You’ve tried everything you know to change.
You’ve tried to ‘will’ yourself to be different.
Maybe you’ve read books, taken courses, or even gone to therapy.
And yet, you’re still not where you want to be.
It’s understandable that you might even blame yourself for the lack of progress.
After all, who else is there to blame?
But the hard truth is this: most mainstream approaches to change are built on scientifically outdated assumptions.
That’s why therapy outcomes haven’t improved in over 50 years.
It’s also why the endless cycle of self-help books, courses, and motivational “hacks” so often leaves people frustrated, working hard but never seeing lasting results.
These eleven contrarian truths reveal a different paradigm—one where change can be fast, automatic, and life-changing.
They come from over 25 years of helping clients from more than 103 countries, with nearly every kind of problem imaginable.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
1. Psychological change frequently happens in an instant
Given the right conditions, your life can change for good, in a single instant.1
When you understand how to create those conditions on demand, you gain the ability to make precise, life-changing shifts deliberately, whenever you choose.
In an Automatic Change session, our goal is for these shifts to occur within the session itself, so you are effortlessly different moving forward, rather than relying on weeks of effort, practice, or “homework”.
(After all, if life can change for the worse in a single instant, why couldn’t it change just as profoundly for the better?)
Frequently, a significant transformation is built from a series of smaller, iterative changes, each happening in its own instant, within a single session or across several.
Sometimes change is better understood as pushing a snowball down a hill. The push happens in an instant, but the momentum builds automatically over time, especially as you encounter situations that used to trigger difficulty.
Mastering these skills has been my all-consuming passion for over 25 years.
Of course, not all change happens this way. For balance, see my upcoming post on Patterns vs Paths.
2. Real change is ‘Automatic Change’.
Our goal is for the solution to be as effortless and automatic as the problem once was.
If it still requires willpower to think, feel, and behave the way you want, you’re not there yet.
This doesn’t mean willpower is never needed. Sometimes it’s essential for reaching the automaticity we want.
But surprisingly often, willpower isn’t needed at all, even for significant changes.
For over a century, scientists—from Nobel laureates like Ivan Pavlov to Daniel Kahneman—have studied how our brains create thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.
Their discoveries reveal two ‘systems’2 that drive psychological change:
- The Effortful System: slow, deliberate, and reliant on willpower.
- The Automatic System: fast, effortless, unconscious and far more powerful than most people imagine.
Yet despite these revolutionary insights, most change methods still rely on willpower,
reinforcing the belief that change must be slow, difficult, and fragile.
(This is one reason therapy outcomes haven’t improved in over 50 years.)
3. You’re not broken (even if you think you are)
The philosopher Ian Hacking observed that the way we categorise problems can shape how we experience them, how we try to solve them, and even how they unfold.3
Crucially, the concepts of “mental illness” and “mental disorder” are not empirically discovered entities. Instead, they are descriptive frames, one particular way of organising and making sense of very real patterns of human suffering.
The problem is that when psychological suffering is framed in ways that imply people are “broken” or “ill,” it tends to appear far more fixed and harder to change than it does when we adopt a more nuanced understanding of what is happening.4
In practice, it’s remarkable how often even a single Automatic Change session can bring lasting relief from problems that once felt overwhelming.
4. When it comes to human psychology, genes give us tendencies, not fixed outcomes
When it comes to our individual psychological patterns, what we inherit are tendencies, not fixed outcomes.
Genes can tilt the odds, sometimes strongly, but there is no evidence that they specify a single, inevitable psychological future.
Even the strongest genetic influences we know of are probabilistic rather than deterministic, shaped continuously by development, learning, life events, context, and meaning.
This is why identical twins, who share the same DNA, often diverge in personality and outlook (I witnessed this first-hand; my mother was an identical twin).5
Importantly, our brains evolved to be remarkably flexible in response to social and psychological influences. This is why the right psychological approach can quickly create meaningful, lasting, positive change, even when strong tendencies might be present.
Read: The Myth Of The Anxiety Gene (And Other Mental Health Genes)
5. Eliminating problems and limitations is important, but amplifying joy is equally vital.
Mainstream approaches have long set the bar too low. Their goal is too often merely to reduce so-called “symptoms.”
Why stop there?
We can aim higher by turning weakness into strength, anxiety into confidence, sadness into joy, and impossibility into possibility.
The question shouldn’t just be “How can I suffer less?” but “How much can I thrive?”
6. Inside every mental or emotional problem lie strengths and resources that can make life better.
The very patterns that create suffering often contain hidden assets: persistence, imagination, sensitivity, vigilance, memory, or drive.
When these elements are recontextualised, limitation can turn into power.
What once created distress becomes a source of strength.
The same vigilance that fuels anxiety can fuel a positive focus. The same imagination that once generated fear can fuel creativity, vision, and joy.
Redirected, those forces can sometimes solve the very problem they’re part of—or open doors to entirely new possibilities.
See my upcoming post: Hidden Strengths Inside Your Problems
7. One-size-fits-all approaches rarely fit anyone.
If you strike ten billiard balls in precisely the same way, you get the same result each time.
Importantly, human psychology does not work like this.
Say the same words to two different people and you’ll often get completely different responses.
Say the same words to the same person in a different mood and you may get a different result again.
Tone of voice, timing, context, non-verbal cues, mood, expectations, and countless other factors all influence the outcome.
This is why one-size-fits-all approaches, which dominate the “mental health” field, are so counterproductive.6
It’s only when we tailor our approach to fit you that truly exceptional results become far more predictable.
8. Your past ≠ your future.
We live in a world where the future isn’t determined by the past. The only constant is change.
As the Nobel Prize–winning complexity scientist Ilya Prigogine observed:
“The future is not given. The universe is in continual construction. Creativity is the rule, not the exception.”
Even the most stubborn patterns carry the seeds of change.
Your past does not dictate your future.
The real question is: How do you want your future to differ from your past?
9. You don’t need to understand the cause of a problem to resolve it.
The idea of a single “root cause” in human psychology is outdated. This is why an endless search for a cause in the past is one hallmark of an ineffective approach to change.
Even when a clear triggering event is present, not everyone responds the same way. Outcomes depend on a wide range of interacting factors, many of which operate outside conscious awareness.
This helps explain why so much talk therapy is slow, exhausting, and unproductive. When we focus too heavily on the past, searching for the cause of our problems, we tend to stay trapped in analysis and rumination.
Instead, we can take advantage of a more accurate understanding of human psychology: unwanted patterns arise from a web of interacting influences.
This opens up opportunities for a better life, even when the past, or a repetitive triggering situation itself, cannot be changed.
By working indirectly to transform these other factors, we can often create change much more quickly and easily than most people would expect, without spending vast amounts of time trying to identify a single “true” cause.
10. Transformation > Information
Merely talking about problems or gaining intellectual understanding rarely leads to real change. This is especially true when it comes to deeply ingrained mental and emotional patterns.
The late Milton Erickson is regarded by many as the greatest therapist of all time. As Erickson observed:
“Change will lead to insight more often than insight will lead to change.”
As psychologist Jonathan Haidt famously put it in an influential scientific paper:
“The emotional dog wags the rational tail.”
Real change rarely comes from logic, intellectual insight, or endless talking in therapy week after week.7 Real change comes from lasting emotional shifts.
11. None of us are entirely self-made.
We don’t create our problems, or our successes, entirely on our own. We didn’t choose our genes, our parents, our culture, or the random life events that shaped our lives. And all of us need help from time to time (myself included).
Remembering this doesn’t make us weaker. It reminds us that we are a social species, and none of us can thrive alone.
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Footnotes for the Scientifically Curious
- Underlying biological processes, including memory reconsolidation (updating older learnings) and consolidation (stabilising new learnings), unfold over hours to days. This is why an instant shift continues to strengthen automatically after a session. ↩︎
- The “Effortful” and “Automatic” systems are metaphors—useful ways of describing different modes of processing, not literal brain structures. (See Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011.) ↩︎
- Philosopher Ian Hacking distinguished between indifferent kinds and interactive kinds. An indifferent kind (like an electron) is unaffected by what we think or say about it. An interactive kind (like a person) can be influenced by how they see themselves or how others see them. (See Hacking, I. [1999]. The Social Construction of What? Harvard University Press.) ↩︎
- Framing and Outcomes:
Studies show that describing psychological struggles in fixed or medicalised terms increases pessimism and self-stigma, while flexible, growth-oriented language improves hope and outcomes.
Examples include:
Kemp, J. J., Lickel, J. J., & Deacon, B. J. (2014). Effects of a chemical imbalance causal explanation on individuals’ perceptions of their depressive symptoms. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 56, 47–52
“Biomedical causal explanations of depression, principally the chemical imbalance theory, convey no reliably discernible psychological benefits and foster beliefs that may interfere with recovery and response to treatment, particularly psychotherapy.”
“[Misleading] Chemical imbalance feedback was found to lower individuals’ perceived ability to successfully regulate their depressed moods… The observed detrimental effects… are consistent with neuroessentialism theory, which posits that a mental health problem ascribed to brain abnormalities will be perceived as stable and resistant to corrective action.”
“Belief in a deterministic biomedical causal explanation may lessen the extent to which depressed individuals view their symptoms as under their own control.”
Lebowitz, M. S., & Ahn, W. K. (2014). Effects of biological explanations for mental disorders on clinicians’ empathy. PNAS, 111(50), 17786–17790
“… Biological explanations evoked significantly less empathy. These results are consistent with other research and theory that has suggested that biological accounts of psychopathology can exacerbate perceptions of patients as abnormal, distinct from the rest of the population, meriting social exclusion, and even less than fully human.”
“Biological explanations led clinicians to believe less strongly in the potential for psychotherapy to be effective and more strongly in the need for medication.”
“Empathy is a bedrock of the therapeutic alliance … and significantly predicts positive clinical outcomes. Thus, if biological explanations decrease empathy, patients’ mental health could suffer as a result.”
Haslam, N. (2017). Concept creep: Psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 28(1), 1–17.
Haslam described how expanding definitions of “pathology” have shifted cultural attention toward vulnerability and damage, often at the expense of perceived resilience and agency. ↩︎ - This is due to epigenetic changes (genes switching on or off through experience), random developmental variation, and unique life events. Life is dynamic and complex—and DNA isn’t a “blueprint”. ↩︎
- Therapy outcomes haven’t improved in over 50 years.
Alongside this, decades of research have shown that most therapies produce broadly similar results, with no single approach reliably outperforming the rest. This pattern is often called the Dodo bird verdict, after a scene in Alice in Wonderland in which “everyone has won, and all must have prizes”.
A likely reason lies in how therapy is commonly practised and studied.
First, very different individuals are grouped together under diagnostic labels (such as Generalised Anxiety Disorder) that are rough, human-made groupings rather than clean divisions that exist in nature.
They are then given one-size-fits-all ‘treatments’ designed to fit the category rather than the individual.
When very different people are treated in the same way, approaches that work well for some and poorly for others can end up with the same average results.
This reflects a more general limitation of group-based evidence. As Gordon Guyatt, the originator of the term evidence-based medicine, put it:
“Evidence about groups of people can only tell you about groups of people… the best would be to find out what the effect of the treatment is in this patient.”
The same logic applies to changing mental and emotional patterns. ↩︎ - As outcomes researcher Scott Miller noted: “What’s the difference between a trained therapist and a compassionate friend? Look at outcomes and you are likely to be disappointed [at the lack of difference].” ↩︎