“We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” -Einstein
If you have had the good fortune to travel and leave your country of birth for a length of time you may likely relate to how peculiar one’s own culture can seem when returning home. I always personally felt more culture shock returning home than I did when going somewhere new. Idiosyncrasies about my own culture became apparent when viewed as a “foreigner” but are invisible when you have nothing to compare it to.
In the same way, blind spots in the view we hold of ourselves remain undetectable simply because we lack the language to describe it. They remain unconscious until someone, or by some change in perspective we can be made aware of it.
The quote, “I don’t know who discovered water but it probably wasn’t a fish” describes the same sentiment- that to talk about anything intelligently means we have to develop a language that is meta to the system we are attempting to describe. Similarly, to speak about changing means we have to talk about change from the perspective of how change occurs.
Two types of change
We can make ‘first order’ change and we can make ‘second order’ changes – a complete shift in paradigm. First order changes are like a change in mood- while they may feel utterly real, they typically don’t last long and fail to create a fundamental shift in the conditions that gave birth to the original problem or habit of thinking.
One day we feel lazy and then kick ourselves into exercise, then become lazy again. We resolve not to get angry so easily so we try to replace it with being more friendly, only to discover that when we least expected it, our temper flares up. You want to quit coffee so you replace it with tea… only to find that the habit of coffee seemingly returns on its own. Whatever the problem content is, let’s call it “X”. The knee-jerk thinking for most humans is that a good solid dose of “not-X” would be the fix, but unfortunately it’s not how it works in the long run.
Politics seem to be a great example of this phenomenon- Republicans one term, Democrats another term- and while there are some apparent changes, the whole ridiculous show keeps bouncing back and forth while the underlying challenges remain. The desire to remedy social ills by prohibition perpetually brings about more of the same problems, regardless of the time or place. Indeed, ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’.
If I am in a nightmare and I want to get out of it, nothing I do inside the dream will make any difference. I could jump off a cliff, sprout wings, turn into a giant bunny, yet I am still inside the same dream. The only real way out comes from waking up. The tools to make fundamental changes are just not available from the state we are in currently. That means the solutions we dream up from our existing perspectives might not be the ones that work the best.
“Under Heaven all can see beauty only as beauty because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil” -Lao-tzu
The most primary aspect of our awareness is contrast. If I want to get somewhere, it is in relation to another place or space. Any change I consciously contemplate making will only be detectable by it’s relationship to where I was before. This is why this level of making apparent changes contain the seeds of it’s opposite and hence the possibility that it returns to it’s starting position. People who go from smoker to non-smoker and back to a smoker can testify that as long as the identity remains as an “ex-smoker” the possibility to start again remains very real. Like many Catholics who leave the church… they never seem to become some other religion entirely, rather, it’s always a case of being an ‘ex-Catholic” eternally.
As Carl Jung wrote : “Every psychological extreme secretly contains its own opposite or strands in some sort of intimate and essential relation to it… There is no hallowed custom that cannot on occasion turn into its opposite and the more extreme a position is, the more easily may we expect of something into it’s opposite”
Yoga calls this ‘dualism’, the world of opposites. Yet the teachings point that there is a way out of the restless ping pong scenario by transcending good/bad thinking, ultimately including both as true and fundamental.
“IF you call this a stick, you affirm; if you call it not a stick you negate. Beyond affirmation and negation what would you call it?” – Zen koan
Real 2nd order change includes the good/bad, the X/not X, and demands a new label. The insights and ideas that provoke 2nd order change can only be introduced from the outside whether that is from a person you know who makes a comment at the right time or if it’s from yourself, looking at yourself in a new way. That is the structure of the ‘AHA!’ insight that can change a life in an instant.
Real solutions to our “problems” are not going to seem familiar or even understandable at first. This leap into the unknown is where our imagination comes alive, inventing outside the usual logical processes, arising out of the unconscious. This where all great insights always come from. Even Einstein – the Theory of Relativity popped into his head one day while day dreaming.
What it would be like if you could have that experience more often?
I remember the first time I came out of a long meditation retreat. For a week or so afterwards, my awareness seemed so acute that I noticed my impulses before they became translated into action. With that margin of dissociation, I could choose to engage in my usual personality quirks, or not. What would normally instantly make me annoyed or laugh without any feeling of control would arise presented as a menu to either choose or not. I learned a lot about the personality in those few days.
Yoga techniques of pranayama and meditation provide the practitioner excellent means to be an ‘inner space’ traveller and ‘get out of the nightmare’ by deliberately affecting a conscious change in state. By going into an altered state and again considering our usual waking state, we get two descriptions. This is how intelligence increases- when intelligence looks at intelligence. It’s like having a very insightful advisor but it occurs from within oneself. Like the returning traveler, we apprehend ourselves and personalities with new eyes and are a little more detached from the ‘reality’ of how things seem each time. By believing a little less in our perceptions we get an opportunity to rise up, to move to the next level of being. This may be how kundalini rises to awaken the chakras, and provoke stages of spiritual and mental development in the process.
NLP makes these kind of changes in perspective easy. By using NLP you can consider the changes you want to make in a way that will make them be part of an evolutionary shift upwards, not just a temporary change in habit that doesn’t stick. In other words by becoming conscious of the underlying pattern of how change happens- we can aim for more than just the inverse of the problem. Instead we can really think outside of the box entirely.
When you want to make a change
By asking yourself these questions about the changes you want to make you will be changing a way of being, not just a behavior. Changes then become generative- it will spur a whole number of shifts that fundamentally change the conditions for which that problem arose in the first place!
Ask yourself…
- “What do I want?”
It’s easy to say, “I don’t want to be X anymore”. This is an example of “not-X” thinking. Take some time to consider what you will have when that problem isn’t there at all. In other words, describe what you want in positively framed language. It will orient your mind towards the solution and rally all of your personal resources to attaining it.
- “How are these changes part of the way I want to live my life through time?”
Instead of going for “quitting smoking” (as an example) chunk up to a new label- a category of behaviors of which quitting smoking is included in. For example you might say that it’s about ‘healthy living’ which would include the way you eat, exercise, and more. If it’s a change in behavior you want, chunk up to include that change in a broader category. How is this change you want to make an example of a shift in the type of thinking you had been doing.. until now?
- “For what purpose?”
Ask yourself this question to discover the higher purposes that your changes will support. “Why is this important?” and, “to do what?”. By chunking higher in your thinking, you include more and more categories underneath it and you may discover for example that by quitting smoking you are actually enabling yourself to be a more loving person, and that… can be very motivating!
As I write this, there are a great number of political upheavals happening around the world, people in mass numbers asking for change in the system. Yet revolutions are common place through history, and one irony is how many times where what replaces the thrown out system becomes worse than the original. If you could for a moment, imagine that you could look back on the earth and it’s population from space and ask…
“How are the changes we are making an example of creating a world to which we enjoy being in? “
Namaste
Yoga Elements Studio
About the Author
Adrian Cox (E-RYT) is an acclaimed yoga teacher and licensed NLP trainer with both with Dr. John Grinder (co-developer of NLP) and Dr. Christina Hall (Society of NLP). He has trained extensively with the brightest and best in NLP, yoga, meditation, and Ayurvedic medicine. Adrian works with the way people and groups use their bodies, minds, and how they communicate with themselves and with others – to assist in creating change in behaviour, thinking, and performance. Adrian is the founder and director of Yoga Elements Studio in Bangkok, one of the first yoga centres in Thailand which many people praise as “Easily Bangkok’s best studio” (Travel and Leisure) “Bangkok’s most inspiring place to study yoga” (Bangkok Post), ”the most respected yoga studio in the city” (Lonely Planet Thailand), “the undisputed king of Bangkok yoga studios” (Bangkok Air inflight magazine) and “Bangkok’s top yoga studio” (Thai Airways inflight magazine) In demand globally, he trains people and companies worldwide and is featured at the Yoga Journal conferences in Moscow and Bangkok in 2008, 2009, and 2010. His clients include business people throughout Europe, Olympic athletes, Dusit Thani, Shangrila, and Six Senses hotel groups, Boston Consulting Group, and people from all walks of life.