Self-Transformation Does Not Last Because the Order of Changing Is Reversed

The procedures offered for self-transformation share a well-matched shape. Become aware that you need to change. Put into concrete words what should be changed. Hold the conviction that you can do it. Stack small successes to strengthen the conviction. The order places one premise: that the object to be changed can be identified before you begin. And the identification is performed from your present position.

What is visible from the present position is only the inside of your present range. So the objects identified are limited to what sits on the line extending from where you are. Change something on that line and the direction of the line does not change. The quantity changes and the form does not. That is why carrying out the procedure faithfully moves little.

Seen from the side of order, a set of questions becomes answerable. Why does the improvement genuinely appear while the change you expected does not? Why does measuring yourself for capacity to transform keep producing a list of what is lacking? Why does full awareness of necessity still fail to keep anything going? None of these is a question of quantity. Each is a question of which position the present is being measured from.

Two answers are withheld. How far out to place the destination, and how many months until how things look changes. The same number of months points to an entirely different distance depending on the form of the business and on how far the placed position sits from it. Receive a period first and the destination gets pulled in toward whatever fits that period.

The object also needs bounding. What is treated is the case of someone running a business who wants to change the form of it. Improvements in efficiency that keep the form intact are not the object. Improvement itself works. Its range is simply confined to the inside of the present form.

Reversing the order means placing the destination first. Whether the placed position sits on the line of extension from the present changes every step that follows. On the line, how things look does not move. Off the line, the same daily work starts showing you different things. One question is enough to tell them apart. One is enough because whether something is an extension shows up not in the contents of the achieved state but in the arrangement of the day. Without checking the placement first, the whole procedure spins.

Measurement, verbalisation and necessity each arrive at the same result for a different reason: the object to be changed gets selected from inside the present range. However much the execution is sharpened, then, the kind of object that comes out does not change. Changing it means resetting the criterion itself before any object is chosen.

The Self-Transformation Procedure Begins from an Analysis of the Present

The procedures in circulation often begin from an analysis of the present. What is wrong with you now. What is lacking. What should be reformed. What gets listed here becomes the object of the transformation.

That beginning has the same shape as a business improvement procedure. Measure the present, compare it with how things should be, close the gap. In running an organisation the shape works, because how things should be is supplied from outside.

In personal transformation, you place how things should be yourself. Here the shape breaks. The material for placing it is what you already hold: what you have seen, what you have heard, what you can believe holds. So how things should be also comes out of the inside of your present range.

Both the present and how things should be therefore sit inside the same range. Measure the gap and what you get is a distance inside the range. The range itself never appears in the measurement or in the plan.

When someone decides to reform how they work, the proposals that come out tend to take this form. Review how the hours are managed. Be selective about which jobs to take. Raise the skill another notch. Keep publishing. Carried out, each produces some improvement. And each can be carried out with the present form exactly as it is. The form does not change, so the ceiling does not either.

The problem is that what the procedure calls transformation and what it can actually execute do not match. The word transformation points at a change of form, while what comes out of the procedure is an improvement in efficiency. The mismatch distorts the verdict. You carried it out; the improvement appeared; the change you expected did not. The account that comes out is still not enough. What is short is kind, not quantity — but with only a quantity scale in hand, it gets read as quantity.

The phrase capacity to transform sits on the same scale. Measured as a capacity, all that comes out is a high or low reading. A low reading starts the work of raising it. Raising can only begin from the present position, so it circles inside the same range again.

An analysis of the present carries one more cost. Its object leans inevitably toward what is lacking. The analysis produces the difference from how things should be, so its output is a list of what is short. Anything already sufficient has a difference of zero and does not appear on the list.

What does not appear drops out of all subsequent examination. The material in your hands, the relationships still running, the understanding accumulated. Their difference is zero, so they never once appear inside the transformation plan. Yet what is actually usable when changing the form is exactly what dropped off the list. What you can hand over first in a new form can only be built from what you already hold.

So the work of listing deficits systematically removes the material for the next move from view. The longer the list grows, the less visible what you already hold becomes.

The Gap Between the Present and the Ideal Can Only Be Measured from Your Present Position

Measuring a gap requires a criterion, and the criterion is where you currently stand. And the position of the criterion never becomes an object of the measurement.

Income makes it plain. Sixty at the moment against a target of a hundred gives a gap of forty. The arithmetic is correct. It carries the criterion income is measured by the month inside it.

Change the criterion and the same situation looks different. Measure by how much arose without moving your hands and the figure is zero for many. Sixty and a hundred take the same value under that criterion. The gap is not forty; it is the difference between zero and zero.

Both ways of measuring are correct. What differs is what each measurement specifies as the target. The first specifies more. The second specifies a destination of a different kind. The target is half decided the moment the way of measuring is fixed.

And while the work of closing gaps continues, the criterion does not move. Closing only holds together on the assumption of the criterion. Doubt the criterion mid-task and the task itself stops. So the more diligently you close, the more firmly the criterion is fixed.

Results make the criterion look validated as well. Sixty becoming seventy reads as progress on that scale. Because it reads that way, the scale is not examined.

There is an objection: nothing gets done while you keep doubting the criterion. If you doubt it perpetually, work genuinely does not hold. What is being stated here is not perpetual doubt but an order. Resetting the criterion and closing gaps under the criterion you have set are separate steps. Do the first once and the second proceeds without hesitation. The problem is that the first step is not in the procedure.

Advance far with the criterion fixed and the load of moving it rises. The record you have accumulated holds its meaning under that criterion. Move the criterion and the meaning of the record changes. A force that would rather avoid the change works on the side of holding the criterion.

The force is not only psychological. It works from the practical side too. The work running under the current criterion supports your living, and moving the criterion lowers that work’s priority for a while. Lower it and income moves. So a change of criterion gets examined simultaneously with a change in income.

This is the most concrete difficulty in the work. Moving the criterion and earning under the current one compete for the same hours. And the second has deadlines while the first does not. That what has a deadline gets priority is a sound judgement. The criterion staying put is not a matter of motivation. It is a structure in which work with deadlines legitimately displaces work without them, every day.

Why Putting “What to Change” into Words Cannot Be Finished Before You Begin

The material used for verbalising is the vocabulary you already hold. And vocabulary enters from the places you have passed through.

Someone from an organisation has an organisation’s vocabulary; someone who has taken contract work has the contract worker’s. A vocabulary holds whatever that place required. So for places you have not passed through, the vocabulary is not there. Try to verbalise such a region and the nearest available words get selected.

You feel the wish to change the form of the business, and verbalising it produces strengthen the acquisition, raise the unit price, publish more. None of these points at a change of form. They are variables inside the present form. What you felt and what you said have diverged. And at the moment of saying it, the divergence stops being visible. All subsequent work proceeds on the object that became words.

Verbalising is required. Without it nothing can be shared and no progress can be measured. What fails is the use that tries to fix the final object before beginning. Vocabulary for regions not yet passed through enters after passing through. Fix it first and only what is fixable becomes the object.

The step also runs a selection that is hard to see: what is easy to put into words gets priority. What is countable, what can be given a deadline, what already has a name. These verbalise easily, so they are adopted as objects. What has no name yet, no deadline, and no clear test of completion drops out at the verbalising stage.

And a change of form belongs to the second group. It has no name, no deadline, and no clear moment of completion. The second step of the procedure systematically excludes the very object you want to handle.

The exclusion strengthens in the sharing. To make something explicable, you have to match the other person’s vocabulary, and their vocabulary comes from the places they passed through. So in the course of explaining, it shifts one more notch toward what already circulates.

Concretely, I want to change the form of the business becomes, in a form that lands, I want to earn more efficiently. It does land. What landed, though, is not the original. And on the landed content, the people around you offer advice. The advice is apt. Apt advice carries you further from the original object. There is no ill will anywhere. The object was swapped during translation.

Does that mean verbalising should be postponed? Not quite. Without words you hold no route for consulting anyone and no route for recording anything. The practical handling is to move where verbalising sits. Rather than fixing the object before you begin, write it after passing through, using the vocabulary of the place you passed through. The order changes; the step itself remains.

Awareness of Necessity Is Not Fuel for Continuing

The step “become strongly aware that you need to change” is placed as the starting point of motivation. Yet awareness of necessity and continuation of behaviour correlate poorly.

Knowing full well that it is necessary, and still not continuing. This is a commonly observed form. The reason shows once you look at where necessity comes from. Necessity mostly comes from outside. It will not hold at this rate. Everyone around is doing it. Each takes an external condition as its ground.

With the ground outside, the motivation changes when the external condition changes. And external conditions change daily. One job lands and necessity drops. The month fills and it drops. Behaviour fuelled by necessity runs on a fuel with seasonal variation.

What a reason supplied from outside does to motivation from inside has been examined experimentally. In 1971 Edward Deci reported that introducing monetary reward into a task people were already engaging with out of interest reduced the time they spent on it voluntarily once the reward was withdrawn (Deci, 1971, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18(1), 105–115). Add a reason from outside and the reason from inside gets pushed out.

The effect has been confirmed in meta-analysis, with the indicators of intrinsic motivation falling in particular for rewards tied to task performance (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999, Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668). The reward is not the problem in itself; what tells is the source of the reason moving outside.

Driving by necessity has a closely related action. Attach this has to be done or nothing holds to something you were doing out of interest and the interest recedes. The phenomenon of the early interest thinning out as a business continues is partly explained in this form.

Necessity works strongly as a trigger for starting. Many changes genuinely begin from it. What can be stated is that it works as a trigger and is unstable as fuel for continuing. So placing it at the start of the procedure is correct; placing nothing but the start is the shortfall.

Keep necessity as the starting point and a motive to maintain necessity arises. In periods when the month is filling, you tell yourself the outlook is severe. You read the numbers from the bad side. Knowing that you do not move otherwise, you maintain necessity in order to move.

The maintenance has a cost. A state of high necessity narrows the width of judgement. Judgement leans toward avoiding collapse, so options that take time drop out. And a change of form is precisely an option that takes time. The operation used for running is restricting where you can go.

Reversing the Order Swaps the Position of the Criterion

The old order ran: measure the present, produce the gap, decide the object, execute. Reversed, it runs: place the destination, look at the present from there, check the change in how things look, execute what comes out.

The difference looks like nothing but a rearrangement. What actually changes is the position of the criterion. In the first, the criterion sits in the present and what is measured is the distance from the present. In the second, the criterion sits at the destination and what is measured is where the present stands as seen from there.

Take the present as criterion and the present is treated as the place to depart from, with its components carried over intact. Your current clients, your current form, your current skills. These are treated as premises and never become objects of examination.

Take the destination as criterion and the present is treated as what state this is, seen from the destination. The components then become objects of evaluation one by one. Is this on the route toward the destination, or outside it?

And that evaluation does not arrive as the result of a judgement. It arrives as how things look. Carry on the ordinary work after placing a destination and the same tasks as before start carrying different meanings. This job is on the route; that one is not. The distinction is not produced by analysis; it appears because the position of the criterion changed.

The objection that merely placing a destination cannot change how things look arises naturally. It depends on the placement. Place it on the line extending from the present and how things look does not change, because what sits on that line is already inside the same criterion. What changes is only a position off the line. That difference becomes the question of where a destination can be placed.

Reversing the order also means a plan shaped like a procedure can no longer be written. Accumulating from the present produces a schedule; looking from the destination produces the next move out of the change in how things look, so it cannot be listed before you begin.

That is inconvenient. At the same time, not fitting inside a list is a mark of handling something outside. If the list could be written, its contents were already inside. So what you hold in this form is not a plan but a criterion for sorting. Rearrange what comes out by its distance from the destination. The criterion has been in your hands from the start: it is the destination.

Reversing the order also changes the meaning of failure. Accumulating from the present makes failure a shortfall against the gap — a record of distance not closed, and a target for recovery in the next plan. Looking from the destination makes failure information about the route: this direction was not on it. Not something to recover, but material to write onto the map.

The difference bears directly on sustainability. The same event becomes a debt on one side and an asset on the other. And in work that changes the form, the times it does not go well tend to be many. Design frequent work in a form that accumulates debt and it does not continue.

The Destination Cannot Be Placed on the Line of Extension

Two kinds get placed as destinations. One is an extension and the other is not. And spoken aloud, the two sound closely alike.

The extension keeps the present components as they are and enlarges the value. Double the income. Increase the number of jobs. Widen the client base. Raise the skill. Each can be realised with the present form intact.

The non-extension has different components altogether. The mechanism by which income arises differs. The owner of the route that reaches people differs. The agent that sets the figure differs.

One question tells them apart. Picture the state in which it has been realised, and see whether a day of the same shape as your current day appears. A day of the same shape means an extension: the values differ and the composition is identical. A day of a wholly different shape means it is not.

Place a non-extension and the sense of reality thins immediately afterwards. It is a place you have not passed through, so the material is not assembled. The unassembled state is felt as thinness of reality.

How that thinness is read is the fork. The forking of readings itself has been examined in research on views of ability. In 1988 the psychologists Carol Dweck and Ellen Leggett set out how holding ability to be fixed or to be developable changes the response in difficult situations (Dweck & Leggett, 1988, Psychological Review, 95(2), 256–273).

Thinness in the sense of reality is not a difficulty. As a forking of readings, though, it has the same shape. Reading the thinness as evidence that you cannot do it, or as the state of the material not yet being assembled, changes what you do next. Read it the first way and you pull the position back within reach. Draw it back and the thinness goes. The moment it goes, the thing has become an extension again.

None of this extends to the claim that anything is possible with enough effort. Fit and unfit are real. What is being handled here is one point only: not fixing the verdict on something untried before trying it. Learning after trying that it does not suit you, and deciding before trying that it does not, leave completely different material in your hands. The first becomes material for what to try next; the second leaves nothing.

Placing a non-extension also brings a period in which conversations stop meshing. The criterion the other person holds is often the extension. You use the same words and point at different things. Try to explain your way out and the translation into a form the other person receives operates, swapping the object again. The failure to mesh reflects the object not yet being in the other person’s vocabulary; it is not a problem of explanatory technique.

What Gets Changed Is Not Decided; It Comes Out

In the procedure, you decide the object of change. In the reversed order, you do not decide. It comes out.

It comes out sounds vague. Concretely it happens like this. With the destination placed, you carry on the ordinary work. Nothing special. Then things that never bothered you begin to catch. This job is not on the route. This task will not bring the destination nearer however long it continues.

The catching is not a judgement. It arrives in the form of noticing. And what you notice can often be dealt with, because what shows a handle tends to rise as noticing.

The order has a property the procedure lacks. What comes out already carries meaning for you. The object decided by procedure carries none at the moment of deciding; it holds the position change it because it should be changed. So execution takes load, and the load gets supplied by will.

What comes out has been felt first, as a catch. Dealing with something already felt takes a different load. The amount to be supplied by will is smaller.

Coming out has a condition. The ordinary work has to be continuing. Without touching situations inside the work, no catching occurs. Place the destination and do nothing else and nothing comes out. So the order is not a claim that you need not act. The quantity of action stays the same or rises. What changes is who decides what gets done. Not the plan in your head, but contact with situations.

The order has one difficulty: progress is hard to see. A schedule lets you measure progress by completion rate. Dealing with what comes out leaves no list to complete, so am I advancing becomes unclear. The handling for this lies in moving the object of measurement from action to how things look.

There is one more caution. What comes out arrives without an order of priority. A schedule can be ranked. Catches arrive through contact with situations, so they simply line up in the order they arrived. The important ones do not necessarily arrive first.

So dealing with them as they come scatters the effort. The handling is to note each one down and then rearrange them by distance from the destination. The criterion for rearranging is already in your hands: the destination.

Whether that one extra step exists changes the result. Dealing with catches as they come amounts to letting the situations set your schedule. The situations are produced by the present form. So processing them without selection pulls you back inside that form.

What Happens Along the Way in Self-Transformation — the Gap, and Two Criteria Side by Side

Four things tend to happen mid-transition: the gap becomes visible, two criteria coexist, results under the old criterion stop telling, and the length of the period is not yours to decide.

First, the gap becomes visible. Place the destination off the line of extension and the distance from the present shows. The distance existed before you placed anything. Placing it merely put the reading on the display. Even so, what stands out immediately afterwards is the shortfall. Read that as placing it made things harder and the placing operation itself gets doubted. In fact the earlier state, with no display, was the state in which the distance could not be measured.

Second, two positions coexist. Both the old criterion and the new one operate for a while. On the same job, one criterion says take it and the other says do not, at the same time.

The state is experienced as hesitation. Hesitation occurs only when there are two criteria. With one criterion there is one verdict. So an increase in hesitation is also evidence that the new criterion has begun to operate.

Hesitation has another type: hesitation from simply lacking material. What tells them apart is whether two conclusions come out of the same material. Lacking material, neither conclusion comes. With two criteria, both come.

Third, results under the old criterion stop telling as they did. This is an awkward stretch. Produce results under the old criterion and the new one does not count them as advance. Uncounted, the sense of achievement thins. Meanwhile results under the new criterion have not appeared yet. A period arises in which results look thin under both.

One reading applies to this period. That results under the old criterion stopped telling is evidence that the criterion has moved. If they still tell, it has not. Evaluations from the people around you also dip temporarily during it, because the criterion they evaluate by is the one from before the move. Read the dip as evidence of a mistaken judgement and the pull is toward restoring the old criterion.

Fourth, the length of the period is not yours to decide. A new criterion settles only after results under it actually appear. How long that takes depends on the form being handled: the period of making what you hand over, the period of it reaching anyone, the period until anything comes back. In each, what will can shorten is limited.

So how the period is spent is the fork. What works is not stopping the work under the old criterion. Stop it and income falls; once it falls, work with deadlines takes priority, and work under the new criterion stops. Stopping is what causes the stop.

So the transition proceeds by overlap rather than by switching. Keep the old form running while building the new one alongside it. The load rises temporarily. The added load falls once income begins arising from the new form. Hold that order and a long period does not stop the work.

Whether Self-Transformation Is Advancing Is Checked by How Things Look and by the Foundation

What to look at first is the destination you placed. Then how things look, then the quality of the hesitation. Last, whether the foundation is running.

First, check whether the destination is an extension. Picture the realised state and see whether a day of the same shape as now appears. The same shape means an extension, and an extension does not function as a criterion. Make this check immediately after placing it. Judge later and you have already grown used to the position, so whether it is an extension becomes unclear.

Second, check whether how things look has changed. Concretely: doing the same work as before, does a different catch appear? If it does, the criterion has moved. If it does not, it has not. What is looked at here is not the quantity of action. Action moves after how things look has changed. So judging by quantity marks a period of genuine advance as no advance.

Third, check the quality of the hesitation. Hesitation from lacking material, or hesitation from two criteria? The second means mid-transition. The first means the stage of going to get material. Both are called hesitation, and the next move differs.

Fourth, check that the current work has not stopped. This is not an indicator of progress but a confirmation of the condition for continuing. When income from the old form falls, hours move to work with deadlines and the new work stops. In sequence, look here first.

The check looks passive. It is the reverse: that the work is running is itself the condition for handling a position off the line of extension. With unstable ground underfoot, judgement leans toward the nearest deadline. Leaning that way, a non-extension never gets chosen. The foundation decides how the destination can be placed.

Why does following the procedure faithfully move so little? The procedure is not badly made. Its first step is built to decide the object from your present position, so the objects that come out are confined to the extension.

So this article does not reject analysis of the present. Analysis of the present after the criterion has been reset is usable as it stands. The position of measurement has changed, so the same work yields something else. The order swaps and almost all of the steps remain.

No figure is attached here to the distance or to the months. Place a figure and the destination moves into whatever range fits it. What remains in your hands is one question for telling an extension from a non-extension, and four checks. Those two set the order in place of a period.

Where the destination has been placed and no candidate rises at all, see not acting is not a failure of will; the work of moving daily behaviour toward a reset criterion is in change the return point before changing the habit; and the handling of resistance that appears mid-reset is in a mental block is not a defect. Where this order sits within recognition as a whole is in what cognitive science shows is that behaviour is generated out of the world being felt.