Once you feel the power and success of taking your life into your own hands, everything becomes possible.
One of my clients once said to me: “A good coach needs to make the client feel 2 things in order to have the best results: irritation and inspiration. And you sure know how to evoke both.” 🙂
I know, it can be oh so annoying when somebody tells you: “All you do/have in life is your responsibility”, “It’s all up to you”, “You’ll never change another person, all you can control is YOUR reaction to their behavior”, … I know, sometimes it’s not easy for me too. But once you start believing this AND once you start acting accordingly, you’ll realize it’s the only way to start feeling better, to be more relaxed, to be happier.
So many people come to me and ask: “How can I change other people’s behavior in order to feel better. My answer is very short and very clear: you can’t. That is their tipping point, the moment they make the decision whether to take things into their own hands or not. Their questions, like:
How can we change our relationship(s)?
How can we feel better at work?
How can we go through family reunions without needing anger management afterwards?
How can we take control of our life?
can all be answered by: Start training your mental muscles*.
In order to start doing this, let’s have a quick summary of how our mind works. We have our conscious mind and we have our subconscious mind**The conscious mind gets its info by input from the 5 senses: visual, auditive, olfactory, touch, taste. These senses bring information to our conscious mind. Our subconscious mind has 2 major components: the Protective Self, aka your ego, and the Higher Self, aka your true self, your core being.
Your Protective Self is established through your experiences, your education, your friends, your family, your religion, through all of the things you hear, see around you from the moment you are born, through all of your actions that have created your habits. You accept those beliefs as being true, you accept your habits as being okay. Once you get older, you start questioning certain beliefs, certain habits, you take a closer look at what is in that Protective Self. It’s like a filing cabinet where all of your files are stored. Every time you encounter a certain situation, the Protective Self dives into your filing cabinet and searches for a similar experience so that you can act in the same way as you did the previous time in that similar situation. As long as this behavior is good for you, as long as it brings you joy, fulfillment, the results you want in life, then that is a ‘good’ file. You can keep this up. But when you don’t like the result of that behavior, when you are unhappy in life, you will need to change it in order to have a result you do like. So, you chuck this file and you replace it with a new file, a file that represents a behavior you like, that gives you the results you like. To install this new file, you’ll need your mental muscles. This new behavior will be inspired by your Higher Self, by the person you really are, by your true values, by what your hearts tells you is right. Having this Protective Self, this filing cabinet in your subconscious mind, does not mean that all of the files are wrong for you, that all of what you’ve learned as a child does not correspond with your Higher Self, your True Self. Some things will stay and others will change. But now you realize you have a choice.
Don’t be harsh on your Protective Self, it did its best to guide you through life so far, but now it’s up to you to take control. Now is the time to learn that how you think, will change the outcome of the situation, because your thoughts determine how you feel and your feelings will influence how you will act. And of course, your action provokes a reaction. This reaction is what you call your results in life. And it’s those results that you either like or dislike, that make you happy or unhappy, and now you know how you can change the results in your life: by changing how you think, by managing the ‘files’ in your subconscious mind.
Now, how do we change these files, how do we train these mental muscles? We can only train what we are aware of, so the mental muscles belong to the conscious mind. We train them consciously.
Here are our 6 mental muscles*: perception, imagination, intuition, memory, free will and reason.
We need all of those to become aware of our files, to make a mental image of how we want to live our lives, and to realize how we can actively and consciously change our behavior in order to have different results in life.
1. Perception: how you look at a situation determines how you feel hence how you will act and consequently what the reaction will be like. Changing your point of view, changing how you look at things, will change your thoughts about it and ultimately how you will act. For instance, when you look at a situation, believing there is a solution, you will start looking for that solution. Looking at a situation thinking there is no solution will keep you stuck in the problem. Looking at someone with compassion, for example, will make your thoughts milder, will make you feel milder and so you will act in a kinder way. Looking at someone with prejudice will make you think unkindly, which will result in acting more harshly. Training this muscle is a necessary step you need to take in order to change the results in your life through consciously thinking differently by looking at a situation from a different angle.
2. Imagination: here is where you tap into your Higher Self. Here is where you imagine what you really want in your life, how you want your life to look like, what kind of person you want to be, how you like to be treated in life, what new files you want to create to put in your filing cabinet in your subconscious mind. It is very important to create positive files as you are going to train your mind to ultimately have those new actions become your automatic response actions in order to have that life you dream of, in order to become your True Self, the person you really are, in order to get the results that you like.
3. Intuition: when you are creating new thoughts, new images of how you want to be in life, you will feel when it’s a good change or not. Your gut-feeling, your absolute first feeling when you think of something, when you ponder this new idea, is your intuition. This split-second tug in your guts, before your mind can start reasoning or before your ego kicks in to keep you from changing your old files, will tell you whether it is a good thing for you or not, whether it comes from your Higher Self or not. This is very important to learn to listen to as you only want ‘good’ files to be stored in your subconscious mind and you do not want to replace old files with new files which trigger, again, a result you do not like.
4. Memory: your memory opens up your filing cabinet and produces the files of previous, similar situations. The more you repeat a certain action, the clearer your memory will be. The good thing is you can remember from the past, but you can also remember ideas, images, you install for the future. Here is how this works, you imagine your ideal action and when a situation occurs, you use this ‘new’ behavior to respond. That is why our mental muscles are part of our conscious mind, we have to actively change our default modus, our old file, with this new, deliberate action. The more we do this, the more ‘automatic’ this new behavior will become, until it is our new ‘modus operandi’, until it is our file that will automatically open as we find ourselves in similar situations, until it has become our new habit with a result we like.
5. Free will: we all have a free will so we are able to choose what to keep and what not. When a thought does not result in positive behavior, hence a positive result in life, we can choose to not have this thought anymore. We have a free will to focus on what we want to focus upon. It’s up to us to decide what we want to create in life and where we need to put our focus in order to get there. We consciously need to steer our focus away from things we do not want in life. “Where focus goes, energy flows” So we want our energy to flow to positive thoughts, so that our actions result in what we like to have/experience in life.
6. Reason: now we can allow our reason to kick in. Now that we know what we want and what not, we can decide what action is needed in order to take the first step towards this goal. Don’t think too far ahead, this will immobilize you. Just the first step. Once you’ve taken that step, you’ll be in a different position and you will see more clearly from there, what you need to do next.
This may be a lot to take in but the more you read and re-read how your mind works, the better you will understand how you can really change your life around. It is so worth it!!
And as I wrote in last week’s blog: instead of keeping up the blaming, shaming and complaining, you make the decision to start acting differently. By training the mental muscles you will actually be able to live up to that decision. You will actively do things differently, you will go step by step towards a cabinet full of positive files, files that are in alignment with your Higher Self, with the results you want in life.
I wish you good luck, great fun in creating those new files and enjoy your life living as YOU!!!!!
Thank you so much for reading me.
Katrien
www.lifecoachwomen.be
Author of « Less is Yes! »
*Teachings in ‘The Inge Rock Coaching and Mind Academy’ based on the theories of Bob Proctor.
**Teachings in ‘The Inge Rock Coaching and Mind Academy’ based on The Concept Therapy, illustrated through the stickman by Dr. Thurman Fleet.