We can split a person in two individual tendencies: the follower and the leader.

The follower seeks attention, intimacy, validation, recognition, wants to share, to show what he does and most important, he wants to have one or more practical raison d’etre. He has the freedom of choice but he is never good at inventing alternatives.

The leader is an affirmative expression of the self. He likes to change, to resist, to make up his mind; he is curious, always doubting the status quo and usually upsetting somebody – even you. HE has the freedom to say NO and to change his mind. He is never very happy; there isn’t much place for him in this world: only 10% of the leaders make it.

Now, when you start to have new interests in your life, you don’t change anything. Taking new classes, doing new things does not change your lifestyle. You are still a follower, doing different things. At most, your time schedule will change and you may start to use different selection criteria to choose how you spend your time and with who.

When you have a new relationship, again (yeah, I’m sorry)… nothing changes. You are yet another type of follower: you start to do exactly the little things that the beloved one wants. You are hypnothised by his/her lifestyle and you may even start to imitate it. Mimesis is perfectly normal to occur when infatuation is what draws you into it.

In time, as the motivation level will drop, being a good follower for your beloved will start to be frustrating. Then you will start to feel the pressure. This is when the leader will fight to come out and break the pattern.

As you can see, we can all be leaders or followers, even in one-to-one relationships. This is not what matters… Both of them, leaders and followers need each other, just like you need to sit back and chill or get out and kick ass… sometimes.

What matters is to see where the real change is.

If you make a change for someone or something, you just choose from a given set of conditions.

If you resist the status quo and, instead of choosing something, your create a new condition, then you have trully made a change.