3.14159 Steps to Lasting Change

Major life transitions offer the same opportunity as psychedelic journeys:

Both open a window of heightened malleability.

This window is temporary. And without the right approach, we will simply perpetuate our past patterns on the other side.

How many times have you seen a friend go back into the same toxic relationship?

Or stay stuck in the same behaviors after a "profound" retreat experience?

I've seen both dozens of times—and, I've seen almost all of my clients in recent years succeed in changing their life profoundly, for the better, and in a way that sticks.

Below are the 3 approaches that I've seen make the biggest difference.

1. Clarity (Top-down)

You are your own coach. And even if you work with an external one:

— You are your main guide each day

— The foundation of good guidance is inquiry

— The most useful inquiries simplify.

So begin here:

You would be astonished by how much simply asking these two questions, and spending real time reflecting on them, can accomplish.

But creating lasting change requires more than simple clarity. It also requires a basic reorganization of your entire body-mind system.

2. Embodiment (Inside-out)

If you try to change a long-standing behavior of any kind, you will encounter resistance.

This resistance will often feel physical—as if a force inside your body is pulling in the opposite direction of your intention.

I see most people encountering the peak of this resistance around the 3-week mark of a newly clear commitment.

When this happens, you can:

• Brute force it (harness an aspect of your identity to motivate overcoming it, like "I am stronger than this")
• Analyze it (use some process of self-inquiry to understand the resistance better, thereby partly freeing yourself from its grip)
• Convert it (transform the resistance into an ally)

The first two can work, especially temporarily. But the third is where I've seen people have by far the most lasting success.

Many approaches to conversion exist; my personal favorite is the simplest, and can be found in the work of Judson Brewer—

A scientist best known for creating a protocol for quitting smoking that worked 2x–5x better than the gold standard, depending on what metric you look at.

The method centers around turning waves of resistance and craving into triggers for somatic curiosity. You can learn it here.

3. Design (Outside-in)

This approach is simple:

Change your environment in alignment with whatever else you want to change.

Historically, the most impactful aspect of environment to change was social environment.

For most of us, this is no longer the case.

Or, maybe more accurately, our social environments no longer exist mainly in-person.

The most important aspect of environment to change is now digital environment.

Our phones and computers now provide extraordinarily effective channels for others to influence us through.

You can harness tech for positive change in all sorts of ways (creating an antifragile calendar system, setting up habit-reminder interval bells throughout the day, setting up text message accountability)—but 90% of your job with screens is simply to protect against them.

The three most impactful ways to do so are:

• delete all social media apps from your phone
• turn off all notifications
• restrict content consumption only to that which directly supports your top priority

You will be astonished by how much easier it is to maintain lasting transformation once you install these three boundaries.

Bringing it all together

With these three approaches:

1. Clarity (top-down)
2. Embodiment (inside-out)
3. Design (outside-in)

I've seen clients accomplish 80–90% of the positive, profound, and lasting changes they want on the other side of a major life event.

But, for most of us, the remaining 10–20% often requires something different, deeper, and—from the perspective of our former selves—more dangerous.

This last layer only shifts through a fourth approach:

The bottom-up approach, which—though it isn't particularly sexy—I think is most accurately called healing.

Healing consists of traveling down into the knotted roots of our childhood, lineage, and collective trauma, facing the demons of our past, and feeling what our ancestors weren't able to.

This type of work is a privilege for us to do. And, if you are reading this, you are likely blessed with access to some of the most powerful paths in the world for doing it.

Facilitating healing is not my personal domain of mastery in this life. But, through my 1-on-1 work, I have built a network of some of the most powerful healers in the world, and am blessed to collaborate with them regularly as a part of my long-term containers with clients.

One pitfall I have seen in people seeking transformation is to pursue healing without the other three approaches in place.

This, unfortunately, can result in an inward-spiral of bottomless self-obsession, and a sort of perpetual mushiness without any structure or direction to move back out into the world with more skillful love and impact.

But the opposite is also true:

Trying to live your best life without doing the gritty work of really healing guarantees a certain ceiling.

And with that ceiling lifted, it's hard to overstate how extraordinarily beautiful your life can become.