How is it possible to change?

As long as you can fit a behavior into someone's belief system, you can get him to do anything, or stop him from doing anything.

I made changing fit into his belief system so completely that he couldn't do anything else.

When you already have a belief, there's no room for a new one unless you weaken the old belief first.

Trying to change slowly is like having a conversation one word a day.

--Richard Sandier

How is it possible to change?

Change your expectations, change your reality.

--unknown source

How is it possible to change?

Build a habit of meditation. If you are peace, you bring peace to your friends, family, to all people around you. If you transform yourself, you are transforming the world, helping the world by helping yourself.

If I tell you, you'll understand and then after a while you'll forget. If you come to it yourself, it stays with you.

--Mingyur Rinpoche

How is it possible to change?

Shifting other people's attention from a threat state to focusing on what you want them to focus on is the central challenge to creating real change.

However, focusing on solutions is not the natural tendency of the brain. Solutions are generally untested, and thus uncertain. It takes effort to dampen down the threat created that comes with uncertainty. To focus on solutions, sometimes you need to activate your director, veto your attention going to problems, and gently nudge your brain in a direction it would rather not go.

Humor is all about creating unexpected connections.

It's astonishingly easy to get stuck on the same small set of solutions to a problem, called the impasse phenomenon. Resolving an impasse requires letting the brain idle, reducing activation of the wrong answers. Having insights involves hearing subtle signals and allowing loose connections to be made. This requires a quiet mind, with minimal electrical activity.

As you have insights, you change your brain, and by changing your brain you change your whole world.

Focused attention changes the brain. Attention goes all too easily to the threat. Once you focus attention away from threat, you can create new connections with the right questions. Creating long-term change requires paying regular attention to deepen new circuits, especially when they are new.

Don't try to influence people when they are in a strong away state. Use elements of the SCARF model to shift people into a toward state. Practice using solution-focused questions that focus people’s attention directly on the specific circuits you want to bring to life.

 
--David Rock

How is it possible to change?

The truth is that all human passions, both the "good" and the "evil," can be understood only as a person's attempt to make sense his life. Change is possible only if he is able to "convert himself" to a new way of making sense of life by mobilizing his life-furthering passions and thus experiencing a superior sense of vitality and integration to the one he had before. Unless this happens he can be domesticated, but he cannot be cured.

--Erich Fromm

How is it possible to change?

… when you change what you believe, you change what you do.

--Johnson, Spencer

How is it possible to change?

You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You don't change. But when you understand it, it changes.

--Anthony de Mello

How is it possible to change?

The observance of rules, with a wise measure of slippage, coupled with the violation of rules, with an ironic measure of prudence, creates flexibility, strengthens the group, and thereby creates the possibility of nonviolent change in the social order.

--Allen Wheelis

How is it possible to change?

The single most important thing Greta has done is to shift her internal stance from "I understand" to "Help me understand."

--Douglas Stone + Bruce Patton + Sheila Heen