There is a phrase that I hear surprisingly often when people are talking about their health, their relationships, their work, their anxiety, their sense of feeling stuck. Which is at some point they'll say, quite earnestly, "I'll do anything.”
I've found myself thinking about that phrase a lot over the years because, most of the time, I believe them. They're not trying to be dramatic. They're not trying to convince me of anything. They genuinely want things to be different because whatever has brought them to that point has become uncomfortable enough that change feels preferable to carrying on as they are.
And yet, every now and then, the conversation takes an interesting turn when an alternate possibility comes to light, and not necessarily a big one. Sometimes it's a practical suggestion, or a different way of looking at something. Commonly, it's simply an invitation to stop doing something they already know isn't helping.
And what happens next isn't obviously a refusal because it's way more subtle than that, but I notice their energy changes slightly, and the conversation slows down and then suddenly a reason appears, and then another about why they can’t change. The person's certainty about wanting change remains completely intact, but somehow the thing that might require the change has become more difficult than it appeared a few moments earlier.
I think it's one of the most revealing things about being human.
Because what if that moment isn't telling us that somebody doesn't want change? What if it's revealing something much more interesting than that?
What if it is showing us the difference between what we think we want and what we are actually organised around?
I don't think many of us spend much time asking ourselves that question.
We assume that because we desire something, we must therefore be moving towards it. Yet when you look carefully at human behaviour, that doesn't always seem to be the case. I've met people who desperately wanted peace whilst structuring their lives around urgency, or people who longed for freedom whilst remaining fiercely attached to identities that confined them.
And people who wanted healthier relationships whilst repeatedly choosing familiar dynamics that guaranteed the opposite.
That brings to mind an example which is mildly amusing. I remember a young man years back who was seeking a relationship. I asked him to describe his ideal woman and he came back with a list which was quite predictable; slim and attractive, natural beauty, and then his eyes lit up as he landed on exactly the type of woman he wanted; a surfer girl. You’ll get the image. But the man lived in Coventry which is about as far from the sea as you can get!
You see, if you asked somebody what they wanted, they would probably be able to answer fairly quickly, but if you asked them what they were organised around, I suspect most people would need to sit quietly for a while.
I know I would. Because the answer isn't usually found in what we say.
It's found in patterns. It's found in repetition. It's found in the things we continually move towards and continually move away from, often without noticing we're doing either.
And I wonder whether this is why genuine change can feel so strange when it finally arrives. Not because change itself is difficult, but because it sometimes asks us to loosen our grip on something that has become part of how we understand ourselves.
A person who has organised themselves around being needed may discover that freedom feels oddly uncomfortable, or a person who has organised themselves around certainty may discover that curiosity feels far more threatening than they expected. Someone who has spent years identifying as the one who copes may find receiving support far harder than offering it.
None of this makes anybody broken.
In fact, I think it makes perfect sense. We all develop ways of navigating the world and, for the most part, those ways emerge for good reasons. They help us belong. They help us feel safe. They help us make sense of our experience.
The difficulty is that what begins as a useful adaptation can gradually become invisible, and once something becomes invisible it can start directing our lives without our knowledge.
This is why I have become more interested in seeing what is there rather than fixing, because fixing assumes we know what the problem is. Seeing, however, allows us to discover whether we have identified the right problem in the first place.
And often, when somebody says, "I'll do anything," what catches my attention is not the statement itself but the moment that follows - the hesitation or the justification.
That place where something tightens and resists, because very often that is where the trail begins. Not towards what is wrong with a person, but towards something they may not yet have seen about themselves.
And in my experience, what becomes visible in those moments is often far more valuable than whatever solution we thought we were looking for in the first place.
