Why Is Change So Hard?
People tell me all the time, “I work really hard to create good change in my life and I still wake up day after day feeling the same and stuck in the same situations. Maybe it changes a little, but not much. I’m tired of working this hard and not really seeing anything change.”
Why is the change we want so hard to achieve? To answer that, we have to look at what is being threatened by change. Is it that we just don’t like change, as we so often hear? Is it that we are stubborn or just plain dumb—that we can’t see how much better life would be? Nope.
It’s our survival mechanism that puts up the strong resistance to change. In a very real and primal way, we feel that we will die if we change. But how can this be true? Rationally, we know that the change we’re working for is good for us. But it isn’t the thinking part of our brain that stores this survival mechanism, so we can’t reason with it about change (or anything, for that matter).
What stores the survival mechanism is what Quanta Change founder Mimi Herrmann called the “sensory brain.” It stores how we feel about being ourselves. This part of the brain is 2 ½ years old. That’s when it stopped developing and started to build around itself a wall of resistance to change—to make sure that our mechanism for staying alive stays intact. (Both in a feeling way and literally—your nerve cells are surrounded by myelin sheaths that prevent physical change.)
Think of it this way. . .you’ve seen those news stories about an abused baby who is taken from her abusive parent and placed in a loving and nurturing home. You know that she will be much better off in her new home, right? But she clings for dear life to the person who has abused her. Why? Because she has no rational, thinking capacity yet—there is no way to reason with her about this change. The only survival she’s ever known is that abusive parent.
The same is true with your sensory brain. It will hold onto your Sensory Quotient pattern of survival for dear life, even though you can see rationally that over time, this survival mechanism has meant that things only got harder for you—life has either gotten worse, or it has become harder and harder to make good things happen.
Mimi found a way for you to break through the wall of resistance and tell your sensory brain that the change you want really is safe and good for you. Even better, she found that Quanta Change uncovers the natural well-being that has been hidden beneath your survival mechanism all this time—the source of the change you want is actually within you and just waiting to be uncovered.