There’s a technical sounding term for a root cause to many of your troubles …

There’s an old saying that “nothing changes if nothing changes.”

Put another way, nothing changes until something changes.

Both of those sound like “Duh!” statements, and yet they tend to stymie many of us. We want or need something about our lives, or our selves, to be different but we’re not willing to change anything … but we still want our circumstances to be different.

Sorry, but nothing changes if nothing changes.

The remarkable part of this silly sounding sentence is that often we know we need to change in order to get either what we want or what we need, yet we still push against making the change(s) required for something to change.

There’s a technical sounding term for such stubbornness: Non-compliance.

We’re often very non-compliant people. To be compliant generally means “to adhere to or conform with established rules, regulations, standards, or guidelines,” or more often to do what you know you should do, or what is right.

We’re often non-compliant in many aspects of our lives, like:

Our health – We’re hammered throughout our lives with information about the need to exercise and maintain a healthy diet to nurture and maintain good health … but most of us are non-compliant.

Our physical fitness – We hear over and over and over that physical fitness needs to be a permanent lifestyle to maintain not just our physical fitness, but also it’s real and significant impact on our physical, mental, and even our spiritual health … but we’re more often than not non-compliant.

Our mental health – Instead of getting help to get ahold of our thought life to overcome habits and patterns of irrational thinking and cognitive distortions, we habitualize thoughts of worry and fear until we foster anxiety and depression … because we’re non-compliant.

Our relationships – We’ve heard that relationships should be lived from a foundation of love and selflessness but we want what we want because we’re often stubbornly selfish … because we’re non-compliant with the truth about relationships.

Our relationship with God – When Jesus personally taught and preached the Good News of the kingdom of God, you might think people would be more compliant to what God commanded, and yet we read of Jesus calling out people for their lack of compliance: “So why do you keep calling me ‘Lord, Lord!’ when you don’t do what I say?” Luke 6:46.

How different — how much better or improved — would your health, your physical fitness, your mental and emotional health, and your spiritual life be if you were a mostly compliant person?

Scotty