The 5 Stages Of Making A Major Life Change
According to famed life coach Tony Robbins, making a calculated shift in your life or initiating a major life change is a process that begins before you ever feel ready to take the leap. Nearly everyone who undergoes a transformation follows this same process, he says, and in Robbins’ experience empowering individuals to transform their lives, the path toward change is almost scientific.
“I think there’s a chemistry to transformation,” he says. “And this isn’t just my concept. It’s a couple of different people’s concepts, but I’ve kind of simplified it in my own mind.”
As Robbins outlines in the clip above from OWN’s “SuperSoul Sunday,” he has noticed five stages of transformation, each one serving a distinct purpose and leading up to the pivotal moment where real change occurs.
Stage 1: Satiation
“I am experiencing too much of this thing.”
This is where the seeds of change are first planted and you may start to feel restless with your current life even when you don’t have anything “wrong” in it, Robbins points out. “If your favorite meal was steak and lobster, and you had it breakfast, lunch and dinner for six months, I guarantee … you’re going to be sick of it,” he says. “You’re going to want to change something.”
Stage 2: Dissatisfaction
“I’m having a negative reaction to this thing.”
Typically, Robbins says, satiation must evolve into dissatisfaction before most people begin to entertain the idea of making a change. This is when a sensation of pain settles in. “The same thing that I was doing that was fulfilling, it’s not just empty now. It’s actually a little painful,” he explains.
Stage 3: Threshold
“I can’t take it anymore. This thing has to change.”
How much pain can you tolerate? The answer varies for everyone, but at some point, the scale always tips. “If you get enough dissatisfaction, there’s enough leverage in you, there’s a part where your brain goes, ‘No more. Not another day, not another hour, not another moment,’” Robbins says.
Stage 4: Truth
“It’s up to me to change this thing.”
In this stage, Robbins says that you become acutely aware of the fact that no one else is responsible for making a shift in your life; only you have the power to make change happen. “You get the insight,” he says. “You get the truth, usually. ‘It’s not my mother, my brother, my sister, my boss … It’s me.’”
Stage 5: “Opening”
“I’m taking the leap and making the change.”
Finally, the breakthrough. “When that truth shows up, there’s an opening, and that opening is only there for a second,” Robbins says. “It’s a scary opening, because you don’t know what’s on the other side. If you’ve got momentum and you’ve got guts and if you train yourself, when you get the truth, you act on it. You jump through the opening, not knowing what’s on the other side, just trusting it’s got to be better than where you are, because it’s based on the truth.”
“SuperSoul Sunday” airs Sundays at 11 a.m. ET on OWN.
Another transformative piece of advice:
Robbins’ number-one rule for becoming your most authentic self