Change Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard
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Episode Summary
You haven't failed—your method just might be exhausting. In this episode, I’m sharing one of the most powerful mindset shifts I use with clients (and in my own life): What if it could be easy? So often, we assume that change has to be hard, that we need to push, force, or shame ourselves into doing something differently. But what if we’ve been putting all our effort in the wrong place? I’ll walk you through what happens when we stop trying to change our actions directly and instead focus on the thoughts and feelings that create those actions. You'll hear two client stories—one about parenting and one about body image—that show how change can feel natural, even effortless, when we stop forcing and start understanding. If you’ve been stuck in a cycle of “trying harder,” this episode is for you.
Topics:
Why do we assume change has to be hard—and where that belief come from
The motivational triad and how your brain resists change
How to stop forcing yourself into action and work with your thoughts instead
Real-life examples of effortless change through mindset work
The difference between emotional blackmail and real self-awareness
What to ask yourself if you’re stuck: “What if this could be easy?”
Episode Resources:
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Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:01.72)
Hey and welcome to Calmer Conversations. I'm Cecilia, your host today. We're gonna talk about the, we're gonna pose the question, what if it could be easy? If you're watching the video, if you watch them, YouTube I guess, you can see that I'm still here with the baby and we're in this transition period. She's about four and a half months old where she still really wants to be with me all the time, but she needs more and more of my attention. So she's asleep right now. Hopefully she'll sleep through this episode.
and, we'll figure out where she goes from there. So I guess that's my way of saying, I'm not sure how much longer she's going to be on the podcast. And, it's a pleasure having her with me. And I'm sure all moms who've done this kind of dance of parenting and working, there starts to be a balance shift that happens at some point. And that's kind of where we are. Okay. So one of the
the kind of hesitations that people have before they start working with me or when we talk together is they think that change is going to be hard. And I get that and we can talk a little bit about that. But what I want to pose right now is what if change is easier than you think? And what if the calmness and the ease and the happiness and the confidence that you want in life can happen easier than you think without as much effort? And the reason why
I wanna pose this is because oftentimes we think we're gonna have to put the most effort on the actual change we wanna make. And I'm gonna use a physical workout example because I think that that's generally understandable by most people, but I'm gonna use a couple other examples too. So for instance, if somebody wants to be working out or moving their body more for any number of reasons, right? From anything from like longevity and health to they want a different shape body to they wanna alleviate knee pain or whatever it is.
They have a reason they wanna be working out and they're not doing it. And they think that all the hard work is going to be getting themselves to work out. And the reason everyone thinks that, and the reason why you might think that, is because oftentimes in the past, you've used action to change action, right? So the action is working out, you put all of your effort on the action part of change. And that makes a lot of sense.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:23.832)
to most people, to most of our brains. like, well, obviously if I wanna start working out and I wanna take a different action, then I need to focus on taking different actions. What else would I do? And since you've been listening along, or if you're new here, our actions come from what we think, right? And so we think that if, well, the assumption that we make and what most of us have learned, that if we push ourselves harder, or if we use more willpower, or even if we use shame and judgment,
against ourselves, so we try and shame ourselves into doing something, that the action will happen more easily. And so we push harder and harder and harder. And if you've been in this place, and I get a lot of clients coming to me at this time where they've been pushing, they've been pushing, and they've been doing it for years, and it's worked up until some point, and then it just doesn't really work anymore. So like the shame story doesn't work anymore, or the willpower doesn't work anymore, or it's not working as well as it used to. And all of a sudden they're figuring, they're like, well, what do I do? Right?
And the fear they have is that it's actually going to be even harder to get themselves to do something. It's gonna take even more effort. It's going to feel really arduous. It's gonna feel like drudgery to do this work. They're also worried about the amount of time that it's gonna take in their life because most of us don't have enough time or we think we don't have enough time. That's probably a topic for a whole other day, but it's this hard thing. So I want you to check in with yourself. And if you're somebody who's either doing this work
Or if you're someone who is kind of dabbling in this work or dipping your toe into this work, do you have a story about this work being hard, that it's going to take a lot of effort? And some of us just reflexively think of making a change and we'll have the thought come up, that sounds hard, or that's gonna take a long time, or that's gonna take a lot of effort. And it's not because we've actually checked it out and we've investigated it or we've even tried it this way, but it's just that our brain, anytime it's presented with something different,
thinks that's going to be hard. That's gonna take a long time. And again, if we go back to the motivational triad, that makes a lot of sense, right? Your brain wants to conserve energy. It wants to avoid danger. It wants to seek pleasure. wants to conserve energy is the big one here, right? So it doesn't wanna do anything different because doing something different very normally takes more effort from your brain. Sometimes your muscles, you're changing something, right? In a recent class that I gave,
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:45.836)
I talked about one of my kids and they're writing and they're doing like the fist grip with a pencil and they're trying to switch to the more like normal writing grip. And this is hard because their brain, they already know how to write and draw with that fist grip and so their brain and their body doesn't really wanna switch. It feels weird to switch. It takes extra effort both physically and mentally to switch.
But the payoff is that if they figure out how to do that, that they will have more skills available to them later on and more nuance in their writing capability, right? So there is a benefit. So what we're doing is kind of something similar, right? Your brain has figured out some method around doing something, right? It just created a neural pathway at some point in the past. And so for instance, pushing yourself to work out, forcing yourself to work out. And
That's okay, it worked for some period of time, but now you wanna try something different and you think it's gonna take a lot of effort. But the interesting thing is, I'm not gonna say this goes without effort because it does. And it can be uncomfortable to do something different and you are creating a new neural pathway and you are creating new energetic muscle memory pieces within your brain and your body. what, this process and this question, what if it was easier than you think?
is what if it could just take five minutes, right? So what if it could take a few minutes every single day that you start to tap into the story you're telling around, for instance, your body or around exercising. And that story might be, I don't have time for it, right? It might be that simple. And instead of pushing yourself to work out, what you're doing is you're using your energy in a different way. You're using your energy to start to notice
where your brain is at any given moment, what the story you're telling yourself. So you're no longer exerting emotional kind of blackmail on yourself, like shame. You're no longer trying to force yourself to work out using cognitive power. Instead, what you're doing is you're shifting your brain to start to notice. So the effort that you're actually using is totally different. It's in a different place.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (08:13.1)
Okay, so I want to share a story from a client to illustrate this, and it's not about working out in case you hate the working out examples. Okay, so this is a client and she's been working with me for a while and she has been noticing her brain. So instead of forcing herself to work out, if we're gonna go back to that analogy, she has been noticing the thoughts she has around working out. And her specifically is she asked, when she started working together, one of her big areas she wanted to focus on
was feeling less reactive and panicked around her parenting. So particularly not feeling closely tied to her kids behavior and needing them to behave in a certain way for her to feel like a good parent in person. And so she's been working on noticing feelings, accepting how she's feeling. So that's where the main effort that she's been exerting, if you wanna use that word, has been. So.
Instead of forcing herself to, for instance, keep her cool when her kid does something or stuffing down her anger, what she has been doing is noticing feelings, accepting her own feelings. OK, so then this came up. she says I noticed overall that I feel calmer and less reactive, but I didn't really have concrete proof until my oldest son received his first school detention last week. The school called me and explained what he'd done. Essentially, he got frustrated and acted out.
And in the past, I would have gone to a place of immediate rage and shame and panic, and it would have built up and built up, built up, and then I would have exploded at him. But this time, I noticed straight away that I actually felt quite calm. So it helped that the teacher was very calm, she says, and reasonable and empathetic. And I know immediately how I wanted to respond when he got home and when we talked about it. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to let him know that we were on his side and that we wanted to help him. He was actually a bit stunned when I followed through with this.
I talked to him about my own work on frustration and rage and I understood where he was coming from and he listened as much as a 13 year old can listen and he wasn't defensive or contrite. The thing about all of this that struck me as particularly miraculous is that this seemed to happen without effort. It didn't feel like I had to work at noticing and uncovering the story thought in the moment, it felt like it was effortless. because
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (10:32.161)
this person has spent the time noticing her own thoughts and feelings and doing the work around accepting her own feelings. She's been practicing in real time in the rest of her life, which honestly doesn't take a lot of time because these things come up and they honestly even save you time because instead of spiraling in emotions, you are just with them in the moment and process them. But what's happened is the baby woke up just in case you're, if you're not watching. So if you hear some baby noises, that's what this is. Okay, so she,
She has been using her effort instead of trying to stuff her emotions down or avoid her emotions or control her kids. She's been using probably a similar amount of effort or less effort to start to understand and notice her own feelings and process them. And then what happens because she has been practicing this, right? This doesn't happen the first time usually, although sometimes it can because she has been practicing this. She was met with a real life situation. Now, unless you're sitting on a mountain somewhere, we will all be met with real life situations all.
the time because you're living life because they will continue to come up because you live with humans because you live in the country that you live in and have the government that you have they will keep happening and so this person was met with a real-life situation they were able to be with the information instead of making a story about it and that means that instead of going into rage and anger and panic and making it mean that they were a bad person and a bad parent they were able to sit with the information and understand okay well how do I want
to show up to this, what kind of parent do I want to be? And then from that place, they were able to follow through and it felt effortless, not because they have not put an effort, but because they have been putting effort into a different place. Instead of forcing their actions to change,
they have actually been noticing the feelings around them, noticing the thoughts and stories and beliefs they have around their own emotions and around their children's behavior, and they've worked from that place. So to go back to the working out one, somebody else, another recent client, had this goal of working out more regularly. We worked together individually for a period of time and now in a group, and we have never honestly talked that much about working out. It's come up every now and then, but it hasn't been a focus of the work we've done.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:09.87)
So we have done is we've changed her story about her body and her current body and how she talks about herself. And the result is, is that she is more effortlessly working out and being with her body in ways that she likes. And this, this changing the story around her body, honestly, it's not like we're talking about going to the gym, right? But when your perception of yourself changes, when you change the thoughts you have about yourself, then the actions you take in your life and what happens within your life starts to shift and change really naturally.
I think this is an idea that sounds really good to people cognitively, right? Like what if this could be easier or the fact that my actions will change even though I'm not working on them, but many of us don't believe it. And sometimes we just don't have the evidence. So I wanted to provide these two examples because I think that they are so powerful in illustrating that when you focus on the thoughts, when you focus on the feelings, instead of focusing on shifting the actions, the change can happen without feeling like change, with actually feeling.
Effortless, right? Those are not my words. Those are someone else's words. She said it felt effortless. It felt like this happened kind of without me doing anything. And obviously she has been doing things. She's been in a group of mine for several months now. And so she has been doing this, but she hasn't been, it's not like we're working together intensively for eight hours a day, right? So just know that instead of spiraling in emotions, you start to pay attention to emotions. You're using about the same amount of effort.
It's just productive in a different way. And then the actions you take in the area you wanna shift, whether it's working out or changing your relationship with your kids or your relationship to money, whatever it is for you, starts to happen very naturally. Okay, I hope that that was helpful. And if you have a story that this could be hard, you might start to ask yourself instead, what if this could be easy? Or what would it look like if it were easy? All it was great to be with you today, to see you, even though we're in different space time continuum.
and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for being here. Bye.