Personal Change is a Sinusoidal Function over a Slope
We usually think of personal change as a one-step process: you start it, you do it, and then you get the desired results. Unfortunately, that is not true in most cases. One way or another, personal change is a gradual process that happens over many rounds and steps.
If we correctly manage the process, we will take one more step toward the desired results in each new round. Usually, each new round brings better results, and we become, with time, more capable of achieving more things with less effort. Also, we earn more knowledge, wisdom, and experience on how to deal with the subject of change.
In some exceptional cases, the change can happen in a single step with an immediate effect. We call that the revolutionary way of change. Flip it all over, take exceptional decisions, make exceptional procedures, and apply the required change immediately. Although this choice is tempting, and sometimes it is available and gives fast results in the beginning, but only in a few cases the results will become permanent. Relying on the revolutionary approach only to achieve permanent results would require extreme force to eliminate the fierce resistance that will occur sooner or later.
In most cases, it does not work. A counter-wise flip happens, and the old situation or even a worse one becomes the net result. The typical scenario is that more revolutions will happen, followed by counter-wise flips again and again, and so on. There will be no stability for a long time. So, somehow, if the desired change is going to occur this way, then eventually it will be gradual but with a lot of struggles.
This approach could be useful in some exceptional situations, as it is like throwing a stone into a stagnant lake where any kind of change is required to break a deadlock situation. Otherwise, this choice should only be used to achieve permanent results in cases where immediate results are necessary to prevent serious damage. In such a case, you should be prepared for the extreme power consumption required to enforce the new situation for a sufficient duration to make it permanent.
Personal change is a complicated process, and it is more complicated than other kinds of change. The complexity comes from different sides: the nature of the process is dynamic, which requires a lot of effort to follow and guide it all the time. The process also includes altering human behaviors and habits, which is a process that cannot be described as a binary one where an on/off mechanism is applicable in most cases.
Successful personal change is simply a personal development process, so if you made a development, then you made a positive change. The results of a development process cannot be described using words such as “Success” or “Fail” only.
Development is a process of multilevel success, and each step in the right direction is a success in itself that deserves the effort.
The fact is that the change process needs wisdom, patience, and that is why another approach that is more explicit in its gradualism is the preferred one in most cases, as it is safer, easier, and costs less; and it produces results that are more permanent in the long run. However, this takes much longer time to be effective, and it needs some understanding of the real way it works.
To make a successful change, you should start from where you are, not from where you should be. Change is like a ladder; if you want to reach up, then you should start from where you are. You cannot simply start from the top and ignore the ladder, why? It is because you are not there yet! You are already still at the bottom and need to spend energy to climb up.
Although this is so obvious and axiomatic, it is strange how much we forget it when we are about to commit a change in our life.
Sometimes, it might be useful to mix or combine the revolutionary and the gradual approaches together.
Where the gradual approach is the main context here, the revolutionary approach is used to achieve minor sub-changes more quickly at some stages of the process. However, you must understand that gradual personal change has an oscillatory nature, which is a general characteristic of change processes, but is especially true when it comes to changing human behavior.
Many people think that gradual guided changes happen in a linear way, where we become either better or worse directly with each step we make; and if they try to draw their path of change to both good or bad, they will draw it as straight lines like the ones shown below. But that is not what actually happens.
Although the process of the change is too complicated here, we can summarize it in a simple way that can be true in general and enough for you to understand the point.
Any guided change takes an oscillating or a sinusoidal form. When we attempt to commit a change, we keep trying to rise up until we reach our best. Then, we start falling slowly again until we go back to the initial (or the average) level. After that, we keep falling down until we approach our worst case. When we are near to that worst point, the alarm rings. We wake up and try to raise ourselves up again, and so on. We just circle around an axis, and the net result of such a change is zero. In the long run, our average level remains the same, and that is why most of the guided personal change processes fail.
Of course, the alarms could ring a little earlier, i.e., before reaching the worst point, or we might start to drop before we reach the peak of our best, but in both cases, we will remain cycling around that axis.
For simplicity and the goals of this illustration, we will ignore such cases and consider the general case, as the conclusions will remain valid for most cases. Also, we will consider only the positive change, as it is what interests us here.
So, what is wrong here?
The problem is in the axis we are cycling around, it is a perfectly horizontal one. In order to make a successful change, we should perform a little upward rotation of that axis around which we circle. Such a rotation should neither be a very small one, as the process will take a very long time in this case, nor a too wide rotation, as the slope will become so hard to climb in such a case; our momentum power might not be enough for that.
The actual practical step to rotate the axis upward is to try to make your worst level now just a little better than what your worst one was before, and rise up your best level now just a little higher than your last best level was, and keep on that way. With time, the worst level you will drop to becomes higher than some previous best levels, as you can see in the figure from comparing points A and D.
Here, it is worth noting that the frequency of circling around the sloped axis would decrease automatically with time as we gain more stability, and the period of the new cycles would increase gradually. Each time, we would need a longer period to fall or rise up again. Later, the period needed to rise up gets shorter, and the time we need to fall becomes longer. The difference between our best level and our worst one in each new cycle would decrease over time. The vertical distance that we travel between the worst and the best levels becomes shorter as we move along the axis, as you can see from comparing the vertical distance between points C and D with the vertical distance between E and F.
When that vertical distance becomes very short and the frequency becomes so slow, the change becomes permanent, and we can say that the overall process succeeded. The overall enhancement will be the vertical distance between the points on the sloped axis and their matches on the horizontal one. That enhancement is the change that happened (the net result of the change process).
A general conclusion here is that behavioral change will not happen successfully once its button is turned on!
Trying to jump to success and thinking that change is just a switch button is just a delusion; that delusion would take us to certain failure in most cases.
Changes and enhancements in human behavior happen in an oscillating manner, not a linear one. You should keep that in mind and respect that oscillating pattern when you try to make a change or enhance your behavior, even if you intend to make a revolutionary attempt at some point.
Moreover, unless it happened accidentally, you should never try to use the revolutionary approach of change to make major deep changes in yourself because a change in such a way could crack your emotional and mental stability and cause serious damage to your intellectual infrastructure in the long run.
Deep here means specifically your freedom, your identity, and your basics, including basic beliefs, ethics, and intellectual orientations. This group of elements defines your mental and behavioral orientations. A sudden deep change in them can simply shake your whole personal world.
Again, one exception is when it is obvious that you are heading toward a disastrous result or serious damage, and a deep change is required immediately to prevent that.
However, if such a revolutionary deep change happened accidentally for one reason or another, you should be careful because that will lead you, at some point, to be an extremist or a fanatic in some way or another. You should be aware of that and do your best to neutralize such effects, which in turn will require a huge effort. You should treat yourself in such a case as a patient who is in recovery after a major serious surgery. Actually, that is a precise metaphor for what happens, except that it takes a mental and emotional form rather than a physical one.
