by Kevin Hogan

Can YOU or ANYONE really become a “New Person?” 

Is it even a little possible?

There’s a lot working against you. If you stay at the same job you have all the negative triggers in the same place from the same people every single day. That is incredibly tough to fight, without fighting.

What about at home?

Kids? Spouse? Dog? Whatever, they are there every single day and the triggers are most intense at home because there is very little reason to control your behavior. Your friends don’t see you flip out. At work you look like an idiot if you flip out. At home you only look like an idiot to a couple of people!  Very little leverage to be a new person at home.

The odds seemed stacked against you.

And as I’ve shared with you, if you are becoming a better person you’ve noticed that very FEW people respond positively to your changing who you are, even if it’s for the better.

Changing a self is no simple project. Changing it so the new self is actually a better version of (let’s call him Bill) Bill is even more difficult.

Quite some time ago I took an anger management course. I’ve always had expectations of myself and others that are quite high and have known that if you want results yourself and others expectations are critical.

The problem was I’ve always lived in a world of dealing with family, friends, clients who either had done stupid things in business or their life to get the results they were getting But of course, not everything that happens to you is something you generated. Sometimes your results have nothing to do with you.

Two quick examples to understand.

In a relatively free country like the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, etc. you really have a significant amount of control over the results you have. (This is a subject of an article we’ll do in a few weeks. Significant means 1/3 or more for this subject.) The problem is that luck, the environment, the culture, the person you live with, the person who left you, the children or parents or friends you take care of, your boss, your competitors, they ALL influence where you go in life.

I’m not going to say “end up” because we all end up in the same place in the end.

What life is about is making everything that happens from THIS MOMENT forward as good as it can be as defined, by you, with suggestions from me, along the way.

If a car broadsides your car as they happily race through the intersection, whether you or someone else in the car dies, gets hurt is really, for the most part, not their responsibility.

Sure, maybe if someone was driving on an icy day and they knew they shouldn’t have…we all know that. But for the most part the guy who ran the red and torpedoed into your two doors doing somewhere between minor and life taking damage…is their responsibility.

Those moments and everything that follows due to that experience, are called Black Swans.

If someone robs a store or does damage to another person, that’s generally a bad thing. And here we have another problem. Just because someone robs a store doesn’t mean they did something wrong, they simply might have done something that was necessary for the survival of their family, for example. On average, life is 50 Shades of Gray.

About 7 years ago, my fairly well known girlfriend said, “Kev you want to see?” This was in another country and I didn’t speak the language. “Like what?” (Who knows maybe it was Avengers or a Tom Cruise movie.) “50 Shades of Gray.” In my mind? Ah you gotta be kidding.

This is where anger management paid off.

Obviously, I wasn’t angry. Not even a little. I was humored and almost laughing. But what you learn in anger management is that when a stimulus occurs and your trigger reaction is to blow up you first think. “Shut up, Kev.” then “Think Kev, there is a best answer here. If you can’t figure it out return to “Shut up Kev.”

(You don’t have to be in an anger triggering or triggered moment to use the “Shut up, Kev” tool.)

I ALMOST SPOKE! I almost said why in the name of Xenu would I want to see that?

But then I realized either A, she really had been looking forward to it or B, she wanted me to see it and learn something. C? She couldn’t have believed I’d want to see it for my pleasure, as I’m just not THAT wild.

Not knowing and not wanting to reduce harmony, I said, “Sure, what time?”

We saw the midnight show, there were like 30 people in the theater as it was at the end of the run, and it was in English. Praise god.

And it was certainly interesting. And I learned a lot of things, most of which were out of my future before the things had run their course in the show.

You use the tool in anger producing situations the same way. Someone says something that triggers you. You squelch the nuclear bomb. If you don’t know what to say, you silence your self like you do a phone. Then walk away so you don’t do damage to the rest of the day or week or life.

It was the first step (so to speak) in making a better human.

But what do you do NEXT?

That was hard. It was harder than losing weight. But one useful tool is really just that.

1.

Now let’s return to the question but change it just a bit because the question is not can MOST PEOPLE become a new person, but can you become a new person, and IF you can is it worth the effort?

Humans don’t want to change on average, but they recognize that certain aspects of what they do or what they say or how they look really is getting them negative results in life.

Here’s the thing: Quite often, even amongst all the randomness of life, people are negatively changed by the randomness, almost never in a good way, and they recognize that SOMETHING MUST CHANGE.

Life is filled with randomness.

5 years ago everyone answered with “That’s random.” People were recognizing that random things were random. Then the “that’s random” reaction became a catch all for not telling the person they were an idiot. And the value of the response became mostly useless again.

Question: When was the last time someone RANDOMLY walked up to your house, your apartment, in your office and said, “HEY BILL, I want to GIVE YOU A MILLION DOLLARS! Here ya’ go!”

“Hey BIll, I want to give you a THOUSAND DOLLARS because you are such a nice guy! Here ya’ go!”

“Hey Bill, I want to give you twenty bucks because you’re such a good guy!”

or

“Hey Bill, I cut your lawn, shoveled your sidewalk, made the bed for you, cleaned the bathroom, washed your dishes….”

You get this right?

YES! There are good people in the world who actually do things like this for people. 

And even complete jerks will occasionally do something good for another human being for no reason other they want to make the world a better place or give a person a better day. 

But let’s address what to expect and not end up disappointed:

Just because YOU want to be a New Person, a better person, a better version of your Self does not mean anyone else around you has any interest in doing that for themselves or assisting you.

Here are the First 10 Facts of Life as they Relate to Becoming a Better/New Person

1) The people you live/work with, have many daily actions that sabotage you. AND they are also the most likely experiencers of your negative actions. Thus, they are the least likely to help you with something they haven’t already been doing for days, weeks, months, years.

2) The people you work with have a job with rules. One of those rules is NOT do bonus good things for people at the office.

3) Your expecting different behaviors from others without working on those behaviors directly with that person is very, very difficult.

4) Influence and persuasion can help you change those in your environment.

5) Change takes time.

6) Someone once told you it takes 21 days to change a habit. They either lied to you or they were speaking out of their rectal sphincter. It’s not even close to true and THIS fact alone is a HUGE reason people see themselves as failures.

7) People stop giving EFFORT often right before a breakthrough is about to occur.

8) Reinvention is very real, but I have yet to see anyone address the impact of physical space, humans in the spaces being occupied  around you, your current load of effort requested by others vs. your capability bandwidth.

9) The vast majority of people don’t want to see you achieve a result unless it benefits them directly. In other words, yes, if you lose weight you are a more attractive object to see at the office, so here people will applaud you. But if you believe by working 30% harder and get a 30% result increase and then a 30% raise when everyone gets 4% for inflation, you already can see that people don’t want to see you succeed. Humans want you to be almost as good at x as they are, or maybe a little better at x, but NOT rewarded significantly more than they are.

10) The stuff in your environment must be rotated until you see what things in your environment give you improved return on your life.  Important to understand here that playing your favorite music could be helpful to you and maddening to someone else around you. Decorating your house with xyz could make you feel much more productive and drive someone else to have arguments about the change itself or other things.

11) The First 10 Facts of  Life are facts, not ideas. That means you prepare for what happens when change happens in your environments.

Next week you’ll get a look at precisely how to begin the process of becoming a new person. Between now and then note the facts on paper, note how these facts might manifest in your situation(s) and how  you might respond.

IF you can actually do THIS simple exercise you will be able to meet your outcome.