The Irony of Viewing Personal Growth in Life as Emotional Change.

Embarking oneself on a personal growth journey is not about changing our life but our perception and understanding thereof. Emotional change is not something that we only pursue on our personal growth path. Emotional change is embedded into our very life itself – there would be no life without change. Life is change, or even more to the point:

WE are change.

Every second, trillions of reactions are taking place in each one of our cells. Change in itself is paradoxically the only certainty we have in life. Death is following birth, and in that cycle between birth and death we are creating and living our world each moment anew; and out of each moment arises the most precious gift that life is offering to us: our human experience.

Any given moment in our life we feel, we think, we engage with our mind, our body and our spirit. We engage with our world within and without, whether we know it or not. An experience is a felt sense of that energy in motion (emotion) of that intricate relationship of all that is .

In that sea of energy, each moment of ours creates itself anew – moment after moment. Change is the only thing we know – change is the very essence of our human existence.

In each moment we have the possibility to recreate the script for our experience in our life anew. In each moment lies the potential for positive change and personal growth. Moment after moment is shaping our life, our experience and our path. And more often than not we walk that path year – after year – after year; wondering if that is all that life has to offer, wondering what the key is to changing our human experience: our emotions, our feelings, our thoughts.

The Stoics taught that unhappiness results from an attitude problem – a refusal to accept the way things work. We embark on a personal growth journey hungry for change. We look at our world from all angles, yet, seldom do we look at change itself. How can we change anything if we don’t look at the very process of change itself. In order to interrupt the natural flow of change, we need to know the way change works. Otherwise, as John Lennon so nicely put it, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”.

Each moment of our lives offers us a potential for change and we take it again and again and again, whether we know it or not. And then we stop and start wondering why things don’t change.

The fact is, things do change, everything changes a million of times over and over again but we exude all our energy in keeping those changes in line with our human experience that we designed for ourselves in our minds a long time ago, somewhere in the realms of our past. And that is why we often arrive at the very same place in our experience, another full circle taken, another round fought.

Trillions of changes later we find ourselves to be sitting with the same familiar emotion, with the very same experience that we wanted to change in the first place. Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

But everything was so different this time, or was it really?

The following video looks at a study of the decision making process in our brains. Every decision can only be made in the now and ‘now’ arises anew in each moment. The question is here is, at what point do we become aware or conscious that we are making an actual decision? Decisions are made every moment of our lifes and govern us on our journey; yet, the decision making process is happening mostly behind the scenes, so to speak. Beyond our conscious awareness.

The decision making process and, thus, change whether conscious or unconscious draws from information within our mind and is determined by the perception of our past, the present situation and the future. Drs Philip Zimbardo and James Boyd have dedicated their lives to pioneering research that presents us with insights what influences how we decide each given moment in our lives.

Each decision is made in the now; however, the decision making process changes from person to person. You can find a one hour presentation of their book The Time Paradox: The new psychology of time that can change your life here where they talk about how your individual time perspective shapes your life and determines the focus of your decision making process.

Technorati Tags: awareness, change, decision making, development, emotion, emotional change, personal, self discovery, self inquiry

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