We’ve built an entire culture around the idea that change is a matter of decision. Just decide to start that old project. Decide to eat better, exercise, or quit smoking. Decide, finally, to become your best self. And if nothing happens, we assume the problem must be our decision, our willpower, our lack of discipline.
But decades of research on behavior change tell a very different story: fewer than 20% of people are actually ready to take action at any given time to improve their health and wellbeing.
The vast majority are not ready. Not ready to think about it. Not ready to talk about it. Not ready to act.
This is the part that tends to make people uncomfortable, because staying the same is usually framed as procrastination, fear, resistance, or self-sabotage. All words that imply deficiency. And yet, staying the same is often not a failure at all. It’s a form of loyalty.
People stay loyal to identities that once protected them. To roles that gave them a place in the world. To ways of living that made suffering survivable. They stay loyal to narratives that explained their past, even when those narratives quietly limit their future. They stay because leaving would require revising the meaning of what came before.
Readiness, then, is not a personality trait. It isn’t something you can will into existence. It isn’t produced by motivation or insight alone. Readiness emerges when the cost of staying loyal begins to outweigh the cost of letting go.
This is why advice is so often ineffective. Advice assumes readiness. It speaks to the 20%. It assumes that knowing is enough to set people in motion. But movement takes more than information. It takes a system that can tolerate change.
What the research reveals is that most people are constrained by attachment to systems, identities, relationships, and self-understandings that still feel necessary. Until those ties loosen, action is premature. Pressure doesn’t help. Urgency doesn’t help. Inspiration doesn’t help. All they do is add strain to a system that is not yet ready to reorganize.
Change begins when loyalty expires. When an old protection becomes a liability. When a role no longer fits. When the story you’ve been telling yourself starts to feel dishonest. That moment cannot be forced. It can only be recognized.
Until then, staying the same is not failure. It’s information.
Most people don’t need to be pushed. They need to see clearly what they are still loyal to and why. Only then does readiness to change appear. And only then does change stop being an idea and start becoming a fact.
As this Sunday, my first course, Finding Your Happy Place, comes to an end, I found myself reflecting on that truth, thankful to those who stepped out of their comfort zone and took action.