When trying to make a change in your life, staying the course through a plan can leave you feeling insecure. It doesn’t matter if this change is to feel better emotionally, or if you are trying to change a habitual or even addictive behavior. Letting the plan takes its course can be intimidating, because you could end up with a sense of being let down. You’re no longer going to be responding to your old, learned habits, so the uneasiness makes sense. If you have set a plan for yourself to change something in your life, this discomfort can make it tempting to switch the plan completely. However, if you change your plan too frequently and too much at one time, you aren’t making an ineffective plan more effective. Instead, you’re likely going to recreate multiple ineffective plans, and even more problems.
Most plans need to be adjusted to make them successful. Rarely do we create a plan for a long-term change that works out without any adjustment. Sometimes these adjustments can include painful realizations about yourself, but that is a basis for empowerment. This will allow you take personal responsibility, rather than feeling like there is nothing that you can do. You can control some things that happen in your life, but there are many more things that occur that are completely out of your control. Therefore, it’s better to change how you react to those situations, rather than focus on what you’ll never have control of.
There is a difference between adjusting a plan to make it more effective and learn from it, and changing the plan completely to deal with short-term discomfort. You might be concerned about allowing a plan to play out because, to some extent, what you have done in the past has worked to hold off pain. New plans can be exhilarating, and exciting. They can overcompensate for painful emotions for a period of time, yet new plans don’t deal with the underlying issues. They are reactionary. Long-term, successful plans have much more information gathering that is involved. Identifying a long-term personal change that you want to make, and what you can do to make this change is extremely important. Do your actions today help create a path to that long-term goal? Not knowing what the goal is, and reacting to avoid discomfort will further get you stuck in your life. There’s a ceiling that you’ll have to break through, and sometimes that ceiling is painful. What you will come out with is more wisdom and experience. So when you make a plan for a major change in your life, stick to it. Learn from it, and be fine with amending it. However, don’t be too influenced by the unknown, and overhaul the plan completely. Instead, embrace what you don’t know as a potential learning experience.
