Odds are you can change for the better

By Julia Clowney, LICSW

Quick, think of something you know you can’t do.  We all have so many limitations on ourselves, it shouldn’t be too hard.  Pick one that you’d actually like to be able to do, despite “knowing” you can’t.

Here’s an example.  Take Sheila – a 38-year-old woman, an office manager with two kids and, by her own account, a horrible temper.  We know this because she tells everyone – from her husband to her co-workers to the guy who washes her hair at the salon. “I have a horrible temper!  I can never stay calm when someone is disagreeing with me!”

While making this type of confessional small talk – Sheila is engaged in a much bigger conversation with herself, even if she doesn’t know it.  When she says something like, “I really loose my stack when someone thinks they know better than me” – what Sheila’s really saying is that she’s lost her stack in the past, and that she’ll always loose her stack in the future.  It’s just who she is, and nothing can change it.

Let’s look at the facts of her case.  To be fair, Sheila HAS, in the past, shown a bad temper.  She HAS, in the past, lost her cool when someone disagreed with her.  She has, in fact, spent years loosing her temper and now, can loose it at the drop of a hat, or a misplaced comment or a slow start at a green light.  Sheila is good at losing her temper.  When she’s hollering at a co-worker in the break room or slapping the steering wheel – Sheila is in her COMFORT ZONE.  She’s taught herself through decades of repetition that this is her way of reacting to negatives – big or small.  These are the facts of Sheila’s life.

But here’s where it gets good.  That Sheila will forever be apologizing to co-workers or wishing she hadn’t just called that other driver what she called him in front of her kids – that she will ALWAYS have a bad temper – that is a CORE BELIEF.  And that can change.  A core belief is a fancy way of saying that she has believed something so strongly and for so long that it HAS BECOME A FACT for her.  But a core belief is not a fact, it’s a malleable thing, and so, as it turns out, is Sheila.  So what’s the answer?

Sheila’s tried before.  She’s promised herself that she will change.  That tomorrow, she will be 100% calm when she calls the cable company to ask about that incorrect bill, 100% calm when she talks to her boss about vacation time and 100% calm when she makes Thanksgiving plans with her sister.  That’s the power of positive thinking, right?  Wrong.  Here’s why Sheila is still losing her temper:  Yelling, accusing, storming off – they’ve all become so common that it actually feels scary to let them go.  The part of Sheila that needs things to stay the same, to stay “safe” will throw that “100% calm” right out the window.  So it FEELS like there is no chance of that happening.  What happens?  Sheila sticks with her original message to herself:  She will ALWAYS have a bad temper, and she yells at the cable company, her boss and her sister.

Here’s where it gets really good.  Sheila can actually trick herself into changing her behavior.   Instead of going for 100% clam – Sheila can tell herself that she’s got a 10 or 20% chance of controlling her temper and being the calm, confident person she wants to be.  By not instantly banishing that part of her that feels comfortable and safe when yelling, Sheila’s not fighting herself (along with the cable company) and smaller-sized goal seems POSSIBLE, which is ever so exciting to the part of her that does want change, that is ready for Sheila to be the type of person who doesn’t loose her temper.

By believing there is a 10 or 20 percent chance of changing how she reacts to things, Sheila can shift her thinking from the absolute “I will never be able to drive in traffic without cursing like a sailor” to a more flexible, more likely to change scenario of actual personal growth.  She has to sneak around that bully part of her that doesn’t even try to change or grow and announces at every chance that she’ll just always be flawed and ill-tempered when it comes to conflict.

Here’s how the trick works in action.  Sheila is driving with her boss in the car.  He’s telling her how he really needs her to put more hours in at the office, and she’s thinking about how, just last night, her daughter asked her to come to more of her soccer games.  Sheila is feeling anxious, even before the car behind her lays on the horn and passes her on the right.  Now what?  The you’re-just-a-hot-tempered-kind-of-person part of Sheila starts putting together a comforting litany of curse words, BUT the maybe-I-can-change-how-I-react-to-things wonders if there isn’t maybe a chance to put the new calm Sheila into action.

Believe it or not it’s fine if she chooses litany of curses.  Why?  Because Sheila’s moved from KNOWING that she’s just always going to loose her temper in those situations to RECOGNIZING that she has a choice.  She might choose that litany of curses four or five more times – but every time she does – Sheila can see that it was a choice she made.  The sixth time, she’ll be more comfortable with the idea that she could actually choose a different reaction.  And by the seventh time Sheila might actually have a heated conversation with her boss that didn’t involve her cringing over her actions several hours later.

Sheila might not yet feel 100% calm and confident – but it’s good enough to think that maybe she has more than a 10% chance.  Maybe she even has a 30% chance of banishing that bad temper.

This process continues until she has explored the choices she has enough to discover that her bad temper is not a “fact” – it’s a choice.  And she may still have bad reactions to conflict – but the story is no longer “I’m Sheila and I hate it, but I’ve got a nasty temper.”  It becomes, “I’ve had a problem with a bad temper but I’m making progress toward being calmer all the time.”  And that’s becomes the truth.