Implement Change by Changing Who You Are

Two key concepts I have come across recently about generating change include the pleasure and pain theory (which I discovered on Tony Robbins' Personal Power II) and the identity theory.

These two theories are very comprehensive and can be understood on many levels, but to summarise in a few sentences...

The pleasure and pain theory says that our decisions on how to act are based on our perceptions of how much doing something will hurt or feel good. If doing something, e.g. smoking a cigarette, feels better than it feel hurtful to us, then we do it.

The identity theory is that all the result in our life that we produce are in line with what at our core we feel we deserve. E.g. if you at your core believe you are financially poor then you are probably also poor in real life. This phenomena explains how people who are poor and win the lottery often fall right back to being poor within a few years, if that.

So how is this useful for implementing change?

Say you want to become a millionaire. If you want to happily remain a millionaire once you get there you will have to have the identity of a millionaire. Having the correct identity means you will act 100% congruent with being a millionaire.

But how does this tie in with the pleasure and pain theory?

If you at your core believe you are a millionaire and you look at your bank account and realise that you have only a thousand dollars then this will cause incredible pain to you. This will cause so much pain because it is so not real to you that any pain involved in earning that money back will not compare to the pain of not being your true self of being a millionaire.

Many real life examples of this are when millionaires lose all their money, but then get it back again really quickly.

So how can we use this knowledge to achieve our goals?

1. We need to change our identities so that they are in line with our goals
2. We do this by changing our pleasure and pain associations to those of someone with your ideal identity would experience if they were in your situation.
3. We do this through various methods including NLP, journaling, asking focussed questions, e.g. how painful will not acting make me feel in 10 years time?
4. Discover what the side effects are of having that identity would be and start acting them out, like Steve Pavlina suggests on one of his podcasts.

Changing your identity is essential for rapid and long lasting change. My advice would be to take every action possible in making this change, because if at your core you believe you really DESERVE your goal, then it will take very little struggle to get there.