The Holy Sh*t Moment: How lasting change can happen in an instant

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First published in the US by by St. Martin’s Press 2019

This UK edition published by Thorsons 2019

© James Fell 2019

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Source ISBN: 9780008288686

Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008288693

Version 2018-12-07

DEDICATION

Hi, Mom

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Introduction: The Librarian Who Put Down the Cigarettes and Picked Up a Sword

PART ONE: EPIPHANY AND COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR CHANGE

1 The Antidote to Despair: The Euphoria of the Life-Changing Moment

2 Embracing Chaos: Quantum vs. Linear Behavior Change in the Role of Epiphany

3 You, Part 2: Finding Purpose via Epiphany

PART TWO: EPIPHANY AND THE EMOTIONAL SELF

4 What’s Going On in There?: The Brain Science of the Holy Shit Moment

5 The Rock-Bottom Hypothesis: The Power of Epiphany to Battle Addiction

6 The Hand of God: Exploring Religious Epiphany

7 The Power of Love: How Passion for Life and Love Inspires Sudden Change

PART THREE: HACKING EPIPHANY

8 Dreamers Aren’t Doers: Making Positive Fantasies Work for You Instead of Against You

9 Nudging Toward the Leap: Battling the Status Quo and Preparing Your Mind for Epiphany

10 Shamans, Drugs, and Rock and Roll: External Assistance in the Reevaluation of Reality

Conclusion: The Love We Found

Acknowledgments

Notes

Resources

Index

About the Publisher

PREFACE

Psychology is not an exact science.

It is a field that Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory would deride for its lack of mathematical verifiability, and he’d be right. After all, when Sigmund Freud was pulling stuff out of a lower orifice to describe the “anal stage” of psychosexual development, Albert Einstein was creating theories of the universe that remain valid to this day.

Humanity’s understanding of physics allows humans to build rockets that only sometimes explode. Our understanding of psychology allows us to … uh … wait.

It’s not as bad as I allude to, but it is a discipline in flux. Homo sapiens’ neurological processing unit is complex and beyond our current understanding of mathematical formulae to neatly explain.

When I first approached the life-changing epiphany as an idea for a book, I expected it would be a water-cooler “Hey, check out this interesting information” variety of tome. Like a Malcolm Gladwell book, but with swearing and the occasional mention of poop.

I never imagined it could be a “how-to.”

But the more I researched, the more realistic the idea became. I gathered studies and spoke to smart people. I tried it on myself and my clients. I wrote articles and received enlightening responses.

There are no guarantees in life, but there is often good advice based on data and experience. We may not know all regarding the complexities of the mind, but human motivation has been studied for millennia. We do understand some interesting things, and through trial and error, people have transformed their lives for the better using myriad methods for change.

It turns out, the hare can kick the tortoise’s ass when properly inspired.

Sometimes the slow-and-steady approach doesn’t take you nowhere fast, it takes you nowhere at all. Conversely, the rascally rabbit has the finish line in its sights and is dashing toward it, invigorated, undeterred, unstoppable.

Finding true meaning, uncovering your real self, revealing your life’s purpose—such things rarely happen via baby steps. These are transformations unleashed, suddenly, to great effect. Often, there is a “Holy shit!” thrown in to celebrate the momentous realization. The epiphany drives you forward, passionately pursuing the newfound aim. And great thinkers across the ages have interesting ideas about how to make such an experience happen.

Read on, and perhaps it will happen for you.

Introduction

THE LIBRARIAN WHO PUT DOWN THE CIGARETTES AND PICKED UP A SWORD

One cannot leap a chasm in two jumps.

—SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL

I saw Jaws when I was seven.

Children were free-range in the 1970s. Parents did their own weird thing that decade, so my sister and I got dumped at the local theater with regularity. It was a small town with one screen. In the summer of ’75, it was a movie about a megatoothed murder fish or nothing.

I wish I’d sat outside and watched dandelions push through the pavement. To this day, I can’t snorkel without hearing the music.

Despite living in the middle of a forest, after seeing the film I had nightmares that a great white was out to get me. A year later, the low-budget land-based knockoff, Grizzly, made my sleep even more of a horror show. My young brain could rationalize that hundreds of miles of spruce trees between me and the nearest ocean was even better than having “a bigger boat,” but what about a bear?

He could be outside my window. He might be pissed about the bear my dad stalked, shot, and skinned, now a rug lying in the living room of our house. The grizzly might be seeking revenge on the only son of the sonofabitch who slaughtered his sibling!

“MOOOOMMMMM!!!”

I came within fifteen feet of a bear while out for a run a few years back and managed to not pee myself. Statistically speaking, I’m far more likely to die on the toilet, and I love my toilet.

I love bears too. I grew out of the fear and realized what amazing creatures they are, so long as you’re not watching one rip Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar-winning face off. You don’t need to pack up your shit and head off to the great outdoors and have your own face-to-bear experience. I like imagining them because, as a metaphor, they represent that which is fierce and powerful. A grizzly is something with claws and teeth. When they are of a mind to do a thing, they are unstoppable. Also, like me after a long run, they don’t smell too good.

When I imagine something kicking a lot of ass, I imagine a giant bear. And so when I have a lofty goal in need of chasing, I awaken my inner grizzly.

There is a grizzly bear hibernating within you, waiting for a key to unlock it from its cage. I want to help you find that key.

You have seen such an unleashed beast manifest in others; they become inspired about achieving their dreams and are relentless in the pursuit. My dad worked outside year-round and had the Grizzly Adams beard, but Mom was the one who let the huge furry quadruped loose. After the divorce, she moved us to the city and went all Revenant on glass ceilings.

Are there ceilings in your life you wish to burst through? Let’s rattle that cage and see what we can stir from its slumber.

How you direct this powerful creature is up to you. As a health-and-fitness columnist whose work has been read by millions, and as a weight-loss coach, I first became aware of the phenomenon of sudden and dramatic life change regarding people’s desire to change their bodies. But this is not a weight-loss book.

Okay, it’s a little bit of a weight-loss book.

If you want it to be, it is. Because such accomplishments have cascade effects. Improving one’s body is challenging, and those who attain the drive to do so rarely stop there. I’ve witnessed them go on to enhance their careers, improve relationships, conquer addiction, or undertake a complete life overhaul. Once the grizzly is free, there is no telling what adventures it will take you on.

That’s enough about bears for now. Let’s talk flying reindeer.

The Gift of Sudden Inspiration

“Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.”

My father says this often, as an explanation for his lovable goofiness. One day, I heard some motivational douche on the radio say those exact words, but as an imperative. His tone negative, the speaker proclaimed you must work to grow up, so you can be a big success or some shit. I don’t know. He was trying to suck the fun out of life. Anyway, he totally came across like “I will death murder the shit out of your inner child!” and then I was like “Yeah, go screw yourself; my dad is cool and you’re not,” and I changed the station.

That inner child. Remember when you were a kid and believed stuff?

The Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny are stupid, but Santa Claus? He kicks ass. There is a reason we let go of the Tooth Bunny earlier than the red-suited flying-reindeer wrangler: Santa is too cool to not exist.

I want to tap into your inner child, so you can believe some stuff. I want to tell you something so Christmas-Day awesome, you might have difficulty believing this present under the tree is real.

Except it’s real as puppy breath. I’m going to science this baby up with a heap of evidence to show you. I’ll share both far-out stories and studies about unlocking overarching awesomeness that takes life to a new, this-is-who-you-were-meant-to-be level.

You want big change? You want to be a badass at life? I’ll tell you something about what it means to be Evil Gluteus Maximus. Or … no. I won’t. Self-improvement is something that happens on your terms. You decide what is and is not the “Person You Were Meant to Be Registered Trademark.”

Who is this person? Start imagining now. Take a moment and reflect on life experiences; couple them with your inner child. Dream big. Realistically big, because not everyone gets to be an astronaut. But imagine what you could do if you were suddenly inspired to strive for it. If you had the passion and drive to go on an ambitious quest, what would that new life look like? Not just the body, but the whole life: career, relationships, finances, happiness, self-worth, personal identity … Take a moment; take three moments. Invest some mental energy. Think!

You’ve heard it’s about the journey and not the destination, right? Whatever. Despite what I just wrote, I’m not going to talk journeys too much in this book. Instead, we are zeroing in on the moment your passion to take that journey is unleashed.

Does this word “unleash” make you think of a process that happens slowly, step-by-step, through careful deliberation? Hell, no. It’s a big-ass rott-weiler straining to get off the chain and go fang-first into Nickelback.

It’s when suddenly life—or the universe, or whatever—sends you a powerful message for which you cannot help but proclaim, “Holy shit!” at the revelation. (Profanity optional.)

I don’t care if you believe in Santa or Satan, a golem or Gollum, an Indian elephant or Indiana Jones. Activate your imagination, and do some scientific discernment while you’re at it, because we’re about to take a voyage into explaining why you’ve been taking the approach to life change all wrong.

It may seem wishful thinking, what I’m about to tell you, but it’s not.

We’re about to unleash some shit.

Eye of the Tiger

I awoke at ass o’clock, guzzled some weapons-grade dark roast, and headed out for a six-mile run in temperatures hovering around hideous below zero.

As the sun rose, I did not lament the lack of sunglasses. They fog in under a minute at −20 degrees. Rather, my eyes were protected by a thick coating of frost collected on my lashes. Upon returning home, I snapped a selfie of my snowy visage and posted it to Facebook. The comments collectively proclaimed, “Dude, you are an entire cave full of batshit.”

My pre-epiphany self would agree.

In a previous life, I abhorred physical activity, guzzled English brown ales, and stuffed McDonald’s into my maw as though the apocalypse were imminent. Additionally, I was in debt, flunking out of college, and feeling like an unmotivated and out-of-shape bag of poo. But one day, the ground shifted beneath my feet. There was a transformative moment: a sudden strike of awakening in which my existence was split in twain; it became the instant that divided my life into “before” and “after.”

Everything changed that day. Not that day—that minute. Those few seconds.

I have often said someone won’t change their life in an instant unless they believe God threatened to shove a lightning bolt up their ass if they didn’t alter their path. Divinely inspired or not, what I didn’t realize at the time was how common the phenomenon of electricity in a posterior orifice can be for motivating rapid transformation. While coaching countless readers on the merits of the slow-and-steady path to change, I’d forgotten that wasn’t how I’d done it. When I asked for similar stories of people who, in a single instant, found an overflowing fountain of desire to change their lives, I was amazed at the response. As I will show, research reveals that sudden and overwhelming motivation to change is more common than not in those most successful at it. This book contains many such stories.

Stories like that of Lesley Chapman, who picked up a sword, and her life changed.

Eleven years later, Lesley felt no pain. There was no dripping sweat, no aching muscles, no heart ready to burst out of her chest, and no lungs rasping like an asthmatic Darth Vader after a road trip with Cheech and Chong. No fear, either. There was only this moment: the fencing match of her life, fueled by adrenaline and a competitive spirit her old self wouldn’t recognize.

The depressed, booze-chugging, overweight cigarette aficionado was no longer there; a lean and energized forty-four-year-old athlete questing for gold replaced the woman she had been. The new Lesley was a force to be reckoned with.

But her opponent was so fast; she struck like an arrow.

It was the last day of May 2015 in the city of Markham, Ontario, a multicultural community, part of the Greater Toronto area. The newly constructed Vango Toronto Fencing Center, located twelve miles north of the iconic CN Tower, was hosting the Canadian-American Veterans Cup, featuring the best fencers over the age of forty from across North America.

Lesley traveled from her home in the small town of Madison, New York, to take off to the Great White North for the first time, to prove her mettle after more than a decade of dedication to her bladework.

“I’d had a really good day,” Lesley said. “I went to the tournament without a lot of expectations.” As Lesley won match after match, her confidence in her sword-wielding abilities grew, and so did her enjoyment of competition. She beat someone she didn’t expect she would to get to the gold-medal round and was elated at the opportunity for a championship bout.

The match took place on the raised platform at Vango, the fencing strip reserved for the final pairings. Long and narrow, the strip runs along a white wall that is painted with a large Canadian flag. Lesley and the woman she would challenge, Jennette Starks-Faulkner, were the highlight as they battled for overall gold in women’s foil. Chapman took no notice of the crowd. All her attention focused on her opponent. She was in a state of flow.

Cue Rocky III music. It was “Eye of the Tiger” time.

“She is built like a teenager,” she said of Starks-Faulkner, speaking respectfully of her opponent’s physical build and skill; Lesley was honored to have this chance to compete against the world champion. But there was also a desire to prove herself. Six months previous, the two paired off in Reno, Nevada, and Starks-Faulkner throttled Chapman 5–0 in under a minute. Such a crushing defeat can be hard for a warrior such as Lesley to swallow.

Chapman explained she would be happy just to get a couple of points on her opponent. But because Starks-Faulkner was so small and fast, Lesley would have to outthink her to stand any chance of not repeating their match the previous December.

“When she attacks, she’s like an arrow,” Lesley said of Jennette. “I knew when she came at me I had no choice but to get out the way.” Back and forth they danced across the raised strip, blades ablur in an ancient test of skill that used to be scored with blood rather than buzzer. Lesley’s mind raced on how to outwit her opponent’s superior speed. The tactics she devised used the advantage of her reach, following up a retreat from her opponent’s lunge with a counterattack using her longer arm.

Lesley watched Starks-Faulkner carefully, fencing defensively, waiting for her opponent to lunge. When the strike came, she beat a hasty retreat, just out of range of her opponent’s foil, then countered the smaller woman’s lunging blade and scored her first-ever point against the champion.

“‘Holy shit!’ I remember saying,” Lesley recalled. She knew she was still not at her opponent’s level but she wanted to give her a good fight.

In such a match, it is often said you don’t win silver but rather lose gold. After a long-fought battle, the final score was 10–6.

Lesley Chapman won silver.

Clicking into Place

The seed of Lesley’s silver-medal win was sown in 2004 in a single, life-defining moment.

“I had been sedentary my entire life,” Lesley said. “I was a good student and had it in my head that you were either a brain or a jock and ne’er the twain would meet.” This attitude had a negative effect on Lesley as she reached her third decade of life.

Lesley explained that she smoked and drank and would often eat an entire pizza for lunch by herself. Significantly overweight, she believed this was what life had in store. She’d become fatalistic.

Life sucked. She wasn’t happy but wasn’t seeking change, either. Life was a slow, downward spiral she felt powerless to prevent.

“When you’re drinking too much and smoking and eating crap all the time, it’s going to chip away at your happiness,” she said. She became depressed because she wasn’t doing anything with her life. Her routine was work, drink, smoke, watch movies, repeat.

But fencing changed all that. Quickly.

Lesley’s story is one of finding a passion for a specific sport that challenged not only her body but also her mind. She was living in Lexington, Kentucky, and an Olympic-fencing coach began offering classes at the local Y. Lesley heard an announcement about it at the university where she worked, and thought, Why not? Fencing was the one sport that held even a modicum of interest for the librarian, as it seemed sophisticated to her. “Grace Kelly fenced,” she said.

She found the sport intellectually engaging. “You’re concentrating so hard that you don’t realize you’re winded.” In addition to the Olympic-level coach and the mental stimulation, there was another instance, a seemingly minor event, Lesley remembers with clarity, that defined the next stage of her life.

Many embark on a path of lifestyle change and suffer through for a while, only to quit, but not Lesley. What made her experience different? Why was her journey of personal transformation successful when so many others fail?

The answer can be found in a single moment, when a new sense of purpose clicks into place.

Lesley had been fencing just a couple of months. The fencing area at the Kentucky YMCA is an intimate space atop three flights of stairs; climbing them was a workout all by itself. She’d be gasping and sweating by the time she reached the top, wondering, Why the hell am I here?

Her commitment to continue was tenuous. Then a switch flipped.

On that day, early in her fencing career, Lesley noticed a group of child fencers had stopped their practice to watch the adults engaging in partner drills. Knowing she was being observed by these impressionable youths, she doubled her efforts at parries and lunges, trying her best to make a good show. “Suddenly, I felt like I belonged there,” she said, “and that I wanted to get really good at this.” There was a powerful awakening in both heart and mind that this is what she was meant to do. “In that emotional moment, I knew I would keep coming back to learn everything I could.” It was an overwhelming sensation that made her feel as though she could weep with joy at what she had discovered: she would not quit. She would do whatever it took to become the best she could be. She would not quit.

Sacred excrement!

Suddenly and with surety of purpose, Lesley changed. It was not the step-by-step process like many behavior-change theories focus on. It was both instantaneous and total. A new part of her mind opened; a new Lesley was born, one that would never have to struggle to be motivated again.

She saw progress in her skill in increments, and it led to quitting cancer sticks so she didn’t cough up alveoli during matches, giving up booze so the hangover didn’t feel like she had a brain aneurysm during practice, and eating healthier to fuel performance and lose forty pounds so she could move faster and present a smaller target for her opponents.

“The changes are substantial,” said William Miller, an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of New Mexico and cocreator of the popular behavior-change technique called motivational interviewing. Miller is also the coauthor of Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives. He is a leader among the handful of researchers examining the topic of sudden and massive psychological change.

For the book, Professor Miller and his coauthor interviewed fifty-five people who had experienced life-changing epiphanies to create a structure around the phenomenon. He explained there can be focal changes, such as ceasing an addictive behavior, adopting a physical activity, or even a massive shift in mood, such as dramatic alleviation from depression. But such sudden change can also be broad-sweeping—a total shift in identity with far-reaching impact through a person’s life. What’s more, his coauthor did a ten-year follow-up and found something incredible: “No one had gone back to their state before the event happened. To the contrary, everyone spoke of moving ahead.”