The Reason we are encouraged to use pictures to accelerate Change

The process of personal change can be one of constant frustration, as exemplified by the millions of people who set out each year to make some changes in their lives, in the form of resolutions, only to fail within a few months. Why is it so difficult to effect real change in our lives?

To understand why change is so difficult, we must first understand what it is we are up against when we endeavor to change a habit, whether it be a lifelong one, or one that developed only recently in our lives.

Our bodies are equipped with mechanisms that protect itself from outside attempts to shut it down. This applies to the automated systems of breathing and circulation and other simpler systems such as hunger, or even the eyes tearing up, or closing (flinching) when something is coming at them.

We also have many mechanisms that are set up to automatically respond to outside stimuli, often because of our repeated responses to the same stimulus over time. As we start to perform certain repetitive acts, triggered by the same outside stimuli, our bodies set up programmed responses, to those stimuli, regardless of whether the responses are the best for our bodies, they have been deemed favorable in that they either bring pleasure or avoid pain.

The first thing we must do to change any of those programmed responses, is to recognize the relationship that exists within us between certain situations in our lives, and the things they trigger within us. We have all heard of the obvious ones like when people have to eat or light up a cigarette whenever they feel stress. These are not natural responses to these situations, but are learned, and eventually programmed to save us the time of having to think about it.

The thing is that once these responses are programmed, we have to be able to find ways to overcome the protective mechanisms in the body that are required to overcome these processes. It cannot be merely an intellectual pursuit but requires that we find what association this stimulus has to our desire to either gaining pleasure or avoiding pain, and we must develop the necessary imagery to change the association we have on an emotional level.

Often pictures and music can be employed to accomplish this emotional connection in the body. Some stop too early in the picture process by merely placing pictures where they can see them daily, and fail to endeavor to form an emotional connection between the image and the emotional need for a certain behavior. We must by repetitive imagery in our own minds, connect emotion to the picture that represents what we desire, and it must be constant and frequent in its occurrence.

The use of pictures is merely a trick to get the image into the psyche, where we can really use it, as the picture itself holds no power to effect change. It must be connected within us to the gain of pleasure or avoidance of pain, and sometimes we must also perform the opposite trick to first get the old image changed to its opposite effect.

Tony Robbins speaks of this as one of six major steps that must be followed to effect real change and make it last. I will discuss these in a future blog, and will endeavor to insure that I am not just plagiarizing his materials. The process is real, and has taught me a lot, as I have applied them to my life lately.

This is the key that is so often left out of discussions of using images to help us change.