True behaviour change is identity change. Your habits form your identity, and your identity forms your habits. So says James Clear in his book, ‘Atomic Habits’. His basic message is that instead of focusing on what you want to achieve, it is wiser to place your attention on the kind of person you want to become.

Dr Sue Morter agrees that it’s always an inside job. She says that lasting transformation doesn’t come from chasing change. Instead, it comes from designing a state within yourself where change can naturally happen. Lasting change happens when you stop striving and start embodying the energy of what you want to create.

She says that we’re not here to constantly be seeking and searching, but to be finding and having. “We have to have instead of want. We have to practice the feeling of having instead of getting lost in the feeling of wanting all the time.”

Psychology.Net puts it this way: “There is a moment – often quiet, almost invisible – when something inside you finally stops running. Not because you gave up, but because you understood. You stop chasing messages, reassurance, attention, love, and emotional confirmation. And paradoxically, that is the exact moment everything begins to change.”

While dr Sue explains how to work on creating a calmer, more aligned state, which becomes the foundation for a whole new reality, clinical psychologist, Diana Hill, gives examples of how shifts happen spontaneously for many people.

“Sometimes, we have a fundamental shift in the way we view things – a shift in consciousness, sense of self, or worldview – and the way we behave begins to reorganize around it. When that happens, change flows easily, effortlessly from the inside out,” Diana says.

She explains that disruption or loss can open the door to profound personal change and that noetic experiences help us access deeper layers of meaning and self. The Greek word ‘noesis’ means ‘inner knowing’ and noetic experiences are awakenings (big and small) that happen in the face of ordinary and extraordinary events.

The late Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, experienced such a transformation on his sixth trip to the moon when he looked back at earth and felt a wave of awe and interconnectedness that changed the trajectory of his career. As a result, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to study consciousness and transformation.

A 2008 study by IONS psychologist Cassandra Vieten and colleagues collected hundreds of stories of people who had undergone profound inner shifts like this. They also interviewed teachers from many traditions and piloted longitudinal analyses of people undergoing transformational programs. From this, they defined transformation as “a profound shift in consciousness resulting in lasting changes in the way you experience and relate to yourself, others, and the world.”

One striking finding from their research was that two-thirds of transformative experiences come from painful or disorienting events: trauma, loss and illness. “It’s as if life shuffles your deck of cards and all the cards scatter. At that moment, you have a choice about which ones to place back on top,” Diana says.

“If we have opportunities to step out of ourselves and transform our perspective all the time, how can we nurture them? How can we shift from a self that is stuck in our ways, to a more expansive, open, aware and transformed self-as-context?”

Cassandra Vieten’s research suggests that the best way to ingrain a transformative experience into your life is to develop a regular practice that keeps what you have learned alive. Diana says that once you’ve had an experience that leads you to see the world in a different way, keep building your flexibility. Ask questions that open you further:

If you could look down at your experience from outer space, what would you see? What is one possibility that’s different from what you believed to be true? How are you being invited to change?

James Clear says that you don’t need all the answers right now. “Many situations in life are similar to going on a hike: the view changes once you start walking . . . New paths will reveal themselves if you have the courage to get started.”

It’s not a race, girlfriend. As James says: “You are not ahead. You are not behind. You are here. Enjoy it and make the most of it.” – Angie Kleijn