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[TobiasK]

BY Ozzie | July 24th, 2009 at 12:16 PM
Is Change Cyclical?
The western mind is geared to forward progress, forward change. Our culture is obsessed with forward motion. We want to go from point A to point B in the least amount of time...and all the way there we are asking ourselves “are we there yet?” “Where are we?” “How long do we have?”

Trained Dummies

All our culture is based on the idea that progress is linear. It is not even questioned. You invest a certain amount of time and effort and you get from one end of the pool to the other end of the pool. With more time and more effort and more training you can reduce –in a linear fashion- the time you do this to a swimming world record.

Wrong.

Linear Progress as an Illusion

It doesn’t take much to find out that this model for change is flawed. If change was linear we could change everything very easily. We just had to invest time, effort and money and voala. Change is done. We can move to the next thing.

On further examination linear progress is just a construct of our minds to somehow give a logical explanation of reality. But as we all know, reality is far from logical. If it was, we could all be millionaires tomorrow by investing in the “best” company in the stock market. Following a linear pattern, the company with the best fundamentals will steadily increase its stock value exponentially and will make us rich in time down the line. If that was true everybody will be rich. If everybody is rich what’s the point of having a stock exchange anyway?

Cycles of Change

Change operates in cycles just like nature does. Nature is cyclical and so are we. We cannot expect personal change and skill progress to be any different. It is against nature. It is not real.

Skills and personal changes go thru cyclical patterns. There are moments of spurts of progress and there are moments of sudden darkness, where nothing seems to be working.

It is not uncommon for me to receive emails from advanced guys in the game who are stuck at some point in their development where nothing seems to be working. They also complain that “forward progress” has stopped.

Well, forward progress is just an illusion to begin with. It is how we explain things but it is not the real thing. Forward progress is just how we make sense out of reality. However, this illusion of straight-onwards change is at the very foundation of most guy’s inner game. It is only a matter time before this illusion bites them in the ass.

Even economic experts, trained in logic, talk all the time about economic cycles. They always talk about riding the wave of economic changes and let the economy do the work for you.

Airplanes Never Fly On Route

May be this is a example to understand change. An airplane never sticks to its original course. It is always out of course but always gets to its destination. I think the same applies when we set goals for ourselves. We are most of the time blown off course, sometimes taking by-ways or secondary routes until we get back on track. However, without a goal we have no direction. We would be lost.

The Newbie’s Linear Progress

One of the things that feeds this myth of linear progress is how a newbie progresses in the game. The newbie that starts from scratch marches forward in an apparent linear manner. They go from not being able to approach to engaging girls and at times making out with them in the first night of BC. Their levels of excitement propels them to incredible results. Nothing can touch them. In their mind they are moving forward at 200 mph.

And in a sense they are right. At the beginning skills develop real quick but then the challenge of consistency starts to rear its ugly head. They find out pretty soon that producing those kinds of results on a regular basis take some lengthy repetition and practice.

However, guys get used to thinking that progress is linear and they are only going to get better in an increasingly linear fashion.

Needless to say, as they go out consistently they realize that change is not linear and it sometimes goes back and gets worse before it gets better. And that to get good at anything they have to plough thru rough periods or times where they are not getting what they expected-namely linear progress.

Negotiating Change

I teach guys that you have to become a master at negotiating change. We all have an inner resistance to change. We have to negotiate it every time.

A big part of negotiating change is understanding change. By knowing that change is not linear, we can welcome going backwards a little bit. We can adapt better to periods where nothing seems to be happening in our game. We can expect those moments and not obsess over them and keep doing our jobs like nothing happened.

We can adopt the mantra for hard times: “I don’t know where I am going but it is ok”. Sooner or later I will hit my stride if I don’t fuck with my head too much. It is all part of becoming a master of change.

I can think of Christopher Columbus in the middle of the ocean leading his expedition into the unknown and thinking “I don’t know where the fuck I am but I will keep going”. If Columbus believed in forward progress he would have quit his efforts to discover the new world long before he even started. It took him a long time and many backwards cycles-namely fund raising- to get his expedition off the ground.