Can people change?

Instead of positioning change as break from familiarity, we need to position it as chance to rewrite destiny.

Are we doomed to live out our destiny or do we have the power to change who we are? By the time we turn 25, we’ve already lived a third of our lives and developed a large repository of life experiences — good and bad — that colour our worldview and future. As a result, we develop unconscious biases in our behaviour that inhibit our ability to live life to the fullest: from something as simple as ‘I’m not pretty (or I’m fat) so I must always compensate with an effort to be witty and friendly’ to something as complicated as ‘I’ll never find a perfect life partner so I might as well overcompensate by excelling in my professional life’. We develop biases — shaped by our past experiences — behind which we imprison our future.

“We cannot solve problems at the same level at which we created them,” opined Albert Einstein, poignantly capturing the paradox of living with a bias against ourselves. Let’s unpack bias by asking a deeper question: why do we develop biases to begin with? Biases give us the gift of predictability. I have a bias against trying new things at restaurants because I know what I enjoy eating and want to replicate the same feelings every time I go out. This is why we choose to spend time with our friends on the weekend instead of meeting new people; we’re confident our friends will make us feel a certain way and maximise our happiness. Similarly, biases also protect us from getting hurt because they drive us away from experiences that have hurt us in the past. In short, biases help make decision-making easier but they don’t necessarily help us make better decisions.

Can we ever lift ourselves from the burden of our history to reinvent ourselves with purpose? Yes, if we can break free from the biases that serve as the prison guards holding our imagination and our lives hostage. How do we break free from our biases? By opening ourselves up to new experiences independent of our biases. For all our rhetoric about being stuck in a rut, human beings hate change and new experiences. When an external virus enters our body, our immune system fights against the external agent and we fall sick. Similarly, when we engage in new experiences, our emotional immune system reacts violently to a challenge against the carefully constructed biases intended to ‘protect’ us from getting hurt in an uncertain world.

How do we pull ourselves out of the gravitational pull of inertia and familiarity? Stepping out of our comfort zone is a discomforting process but it is the only way for people to change and grow. Instead of positioning change as a break from things we are familiar with, we need to position change as a chance to rewrite our destiny. When young children accidentally touch something hot and burn their hand, they learn a lesson for life. Shattering your biases is essentially a lot like exposing yourself to the possibility of getting burned again — with the upside of discovering a whole new world of fulfillment and excitement. The problem is that we can’t always differentiate between biases that are holding us back and the biases protecting us from getting hurt. With the confidence and ambition to discover our true selves, we can embark on a painful journey to test which biases are holding us back and which ones are protecting us. The best way to test our biases is through trial and error — actively engaging in experiences that run counter to our biases and then understanding whether the results pay off or not. This process requires you to give yourself the freedom to fall flat on your face repeatedly — only to stand up again. Why would anyone willingly put themselves through this pain? Imagine the difference between a life lived within the narrow boundaries of society’s biases versus a life lived in pursuit of self-actualisation. Almost overnight, life is full of possibilities again. It makes all the difference.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 13^th,  2014.

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