“If you are not moving forward, you are moving backward.” ~ Mikhail Gorbachev
Goals, just like project plans are used as a way to define an objective. It helps us to get clear about what it is we are aiming for. It then enables us to break the target into bite sized chunks, which are easier to devour, reduces the opportunity for overwhelm and enables us to identify and manage risk. This is especially important if the goal has more complexity than we have previously dealt with.
But what if goals served another purpose? What if the goal could help us break through barriers to grow our capability and mindset to a whole new level? A whole new world view of possibility?
For me this is the real value in goals. You increase your skills and your ability to apply them, you develop a new mental set point, which gives you a new foundation from which to build from.
This sounds good in theory, but what happens when we hit up against the edges of our own mental boundaries? How do we recognise them, and more importantly, what can we do about it?
Pushing Limits
Limits only ever exist in the mind of the beholder. See that for yourself and you’re well on your way to freedom. The freedom to learn, create, experiment and most importantly, to do. If you believe that all the things that stop you from achieving success are outside your control and can’t be overcome and you’ll quickly find yourself marking time, losing any momentum and ultimately stopping.
If the object of your desire keeps on coming up as something you want, not matter how many times you’ve tried to get it and failed, then you’ll have to start the process all over again.
Frustratingly, starting again takes so much effort, not just the planning cycle, but trying to overcome the obstacle that stopped you in the first place.
I’ve fallen into this trap more often than I can remember. Develop a plan, begin to execute, only to come up against resistance that had me first questioning my desire, followed by a laundry list of reasons why ‘I’ couldn’t possibly have the thing that I wanted. For me this always seemed to manifest as a knowledge problem, one that would require me to pause, do some research, buy some books or enroll on another course of some description.
I don’t know how long it took me to see it, or how much I had spent before I realised that the problem wasn’t information, it was a barrier created within my thinking that had me stopping in my tracks.
At some point I realised, there is never enough courses in the world to cure a thought.
Curing Thought
Beliefs, values, the unconscious mind. Give them whatever name you like, they’re all made of the same thing, Thought. Thoughts can empower us to do the things we want, or hinder our progress, dragging us down and stopping any forward movement. Thought is the very thing that makes us tick, creating our experience of life, like invisible little computer programs running in the background, always ready, waiting to execute when called upon. Without us realising, thought is the greatest special effects wizardry known.
It may not seem like it but freeing yourself of an obstacle built within the walls of your own mind will have far more impact on your ability to get anything done than a technique ever will.
Skills and information can be learned, or if you can afford it you can pay someone else to do whatever it is for you. But if you have an emotional blockage and progress screeches to a halt as your mind takes over, then no amount of new learning is going to overcome that.
So how do you cure a thought? How do you change beliefs and values or reprogram your subconscious?
Let’s start at the beginning.
It may seem obvious, but my life started to change when I first realised that it was possible for me to change. Up till that point I thought the life I had was as good as it gets, I’d always be the same old me and there wasn’t much I could do about it. I could possibly work harder and earn more money, which would allow me to buy more things, but short of winning the lottery there was a limit to what I could do.
As the saying goes, I was not seeing the world as it is, rather I was seeing it how I was.
The difference that made the difference? learning that it was possible to change your mind and therefore, change your results.
That lead to me diving down the rabbit hole and learning various change techniques that I was able to use and benefit from. Hypnosis, affirmations, NLP, all can have the ability to create change.
Now see things a lot more simply.
It’s wasn’t my childhood, education, that I was categorised as a slow learner, nor was it my insecurities or feelings about getting it wrong, making a fool of myself or that success was disrespecting my parent or just my lot in life that was the problem. It was not that any of those things couldn’t be worked on, or that I couldn’t, with lots of digging and effort make some gradual changes by working through those things.
It’s not that any of these things didn’t seem real to me, it’s that I didn’t realise what they were made of, and I certainly wasn’t aware of what was available to me once I saw past that.
Who I thought I was and what I thought I was capable of doing was a series of ideas made true from within the boundaries of my own mind. The thoughts may have their origin in something that was said to me when I was younger or some meaning I had made from the way people acted towards me at an impressionable age. But they were still made and held in place by the same thing.
I suspect we give our thoughts more credence than we should, because for one, they’re our thoughts and they seem so real, and secondly, they come with a feeling attached, and rightly or wrongly, we make meaning of them, all this is done unconsciously.
My insecurities were a thought I believed to be true, and, at least in my world they were.
Change Your Mind Change Your Life
Here is a new spiritual practice for you, don’t take your own thoughts too seriously – Eckert Tolle
‘It’s only your thinking’. The first time someone said to me, I wanted to slap them into the middle of next week, much the same way my brother would tell me to take a chill pill when we would fight when we were younger. Rather than soothing me, his words would fire me up more, although I suspect he knew this!
When it’s first pointed out to you the only reason you’re feeling a whirlpool of emotion is that it’s down to your thinking, it’s hard to believe. With the logic we all been raised with surely there is more to it and it has to be caused by something else. A person being annoying, that fiddly thing that you can’t get to go into the other fiddly thing even though the instructions say that it should, the world never working out in your favour. Your circumstances, the way people treat you, the list is endless.
I thought that way too, and I tried different ways to fix my thinking and to only ‘think right’. Focusing on positive thoughts and trying to push the negative ones away before they could take hold, leading to a downward spiral, seemingly at their mercy. If you have ever tried to manage your own thinking, you might just realise how vigilant you have to be and how it seems like a never ending losing battle.
This approach seems totally illogical now.
‘You’re living in the feeling of the Principle of Thought taking form, from moment to moment’ ~ Jamie Smart, Coach, Author of ’Clarity’ and ‘Results’, Public Speaker
It took some patient coaching, and the deep-seated grounding of my coach to what he was pointing at for me to finally see it for myself. One morning, in a moment of quiet and clarity I heard that voice in my head, ‘I bet you think that feeling is coming from that email?’ In reference to an email I’d read earlier in the morning, that I’d made a whole lot of meaning about and then on some level decided I needed to feel bad about it.
In that split second of internal commentary I knew it wasn’t the email that was making me feel bad. How could an email give me a feeling? Only thoughts can do that, and I knew an email could only get inside my head other than via a thought. The rest of my reaction was mine and mine alone. Not true on any level but made up within the confines of my own mind. That one insight rewired my operating system and when it had ‘settled’ into place, has given me a different perspective on life that has stayed with me to this day.
Understanding Thought as a creative principle releases us from its grip. Consequently, the more I’ve seen this for myself, the freer I’ve been to do the things I wanted.
This is the reason I now share from this paradigm. The results experienced through the transformation that follows this form of coaching permeates its way into every area of your life. The change is permanent, and there are no techniques to remember, which for me had always been problematic, as the time I most needed a technique is when I’m least likely to remember to use it.
