Photo by kieferpix - Getty Images
Climber on a mountain
Usually, it happens after you’ve made progress in changing an attitude or behavior. Perhaps you’ve been grappling with some vexing emotional or behavioral stuff—moodiness, pessimism, jealousy, a short fuse—any hold-you-back feeling or tendency that restrains the ability to achieve greater life satisfaction.
Maybe you’ve experienced real progress or even a breakthrough. It feels like you’re finally putting the nasty whatever-it-is behind you and are off to a fresh start. Hope and optimism re-emerge. But then comes a setback, as Jeff discovered.
Before, I was in this place where everything, even the littlest thing, set me off,” he told me. “I was in reaction mode all the time. It was exhausting.”
Turn Around?
Determined not to let angry outbursts rule his life, he set about changing himself. He met with a life coach and then a psychotherapist, meditated, did journaling and generally worked the problem until he turned himself around.
“I was in a pretty chill, together place for several weeks,” he reported. “The usual stuff that used to push my buttons just bounced off. I felt like a different person.”
But then came the fall backwards. A work project that absorbed copious amounts of his time and energy evaporated into cyberspace during a company-wide computer crash and back-up failure.
“That would upset anybody except a saint or a zombie,” I suggested.
“Well, being upset is one thing, but I could feel myself escalating into one of my old rant and rave kind of tantrums,” he replied.
“Did you explode?” I asked.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
“Yes, but not as bad as before. But afterwards, I realized this wasn’t just about a project down the drain. It may sound weird, but I felt like I was being tested by fate to see if I really had changed,” he concluded.
School of Life?
Some believe life is a school of sorts, one providing existential lessons that help us learn about ourselves and bring out our better qualities. According to these folks, events that disrupt our change efforts are not random or coincidental, but display a method to their madness, so to speak. As they see it, setbacks like Jeff’s are not designed to defeat a person’s transformative process, but rather to increase their self-awareness and solidify their resolve to keep moving forward.
Sometimes a fall back event like Jeff experienced may seem to obliterate a positive life change, suggesting we were kidding ourselves, that a transformation of one’s attitude or behavior that felt substantive actually proved skin deep. Unfortunately, many people whose hopes are running high after a positive life change let a setback burst their bubble, assuming any backsliding is a precursor to total failure.
However, depending on one’s attitude toward it, a setback may actually support the change one is seeking. Usually, if we treat these happenings as challenges rather than a pass-fail report card, pick ourselves up and keep trying, we will continue to make progress. Repetition and stick-to-it-ness are key to lasting behavior change.
Life seems imbued with a mysterious calculus that conspires to flush out our weaknesses and unfinished emotional business by presenting “testing” events, like the one Jeff endured at work. While not always welcome, these steps backward can present opportunities to keep growing rather than give up.
At first, Jeff thought he was going to suffer a “one step up and two steps back” scenario that would undermine what he believed he had accomplished. But after he mentally reframed his setback as a “test” and not a failure, he kept investing in himself and the change he desired. Subsequently, he discovered that the process was actually “two steps up and one step back,” not the other way around.
Which is the kind of psychological arithmetic that eventually equals lasting change.
For more, visit philipchard.com.
