If my car stops working, I take it to a dealer or garage and say please fix this. Generally that works. In part, that’s because the car is one of many identical models. It has a specification. The mechanics are trained and no doubt have detailed on line manuals describing how every part works as well as knowledge of the steps required to breathe life back into those parts that don’t.

We all possess many ‘things’.  If they stop functioning to our needs we fix them, or we replace them.

We are so used to this, we somehow seek to apply the same laws of our materialistic consumerist world to our very humanity.

But here’s the thing…
Human beings are inordinately more complicated and each one is stunningly and beautifully unique. No manual. No like for like replacements.

To hope that all of your learning, life experience and behavioural pattern making since birth, can somehow be re-modelled in a few simple steps … a bit like reprogramming the central heating timer … is curious.

And yet we do.

I often get asked in coaching sessions a question a bit like this one … “So how do I change that?”

It’s almost as if we believe we’ve just missed out on a chapter in the ‘How to be a happy human being’ book. Or perhaps misinterpreted some instruction along the living highway which explained how we were supposed to be. Or maybe that we think someone else messed it up for us, so now we have become aware we can just change course, tweak something, switch out one part for a new one. Whatever our thinking about how we came to be like this, we seem to think this ‘expert’ in front of us, this ‘human mechanic’, can somehow put us right.

Changing ourselves is hard work. Rewarding, but always hard work.

And as we set out on that journey, we would do well to remember that we are unique. To value that uniqueness. To seek to enhance and grow what is, not discard it as broken or not good enough.