Three Types of Automatic Change (And How They Work Together)

Most people think change has to be slow, hard, and powered by sheer will.

But what if there’s a better way?

What if lasting transformation can happen faster and more easily when you tap into the way your brain naturally functions?

This is what Automatic Change is all about.

Here are three simple metaphors for how it naturally unfolds.¹

1) Tap In The Right Place

There’s an old story, passed to me from one of my mentors, the late Steve Andreas.

A massive steamship was stuck in port. Engineers tried everything, but nothing worked.

So they brought in a respected boilermaker. He studied the maze of pipes, listened, touched a few valves, then took out a small hammer and tapped a single valve once. The ship roared to life.

When the owner saw the $1,000 bill, he protested: “You only tapped once!”

The itemised invoice read:

Tapping with hammer: $0.50
Knowing where to tap: $999.50

Like that boiler system, many limiting patterns can change with one precise “tap”.

The Science: Why a Single Tap Can Change Everything

You don’t need to know how your phone works to benefit from its incredible capabilities and you don’t need to understand the science behind Automatic Change to experience its life-changing effects.

However, if you’re curious, here’s a glimpse into the neuroscience:

Predictive processing (also called predictive coding) is a neuroscience framework that helps explain how Automatic Change happens.

Limiting patterns often form when the brain makes mistaken, outdated, or over-confident predictions about what will happen and what it means in a given context.²

(For a deeper look at how predictions shape our mental and emotional responses, see: Burning Cars: Why Your Brain Keeps You Anxious (And What Actually Changes It)).

When we “tap in the right place,” we’re updating one of those key predictions.

This automatically transforms the brain’s model of the problem context.

The result is an effortless, automatic shift in how you think, feel, or behave whenever you think about or find yourself in that context again.

A Client Example

For Andre, that shift came from a single sentence, spoken over Zoom audio.

“I used to dread getting on the highway, especially if my husband was in the car.

When I told you during our session that I was going to drive on the highway with him, I was in full panic mode. But your one-sentence reaction completely flipped the switch for me.

Even though we had only one session over a year ago, it’s helped me immensely. I no longer panic while driving on the highway. You really know where to tap, and I just couldn’t believe you fixed my engine so easily.”
— Andre Zanki, Canada

A precise tap often starts the process. This leads us into the second metaphor for how Automatic Change can happen.

Here’s what can happen next…

2) Push a Snowball Down the Hill to Change Your Life

The late Milton Erickson is regarded by many as the greatest therapist of all time. He was famous for his unparalleled ability to help people change even their most debilitating problems.

Here, in his own words, was one way he described change:

“Therapy [personal change] is like starting a snowball rolling at the top of a mountain. As it rolls down, it grows larger and larger and becomes an avalanche that fits the shape of the mountain.”

In the same way, certain precise Automatic Changes can snowball, in useful ways, without conscious effort.

The Science: How a Change We Create in a Session Can Keep Automatically Growing on Its Own

Again, you don’t need to understand the science behind Automatic Change to experience its life-changing effects. 

If you’re curious though, here’s how neuroscience helps explain it:

When we update a key, highly connected prediction in your brain, it can trigger a natural cascade of other prediction updates that spread throughout your life. 

Each time life reactivates those updated useful predictions (through relevant, naturally occurring experiences) the new learning strengthens and spreads.³

As this cascade of positive generalisation continues to ripple through connected beliefs, emotions, and behaviours (long after the original session has ended) it’s like a snowball gathering size as it rolls downhill.

A Client Example

Sara captures the experience of both “tapping” and this “snowball effect” in the video below, when she reflects on her own experience:

“Sometimes it’s a complete light switch. Other times, it just keeps growing.”
— Sara Nightingale | United States

There is also a third way to conceptualise Automatic Change, especially for complex, multi-layered challenges.

3) Paint a Masterpiece One Brushstroke at a Time

How do you create a masterpiece?

One brushstroke at a time.

And the same principle applies to life.

When we split up big, complex, “multi-layered” problems into smaller, more manageable pieces, you might be delightfully surprised at what becomes possible.

While some patterns can transform all at once (when there is a single place to “tap”), more intricate, multilayered challenges are often most effectively approached through multiple brushstrokes over time.

The goal of each session is still the same, though: important, life-changing, automatic shifts, right now. We want every session to leave a positive, lasting legacy.

Then, over the span of several sessions, with each precise brushstroke playing an important role, the masterpiece of living life the way you want begins to emerge.

This is the quiet, life-changing power of iteration.

The Science: Why Complex Changes Unfold One Brushstroke at a Time⁴

If you’re curious about how neuroscience helps explain this process, here’s a very quick summary:

Complex issues often involve several intertwined, mistaken, and unhelpful predictions—again, about what will happen and what things mean.

Each “brushstroke” represents a targeted update to one of those predictions.

Over time, these iterative brushstrokes naturally work together, “painting” a rich, coherent transformation in how you think, feel, and respond.

This process mirrors what neuroscience calls iterative model refinement: a gradual repainting of predictions across multiple predictive “levels” (from concrete to abstract) in your brain’s system for making sense of the world.

A Client Example

My client, Amanda, is a wonderful example of this. Years after we first worked together to help her overcome PTSD, she faced a new and devastating challenge: every parent’s worst nightmare. She lost a child (a five-day-old baby).

I’m grateful Amanda chose to share her story publicly with her 533,000+ Instagram followers because her journey is a beautiful example of “painting a masterpiece” even after the deepest pain.

Each session added its own precise brushstrokes.

Over six sessions—and through conversations with her obstetrician and husband, along with using relaxation skills—those brushstrokes gradually transformed the picture of her pregnancy and what she had been through.

She now has a beautiful, healthy girl.

This is the quiet, cumulative power of iterative transformation.

Summary

These three metaphorical types of Automatic Change are not rigid categories, and they often happen together.

Transformation can naturally and automatically:

1. Happen in an instant through a precise shift that changes everything.
2. Keep growing on its own, as momentum builds and changes spread through your life.
3. Be revealed brushstroke by brushstroke, through a series of purposeful, iterative brushstrokes that paint a piece of art that’s extraordinary.

In whatever way it happens, fast, automatic, and often surprisingly effortless change, suddenly becomes possible when we align with how your brain naturally works.

Footnotes for the Scientifically Curious:

1. These three metaphors illustrate different ways Automatic Change can unfold; they aren’t rigid categories. ↩︎
2. Some patterns are driven primarily by non-predictive factors (e.g., endocrine or medical conditions such as thyroid dysfunction or perimenopausal changes, medication effects, sleep deprivation, pain, or substances) that can create anxiety-like responses independent of meaning.  ↩︎
3. As updated predictions are reactivated in everyday life, memory consolidation and reconsolidation over hours to days stabilise and generalise the changes. ↩︎
4. From a complexity-science perspective, each person is a complex adaptive system—nonlinearity, feedback, and emergence are the norm. That’s why standard, predefined, manualised psychotherapy “treatments” are suboptimal. Erickson long ago anticipated what modern psychotherapy complexity and synergetics make explicit today: work iteratively, sensing and adjusting in real time (Schiepek; Haken & Tschacher. As a cross-disciplinary shorthand, see Snowden’s probe–sense–respond.) The “brushstroke” metaphor fits: precision achieved through iteration. ↩︎