You find them everywhere: on the Internet, in books, on TV – almost everywhere you look there is someone telling you how you should live your life in order to achieve a certain goal.
But this kind of recipes never worked on me and I don’t think they work on others either. Usually at the end of a training session or after reading a book, I have my head full of new ideas and changes I want to implement in my personal or professional life (or both). Yet, in less than a week after the training I find myself in the same routine I was before (the magic had passed).
I am not saying that trainings are useless and by no means reading books or articles. I am just saying that trainings and books, on their own, will not change your life. Why? I found the answer during a training and while reading.
Now, you probably noticed that most of our actions are automatic. We are doing things in a particular way, and most of the time we are not even aware about it. We usually learn the behavior as children and we are keeping it as adults not even being aware of the fact that we can change it (we usually say this is the way I am and that’s that). Of course what we learn as children differs from one person to another (even though “the social rules”, those that help us live in society, are fairly similar) and that creates diversity. And our rational and controlled behavior (the deeds that we are doing consciously) lays on top of that.
To summarize (and simplify) the recent discoveries in the neuroscience: we have two sorts of brain – the one responsible for our conscious behavior and the one responsible for our unconscious one. The difference between those two is that while the conscious brain learns and forgets quickly the unconscious one learns very slowly and tends to keep the information for a long period of time (sometimes the entire life).
What happens when we go to training or we read a book is that our conscious brain learns something new and it is determined to put in practice what it has learned. But it does not work that way. Like I said, most of our actions are automatic, determined by the unconscious brain and this brain does not learn new things in just a few days. It needs weeks, months, if not years. Powerful events in life may change the unconscious brain directly and fast, but we are not talking about that kind of events now. This is why the magic of the training or the book passes. When we return to our usual life, the unconscious brain takes over and we begin to behave as before.
The good thing is that we can do something about it using our conscious brain. If we constantly analyze our behavior and change it consciously to the desired one, finally the unconscious brain will learn it and we will start to automatically behave in the desired way.
This is one of the ideas on which coaching is based: identifying the desired behavior and then getting the coachee to commit on different actions that will help him transform this new behavior into learned behavior.
This is why I am saying that it is not trainings or books that change your life. I know people are talking about life changing books, but it is not the books themselves that change lives, it is the reader that chooses to change.
So the drive and the resources for change are never out there. They are always within you.
