Without the power of hindsight, it’s easy to underestimate the effect that your thinking has on your ability to change the direction of your life. If you want to have a say in how your life is turning out, then you’re going to need to look at how you think, not just about the world around you, but about how you think about yourself.
Before I even hit my teens, I remember I always wanted to be in the military. I started out in the Air Training Corps at 13 as I was fascinated by flight and thought I wanted to be a pilot. A brush with the Army while on a junior leader’s course changed my mind. When an Army Cadet unit started up in my area I joined and was hooked.
Fast forward a few years and I had to wait 6 months after finishing high school to hit the minimum age for enlistment in the Army. I had hoped to go down the officer path, applied, completed the initial testing but didn’t make the grade. At the time I can remember being crushed but looking back I can see I was very immature and probably motivated as a way to bolster my own self-image rather than it being a good fit. In short, I attempted it for the wrong reasons.
It didn’t stop me though and I still went in as a soldier. After 3 years in the ranks, I’d grown up a little and decided to try again for a commission. After a series of tests and interviews culminating in a week-long assessment I was deemed ‘suitable for further training’.
I can remember thinking at the time it was a given I would come out the other end successfully, however life had other plans. While I had the capability to pass the year-long course, I didn’t realise that there was a greater force that was steering driving my decision-making process and actions, which quickly lead me into self-sabotage. I was learning that cockiness and desire alone wasn’t enough.
I could blame the injuries I received, a sprained ankle on a field exercise was the first, followed weeks later by a shoulder injury playing sport, which ironically still troubles me to this day, but they weren’t the reason for my failure.
The truth came to me in an insight I had some 15 years later while sweeping my back yard. In a moment of clarity, I heard that voice in my head say, ‘you didn’t think you were as good as the other boys’ and girls’’. And just like that I knew an uncomfortable truth about myself. A core belief no longer hidden in the depths of my consciousness was now out in the open for me to see. An insecure thought, told to myself often enough that it formed a belief about who I was, leading to an insecure feeling, leading to self-destructive behaviour and ultimate failure, no excuses.
Is Reality Really Real?
‘Beliefs aren’t real but it’s through our beliefs we form what we know as our (personal) reality. Rather than something that is set in concrete, beliefs serve as a signpost, and indication of how we see our world and where we’re at in our journey’
While our beliefs rule the way we see the world in any given moment, they’re not a life sentence. There are any number of ways of identifying and changing limiting beliefs into more empowering ones. When I first go into self-development, I set off on a mission to uncover all my self-limiting beliefs and to change them to something more useful. I soon found that could be a monumental task.
It wasn’t until I came across the work of Sydney Banks who in one of his recorded talks made the statement, ‘the aim should be to become belief-less’, that it really hit me how we can innocently think we’re better off or making progress by changing one belief for another.
At first it may seem hard to grasp, but before our conditioned thinking we’re a clean slate. Before all that conditioning there is nothing that needs fixing or improving, no limitations on who we are or can be. Its only as we start to apply layers of thinking that we begin to throttle back our potential or the possibilities in our lives.
Do You Think You Got to Where You Are by Accident?
Do you think you got to where you are in life by some roll of the dice? There is no such thing as random chance. For chance to be in play would require forces outside of the closed loop of the universe. How can that be? What appears as chance is cause and effect in action. While we may not be able to immediately identify the cause of the effect, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
The implications of this are huge, you aren’t some pawn, being batted about on the whims of some uncaring malevolent Universe trying to get some cheap thrills based on messing with your life.
It does however mean that if you want different results you are going to have to do the work, and that involves changing your thinking, not just overcoming limiting beliefs, but the way you think about yourself. After all, as one of my mentors often says, ‘your best thinking got you to where you are now,’. If you want something different, it’s easier to change yourself than to change the whole world around you.
Get Out of Your Own Way – Moving from Unconscious to Conscious Creator
It took me years to figure out I could change and in doing so move from unconsciously creating; being at the mercy of whatever beliefs I’d formed over the course of my life till then, to consciously creating, which was about taking ownership of my mind, my mindset and how I used it. Because one way or another, life is going to move ahead.
My aim with this work is to do just that. To help you get out of your own way to enable you to perform at your best, so you become a conscious creator and not stay stuck, at the mercy of unconscious beliefs.
Goals are a fantastic way of creating something new, while at the same time challenging our world view. If you start clearing away the patterns of thinking that has got you to where you are now, then you’re going to find a whole new world of possibility opening up for you.
Next up, Part 1 of Transitions
