Your problem is the status quo

All of us wish to make our life work so we don't have too many problems. We are all attached to our status quo, not because we are naturally resistant to change, but because we are naturally attached to safety, security, certainty and legitimacy of the statues quo. Interestingly, we resist change not because we don't value what is available to us in change, but because our status quo is sufficiently comfortable. The mistake we all make in trying to "push" others or ourselves to change is we focus on getting others (or ourself) to see the value in the new opportunity instead of seeing the risk in remaining in the status quo.

This is why salesmen fail to sell, why people keep unhealthy habits, why relationships stay stuck where they are, why parents can't seem to motivate their kids, why organizations experience results below expectations with their change initiatives, and why churches put forth the Gospel to apathetic hearts. People generally stay where they are not because they lack knowledge of the benefits of change, but because they lack the deep emotional sense that staying where they are is too uncomfortable.

So, as the picture above suggests, the key to change is not helping others through the discomforts of change, but to heighten a sense of discomfort with their status quo.

Our status quo then becomes our problem. We fail to move out and move on when there is benefit in the change because we are too comfortable where we are. There have been several times in my life where I knew I should be moving on but was too comfortable where I was. In these instances I would make an uncharacteristic mistake, which would then be met with uncharacteristic rejection. Not only did I not know why I would do something outside of my own standards, but the people that had always supported me met my actions with a revenge i could not understand. This was as if their hearts had been hardened towards me. This reaction made my status quo totally uncomfortable for me and i moved on.

Looking back I see that I needed to move on from where I was, but I could not in my own strength make myself abandon the status quo. It took an unexplainable series of mistakes met with unexplainable reactions from "trusted others" to create an uncomfortable enough status quo that i would willingly change. My problem was not my mistakes, nor was it the "bizarre" (at least to me) reactions of others, BUT my comfortableness with my status quo. Each time my change led to benefits to me and others that I could not have imagined before.

For those of us who trust in our loving relationship with God through Jesus Christ, we can see God's Divine Sovereign hand in these moments. God needed His chosen people of Israel to go to their promised land. Although they were in bondage in Egypt, they were comfortable where they were. God took a man Moses, his mistakes and unwillingness to lead, and then God hardened the heart of Pharaoh, who also betrayed Moses' trust, and God moved His people out of Egypt to their home land.

Because its our nature to seek certainty, change is difficult. While all change is not for our benefit, often it is. To change is not unnatural for us. To deal with the "discomfort" of change is not our problem. Our problem is the perception we have of comfort in a certain and secure status quo. Often our status quo has risks we do not see. Opening our eyes to the risks of status quo is the solution to our problem. Change is not so hard and can be fun. Getting on with it, however, requires us to be shaken loose from the status quo and seeing its consequences realistically.  

This is our human experience. The principles hold regardless of our Spiritual persuasion. Good change practices are better served when the focus is on making the status quo more uncomfortable more than making the change more comfortable. However, if we are believers, we can make sense of mistakes and difficult circumstances as God uses them to move us where He wants us. The risks we run as believers is that we fail to see that our comfortableness with our status quo may in fact be what's in our way of God's blessings for us, not God's blessings for us.