Transformational Change is when there is a significant event to happen in your life that requires you to change an important part in your life. There are four stages to the transformational change and they are recognizing a significant problem, confronting it intensely, finding a solution, and integrating a new perspective and a new set of assumptions into your life pattern. Knowing these are half the battle, you have to also understand them. When you recognize a significant problem, it means that you understand it is causing a situation in your life that needs to be changed, ultimately changing everything that you are normally accustomed to. Once you recognize the issue, you then have to understand how to confront it and understand it as well. You do not run away from the problem. After recognizing and confronting the issue at hand, you then need to find a solution to correct the problem. You sit down and ponder over and over again about the best possible solution for yourself to have a good change in your life and not a bad one. Once the first three stages are done, you then take what you’ve learned from them and apply those towards working to achieve something better in your life.
I, personally, used to be very dependent on alcohol in my early twenties when I was at my first duty station in Seoul, South Korea. I began partying and drinking very heavily as that seemed to be the norm for many soldiers stationed there. It had gotten to the point where I was going out and drinking at least five days out of the week. It eventually caught up to me at work and I almost got myself into serious trouble one day when a suspicion arose that I was drunk on duty. Once I was cleared on that, I decided I really needed change and clean up my act. I did recognize that I drank so much because of the people I was trying to associate myself with. I realized I needed to change by getting away from certain people and certain situations. I confronted myself, realizing I was the problem, to my own personal issues going on. The solution that I found to fix this was to find other activities to do that didn’t involve