When you want to institute a change in your life by changing your behavior, whether it is by actively taking something away, (i.e. less eating, less drinking, less time online), or by adding something, (more time at the gym, practicing meditation), an optimist’s perception, (“it’ll be no problem”), is represented by the following picture.

You just take the first step, and then climb ‘away’ from the initial starting point of your decision, until you you have moved far away from where you began.

For many people the optimist’s stairs lead to disappointment, as there is no way to understand the phenomena of ‘backsliding’, except as return to the beginning.

This next picture represents the way people who struggle to hold onto a change may experience life, as a set of steps that always return to the same point.

Climbing these stairs can bring feelings of cynicism, resentment, impotency, anxiety, paralysis, and the development of a pessimist’s attitude (“it’ll never work”) towards self change.

The final picture represents a third way of looking at life, as a set of stairs that spiral around a central point. The central axis in this set of stairs represents the central, ‘given’ aspects of a person’s character that are always there, no matter how far one may climb. On these stairs you are always you, just ‘further along’.

Setbacks, backsliding, and re-starts should be viewed as part of the process of solidifying change, and if you treat yourself with compassion in those moments of ‘not again…’, you will make it less difficult to take another step on the stairs. This is the realist’s attitude towards self-change.

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