I Change
PUBLISHED · BESTSELLER · FROM VICTIM TO VICTOR
Most people who want change in their lives spend a great deal of time and energy waiting. Waiting for circumstances to shift. Waiting for the difficult person to come around. Waiting for the right moment, the right opportunity, the right conditions.
This book begins with a simple, uncomfortable truth: the waiting is the problem.
I Change grew out of a Chinese parable.
A brief story, tucked inside Dr. Muruga's first book, that readers kept returning to. They asked for transcripts. They shared it with colleagues, with spouses, with their children. A parable set in ancient China, in a domestic situation between a husband and wife, somehow reached into the modern corporate boardroom and changed the way people thought about leadership, accountability, and personal power.
That response became this book.
“Man is the only living thing that can consciously change his thoughts and make a difference in his environment.”
The philosophy is this : you cannot change another person. Not your difficult colleague, not your rebellious teenager, not your flirtatious spouse, not your underperforming team. But when you change, genuinely and from the inside, everything around you begins to shift. Not because you have controlled the situation. Because you have changed the person at the centre of it.
That person is you.
This is not self-blame. It is the opposite. It is putting you back in the driver's seat; it empowers you.
The book introduces the AABB framework: acting above the line versus below it. Below the line is where most people spend their lives without knowing it: blaming, justifying, denying. Above the line is where accountability lives, and with it, the only real freedom a person has in any situation.
The gap between knowing and doing is not a motivation problem. It is a belief problem. And belief lives in the subconscious mind, not in the conscious mind that attends seminars and reads books and nods along. I Change goes to that deeper level. That is where the real work is done.
“This book is about you changing first, and then others changing around you. There is no other way.”
Inside the book: the Chinese parable in full, acting above and below the line, the AABB framework in the workplace and at home, reflections for personal change, and the question that sits at the heart of everything: what is it, exactly, that I have to change?
Published in 2012. A bestseller in the Malaysian market. Still in print across three editions.
The ideas in this book did not stop when the writing ended. They became the foundation for everything that followed: the Mist framework, the Four Quadrant Mind Model, and the stories in The Temple Driver. If The Easy UC Way was the first crack in the conventional story about change, I Change was the moment the door opened.
— Dr. Muruga