How to make a radical change in your life: Introduce chaos

Have you ever found yourself in a deadlock? A situation where you know you need to make a big change, but you don’t have the energy or the motivation to go through with it? Sometimes the only way to break a lasting situation is to introduce chaos, create a radical change by doing something radically different.

Routine is great. It’s our security blanket that sustains our everyday life. But the trade off for this security blanket is a susceptibility to stagnate. Quite often, sometimes without realizing it, we get caught repeating the same behaviors without any change. It can be many different things from “I should lose some weight and workout”, to making a new years resolution to radically change our lifestyle.

Quite a few people I know of do this. It’s very common to see self-improvement website write their new found goals and resolutions. It’s even more common to see abandoned blogs showing only the promise of change from several months, or even years, ago. The ratio of failures to successes is astounding. And the infinite creativity behind the rationalizations is even more staggering. “The time wasn’t right”, “I didn’t have the resources I needed”, “I don’t have the discipline”, “Work got in the way”, etc.

Because we are unchallenged, that we have become so dependent on our routines and environment, we become helpless. Nothing is done well because there is nothing riding on it. We feel free to waste our time as if it were infinite, even if we do not have such time. We have only our life, and following it our death.

This situation is what I call a deadlock situation, defined by the desire for great oppressed by our nature to fall into inaction. Either by your fear of leaving safety or by the false belief of too much time you become a victim of yourself. Being this victim before has lead me to believe the only way to change one is to approach the situation with a drastic desperation. You must feel an outside pressure pushing on you. You must feel the consequences of failure following you, ready to strike at a single hesitation.

Punishment (all or nothing)

My father, at the heights of his success in business his active work was minimal. Content to remain unchallenged and a vegetable, he felt no need to invest energy. When his lifestyle took it’s toll and he began losing money, he at first reacted with indifference. He knew he could bring himself to the top again. When he began losing a lot of money, he only thought that soon he would need to apply himself again. However, when there was no money left, he put himself into his work without a moment of rest. In a single short period of time, his productivity was greater than it had ever been.

There are stories told, of men who would go further than others to force themselves into acting. There are men who entrust large sums of money to others with the promise that it will be returned only upon completion of a goal. There are men like Cortés, who burned his own ships to focus his men on defeating the Aztecs. With no escape outside victory, Cortés and his men fought with all intensity and won.

This tactic is probably the single most effective to shock yourself into change. When you are in a situation where you risk losing everything, maybe even your life, you fight with everything you can possibly muster. If you face yourself everyday and feel the nag that you could be better, that you’re lazy, then this is the tactic to deal with it. Maybe you want to enter a different career, but you’re finding it difficult to start. The solution is to quit your current career. Burn your bridges and you will be forced into completing your change.

Restriction (force yourself into acting with no other choice)

I had long been trying to teach myself to use my left hand effectively. I had even gone so far as to purchase a left-handed fountain pen nib that could only be used with my left hand. However, after the initial wonderment had worn, I found I was never using it. When I had realized what I had done I knew I needed to act. I threw out every other pen I owned forcing me to use my left handed pen. There was nothing I could do but flourish.

When you’re in a situation that is difficult to change because it’s easy to fall back into old habits, you must use the strategy of restriction. Remove every possible outlet to your previous way of doing to leave yourself with no other options. If you need to diet, you must throw away all the food you cannot eat. You may even need to go so far as to buy a large enough supply of healthy food so as to remove as much temptation as possible (here it would be from the ‘junk food aisle’).

Change your venue (completely remove distractions and old habits)

This tactic is to be used when trying to change a frozen dynamic. If you seek to immerse yourself in a different language to learn it, yet you find yourself accepting every invitation that would distract you, you must cut all connections to the outside influences. It is difficult, and sometimes impossible to do so effectively without a drastic change. The only solution then would be to completely remove yourself from your current environment. Move to a different state, or better yet, move to the country in question.

Do not think of this tactic in such narrow terms. It can be as simple as discarding your television, books, and telephones from your life. Maybe an actor requires to change himself completely. Changing the furniture, repainting the walls, changing the rooms, combined are effective ways to change the venue.

Do not limit yourself to any one tactic, or to the ones I have listed here. You must combine them, come up with your own, to effectively change a stalemate. Learn to embrace the possibility of failure and thrive on it. Always raise stakes to uncertainty and you will be forced to become better, to become a god.