One of the clients of my computing services business has a company called 212 Degrees Restoration. They do disaster remediation: Specializing in services to restore damage to buildings due to flooding, fire, mold, unruly tenants, etc. and they are among the best in the business at it. A clue to his company culture is the name of his business and their tagline “We go the extra degree.”
He reformed his company after being a franchise owner with a disaster remediation company for several years. Disenfranchised with his franchise business, he wanted to create a company of his own. He wanted to create a company that reflected his own values. He had an attitude of exceptional delivery of service to the client, and so he broke free of the franchise and moved forward with his own company culture instead: 212 Degrees Restoration. I once asked him why he chose “212 Degrees Restoration” as the name of his business and the core of his company culture, and he referred me to a book by Sam Parker entitled 212° The Extra Degree.
212 degrees is the amount of heat it takes to bring water to boil. 200 degrees won’t boil water. 207 degrees is warmer but still, water will not boil. At 211 degrees the water is really hot, you might get a few wafts of steam, but still you can’t quite make it boil until you reach 212 degrees, and that is when the magic happens. Water spontaneously begins to erupt, releasing pressure and bursts of steam. Water is literally changing form into steam at 212 degrees, releasing enough energy to drive a steam engine, a locomotive or the turbines in a nuclear power plant. Add just a little more heat to water at 211 degrees, just one more degree, and you have a tremendous force to work with that wasn’t there before with just hot water.It’s a perfect analogy for someone who is working towards making substantial changes in their life. Creating change in your world requires making changes within. Changes in your lifestyle, changes in your habits, changes in your routines and perspectives on your life. Underlying all of that work to elicit change in your life involves making changes to your beliefs. Change is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens after continuous, daily effort toward the change you seek. In a sense, you need keep feeding the fire within you to elicit change, and keep feeding it until it reaches the point of real, substantial change. Once you bring yourself to a boil, in a sense, things start to happen for you.
I’ve experienced this phenomenon many times in my life. I identify something I want to change, or something I want to grow into and understand, so I then set forth with the work necessary to create change. And I continue working at it, day after day, week after week, and nothing really seems to change. It’s as if I’m going through the motions of some success principle for weeks on end without seeing any results, and I think that’s how it goes for most people. You reach a point eventually when you begin to wonder if all this “change stuff” is even real, whether you really can make a change, and whether you are wasting your time. I think a lot of people tend to give up at this point. They’ve put the work in, they feel they’ve done what’s prescribed day in and day out for days or weeks, and they get no results. They give up, they decide what they were doing was a waste of time, and the change they seek never happens because they gave up too soon. They no longer feed the fire of their desire to change, and then those things that would bring change then cool down, and then of course there are no results. They have decided that whatever they were doing doesn’t work because it hasn’t yet, and so it never will. Tragically, because they’ve decided that it doesn’t work, then it won’t – ever. Back to normal life. Back to the grind. Back to self sabotage and often, back to despair at one’s condition. That is truly tragic.
So if you are on the road to creating change in your life, let me ask you this: Do you think you can tell the difference between 200 degrees and 210 degrees? Probably not. You may be able to sense that water at 210 degrees is warmer than 200 degrees, maybe, but it’s more likely that you consider both temperatures about the same, and both to you are just “hot water”. Can you sense the difference of one degree between 210 degrees and 211 degrees? No. Both feel like really hot water, but to your senses there really is no difference in one degree of temperature.
How does that relate to changes you are making in your life? If you are involved with some technique or method to create change in your life, whether it be traditional therapy, meditation, Thought Field Therapy, emotional regression and healing, Thoughtwriting, reciting mantras, Emotional Freedom Technique, or just simply working at creating new habits and new ways of thinking, in all of these methods of change: Usually nothing really appears to change all that much from day to day and if they do the changes in you are so small from one day to the next that you do not notice them, eventually you may feel worn out by all this effort to “change”. You may feel as if you are getting nowhere through your efforts. You may begin to doubt yourself and the methods you’ve chosen to elicit change. “What change? Where is this change I was promised?” you may ask yourself. “I’ve been at this for weeks and I have no results. This is all baloney. It’s bunk. I’m wasting my time.” And so after days or weeks of effort and seeing no tangible results, you may give up and decide that you cannot change – and when you decide that, that is exactly what happens for you from that point forward. I see that as truly tragic, since you’ll then sink back to your familiar ways of being and literally waste all of that effort you’ve made to change. You will have forsaken yourself at that point and not only remain as you were, but also without faith in your ability to change in the future.
However, if you continue to apply heat to water, it will eventually come to a boil. This is a fact and it is indisputable. It might take a while, and from degree to degree you may not notice any difference, but as heat is added water will eventually come to a boil and release tremendous energy that wasn’t there before. Would you bring water to 211 degrees and then say “This just isn’t working. I can’t make it boil. I may as well just turn off the stove and give up.”? No, you would keep applying heat until the water comes to boil.
The same is true with you. If you eventually apply heat to your intentions toward change, even though you cannot tell any difference from one day to the next, eventually your efforts will catapult you into a new way of being. Success. Enlightenment. A new perspective. Call it what you will, but invariably you will eventually experience a leap forward due to your continued efforts. This is also a fact and is indisputable. It may take days, weeks, or even months, but eventually without any doubt, if you persist, you will be rewarded with not only a noticeable change but an explosive leap forward in your life. You will have brought the idea of change within you to come to boil, and everything will then be different for you from then on. Not only will you have succeeded to creating a change, you will have succeeded in elevating faith within that you are capable of change. You will have literally changed, as water literally changes to steam at 212 degrees. The difference is that once you prove it to yourself, you can do it again and again and again with faith and persistence, and begin to create the self you truly want to express in the world.
Keep going. Whatever you are doing to create change in your life keep at it, without doubt, and never stop until you succeed. Be vigilant and be persistent. You will arrive if you keep at it. This is indisputable. Keep going. No different than bringing water to boil, just keep applying more and more heat until you get your results. Be patient and have faith. You’ll get there if you do not give up.
Turn on the heat and get to it.