Rewiring Your Self

Picture the outside of a house.

From the outside this house looks well cared for. The lawn is mowed, there’s a few decorative shrubs, the window frames are painted, the door knob is nice and shiny. You walk inside and the inside is similar to the outside. It’s not a new house by any means, the decor could use some updating, but over all the house is livable and clean.

You flip a switch to turn on the lights and…

Nothing happens.

You try again.

Nothing.

You walk to a switch in another room, and nothing happens there either.

You really want the lights to turn on.

But they don’t.

The lights should turn on.

But they don’t.

From what you can see, there’s no explanation for why they aren’t turning on.

But that’s just it: it’s about what you can’t see. It’s about the wiring.

The house may have nice light fixtures, it might have new light bulbs, it might have fancy switches that enable the fancy new light bulbs to dim.

But if the house isn’t wired properly, all those fancy things make no difference.

Human’s are not so different from houses in this respect.

We can look nice and put together on the outside, even our insides can be healthy and well maintained.

But our wiring is an integral part of what we are capable of.

If we were raised with a Fixed Mindset, we may spend our whole lives feeling like failures for not living up to the expectations set for us by others, not realizing that we weren’t wired to meet them.

Many of us wake up on January 1st every year expecting the feeling of a clean slate to be motivation enough to start a new habit. But what has actually changed about us from the prior year? How many habits did we establish and maintain last year? Yet we expect a different date to fundamentally change us, and then take it as a mark of poor character when, two weeks later, we find ourselves in the same cycle we were in every single year prior to this new one.

James Clear alludes to this in his book Atomic Habits when discussing “outcome-based habits” vs “identity-based habits”.

“Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach we start by focusing on who we wish to become.” (pg. 31)

How to figure out who we want to become and why we want to become them is a conversation for another day.

For now, I want you to stop judging yourself based on your wiring. We can’t change the genetics and experiences that wired us, but we can, slowly, with intentional effort, patience, curiosity, and self-compassion change our wiring, and in turn change our selves.