Forward Change: a visiting blog

A new friend has recently posted a blog series that I have found interesting and helpful.  I wanted to share it here.  It's a series, but I'm only reposting the first in the series.  You can navigate to his site if you want to follow/read all of it: http://www.michaelwarden.com/.  I highly recommend that you do!  Enjoy!

From Michael D. Warden's Blog:

"Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better." ~ Richard Hooker

Everybody wants to make a change. Some kind of change. Whether it's to lose 20 lbs (or 50, or 150), or to get out of debt, or to become more "successful" (however they define that), or to find true community, or to encounter God in an authentic, meaningful way, everybody wants something to be different about their lives. Desire--our capacity to want our lives to be something more than they are, something truer to who we are at the core--is one of the common ways we can all relate to one another. "What do you want?" is perhaps the most powerful of all the powerful questions out there. Certainly it is one of the first we should consider when getting to know another person. Or when getting to know ourselves. And especially when getting to know God.


What’s the change you want to make right now in your life? I bet you could list off several without even trying.

But as much and as deeply as we all desire change, we certainly have a helluva time trying to figure out how to do it. Change is really why people hire a coach (the smart ones do, anyway). They either want to make a change and don’t know how to make it happen…or else something in their life is changing (whether they want it or not), and they don’t know how to navigate it to arrive safely on the shore of the new thing that awaits them beyond the horizon of all they’ve known up ‘till now. Having coached many clients of both kinds by now, I’ve noticed that the common thing we all do when we want something to change is (you’ve already guessed it, haven’t you?)...we make a plan. We plot a course of action. We create a program. We design a system of next-steps that will get us from here to there.

And the plan works for a little while. But then the plan fails. So we try a different plan. And that fails. So we try a third. And that fails too.

Naturally, having a good solid plan to get you from where you are to where you want to be is essential. So the plan matters. But the problem in this scenario probably isn’t the plan…er, plans. The problem is that the plan is only one-fifth of the solution. If all you’re doing is creating a plan for change, and trying to follow it, you are (potentially) missing four other key elements essential to making change actually happen in your life. If you really want to make that change in your life, you need to seriously incorporate all five.
I’ll be expanding on each of these “essentials to change” in a fresh series of blogposts in the coming weeks, but here is a quick list of the five essential elements you need to make any significant change in your life (or in the world):

• You need Anger
• You need A Cystal Clear Dream
• You need Faith
• You need A Solid Plan
• You need Love

I hope you’ll join me as I explore each of these elements in the coming weeks, and join in the conversation with me—either here in the comments, or on Facebook. If you find them interesting, forward the posts to your friends. And if you ever want to talk with a professional coach about a change you’re facing (or want to face) in your own life, contact me, and we’ll set up a time to talk. Next week: Anger!

“We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.” ~ Thomas Merton