There you are, happily marching down the road of life, when suddenly you realize you made a wrong turn, or maybe a number of them and you don't quite recognize where you are. You start to feel a little panic rise, like the kind that you get when you miss an exit on the highway in a place you've never been and you have no idea where the next turnoff will be and a fervent hope that there is a gas station coming up soon. You keep the panic carefully contained during the day but every night the ghost of David Byrne Past begins to haunt you. Tormented, you wander through nightmare after nightmare wearing oversized suit coats with skinny ties, and bunny slippers that suddenly become actual rabbits, because this is a dream, after all. There you are hopping, hopping, always hopping and mumbling to yourself "How did I get here? This is not my beautiful wife! This is not my beautiful house!"

After as many nights as it takes you to reach some milestone birthday or a class reunion or your first gray hair (which wasn't too disturbing until you noticed one below the waistline) you declare "This isn't where I wanted to be! I'm going to change me life!"

But you've been here before. Weight loss plans come and gone. Career changes dreamt of. The odd cut up credit card and carefully scripted budget plan. Switching to decaf.

None of it stuck. Now you find yourself faced with the fundamental question, "Can people, specifically I, REALLY change?" followed by, "If I do, will anyone notice?!" and of course, "If they notice, will they support me or sabotage me?"

For the last 25 years, I have been working diligently on my personal development. Admittedly, the quality of my work over that time has varied and sometimes I was so lost in the woods one could question whether I was truly on any path at all, save for my own internal fantasy that I was. (There is a difference between a personal growth orientation and having the discipline to grow yourself deeply, after all). Nonetheless, detours aside, the FACT remains that I have grown TREMENDOUSLY (psychologically, spiritually and in terms of my overall health), particularly in the last 5 years when I started to get the "discipline thing".

I say this is a fact because I can see concrete evidence that I am handling stress and chaos in my life without turning into a lunatic and becoming angry at the world for every thwarted plan and inconvenience I encounter. I have more energy and don't let myself get depleted like I used to. My marriage is thriving. My business is thriving. I laugh every single day and there is a whole range of facial expressions (mostly angry ones) that my face simply doesn't make any more. Burnout is a distant memory. People I haven't seen in years, upon meeting me now often tell me mulitple times "My God, you look GREAT! You look so happy! WOW.", often interrupting the flow of our conversation to restate this.

One day my brother, a cop who had been wrestling with burnout and who holds a much more cynical view of the world than I do told me that he doesn't think people can change (by way of explanation for his mental rut...that's just the way he is, he figured). I challenged his thinking and told him I didn't agree.

"After all, I've changed."

His response? "Well, not really."

I was dumbfounded. What did he mean, "not really?"

Welcome to social drag.

Social drag is essentially the lag time between your changing and the rest of the world giving up its mental image of who you are based on who you have been (to them) in the past.

HUGE ISSUE. In fact, I see this being a major stress in many marriages. When we establish relationships we do so with a whole set of implied agreements. For example, I have had a few women hire me over the years who actually wanted me to help them figure out how to make their husbands more successful so that they wouldn't have to take a bigger part in sharing the financial responsibility for the household. Some went so far as to say this outright! The "agreement" was the man was going to be THE breadwinner and the woman could work as an option, or treat her business ventures as hobbies without the stress of "having to" make money.

Or, maybe a friendship gets founded on the principles of "I'm a mess and you are a good listener." If the good listener goes through a period needing emotional support, they might find that the relationship does not provide the mutual level of support they had been expecting. That simply wasn't part of the original "contract".

As a coach, people recruit me to help them negotiate the challenging process of making major life changes so I get to see this dynamic up close and personal. When people enter a coaching relationship, the gap between the original relationship contracts with their family, friends and coworkers, (and by this I mean both the implied as well as stated agreements) for how the relationships will function can grow quite wide. MANY times I have had the primary breadwinner of the household for example (male or female) state they did not believe they would truly be supported by their family members in making a life change, EVEN IF THE INDIVIDUAL WAS DOING SO FOR HEALTH REASONS, let alone for their own growth, because the family did not want them to change their role. We don't always like it when people change because we are all interconnected. One person can't change in a fundamental, meaningful way without everyone else being affected.

When the nature of someone else's change is going to result in our having to have more responsibility in some area of family life, or our own personal life, many of us resist. Take the example of the friends that I gave above. If I would rather whine than do the hard work of changing my lot in life, I will want friends who indulge my whining. If they change and stop enabling my behavior it's going to make me uncomfortable. Misery loves company.

Social drag can come in to play when people feel invested in keeping you the way you are. You may have heard the story about the crabs in the bucket. Just as one is about to climb out, the rest of the crabs pull them back down. Sometimes success threatens people simply because it threatens the status quo and the status quo feels stable and predictable.

Steve Pavlina who has also written on this topic says that social drag is mainly a nuisance. This is where I disagree. I think it is mainly a nuisance for individuals who are strong willed and who never bought in overly strongly to how other people have felt about them or what popular opinion is. Some people are born mavericks and don't have fear of the implications of continually reinventing themselves.

In my experience, these folks are in the minority. For most people, their family and work cultures are SO strong and their dreams about changing their lives might be so ill-defined or represent such a profound change that most of the fruit just dies on the vine. Naysayers, critics and those who suggest "you'll never change" can kill all serious efforts to do the work of changing one's life in a significant way. In my opinion, this is why coaching is taking off as a profession. When the social drag (or anticipated social drag) is too strong for a person to overcome (think of it like a gravitational field), but when that person can no longer consent to living their life as it has always been lived, a coach can be recruited as a sort of booster rocket so help that individual break the gravitional pull of the belief systems that threaten success.

And you may as well know, social drag can be an internal phenomenon as well. Sometimes our images of ourselves are just as slow to change. Stay tuned for an upcoming article on The Imposter Syndrome.

Laura Young
http://www.wellspringcoaching.com/