Introduction
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you
want to go.
Can People Really Change?
David Lucero knows where he wants to go: He wants to go to El Paso , Texas
David is about sixty years old, I think. For the last three
months, he has been living on a sidewalk across the street from a Greyhound bus
station.
I don’t know how long David has been homeless. He is one of America ’s
walking wounded—mentally ill, unable to take care of himself, unable to cope
with the business of life. He is always happy to talk, although you have to
repeat yourself a few times before he can understand you: David is losing his
hearing.
One day I tried to take him to a shelter for the homeless. All
he had to do was get in the pickup truck. He had to make a decision: Get in or
stay on the street. The right decision could have started the cycle of healing
and change, but it was more than David was capable of doing that morning. He
decided to stay on the street, waiting for his imaginary ride to El Paso .
When I meet people like David, I tell myself that Lewis
Carroll didn’t make anything up when he wrote Alice in Wonderland. I have met many people who are flesh and blood
Cheshire Cats, Mad Hatters, and Queens of Hearts.
I come into contact every day with people whose lives and
families have been torn apart by bad habits: people addicted to cigarettes,
alcohol, and illegal drugs; over-spenders, overeaters, and chronic worriers; negative
thinkers, procrastinators, and people who won’t forgive themselves for
something that happened long ago.
I have seen firsthand how bad habits keep ordinary people
from living happier and healthier lives. Everywhere you look, people want to
know why they are unhappy. And they want to know what they can do about it.
The talk shows offer a constant menu of miracle cures for
every type of bad habit imaginable—everything from quick weight-loss programs
to 20-minute lessons in positive thinking that promise to cure depression. We
are constantly bombarded by programs that promise effortless and immediate
results: Lose weight fast, while eating
as much as you want! Guaranteed to work! Sure.
We are overwhelmed with solutions today. And the more
solutions there are, the harder it is to find one that works. Many people have
failed so many times that they’ve almost given up the battle. Others gave up a
long time ago.
Establishing new priorities
Is it possible to free yourself from bad habits? Can people really change in any
meaningful and lost-lasting way? Can I change myself? The answer to each of
these questions is “yes.” But you can’t change in 24 hours, as some programs
and self-help books promise.
My research,
as well as my experience and common sense, tell me that anyone can change, but at the same time, I know that people need a
compelling reason to change.
What does
it mean to change? To change means to establish new priorities—to choose a
behavior that’s different from the one we’re using now. David Lucero is stuck
on the street, waiting for a solution that doesn’t exist. When a real solution is
right in front of his nose, he can’t see it.
I don’t
know when his hearing started to deteriorate. And even though he can see, I
have a feeling that he has been blind for many years. I don’t know the story of
his life, but I suspect it is a story of bad habits and bad decisions.
I’m sure
it’s a story filled with bad people and bad situations, too. But at some point
we have to discard the factors, the people, and the situations that shaped us.
Focusing on the past won’t help us solve today. At some point we have to take
responsibility for our own lives.
I suspect
that bad habits and bad choices are what brought David to this point—day after
day and year after year—until he hit rock bottom. That’s always the way it
is.
Learning
how to free yourself from bad habits starts with the realization that we cause
our own feelings. I am the major cause of my own problems. The moment I grasp
that simple fact, I’m ready to step into the process of self-change that will lead
to freedom from the habits that keep me from living a more satisfying life. And
when I’m free from my bad habits, the people around me will be free from the
person I used to be.
All
people can bring about superficial changes in themselves. But freeing yourself
from a self-destructive habit like smoking or overeating requires a deep,
long-lasting change. A bad habit is like an iceberg. You can’t beat the habit
if you approach it as if it were only as large as what you can see on the
surface.
Franz
Kafka said, “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Any book or
program that aims to help people break bad habits must reveal the whole iceberg
that lies below the surface.
You can’t
eliminate the whole thing in one day, but if you take a step-by-step approach,
you can eliminate the bad habit sooner than you thought possible. It is going
to take effort on your part.
You can’t
eat whatever you want and loose weight, no matter how many times you hear it on
the talk shows. But you can loose weight, and you can learn to enjoy healthy
foods more than the unhealthy foods you’re eating now.
David has
constructed a verbal cage for himself. His definition of the problem seems to
give him no choice; he avoids having to take responsibility for himself. To
receive the benefits that come with daily meals, hot showers, clean clothes, a
bed, medical attention, companionship, and as much help as a social worker can
give him— bus fare to El Paso, if that is indeed where he should go—he must
break out of the cage.
But David
is convinced that he cannot go to the shelter, for doing so would mean that he
might miss his ride to El Paso
I talk
about some extreme cases in this report, because I see them every day. But I
also think that these extreme cases make it easier to see the real issues and
challenges faced by people who are not in such obviously life-threatening
situations.
David isn’t
conscious of the elaborate mechanisms he has constructed to hide the truth from
himself, but he is hiding it all the same. To free ourselves from bad habits,
we must stop hiding the truth from ourselves.
Overeaters,
smokers, and chronic procrastinators have more in common with people like David
than meets the eye. We all go to great lengths to hide the truth from ourselves
about the destructive nature of our bad habits; too often, lives and families
are destroyed before we become aware of the verbal cages that keep us trapped
in self-destructive behavior.
Does
professional therapy work? Can it help people break bad habits before the habit
destroys their lives? The dropout rate is astonishing: 45% of clients who seek a professional therapist drop out of therapy
after two or three sessions.
Do
programs help? Millions of smokers have quit forever without following a treatment program. On the other hand, many
people who try a smoking-cessation program are not able to quit, no matter how
many different programs they try.
Some
research suggests that for every person
who quits smoking by following a treatment program, there are almost twenty
persons who quit on their own.
What
conclusion should we draw from all of this? It’s pretty clear, I think. You
have a better chance of freeing yourself from a bad habit by becoming your own
coach, by taking responsibility for your own program.
The goal
of this report is to give you the information and strategy that will empower
you to free yourself from bad habits. Millions of people have succeeded in
breaking a bad habit, and so can you.
The six stages in the process of self-change
Change is not an event, but a process. Change happens
through a series of stages, and most
successful self-changers fail at least once before they succeed. Willpower
alone won’t do it.
You need to understand the cycle of change, or you risk
substituting one bad habit for another, as so often happens when ex-smokers
satisfy their craving for “something” by overeating. Success depends on having
the right information and knowing how to use it.
Researchers have identified six clear stages in the process
of successful self-change:
1.
Denial
2.
Awareness
3.
Preparation
4.
Action
5.
Maintenance
6.
Termination
For most
people, the process of breaking a bad habit is not a straight path that takes
them from one stage to the next. Successful self-changers usually follow a path
that’s more like a spiral: They move forward, go back to a previous stage, and
move on to the next level of commitment one or more times before breaking the
habit for good.
Quitting
a habit cold turkey usually doesn’t work. If a person isn’t ready to move
ahead, pushing her into the action stage will cause her to feel like a failure
the first time she slips up. She may end up more addicted to her habit than she
was before she tried to quit. If she feels guilty and blames herself for
failing to break the habit, she will find it even harder to make a commitment
to quit the next time.
We have
all seen cases close to home. Many of us have experienced the frustration of
trying to break a bad habit. As Mark Twain said, “Quitting smoking is easy.
Personally, I’ve quit many times.” If that sounds familiar, this report is for
you.
Whatever
your bad habit is, you may have tried to break it many times, too. This time
will be different, because you’ll understand that breaking your habit is a
process, not an event. You will have the knowledge and the confidence to succeed
this time.
Can you
really change? Can you really free yourself from bad habits? Millions of people
around the world are living proof that you can. This guide will show you how. But
like Alice
Freeing yourself from a bad habit starts by removing the
blinders.
