One of our basic human needs is to grow. Something deep inside each of is the yearning to evolve and change.
Here’s the problem. We don’t like change… remember? There are also parts inside of us with the main objective to keep everything in our lives going exactly as it currently is. Have you heard the saying,”Stay in bed with the devil you know.”? We will choose to keep things going the same even if it’s going terrible so that it can be predictable.
That’s how crazy we can be about sustaining regular levels of certainly. We’re wired for that too. We all have varying levels of being strung out on dependability.
I little paradigm I’ve been playing with lately that has similarities to another model I shared about the phases of change is one that takes into account our need to change but also our need for things to stay the same. Do you remember the phases of Grow, Integrate, Rest? In an ideal world we choose to move into uncertainty from a place of certainty. We move towards risk from a place of safety.
So we move from certainty which is a solid and safe foundation into uncertainty (the unknown, risk, new, etc. etc.) and then after we integrate what we learn from hanging out in the unknown we enter into a new interation of ourselves and back into certainty but a new one.
I’ve talked about change before, shit, it’s what I talk about all the time. That’s my game. Anyway… I want to remind you that studies have been done offering that humans have the highest likeliness of adaptation when the stimulus fall between a 4-20% expansion outside our current scope or way of living.
So… let me draw you a picture… take a weightlifter (I love exercise analogies!). If we want to grow a muscle we have to stimulate it. We introduce a measured amount of strain, pain, tension, or challenge and the muscle gets the message that it needs to adapt. It then has to grow to accomadate the higher level of stimulus. This process is painful, right? “No pain, no gain.”-that’s gotta be one of the best sayings!?
An added, important component is that we’re doing all of this in an optimal environment. Those of you who know fitness are also aware of leveraging performance and growth with proper nutrition, sleep and other factors for maximal recovery and rejuvenation. We have to integrate the change.
Our ideas, beliefs, perspectives about life, people, ourselves, money, sex, death or even dying from sex are the same, we need to challenge those things into adaptation so that we grow and evolve.
Suffer now by choosing stimulus and moving towards challenge or suffer later because of atrophy from lack of use. Get it?
Have a great weekend.