Your technology needs regular upgrades. To prevent an interruption of service and slow processing power, your phone upgrades automatically while you sleep at night. Your Tesla upgrades parked in the garage, and your computer sends you notifications to “restart now.” But what about your personal software? How often do you update and upgrade your thinking?

If you see yourself, your relationships, your work, and your world through your mind’s lens, and if you want optimal performance as a human being - living, working, and loving, you need regular updates and upgrades too. But while, it may be in our best interest to be mentally nimble and up to date, we often chose otherwise.

When it comes to learning, we all agree, it’s a good thing. But we frequently disagree about what we need to learn. We stick to what we’ve learned as if nothing ever changes. Things get personal quickly.

What others think we should learn – like managing finances, choosing better friends, wearing masks, relying on reputable sources of information, time management, etc, may already be going against what we’ve already learned. Meaning, we have days, months, and a lifetime invested in what we already know. The longer we subscribe to a viewpoint, the more time we have into building a habit, the longer we stick to an bad relationship, or an unsatisfying job, the higher the “sunk-cost” and the more defensive we feel about how we are and our choices.

At the same time, we associate what we know and how we see things with who we are. We feel as though giving up on something we know and have defended in the past becomes almost impossible without redefining who we are. It’s easier to surround ourselves with “like-minded” people than to challenge and upgrade our assumptions, factsheets, skill sets, ideas, and beliefs.

We know from psychology that people are more motivated by loss than they are by what they could gain. To upgrade and update your thinking may mean that you lose a set of friends, fall out of favor with relatives, have to leave a relationship, the boss will reconsider what used to be a likely promotion, or that people will stop supporting your business. The fear of loss obscures the potential gain of changing how and what we think, and from there, how and what we choose.

What’s familiar is easier. But when your map of the world no longer matches the world, you’ll get lost. There will be an interruption of service in the form of conflict and crisis. If you choose to sample a new thought, consider facts, science, and logic, you may experience the discomfort of change, but also the freedom from conforming and the need to defend your identity. As your mindset adopts upgrades and updates, your life will sync with reality and you will see opportunities, make friends, and deepen relationships in places and ways you would have never been able to consider before.

Change will be fun, if you let it.

Valentina Petrova has been helping people with life, health, relationships, financial, career, professional, and business challenges since 2015. She has a Master’s in Psychology and is a certified Life Coach. You can reach her at www.valentinapetrovaconsulting.com. She does not take insurance.