"January excels at one thing: Making us confront the gap between the lives we want and the actions we never quite take. What many of us miss is that it is rarely external circumstances or other people that block us from changing course. More often, it is us. We stop ourselves before anything has a chance to begin. And who could blame us? Modern life has been engineered as a sequence of filters and gates."
"We are trained early to wait for approval before we move, because without it, little comes to fruition. And when you grow up surrounded by gatekeepers behind you, it is natural to imagine them in front of you too, even when they are no longer there. Subverting that pattern requires confronting something deeply uncomfortable: our own learned helplessness. How we beat ourselves into submission Most transformations do not fail because of a lack of desire. In fact, many people want change intensely."
Many people mistake external gatekeepers for permanent obstacles and carry those imagined barriers forward even after they disappear. Modern systems condition people to wait for permission, which quietly erodes initiative and agency over time. Awareness of a problem and a strong desire to change frequently coexist with inaction because learned helplessness blocks the leap from contemplation to action. Most transformations fail not from lack of wanting but from the difficulty of initiating movement. Change begins when people stop asking who will allow them to move and start granting themselves permission to act.
Read at Psychology Today
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