Tony Robbins -Re-Awaken_the_Giant_Within

The reason is that one of the strongest forces in the human organism is the need for consistency.
Throughout our lives, we’ve been socialized to link massive pain to inconsistency and pleasure to
being consistent. Think about it. What labels do we attach to people who say one thing and then
do another, who claim to be one way and then behave another? We call them hypocritical, fickle,
unstable, unreliable, wishy-washy, scatterbrained, flaky, untrustworthy. Would you like to have these
labels attached to you? Would you even like to think of yourself in this way? The answer is obvious: a
resounding no! As a result, whenever we take a stand—especially a public stand—and state what we
believe, who we are, or what we’re about, we experience intense pressure to remain consistent with that
stand, regardless of what that inflexibility may cost us in the future.
Conversely, there are tremendous rewards for remaining consistent with our stated identities. What do
we call people who are consistent? We use words like trustworthy, loyal, steady, solid, intelligent, stable,
rational, true-blue. How would you like to have people consistently use these labels to describe you?
How would it feel to think of yourself in this way? Again, the answer is obvious: most people would love
it. Thus, the need to remain consistent becomes irrevocably tied to your ability to avoid pain and gain
pleasure. The Pygmalion effect also works in reverse. If you feel certain that you are “learning-disabled,”
it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is quite different from believing that your current strategy for
learning is ineffective. The ability to change one’s strategy is perceived by most of us to be a simple
and achievable task, as long as we have the right teacher. However, changing ourselves—changing the
essence of who we are—is perceived by most to be next to impossible. The common response, “I’m
just this way,” is a phrase that murders dreams. It carries with it the sentence of an unchangeable and
permanent problem.
A person who believes they have developed a drug addiction can clearly change. It will be difficult, but
a change can be made, and it can last. Conversely, a person who believes himself to be a drug addict
will usually return to the use of drugs even after weeks or months of abstinence. Why? It’s because he
believes that this is who he is. He doesn’t have a drug addiction; he is a drug addict. Remember that
once a person has a conviction about anything, he will ignore and even defend against any evidence
that’s contrary to his belief. Unconsciously, this person will not believe that he can change long-term,
and this will control his behavior.
In addition, there’s often a secondary gain involved in the process of maintaining this negative behavior.
After all, this man can blame his addiction on something he can’t control—it’s simply “who he is”—
instead of facing the reality that taking drugs is a conscious decision. This will be augmented by the need
within the human nervous system for consistency, and he will return to this destructive pattern again and
again. Surrendering his identity would be even more painful than the clearly destructive effects of the
drugs themselves.
Why? Because we all have a need for a sense of certainty. Most people have tremendous fear of the
unknown. Uncertainty implies the potential of having pain strike us, and we’d rather deal with the
pain we already know about than deal with the pain of the unknown. Thus, living in an ever-changing
world—one in which we are constantly surrounded by the flux of new relationships, redefined job roles,
changing environments, and a steady stream of new information—the one thing that we all count on to
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