Change Phobia

Today, we live in a time of rapid and massive change. The speed of change is really trying our soul. Many of us are very frightened to embrace change and learn about new things because of many assumptions, prejudices, and prejudgments which already solidly formed as our “mental baggage.” This mental baggage will make us moving very slow in our life journey.

Why is it so difficult to change?

Believe it or not, we acquire knowledge from the time we were born, and some medical experts and psychologists suggested perhaps even before our birth when we still inside our mother’s womb. We also acquire the stocks of words that formed our thinking patterns, the convention or norm of our culture, the beliefs of our parents, and the philosophy that pleasure us or make us resist to things that rattle our thoughts.

During our childhood, we enter formal education in school. If our parents can afford it, we might be lucky to attend good school with the best brains – best teachers and smart students around us. There we learn many subjects the way our teachers and textbooks teach them. Further, we start to learn on how the world is functioning according to the society’s acceptance or rejection on what right and wrong. From there, we will express ourselves in an established manner to succeed in our studies and mix with our colleagues.

As we get older, we move to higher level of education, more and more knowledge acquired by us, then more and more “mental baggage” being loaded into our already-weighty “mental trolley.” We should be lucky if we receipt positive and good values. In some occasions, if we are not paid extra attention to so many inputs, we might receive negative or bad values along the way that can put us into a situation called “educated incapacity.”

Those values that we learned will become our thinking, our beliefs, and our problem-solving tools, and that will determine our level of acceptance to any unprecedented or possible change that come our path.