I would love for you to decide to Be the Change in your life after you read this article. In the late 1960’s, Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross published a book entitled “On Death and Dying.” She described five distinct stages of grief that people experience when a loved one dies, or when they find out they are about to die. This model has been applied in many different ways, and I’d like to share the five steps with you, because we will be using them to describe what it takes for you to Be the Change.
The five stages are:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
You may not have decided yet to Be the Change because you are in denial about your need for change in your life. You may say things like “Oh my life is okay” which may well be a way of saying “If I never admit to any flaws or discomfort, I’ll never have to do anything about it.” I’d like to ask you this: “How long do you plan to continue remaining in denial about the need for change in your life?”
Nature becomes stagnant if not changed continuously. In fact, change is the only real constant in Life (which I think is funny.) Ever smelled water that has not changed much over a short period of time? It smells stagnant. Not changing makes your life stagnate. I hope you can recognize if you are in this first stage, denial, in one or many areas of your life. Denial is just a temporary defense. You can choose right now to set it aside.
Once you decide to get past denial, you may experience tremendous anger. You might be aware of how long you remained in denial and you’re angry with yourself for it. You might indulge a little self pity with your anger. You might sandwich your anger with blame. But like denial before it, anger is a temporary stage that will pass and slide you right into stage three.
Hope takes on a bright new promise in stage three, bargaining. You’ve still got lingering aspects of denial and anger hanging around, and you begin to talk to yourself like this: “Okay, okay, I know something’s gotta give, but why do I have to start today? Why not go on vacation first? Maybe I can begin on Monday…..” or you might say “Can’t I put this off for a few months. I’ve got lots of work to get done first. I’ll get to it eventually.” Or here is a typical bargaining chip “Dear God, please remove this burden from me.”
Each of those examples of self-talk puts the responsibility outside yourself onto some thing or some one, not you. Sometimes, you get very weary trying to juggle denial, anger and bargaining and eventually, you’re so worn out from not Being the Change, that you slide into the fourth step.
Depression is really anger buried even deep inside your mind. I mean, you really, really, really don’t want to look at it so you shove it down further inside you. Well, this is truly good news to get depressed because what it tells you is that you are no longer in denial; you might still have some rag tags of anger; you’re no longer bargaining and you’re getting closer to a fix for the problem. When you’re depressed, you might not talk as much as before. You might refuse to socialize. You disassociate yourself from being loved frequently in this stage. But you’re much closer to giving up and actually working on the change that wants to come forth in your life.
Finally, the fifth stage: acceptance. You’re at peace with knowing that you’ve got to get this change into action. And you give up all resistance, and begin to enter into the place where you devise an Action Plan for yourself and begin to implement it.
Everyone goes through these steps at different rates of speed. It depends on your personality and your state of mind. I know you can Be the Change and you can implements these steps to bring your life into greater harmony.
