How many times have you heard, “Want something to be different? Change your thinking!” I disagree. What allows me to make this bold statement, and what is it that we need to change, instead?

The work of Mimi Herrmann allows me to reject the “change your thinking” paradigm. She spent 20 years researching how we develop into the unique human beings we are and how our human energy behaves to generate the lives we experience. She brought her findings together in the theory she called “The Quanta Idea.”

Mimi built this work on a fundamental distinction: it is the behavior of human energy, not human behavior, that generates each moment of your life. In other words, it’s not about what you think or do, it’s about how your energy is behaving invisibly, in the background.

How does your energy decide how to behave, then? It behaves according to how you feel about being human. Your sense of self—your unique way of feeling human—develops from conception until the age of 2 ½. After that point, it is like a battery that your brain uses to generate the moments of your life, without conscious choice or control.

Therefore, thinking merely gives you a way to cope with or control what your sense of self generates. That can be effective to a point, but it can take a lot of energy to continuously deal with what the behavior of your energy is dishing out.

In the course of her research, Mimi realized that much more fundamental and lasting change would happen if you could change what was stored in your sense of self – if you could change how you feel about being human. She saw that there are 2 types of feeling stored in your sense of self – natural well-being and Learned Distress, which she defined as the feeling that “there is something wrong with me.” She set about to give you a way to “unlearn” Learned Distress, with the idea that your natural sense of well-being would expand to take its place, and begin to generate moments that feel good without you having to work for them. The result is the Quanta Change Process.

In future posts, I’ll talk more about how Mimi came to each part of the Quanta Idea, which she said is really the story of your energy. I welcome your feedback and questions!