Why "Some Assembly Required"?

09/05/2011 00:39:00

One evening last February, I was walking down the street in Santa Barbara, CA with my sister. We had just finished a day of training and we were walking to a restaurant to have dinner with our fellow trainees. It was the first time that I had voiced the concept of "some assembly required" in a context that related to the human condition of having disconnected parts ... not body parts mind you, rather the mind - body- spirit parts that are sometimes disconnected and the changes required to realign or reconnect them. Thinking of my own life and the lives of other people I knew, I began to examine why those change are so hard to make.

How is it that, being the intelligent beings we are, change is so hard?Are we really more willing to ignore the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room instead of asking the obvious questions of "how did it get here, why is it still here, and what do I need to do to make it go away?" I don't think so. But here's the deal. I do think you need to have the first things first and baby steps mentality to change. Face it, we are a society of instant gratification. We do not like to wait for things. We want the quick fix. The irony in that is we will literally wait years hoping for change to come - waiting for the perfect time, or the perfect place, or for Mars to be aligned perfectly with Jupiter. We think if we read a couple of books or watch a few shows on TV change will happen simply by having the knowledge stored away in the brain somewhere. Knowledge is an important piece, but it is only one piece.

Enter what I call the "Some Assembly Required" principle of change. Okay, so here's my visual. I have a box which represents what I want to change. Inside are all the pieces I need to assemble along with a set of instructions that make very little sense. They do tell me that I should already have all the tools necessary to assemble the parts but beyond that, they are vague and mostly confusing. So I have a box full of pieces, no tools, and a seemingly incomplete instruction sheet and for real change to happen I need to assemble all the pieces in the correct order using the tools I should already have available following these marvelous instructions. Piece of cake, right? Wrong.

For it is in that one spectacularly clear moment in time, when we are faced with the reality of what it will take to change, that most people give up before even trying.

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Why "Some Assembly Required"?