Letter 27: Motivation - The Fuel for Transformation

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

—Anaïs Nin

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Dear Future Human,

This letter will be a little bit different from the others. In this letter, for the first time, I am going to ask you to do something.

Think of everything I have shared with you thus far as constructing a home. We have explored the neurological foundation laid in childhood, examined the perceptual walls built from early adaptations, and mapped the psychological rooms where your Flailing Child hides and your Fraudulent Adult performs. We have traced how your brain’s ancient wiring creates the Noise that drowns out your authentic Signal. We have seen how individual patterns fractal outward, shaping families, communities, and entire cultures.

But until now, we have only been studying the blueprints. Today, I invite you to step across the threshold—to move from understanding to action, from theory to lived practice.

As I have detailed in previous letters, your brain evolved to prioritize efficiency over transformation. The way you adapted as a child involved brilliant survival strategies. People-pleasing helped you navigate an unpredictable or an angry parent. Emotional numbing protected you from pain that was too much to bear. These strategies worked beautifully at the time. But as we saw in Jennifer’s story, these very adaptations that once provided safety often become the source of adult suffering.

Throughout my clinical work, I kept running into the same unsettling pattern. People would often stay in situations that were deeply painful rather than face the uncertainty of change. We are meaning-making creatures. We need to live inside stories, and even a painful story can feel safer than no story at all.¹ Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky calls this hedonic adaptation, the way we slowly adjust to whatever we’re living with until it starts to feel normal. Our bodies learn to relax. We adapt to feeling lonely and we grow accustomed to disappointments.²

These familiar sensations of discomfort and pain actually give us structure, we have learned how to live inside them. Challenging or letting go of these patterns throws us into unfamiliar territory. Our sense of who we are gets shaken, along with our need for predictability and certainty.

This is why understanding your patterns is only the beginning of the journey to self-discovery. Real change requires more than awareness. It requires action.

In their research, psychologists James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente noticed what most of us already know from our own lives: we spend a long time knowing something isn’t quite right, turning it over in our minds, sensing that change is needed, but not yet moving. What finally moves most people to change is when what’s familiar starts to hurt more than the fear of the unknown, when staying the same becomes more intolerable than taking a step into uncertainty.³

Often, that moment arrives through something that can’t be ignored anymore. A doctor shares news that demands attention. A partner asks for divorce. A child’s emotional difficulties that can no longer be ignored. Or you wake up one day and realize this is not the life you imagined for yourself.

I’m inviting you to take an honest look at the pain you’ve learned to live with and to begin noticing what it’s costing you.

Beginning here works because of the way we are wired. We don’t usually move toward change because of what we might gain. We move when we finally see what we’re losing by staying the same. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman helped put words to this: avoiding loss has a much stronger pull on us than chasing improvement.⁴

When I ask you to inventory your costs, my intention is not to depress you or make you feel guilty. I’m encouraging you to see how staying is hurting you. See and feel what you’re losing right now.

A Brief Reminder of the Costs

In The Cost of Sleepwalking Through Our Lives, I named some of these costs. Let me remind you briefly, so you can feel them again—tangibly:

Physical: Chronic tension. Exhaustion. Lost sleep. Emotional distress numbed with food, substances, scrolling.

Relational: Feeling invisible or “too much.” Caught in arguments loops. Relationships that drain. Longing for closeness.

Spiritual: Disconnection. Quiet ache. A life that doesn’t feel fully yours.

Creative: The novel you stopped writing. The guitar gathering dust. The dance class you never signed up for.

Professional: Soul-draining work. Missing out on experiencing your full potential.

Time: Years wasted waiting for something to change. The present lost to past regrets and future worries.

When you live disconnected from who you truly are, your children feel it — because they’re watching what you do, not what you say. When they hear you repeatedly complain about work, they learn that work is painful and unfulfilling. When they see you compromise your values, they learn not to uphold their own. When you stay silent to avoid an argument, they learn to silence their own voices and doubt their inner truth. When you don’t show vulnerability, they learn that their emotions aren’t safe to trust. And when you speak about your dreams but never pursue them, they miss the experience of what it means to reach for their own potential.

I know how difficult it can be to face painful truths. So I’m inviting you to pause here for a moment and check in with yourself. Just notice what’s coming up. Notice if there are any feelings of guilt or shame. Don’t judge yourself. Allow yourself to see clearly what is actually at stake. And remember, this isn’t only about you. Whenever someone cares for themselves and lives in alignment with their values, they create space for everyone in their life to do the same.

Now comes the practical work. The following questions are meant to help you find your why. When you bring your pain to the light and name it, you are more likely to be moved to address it.⁵ “You can’t heal what you can’t feel.” These questions aren’t meant to overwhelm you or create more self-criticism. They are invitations to notice what you may have gotten used to tolerating. Follow the ones that spark something in you and leave the rest for another time.

Physical Awareness

• When did you last feel genuinely alive?

• What chronic tensions or health symptoms might be due to emotional blocks?

• How often do you feel exhausted or drained?

• When do you feel most comfortable in your body—and how long does it last?

Emotional Awareness

• How often do you feel irritated or frustrated?

• Who or what triggers your insecurities most?

• When was the last time you felt genuinely happy or inspired?

• What feelings come up when you reflect on your life?

Relational Inventory

• Which relationships have been harmed by your reactivity?

• Who really knows what you feel and think?

• What conversations are you avoiding that could change a relationship?

• How many friendships have you lost because vulnerability was required?

Creative & Professional Assessment

• What dreams have you abandoned?

• When’s the last time you chose growth over playing it safe?

• What work would you do if money didn’t matter?

• How often do you sleepwalk through your day?

Values & Meaning

• What values do you talk about but don’t actually live?

• When did you last feel part of something bigger than yourself?

• What are your choices actually serving?

• How closely does your life match what you say matters to you?

Future Self Visualization

• If nothing changes, what will your life look like in five years?

• What dreams or possibilities do you keep postponing?

• What would you pursue if your limits disappeared?

• What might you most regret not having tried?

As you explore these questions, notice your reactions. Pay attention to what feelings and stories arise in you. Your defenses will kick in. You will feel a desire to flee. One part may minimize: “This isn’t really a problem.” Another part may attack: “You’re such a failure.” That is normal. These defenses are just trying to protect you from the vulnerable feelings that arise from honestly seeing parts of yourself that are uncomfortable.⁶

But here is what I have learned after thousands of hours with people doing this work: the ones who actually transform aren’t the ones who avoid discomfort.⁷ They’re the ones who learn to stay present with it. They build their capacity gradually, like building muscles. You don’t walk into a gym and bench press 200 pounds on day one. You start where you are. You add a little more weight each time. Your capacity grows. It’s the same with difficult feelings. At first, staying with them feels impossible. So you stay for five seconds. Then longer. Then longer still. And what you find is surprising: when you stop running and actually remain present, the intensity peaks—and then it softens. That’s when you can finally hear what the feeling has been trying to tell you.

I have asked you to immerse yourself in these questions to help you connect to why the hard work of change is worth it. When you feel the cost of staying the same, you access a deeper, stronger motivation than insight alone can offer.⁸

Be kind with yourself. Listen for the voice in you that jumps in to judge you harshly. Give yourself the same compassion you give to people you care about. Self-compassion is essential if you are to stay the course and create lasting change.

Researcher Kristin Neff has shown that the voice we often rely on to push ourselves—the harsh, critical one—actually makes change harder.⁹ When you beat yourself up, your system goes into threat mode. You tense up, get flooded with stress, and either shut down or get defensive. Self-compassion does the opposite. It calms down your nervous system, so you can look honestly at what’s painful without falling apart. As she puts it simply: “Self-compassion is not letting yourself off the hook. It’s taking the hook out of your back while you work on change.” It provides the psychological safety you need to face painful truths without collapsing.

Let this honest look ground you. Let it remind you that your life is finite and precious. Every day you live inside unconscious patterns is a day you could have experienced more fully, more authentically, more aligned with your deepest values—more freely.

You’re at an important choice point in your life right now. You can either let this awareness become fuel for change, or you can let it fade back into the background and keep living on autopilot. At least now you will know the costs.

If you choose the path forward, expect it to be demanding and challenging. You will need to develop your Witness Space, learn to pause between trigger and reaction, and slowly rewire neural pathways that have shaped your life for decades. It means a willingness to tolerate temporary discomfort for the possibility of living a full and fulfilled life.

The alternative is a return to sleepwalking—adding more costs while life passes you by.

Your Invitation

Complete this sentence with radical honesty:

“The main cost of staying the same is __________.”

Now complete this one:

“If I change, what becomes possible is __________.”

Write them down. Look at them again when your motivation wavers—because it will. Change isn’t linear. Clarity gets followed by confusion. Progress gets followed by setbacks. Three steps forward, two steps back. That’s how transformation works.¹⁰

Don’t do this by yourself. Find someone you trust and share with them what you are up to. When someone witnesses you, holds you through your challenges, and simply stays with you in it, you begin to see and accept yourself more. You get to experience that you don’t have to be perfect to be accepted.

In my next letter I will explore with you the need to do this work, not only with one other person, but eventually with a group of people—a community. Remember, We are Nature. Like everything else in nature, we became who we are in the context of our environments. To truly change, you need to practice new ways of being in the same context where the old patterns were formed: in relationship, in community, in real-time interaction with other humans.

With you in this work,

Ronit

1. Archy de Berker, “Uncertainty can cause more stress than inevitable pain,” UCL News, March 2016.

2. Sonja Lyubomirsky, “Hedonic Adaptation to Positive and Negative Experiences,” The Oxford Handbook of Stress, Health, and Coping, Oxford University Press, 2012.

3. James O. Prochaska and Carlo C. DiClemente, “Stages and Processes of Self-Change of Smoking: Toward an Integrative Model of Change,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1983.

4. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica, 1979.

5. Cynthia Price and Carole Hooven, “Interoceptive Awareness Skills for Emotion Regulation: Theory and Approach of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT),” Frontiers in Psychology, May 2018.

6. Geneviève Beaulieu-Pelletier PhD, “Am I Defending My Self from Myself?” Psychology Today, January 2024.

7. Z. Zhong, H. Jiang, H. Wang, and Y. Liu, “The Association Between Mindfulness and Athletes’ Distress Tolerance,” Behavioral Sciences, March 2025.

8. Adi Jaffe, PhD, “We Only Change When It Hurts: Why Rock Bottom Sparks Growth,” Psychology Today, May 2, 2025.

9. Kristin D. Neff, “Self-Compassion: An Alternative Conceptualization of a Healthy Attitude Toward Oneself,” Self and Identity, 2003.

10. A.M. Hayes, J.P. Laurenceau, G. Feldman, J.L. Strauss, and L.A. Cardaciotto, “Change Is Not Always Linear,” Clinical Psychology Review, July 2007.

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