changing Now and Massive Pleasure to the Experience of Changing Now!
Most people know that they really want to change, yet they just can’t get themselves to do it! But change is usually not a question of capability; it’s almost always a question of motivation. If someone put a gun to our heads and said, “You’d better get out of that depressed state and start feeling happy now,” I bet any one of us could find a way to change our emotional state for the moment under these circumstances.
But the problem, as I’ve said, is that change is often a should and not a must. Or it’s a must, but it’s a must for “someday.” The only way we’re going to make a change now is if we create a sense of urgency that’s so intense that we’re compelled to follow through. If we want to create change, then, we have to realize that it’s not a question of whether we can do it, but rather whether we will do it. Whether we will or not comes down to our level of motivation, which in turn comes down to those twin powers that shape our lives, pain and pleasure.
Every change you’ve accomplished in your life is the result of changing your neuro-associations about what means pain and what means pleasure. So often, though, we have a hard time getting ourselves to change because we have mixed emotions about changing. On the one hand, we want to change. We don’t want to get cancer from smoking. We don’t want to lose our personal relationships because our temper is out of control. We don’t want our kids to feel unloved because we’re harsh with them. We don’t want to feel depressed for the rest of our lives because of something that happened in our past. We don’t want to feel like victims anymore.
On the other hand, we fear change. We wonder, “What if I stop smoking cigarettes, but I die of cancer anyway and I’ve given up the pleasure that cigarettes used to give me?” Or “What if I let go of this negative feeling about the rape, and it happens to me again?” We have mixed emotions where we link both pain and pleasure to changing, which causes our brain to be uncertain as to what to do, and keeps us from utilizing our full resources to make the kinds of changes that can happen literally in a moment if every ounce of our being were committed to them.
How do we turn this around? One of the things that turns virtually anyone around is reaching a pain threshold. This means experiencing pain at such an intense level that you know you must change now—a point at which your brain says, “I’ve had it; I can’t spend another day, not another moment, living or feeling this way.”
Have you ever experienced this in a personal relationship, for example? You hung in there, it was painful and you really weren’t happy, but you stayed in it anyway. Why? You rationalized that it would get better, without doing anything to make it better. If you were in so much pain, why didn’t you leave? Even though you were unhappy, your fear of the unknown was a more powerful motivating force. “Yeah, I’m unhappy now,” you may have thought, “but what if I leave this person and then I never find anyone? At least I know how to deal with the pain I have now.”
This kind of thinking is what keeps people from making changes. Finally, though, one day the pain of being in that negative relationship became greater than your fear of the unknown, so you hit a threshold and made the change. Maybe you’ve done the same thing with your body, when you finally decided you couldn’t spend another day without doing something about your excess weight. Maybe the experience that finally pushed you over the edge was your failure to be able to squeeze into your favorite pair of jeans, or the sensations of your “thunder thighs” rubbing against each other as you waddled up a set of stairs! Or just the sight of the bulbous folds of excess flesh hanging from the side of your body!
THE ALPO DIET
Recently, a woman attending a seminar told me about her fail-safe strategy that she had developed for shedding unwanted pounds. She and a friend had committed over and over again to losing weight, but failed to keep their promise each and every time. Finally, they both reached the point where losing weight was a must. Based on what I taught them, they needed some leverage to push themselves over the edge. They needed to make not keeping their promise more painful than anything they could imagine.
They decided to commit to each other and a group of friends that if they welshed on their promise this time, they would each have to eat a whole can of Alpo dog food! So, to stave off any hint of a craving, these two enterprising women told everyone and kept their cans in plain view at all times as a constant reminder. She told me that when they started to feel hunger pangs, they’d pick up the can and read the label. With ingredients boasting “horsemeat chunks,” they found no difficulty in sticking to their commitment. They achieved their goal without a hitch!
A lever is a device that we utilize in order to lift or move a tremendous burden we could not otherwise manage. Leverage is absolutely crucial in creating any change, in freeing yourself from behavioral burdens like smoking, drinking, overeating, cursing, or emotional patterns like feeling depressed, worried, fearful, or inadequate—you name it. Change requires more than just establishing the knowledge that you should change. It’s knowing at the deepest emotional and most basic sensory level that you must change. If you’ve tried many times to make a change and you’ve failed to do so, this simply means that the level of pain for failing to change is not intense enough. You have not reached threshold, the ultimate leverage.
When I was doing private therapy, it was imperative that I find the point of greatest leverage in order to help people make changes in one session that years of therapy had failed to accomplish. I started every session by saying that I couldn’t work with anyone who wasn’t committed to changing now. One of the reasons was that I charged $3,000 for a session, and I didn’t want them to invest their money unless they were absolutely going to get the result they were committed to today, in this one session. Many times these people had flown in from some other part of the country. The thought of my sending them home without handling their problem motivated my clients to spend at least half an hour convincing me that they were indeed committed and would do anything to change now. With this kind of leverage, creating change became a matter of course. To paraphrase the philosopher Nietzsche, he who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how. I’ve found that 20 percent of any change is knowing how; but 80 percent is knowing why. If we gather a set of strong enough reasons to change, we can change in a minute something we’ve failed to change for years.
“Give me a lever long enough And a prop strong enough. I can single-handedly move the world.”
—ARCHIMEDES
The greatest leverage you can create for yourself is the pain that comes from inside, not outside. Knowing that you have failed to live up to your own standards for your life is the ultimate pain. If we fail to act in accordance with our own view of ourselves, if our behaviors are inconsistent with our standards—with the identity we hold for ourselves—then the chasm between our actions and who we are drives us to make a change.
The leverage created by pointing out an inconsistency between someone’s standards and their behavior can be incredibly effective in causing them to change. It’s not just pressure placed on them by the outside world, but pressure built up by themselves from within. One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity.
The reason so many of us seem to be walking contradictions is simply that we never recognize inconsistencies for what they are. If you want to help somebody, you won’t access this kind of leverage by making them wrong or pointing out that they’re inconsistent, but rather by asking them questions that cause them to realize for themselves their inconsistencies. This is a much more powerful lever than attacking someone. If you try to exert only external pressure, they’ll push against it, but internal pressure is next to impossible to resist.
This kind of pressure is a valuable tool to use on yourself. Complacency breeds stagnation; unless you’re extremely dissatisfied with your current pattern of behavior, you won’t be motivated to make the changes that are necessary. Let’s face it; the human animal responds to pressure.
So why would someone not change when they feel and know that they should? They associate more pain to making the change than to not changing. To change someone, including ourselves, we must simply reverse this so that not changing is incredibly painful (painful beyond our threshold of tolerance), and the idea of changing is attractive and pleasurable!
To get true leverage, ask yourself pain-inducing questions: “What will this cost me if I don’t change?” Most of us are too busy estimating the price of change. But what’s the price of not changing? “Ultimately what will I miss out on in my life if I don’t make the shift? What is it already costing me mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually?” Make the pain of not changing feel so real to you, so intense, so immediate that you can’t put off taking that action any longer.
If that doesn’t create enough leverage, then focus on how it affects your loved ones, your children, and other people you care about. Many of us will do more for others than we’ll do for ourselves. So picture in graphic detail how much your failure to change will negatively impact the people who are most important to you.
The second step is to use pleasure-associating questions to help you link those positive sensations to the idea of changing. “If I do change, how will that make me feel about myself? What kind of momentum could I create if I change this in my life? What other things could I accomplish if I really made this change today? How will my family and friends feel? How much happier will I be now?”
The key is to get lots of reasons, or better yet, strong enough reasons, why the change should take place immediately, not someday in the future. If you are not driven to make the change now, then you don’t really have leverage.
Now that you’ve linked pain in your nervous system to not changing, and pleasure to making the change, you’re driven to create a change, you can proceed to the third master step of NAC….