I’ve been thinking a lot this week about change and how we can best handle it. So I decided to share this blog and video with you on how to deal with change.

Life is sometimes really tough. We lose people that we love, our friends leave, businesses collapse, and our jobs with them, we get sick. No wonder we try so hard to cling onto a semblance of control, it can feel like we wouldn’t be able to cope otherwise.

We go through our lives, putting one foot in front of the other, following the same routines, day in and day out, and making plans for what we are going to be doing and achieving.  We love routine because it gives us the idea that we have security, and control over the world around us. If we can just keep with the routines, everything else will hold together.

We set goals in our business and start measuring things, to work out if we are on the right track. Are we winning or losing?  Are we hitting our goals or failing? We have targets for how we should be doing, and then decide whether we are a good person or not according to whether we missed our self-made target or if we are a ‘success’ because we achieved the target.   

And, as John Lennon famously said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”

It can feel uncomfortable when the external world changes, and you begin to feel out of control or anxious because it’s unfamiliar.  Your brain is trying to make sense of it, and begins to give you information based on other things that have happened to you in the past. This can trigger other feelings and emotions.  If, for example, you have a memory of being left in a house on your own as a child and it was scary and horrible for you, when you are left alone following a bereavement or a partner leaves, you will return to the subconscious memory and trigger the same horrible feelings. That is how our brains work. We will do all we can to avoid that happening, and to squash the feelings down, hide them or try to work so hard that the feelings will go away. And of course it doesn’t work.

That is why working on your Inner Child can be so liberating for some people. In hypnosis we explore what these childhood triggers are and why they are controlling what you do now, as an adult. In this way you can become free of them and discover the liberation of becoming fearless. 

The only constant in life is change, and any illusion that you have that you can hold onto control is an illusion. The weather constantly changes, other people change, everything is changing all the time. The trick is to become resilient, and able to cope with anything that life throws at you. And the way to do this is to accept that you have no control. There is no control and there is nothing to control except your own thoughts.

The only thing that you can control are your thoughts and you can do this by first of all realising that you are separate from your thoughts.  Your thoughts are not YOU. You are the one who can observe your thoughts, and you are the one who can change your thoughts.

Change is inevitable, and resisting it is useless too. It’s far better to begin to practice acceptance. Accepting this present moment for what it is and what it isn’t.

When it feels like life is too much, too overwhelming, you feel out of control, take some time out. Go into nature and breathe deeply.  The feelings and thoughts will pass over in time, like the clouds do, and you will find clarity again.

I talk more about the fear of change here in my video.