To Change or not to Change
By Deborah Dorman and Caroline Lucas

Are you happy? How do we answer a question like that? After a deep breath, and a moment to feel how you are, on balance, most of us would say ’yes’, as long as life hasn’t thrown us a real stinker to deal with. Or would we?
Sometimes our personal outlook on life colours the world in a way that actually contradicts reality. So, if the answer were ‘No, I am not happy’, could it be that not only are we unhappy with unwanted events or actions, but we are also unhappy with ourselves, dependant on our ability to effect any change on these circumstances? It we feel overwhelmed and ineffective in certain instants, especially when they repeat throughout our lives, we come to believe that this is how we are, life is, and the past outcomes will repeat too, as always. We can end up not even responding to rudeness, unfairness or questioning being given the wrong change, let alone aspiring to getting what we want, creating positive change, allowing hapiness in. How much of our evaluation is pure open-hearted acceptance, and how much is perceived limitation colouring our response?
Now consider feeling full of confidence, energy, and determination, and any problems naturally diminish in importance. They do not dominate our thoughts and time, and so, on balance, could the unhappiness score be reduced simply by a change in attitude to our effectiveness? Does our belief have to be true, just because we have believed it for a long time?
Life keeps throwing us challenges to our perceived effectiveness, we are using happiness as a measure here, but is this to engrain our belief or provide an opportunity to select another more supportive one? These events are challenging because they enforce a change.
Change is often enforced, out of our control, such as the death of a loved one; redundancy; children leaving home; illness; pension fund collapsing and divorce. You may wonder ‘What am I going to do now? How do I cope?’ If that is not enough to contend with there may be all kinds of emotions surfacing, happiness not usually being one of them.
The only constant thing in this life is that things change. So the question is: ‘How will I react to this change?’. Did you realise that you have a choice? What if the only thing you can change is you? The events are irrefutable. As Wayne Dyer states ‘change your attitude to what you are looking at and what you are looking at will change.’
Do you believe that you can create a life you want and that it is up to you to do something different, if there are aspects of it that you wish to change? Do you have to have someone else tell you what to do, do it for you, or need to follow others who have a ‘better’ way? Have you found that over time you have lost a sense of what you want; letting go of guiding your own life, rather than figuring it out for yourself.
What if you can change all that? What if you can find your own way? What if you can discover the feelings and beliefs that block and limit you? What if you can find a way to let them go? What if you can learn to listen to your body and its innate wisdom, and tune into what needs to change in your life and change it? How different could your life be?
The only thing we can change is ourselves, the only thing ultimately we can control is us. Your choice.
A quote from Henry Ford: “One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.”

Have a Go
Try this exercise around something specific in your life like a close relationship perhaps. Sit somewhere quiet where you will not be disturbed for 20 minutes. Take a sheet of paper, at the top put whatever the topic is that you are working on. Fold the A4 sheet of paper in half vertically, and on one half write what I want and on the other half write what I don’t want. List all the things you don’t want, relating to that particular topic and on the opposite side put what you do want instead. Under each thing write down how that makes you feel, what emotions surface, what happens to your energy levels etc? Then cross out all the things you don’t want and fold the paper, so you only read what it is you really want. This exercise enables you to tune into yourself to find your own answers, [the body never lies] and acts as a good guide to what you really want and what drains you, indicating something that needs changing.
Caroline Lucas is an experienced E.F.T. Therapist and intuitive Life Coach and Deborah Dorman is an Accredited Journey Practitioner also qualifi ed in E.F.T. They run Workshops in Exeter to pass on life skills to others.