Why the people who want to change the most often have the hardest time changing

Some people want to change,
or heal,
or get better,
or improve
SO badly…
…they try and invest in EVERYTHING.

They take the courses, read the books, visit all the professionals, sign up for all the seminars.

They bounce from tactic to tactic to tactic, investing their time and money into things that appear to work damn well for others…

…but nothing seems to work for THEM.

I worked with one of these very people recently.

No form of help has seemed to work for him since the day a guidance counselor “read him” wrong in high school. He’s tried it all over the years. The therapy. The coaching. The tribal work. The somatic work. The psychedelic therapy. Moving to a new state, new cities. Trying different vocations. Taking various assessments.

He still feels lost, aimless, and like (deep down) he simply doesn’t matter here on this planet.

I sat with him for an hour or so and discovered a number of old stories he’d been holding onto, but I knew he’d already “tried everything” and my gut was telling me that diving in like I often do with other people wouldn’t yield results.

He showed up to our call already looking dejected.

After a significant amount of my mental probing, he took a deep sigh and finally said,

“Look, nothing works for me.”

BOOM.

There it is.

There’s the filter through which every appointment, book, and session of his gets processed through.

I probed deeper and found that many things he’d tried actually HAD worked… but he would end up discounting them, explaining them away, or insisting things would revert back after some time.

Whatever situation you walk into, if your mind is adamant that nothing can or will or has ever worked for you — it will change what you see and experience.

Improvements will be ignored.
Progress will be explained way.
Changes will go unnoticed.
Gains will be seen as temporary.

“Nothing works for me.”
“Change must be difficult.”
“I can’t be helped.”
“I’m broken.”

People who are convinced of these things are the ones who often have the most difficult times experiencing transformation, because they resist it with all their might and can’t believe it’s actually happening when it does. I’ve watched past clients with these convictions share how their patterns of fear, doubt, and worry have disappeared… only to then INSIST it’ll be temporary or it’s a fluke.

People who are already convinced that nothing works for them (which is a way of thinking typically developed over time after MANY attempts at getting help hasn’t worked)… lock themselves into vicious cycles of WANTING help but showing up to new modalities already feeling like, deep down, it won’t POSSIBLY work for them.

I know it.
I lived it myself.
Three years of being bounced around between doctors did the trick.

And the power of these convictions is exactly why, with every single new client my team works with, we don’t even start in on what they’re hoping to achieve until we’ve thoroughly examined their relationship to change and how they feel about whether anything can work for them or not.

And this is exactly what I did with the fellow in our session last week.

After further exploration, we discovered he believed he was unique and special, and therefore nothing could possibly help him.

So we cleared that way of thinking and feeling and believing out, completely, in our session as a first step together.

And guess what?

For the first time in a long, long time — his low-level, constant feeling of permanent defeat has been replaced by genuine hope and excitement.

He understands change CAN be possible for him.

And now we can dive in and do the real work.

Do you TRULY believe you can change?

Or do you secretly feel, deep down inside, that you’re broken, and that nothing can actually help you?

What if, just possibly, your attitude and thoughts towards change and help are massively influencing the results you’re experiencing in your life?

In working with hundreds of people and seeing the constant correlation, I’d like to suggest that if nothing seems to work for you…

….it’s quite possible.