Eleven Questions That Lead to Change

BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT WITH IDEAS BY JILL PLACE, MA, RD

How serious are you about changing your life? These 11 questions can help you discover who you are and where you want to go from this point forward.

There are a zillion questionnaires out there that you can use to learn more about yourself out by responding to questions about your lifestyle, skills, personality type, career decision making, handwriting, intelligence, survival aptitudes, and parenting skills, to mention just a few. We don't pretend to cover all those areas with the eleven questions below. But we think these are a good starting point for becoming the best you can be — whether your goal is to find a life partner, lose weight, live with a chronic illness, raise healthy children, develop a greater sense of meaning in your life, or any of a thousand other goals you might have.

Answered in approximately the order they appear, these question can give you a good indication of how committed you are to change and how likely you are to be successful in achieving your goals.

1. Am I willing to be totally honest with myself?

Before you can become a different person, you have to start with who you are today. Otherwise, it's a bit like trying to navigate through a city by pretending you're on a different street than the one you're on. You may want to be someplace else. You may be heading there. You may firmly believe that you'll like it better when you get there. And some day you may actually get there. BUT right now, you are where you are and who you are. Even if you're lost, acknowledging that fact can stop you from going around in circles.

So although you may want to transform some aspect of your personality that tends to give you trouble, and may even be in the process of doing that, today you are who you are. To know who you are, therefore, requires complete honesty. Otherwise you're wasting your time, energy and, if you're seeing a therapist, money

2. What is true about me?

Once you decide you are willing to be honest with yourself, this question is much easier to answer. Without integrity, you will only see what you want to see, or what you think others would like you to be.

Even so, none of us can be totally without prejudice. After all, we can only view things from our perspective. However, there is a way to objectively explore who you are, what you know, what you believe, what you have learned, and what you want to be. That is to imagine that a camera or video, which doesn't give a farthing for whether what it records is good or bad, can accurately record your actions. What would it see? If there were an electronic brain scan that could read your thoughts, beliefs, priorities, and goals, what would the printout say?

3. What is at the center of who I am and how can I strengthen this core of my being?

"Who you are" is certainly not your bank account, the opinions you hold, the power, or lack of power, you wield at work, or the relationships you have. The core of who you are is also not your body, your emotions, your actions, your ego, or your mind. Rather, it is something that people are searching for in an age of increasing stress and materialism. Simply put, it is the soul. It is that which can connect you with a power greater than yourself. Once the soul is recognized and honored, it can become a sanctuary, a place of solace and deep resources you may not even be aware you possess.

This core, this center, this place of the soul, can help you counter the demands of the ego, such as the demand you be perfect or that you are separate and better than those who are different from you or who don't see things the way you do. Several articles in the Spirituality section can help you experience this place that is within each of us. Strengthening this core of your being will give you an internal refuge not only from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but also the little irritating, aggravating, frustrating annoyances of daily life.

4. How did I get to where I am today?

It's not surprising you do what you do, say what you say, and think what you think. You weren't raised in a vacuum. While it isn't necessary to delve into your past in order to solve problems in the present, it helps to recognize that significant events in your life have left an impact. It is possible that you, as all of us have done at one time or another in our childhood, made a decision about what the world was like and decided to act in a way that made sense at the time. What often happens, however, if that we can continue acting that way when our situation today requires a different behavior.

At the very least, when the negative dynamics of the family in which you grew up reverberate in the family you are raising today, taking a look at your history can prevent you from repeating negative dynamics and passing them along to your children. In our Stages of Life section we will soon have a number of pieces that will help you explore your history without needing to make your parents and grandparents wrong for doing the best they could do at the time.

5. What are my strengths and what do I like about myself, others, my job, and about life in general?

Until fairly recently, people who saw a therapist were called "patients," much as a sick person in the hospital is a patient. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) versions I, II, III, IV or IV-TR (Text Revision) was, and still is, the bible for diagnoses. If you met the criteria, you had a label that could stick to you like glue. While it is valuable to have some agreement that a certain number of symptoms are required in order to be given a particular diagnosis of a disorder, so they might be better treated, the tendency sometimes caused people to see pathology where it did not exist.

As psychological issues are increasingly discussed in newspapers and on talk shows, it's easy for the ordinary person to think he or she understands the complexity behind jargon used by mental health professionals. For example, terms like "co-dependent" get thrown around simply because a person cares for someone who has a problem.

It is not surprising that in such a climate it is easy to examine ourselves for flaws. We have them, of course, but when you focus only on your faults, on the cracks in your relationships, on the body image that doesn't match the model's, on the aches and pains and chronic illness that are part of every life, your self-evaluation can become an obsession with imperfection. Then it is difficult not only to accept, but to appreciate and actually like very much about themselves.

Then rather than keeping your problems in their proper perspective, you become like my son the day he came home from a school field trip to the science museum. I ask him how his day went. "Bad," he'd reply. "Bad?," I echoed. "Were the exhibits not what you thought they would be?" "No, they were good." "Was the bus ride bad?" "No, that was okay." Finally, after a long question and answer period along these lines, I would discover he didn't like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I packed for his lunch.

Similarly, if you're looking at your weaknesses, which are probably few and which are part and parcel of the human condition, you can skip over the good parts and only see fodder for a long self-improvement project. We hope that through the articles in this website you will be able to be like a friend of mine who, when I asked how she was doing, said, "My problem with my daughter is causing me tremendous pain and worry, but other than that, my life is doing just fine."

When you acknowledge how wonderful you are, despite an occasional wart here or there, you will have so much more to contribute to the world through your particular gifts.

6. What would I like to have different in my life and is that possible?

There's an old expression that goes something like this; "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." So we want to encourage you to dream great dreams. After all, we're creating a website to make an impact on the world, which may be viewed as a bit grandiose, given the state of affairs around the globe. But we stick with our dream and hope you stick with yours.

On the other hand, I'm a little leery of the philosophy proclaims, "If you can dream it, you can do it." Well, you can dream that your child will be president of the United States one day, but there are limited slots for that position. Thinking you can overcome gravity won't help you when you step off the cliff into air. You can, however, build dream castles in the air — and then create a ladder that can take you step by step toward that dream. You may not arrive at the top, but you can enjoy yourself along the way.

7. If I've tried to achieve that objective before, what has stood in my way?

There is a big difference between obsessing on your faults and exploring what might have kept you from reaching your goals in the past. We all have unconscious resistance to moving forward toward a solution that may take us into scary territory. You can see label this "resistance" as a psychological battle that will continue to defeat you.

Or, you can explore it as part of a subpersonality based on the Psychosynthesis model of human growth and development (future articles should be finished by the middle of the year). These subpersonalities, which we all have, grew out of experiences in our past and are actually trying to protect us. It's just that they don't see the whole picture and we may have to engage in a dialogue with them so they can be transformed with understanding and positive qualities they didn't know how to use.

8. How does this goal relate to my other goals and does it enhance meaning and purpose in my life?

This question goes to the core of how you can maintain balance and harmony in your life when you're attempting to change something, especially if that something is a big self-improvement or relationship project. Change will, naturally, cause imbalance. That's the point! If you're going to turn your life around, upside down and sideways to become the best you can be, you'd darn well better be sure you're expending energy on something that is really important.

This is especially true for people who obsess on losing weight. Often they are so focused on that one ambition that they lose sight of other goals that may be of greater importance in the larger picture. What does it matter if you have a beautiful body, but neglect the qualities that make your soul beautiful? Beauty is only skin deep.

So this question goes to the heart of choosing well the battles you want to fight. Why should you expend energy on an objective that isn't consistent with that which gives your life rich meaning and purpose? Are You Following Your Dreams or Someone Else's? is one of the many articles on Support4Change that are designed to help you explore that very question.

9. What quality would help me deal with this goal?

The Important Role Qualities Can Play in Your Life describes an experience with a client in which the development of a quality was an essential aspect of change. Certainly it is much easier to tackle problems, both small and large, when you have at your disposal the whole array of qualities of the human spirit. For some goals you may need patience, for others assertiveness. In some cases compassion and forgiveness are needed. In others, joy and creativity.

After we're launched, one of the ways we will arrange articles (in addition to locating them in general categories as shown above) is to link our content to specific qualities so you can see examples of how those qualities can be developed and used in practical ways.

10. What image or symbol can reinforce or support my intention to change?

In The Power of Images and Symbols , which is in one of the imagery articles, I discuss the way in which ordinary things like flags, owls and keys can act as "carriers" of ideas. You will find several examples of symbols that we have used in Using Symbols for Transformation . I recommend you read these articles, together with Mirrors and Closets Begin the Day, for they can encourage you to move toward your objective of being the best you can be.

11. What small step am I willing to take to move toward my goal?

"Kaisen" steps are those small incremental steps that lead steadily toward a destination that lies some distance away. Rather than becoming overwhelmed by the enormity of the goal you've decided to set for yourself, read Keeping Your Eyes on Your Goal, which explores how to take minor, do-able steps from intention to achievement. That article also has suggestions for using symbols to help along the way.

There is another set of questions some people have found effective when in the midst of a challenging situation. You may want to read that at Living With Purpose When Facing a Challenge.

© Copyright 2002, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT