I was at the park a while ago watching this scene play out between a mother and a toddler.
Somehow he had gotten into one of the water features and his pants, as well as his shoes and socks, were sopping wet.
He wasn’t loving it (is there anything worse than wet socks!) and he was crying.
And so his mum tried to change his clothes. But oh no! He wasn’t having any of it.
You should have heard the fuss he made! Kicking his legs, screaming his lungs out. You would of thought she was jabbing him with a hot poker.
And so even though he was in a crap situation with water pooling in his shoes, the idea of changing, or the fear of changing, was worse.
(See where I’m going with this?)
One of the reasons I put so much time and energy into helping you build success habits – whether it’s the journal or the 1% practice or whatever – is that we are hard-wired to be resistant to change.
Change involves stepping into the unknown. The unknown is scary.
And it is really, really hard to just one day go and flip your life on its head. To suddenly just quit your job for example – the safe and stupefying 9 to 5 – and just launch your self into a real estate career.
When success comes, in wealth or whatever it is you’re passionate about, it is because there are a whole bunch of habits, beliefs and mindsets buttressing that success.
Think of it like the roots of a tree. The deeper and wider the roots, the higher and broader the tree.
And learning to be ok with change is one of the hardest habits to learn.
Often we’re full of bold advice when it comes to other people’s lives. You don’t like you job? Just quit. Your husband’s a useless turd? Just leave him. Want to lose some weight? Just go on a diet.
It’s all too easy when we’re looking at other people’s lives. The necessary changes seem obvious, and easy to make.
But what we can’t see is how everything ties together. You can’t change one aspect of your life, without taking all of your life somewhere new.
Take quitting your job for example. This is not just about how you put bread on the table. Our jobs are one of the key factors that anchor our sense of identity. If we go from dentist to baker it requires a brand new way of thinking about ourselves. All the more so if we make the leap into being an independent property tycoon!
Not only that, the act of changing also involves a process of re-definition. If you’ve always been a play-it-safe, follow-the-rules kind of person, to suddenly become a chucking-it-in and following-my-own-path kind of person can be a massive gear change.
It involves allowing a new you to be born into the world. For that to happen, the old you must be buried in a box. There must be change.
And change is scary.
And humans are resilient. You gotta love that about us. But the downside is that we can end up putting up with some pretty awful situations for much longer than we should.
Because after a while the pain becomes familiar to us. We get used to it.
But we like familiar things. They’re family like. And familiar things make us feel comfortable.
But if pain = familiar, and familiar = comfortable, then:
Pain = Comfortable.
Write that down. Copy it into an email and send it to yourself.
This is one of biggest blocks to making positive changes in our lives, and why we can end up sabotaging ourselves when we’re trying to make changes that are obviously for the better.
But the question then is, what do we do about it?
Unfortunately, the rational, logical mind isn’t much help here. When we’re talking about fear and pain, we’re talking about the deepest parts of the animal mind.
We can’t just argue our way out of it.
It was like that mother trying to convince his son to change his clothes. “But there’s water in your shoes and your teeth are chattering…”
“I don’t care! I’m scared of change!”
Again it comes back to building a new set of habits – these success habits I keep banging on about. (I’m not doing it for my own benefit!)
You’ve got to build into your life habits and beliefs that support the changes you want to make.
For some people it’s affirmations. For some people it’s vision boards. Everything helps.
But once the habits and beliefs are in place, change becomes easy, almost natural.
And in some cases, unavoidable.
And don’t underestimate the power of community. One of the things I’m constantly amazed and grateful for is the investor community that’s sprung up around my work.
And I see how powerful it is for people. When you can talk to someone who’s on the same page, who’s been through the stuff you’re going through, it can be an incredible comfort and inspiration.
So that’s it. Simple, right?
Keep up with your success habits, stay in touch with the community, and allow yourself to step from the cold wet clothes of your old life…
… into the brand new pants of financial freedom!