6 Reasons Why We Fear Change

Imagine that a divine being came up to you and gave you two choices. Choice one, you could live your life steady with a good job that’s not your dream job, good income with enough money where you wouldn’t have to think too much about money and a good relationship with a partner.

Choice two is that you will have complete free will but you will have nothing guaranteed. You could spend your life in poverty but you also could become a millionaire doing something you love and have the most fulfilling relationship of your life.

What choice would you choose? I think many of us would say that we would take choice two but the reality is most people live in choice one.

We get comfortable in our lives.

Fear Of Leaving Dreamers Land

This is something that I used to have. When I was in my early 20’s, I used to always tell myself that I always had this “potential.” I felt like that if the chips fell in the right spot for me, that I would magically get everything together and live the life of my dream.

There was a major problem with that, I always found an excuse. The chips were never going to fall perfect for me, in fact, there were times in my life where I had opportunities but I missed them.

I enjoyed living in dreamers land. I enjoyed thinking that one day, I could start doing all these things and right now I would just coast through it and wake up a success.

Life doesn’t work that way. There were years of work that I could have put into being a writer. I’ve wanted to be a writer at least since 2014 but I didn’t start blogging until about 2020. That was six years of experience that I missed out on because I was comfortable in the land of being complacently. Granted, I was still writing on a daily basis but I never felt like I was good enough to publish anything.

We fear change because that means we have to start taking accountability for our lives. The truth is, we always have to take accountability for our lives. It doesn’t matter if we fail.

Fear Others Will Not Like You

One of the bigger fears of change that you can have is the fear that others will not like you. If you’ve been hanging out with the same people for years, they have put you into a box. It’s not to a fault of their own but that’s what people do. We interact with people, try to understand their personalities so we can predict how they would react.

We also do this to ourselves. On a deep level, we know how others perceive us. It’s generally how we subconsciously perceive ourselves. If you don’t believe you’re good enough then you’re sending out signals to others that you’re not good enough.

Fear Of Letting Go

When you begin a road to making real change in your life. You must let go what is our of your control. For example, you can control how often you go to the gym, work on your side hustle and the effort you put into your relationships. What you cannot control is how many followers you will gain or how your friends and significant other will react to anything you will do. You may not even be able to control how much weight you lose in ‘X’ amount of time but you must trust the process of change.

Letting go of control is an essential to creating lasting change. The more you try to control, the more frustrated you will become and the sooner you will end up quitting your road to change.

Allow Others To Support You

Be open and honest with everyone in your life about the changes you are trying to make. If you are trying to eat healthier, quit drinking, or exercise on a daily basis tell your friends what you are trying to do. Often when we keep our goals a secret from others, we end up coming up with weird excuses of why we can’t go out tonight and that ends up damaging relationships with others in the long run.

Allow others to support you and offer for them to join you in the process if that is something they want to do as well. In fact, that may deepen your relationships.

Focus On One Day At A Time

It’s easy to over plan. I’ve done it. There’s blog posts all over the internet about planning and how you need SMART goals for everything and if you follow this plan you will all of the sudden be the most successful person on the planet.

While a general SMART goal is definitely a helpful guide. Do not allow it to be the end all be all. Every day is going to be different. You never know how things will end up changing along the way. Focus more on building a system instead of a goal. Goals in our minds are usually a means to an end. A system is something that will last forever.

If you want to get in great shape and stay there, you must build a system of working out that you will maintain. If you have a goal to lose 20 lbs in 3 months, many times people will make a sprint to do that (often achieve it) then once they hit that goal they fall back into their old habits and regain the weight again. In their minds, they ‘hit’ the goal but they didn’t build something that is sustainable over time.

Recognize When You’re Falling Back Into Old Habits

It’s almost impossible to break a habit until you recognize your patterns. In the book, The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg says, “Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.”

This means when you need to recognize your current routines and need to try to insert new ones. If you notice that you tend to order takeout food when you come home from an exhausting day at work, try to insert a new routine of always having food meal prepped at home so you don’t have to try to fight the friction of cooking after an exhausting day.

Conclusion

Change is hard. If all of us had an easy button to press and all of the sudden we would change all of our bad habits, I think anyone would hit it. At the same time, the journey of making a change in your life is almost as fulfilling as the change itself.