Last Night

Hello,

First I want to thank all of you who showed up at my live chat last night. It was good talking to you and learning something new about my regulars.

While we were talking I said something that I put in my Lynnisms notebook. Change is a job not a feeling. I don't know who said what that brought that up but I feel strongly about that. I think our failure to understand the nature of change keeps us stuck in situations we don't want to be in and keeps us making the same mistakes over and over again.

I thought this was worth a couple of words. So here they are. People who are doing something or in something they don't like are in it for a reason. It feels right on some level. Maybe just because you remember when it was good or keep focuing on the parts of it that make you feel good. Or maybe because its a habit. People more often than not will do the same thing on Tuesday that they did on Monday. Change is hard. You won't wake up one morning and simply feel like doing something else. We are ceatures of habit. Change disrupts us. The unknown causes our fear chemicals to pump and makes us uncomfortable. It makes us feel unsure as if something is wrong.

That why I say change is a job and not a feeling. You won't feel right when you first change and start doing something else even if that something else is right and is rationally what you want.

The urge to love will not up and walk away one day just because the one you love isn't the one for you. That FEELING will persist unless you work to make it go away. The job of change first starts not with the hope that you will or the decision that you need to. It starts the 1. Understanding you can change 2. The Decision to do so. To do so means you will take some action in furtherance of that goal.

Once you have made those decisions you have to come up with a process. Something tangible you can do to facilitate that change. Case in point: My mother got depressed when dad died and found herself sitting around watching TV all day and doing nothing. Her first steps to change that were: 1. Turning the TV in her bedroom to the wall so she would have to work to watch it and so its back would remind her that that was a bad thing she was stuck in. 2. Then she enlisted assistance. She called her girlfriend and told her about the problem. And not any girlfriend either. She called one who liked to go out and wasn't afraid to push my mother and give her some grief about staying at home.

Even after all of this she didn't just start feel like going out. But she began to go because she knew she should and she had the help to do it. That's how it starts. Then you do something else. Then it starts to feel right bit by bit. See where I'm going with this?

I'll discuss this further at some later date. Motherhood calls. Kids need to get out of the house and to school.

Peace.