The Holy Sh*t Moment: How lasting change can happen in an instant. James Fell

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">       A Void in Need of Filling

      “It’s like a switch has been thrown and you’ve gone from where you used to be to somewhere else, and the intervening steps didn’t occur,” Rob Sawyer said. “That’s a quantum change.”

      Sawyer’s own change causing dramatic weight loss was quantum in nature. He spoke of twenty years at his sedentary job of being a writer leading to gaining significant weight, but he stayed affixed to that office chair because he had a mission.

      “It was only when I won the Hugo Award for best novel [for Hominids] in 2003 when I had a void in my ambition that needed to be filled,” he said. It was the top professional achievement he could attain in his field. Afterward, this other goal of losing weight that had been hovering in the background went through a quantum change. A return to discussing electrons explains how it happened.

      “The lowest level of an atom holds two electrons, and the next highest level can hold eight,” Sawyer said, explaining that you cannot push one of those lower-level electrons up to a higher state if all of those spots are occupied. But if one spot is vacated, there is an opportunity for a lower-level electron to complete a quantum leap to that higher level. It is promoted instantaneously. This is what happened for Sawyer. When he achieved ultimate career success, space was made for something else to become a top priority.

      “It’s no coincidence the year after winning the Hugo I lost a third of my body weight,” Sawyer said. And true to the descriptions of it being a digital process and not analog, this or that, on or off, Rob was committed. “There was no wavering,” he said. “It was going to happen.”

      Sawyer has kept the weight off more than a decade.

       Make Room for Change

      I have a big task for you now. So big, in fact, it needs its own header and section.

      Reflect on what Sawyer said about winning the Hugo. Recall the description of how an electron at a higher level must vacate the premises prior to a lower-level electron being able to make that quantum leap to the higher energy level.

      This is all about achieving a higher energy level.

      And if your higher level is full, something needs to vacate it and make room for your inspiration to be instantaneously promoted, the way Rob’s desire to lose weight was.

      It’s a fancy way of describing prioritization.

      If your highest energy level is maxed out with “life stuff,” you must reevaluate that stuff, because something needs to be deprioritized, perhaps even eliminated.

      What takes up a lot of your energy?

      Some things are critical. There are aspects of work and family that are challenging to deprioritize, but everyone wastes time, even those who think they don’t. You say you need your downtime to watch TV or surf the net, but how much time? A 2016 Nielsen report determined that the average adult American spends over 4.5 hours each day watching TV shows and movies. This doesn’t even consider surfing on your laptop or phone. Surely there is room to make room.

       MAKE IT HAPPEN!

       I have a few of these special exercises in the book. Call them “Act Now!” on steroids. I save them to call attention to more critical tasks. This one qualifies, because if a quantum leap of motivation is going to take place, your highest energy level needs an open slot. This is the detailed analysis, rather than sudden insight, for which writing things down may help. Examine your schedule and where your focus lies. Make a list of the stuff you do that sucks up a lot of energy and time. Consider where room can be made. You need this hole, this vacated spot, because then there will be a yearning to fill it. Give this task of making room the extra attention it deserves.

      What may happen as a result of completing this first “Make It Happen!” exercise is that, through careful analysis, you determine, “Of course staring at a screen sucks up a lot of my time, so I’ll just cut way back on that.” But you don’t. You keep staring, because it’s paying off for you in some way.

      But now you know this is part of the solution, and it sticks and gets unconsciously turned over, and then perhaps the epiphany comes through that uncovers why you have that behavior, how meaningless it is to continue the way you do, and how much more meaningful it would be to your life to spend that time on a passionate pursuit.

      One day, you could be watching The Big Bang Theory and say, “Wow, this show has strapped a couple of hydrodynamic boards to its feet and achieved altitude overtop a carnivorous fish,” and you start walking each evening instead.

       The Ground Shifts

      “This is about exponential change.”

      Ken Resnicow is a professor of health behavior at the University of Michigan and has published several papers on the phenomenon of quantum behavior change. He explained how the stages of change—the transtheoretical model discussed in chapter 1—“is a very linear progression that is also quite proportional. They even talk about standard deviations of change.” This means studies of TTM show groups of people based along a bell curve changing a specific amount at a specific rate.

      Conversely, Rob Sawyer explained that quantum leaps of change are not linear, not proportional, and not in stages. “Exponential” means going from baby steps to Olympic-caliber long jump in a single stride.

      “Using their terms [from Prochaska’s TTM],” Resnicow said, “one can jump from precontemplator into action at a moment’s notice.” And this is not just action but dedicated action, aka “maintenance.” In TTM, the “action” stage is tenuous. One is struggling to adopt the new behavior to achieve maintenance. But with a powerful epiphany there is no struggle; it is not a half-assed adoption. It’s full-assed.

      Lee Holland did not slowly slide over into laborious action because of her epiphany. Rather, she became dedicated to taking “action” regarding her career and into “maintenance” in an instant after the realization in the parking lot that she was destined to do much more with her life.

      “Epiphany can be primed for,” Resnicow said. “The raw materials for the perfect storm are something that can be provided.” Priming can give people the information and skills that make it happen.

      “Don’t pressure yourself worrying that your light bulb hasn’t gone off yet,” Resnicow said. Doing so creates a state of anxiety. As we’ll examine further, it’s positive mood states that set the stage for sudden insight. Besides, “Sometimes things have to marinate for a while before epiphany happens.”

      It’s a struggle to escape struggle.

      Post-epiphany, the changes in behavior won’t feel like work. It doesn’t mean you don’t have work to do first. I’m going to kick your ass a bit in coming chapters, and then, suddenly, perhaps …

      “It isn’t about struggling,” said Professor Miller, who has been treating addictions for forty years. “With overcoming addiction, some people are often white-knuckle holding on to not go back to their previous situation.” But he explained it is different for others, the ones who experience an epiphany, because they suddenly realize they’ve had enough.

      “The typical epiphanies СКАЧАТЬ