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What If…Enough Wasn’t Good Enough?

The other day a client emailed me with an update and ended with “So thanks for the crappy assignment. It was great.”

The comment reminded me of the several hundred individual conversations I’d had at a festival just the weekend before. I was asking people “What If…You Could Love Your Life Even MORE?” Most of them talked about how their life was already pretty good, how they were mostly happy with work and how they had “enough” fun in life. A few talked about how some things could have some room for improvement, a few talked about how they were already having an amazing life and a select few were more than ready for change.

When pressed to answer the question about loving life even more though, the reaction almost across the board was “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly do that.” What I discovered, rather resoundingly, in these conversations was that for the most part people were scared of actually asking for and getting more of what they really wanted. While they loved the actual idea of Do What You Love, Love What You Do, the reality of what that might mean in their lives felt a little overwhelming. A frequent answer to the question was “I’d probably get in trouble!”

“But what if you could AND you wouldn’t get in trouble?” I kept asking. That seemed to make all the difference with those I was talking to. My client had been having a similar problem. Before even coming to work with me she’d already made some amazing strides at changing her life…but she was still afraid and still holding back. So I shared with her this little tidbit called Beckhard’s Change Formula. It goes like this:

D x V x FS >R

D = Dissatisfaction with Status Quo

V = Vision

FS = First Steps

R = Resistance to Change

The formula talks about what drives change. If you remember your algebra you’ll know that if any one, or any combination, of the elements on the left of the formula is big enough it will overcome the resistance to change (a normal human response pattern.) With my client, she already had the vision and a good set of first steps but she still wasn’t uncomfortable enough with the status quo of her life. So to get her uncomfortable enough to change I asked her to “do nothing” for 3 days. That was her crappy assignment. In fact it was so crappy that she couldn’t even complete it. She got so incredibly uncomfortable with the reality of staying exactly where she was that about

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