Transforming My Shadows: My Framework for Making and Sustaining Personal Changes
Personal changes are hard to make – especially the changes that run counter to our human tendencies. Making these changes and sustaining them in my life are challenging processes.
When I decided to embark on a serious journey to improve my overall health, I knew I faced a 97% failure and 3% success rate for sustaining long-term weight loss.
I wanted to understand the roots of my failures. I wanted to learn from these failures in ways that led to the long-term successes that had eluded me all my life.
I am still learning to try to maintain long-term success. Doing that means understanding the blurry line between failures and successes where one is always part of the other.
And, while I started this journey to address the heavy shadow of weight in my life, there are many aspects of this journey that transcend weight.
I have learned much as an educator in other areas of my life and work. I have also learned from working with students, from hearing the stories of others, and from sharing my own.
Complex, Ongoing Processes
All of this learning has helped me name, develop, and make clear the processes of transforming my own shadows. I share these in case they help someone else.
Facing myself to change myself … this involves complex work and ongoing processes. There is always more to learn, more to understand, more to improve, more questions to ask, and more answers to discover.
About two years ago, I realized there would be value in telling my own story, in naming my processes, and in sharing my ongoing successes, challenges, and failures.
Even though I was finding my pathways to success, giving voice to those pathways was harder. And, I am still working on voicing the processes – for myself and to share with others.
This, too, is ongoing learning – to make these processes clear for myself in ways that I can improve myself around the realities of my failures and the ups and downs of maintaining long-term successes.
The more I reflect, the more I learn.
An Overview of My Transform Shadows Framework
The following framework brings together my story with the mental processes that have helped me find pathways and processes into overall success.
I have already written about these processes and will continue to do so. For this blog, I am going to overview the processes because they may help others gain insights to their own individual pathways to change.
This is the framework that helps me transform my shadows for long-term success.
My process for self-improvement uses these steps:
Name My Shadows: Be Honest with Myself
Face My Shadows: Give Grace For Yesterday, Accountability for Today
Fight My Shadows: Act in My Own Best Interests to Center My Wellness
Understand My Shadows: Use Failure as Feedback to Learn and Change
Reframe My Shadows: Recover from Failure in a Timely Manner
I wish these were one-and-done processes for me. But, the truth of my journey is that these are ongoing processes that I go through again and again to act in my own best interest.
The Razor’s Edge and the Ledge of Safety
I have learned enough to know that I will always go back and forth between the razor’s edge where failures loom and the ledge of safety where successes are easier to sustain.
When life goes smoothly, these processes run seemingly on autopilot. In these moments, making and sustaining positive changes seems effortless and easy.
Acting in my own best interest feels natural, unconscious, and freeing. I live on a ledge of safety, cloaked in the security of ongoing successes.
Other times, I grapple intensely with making and sustaining positive changes. Acting in my own best interest feels impossible.
In these times, the battle is uphill and challenging, and I balance on the razor’s edge. Small failures compound themselves into bigger ones. Large-scale failure looms.
The razor’s edge always lives in the ledge of safety. This is a reality I have come to understand about making changes that go against the shadows that lie deep within me.
Yet, there is transformative power in knowing how to navigate the shadows of myself, to know the processes that take me back and forth between the edge and the ledge.
To transform myself, I have had to name, face, fight, understand, and reframe my shadows. These ongoing processes may be helpful to you or someone you know.
