Change

Since much of what I do when facilitating equine assisted learning or coaching parents is helping people experience positive change, the idea of change has been high on my list of things on which to do further reading. Currently I'm working my way through Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. (I'm enjoying it and finding it interesting a quarter of the way through.) This quote came very early, but I've been thinking about it quite a bit since I read it, so I thought I'd share it with all of you. Really, it comes down to learning to be compassionate towards ourselves, I think. We're fairly good at being compassionate to others, assuming we think they are worthy of our compassion, but we're really not very good at being compassionate to ourselves.

"And when people exhaust their self-control, what they're exhausting are the mental muscles needed to think creatively, to focus, to inhibit their impulses, and to persist in the face of frustration or failure. In other words, they're exhausting precisely the mental muscles needed to make a big change.

So when you hear people say that change is hard because people are lazy or resistant, that's just flat wrong. In fact, the opposite is true: Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that's the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion." (p. 12)

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I finished reading Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. If you need a book that is both comforting and hopeful, this is what you should read. It's short, so you can probably read it in a couple of hours. I might suggest reading it Monday when you will desperately need comforting and hopeful.

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I'm not going to be around to blog over the weekend. I will be off on a crafting weekend with some weaving friends. I'm very much looking forward to it. I spent the afternoon packing. 

The small bag is clothes and toiletries, the larger IKEA bag has books and various projects. I have my priorities.