In my experience and in my personal life, I have seen that change isn’t easy.
When people want to commit to a goal, they start out with good intentions and ideas, but quite often they go back to their unwanted habits.
The concept of change means that we are going to do something different within the same environment; we’re not going to respond to our environment with our customary thoughts and reactions to life.
That, however, is easier said than done.
Many of us tend to think the same thoughts, have the same feelings and follow the same routines in our life.
The rub is, this causes us to keep using the same patterns and combinations of neural circuits in our brain, and they tend to become hardwired.
This is how we create habits of thinking, feeling, and doing.
Don’t get me wrong, hardwiring isn’t a bad thing.
Thanks to hardwiring, when we learn a new skill such as driving a car, the more we practice, the more we hardwire what we learn into our brain’s circuits, and eventually, we can operate a car automatically.
But if we want to change something in our life, we have to cause the brain to no longer fire in the same old sequences and combinations.
We have to create a new level of mind by disconnecting the old neural circuits and rewiring our brain in new patterns of nerve cell connections.
The good news we’re learning from the latest brain research is that we can change the brain and thus change ourselves, if we take just a few simple steps.
In neuroscience, there is a principle called Hebb’s law:
“nerve cells that fire together, wire together.”
If we keep firing the same neural patterns, by living our life the same way each day, reacting in the same manner to the experiences we have in our familiar reality, then we “hard-wire” our brains to those conditions.
In time, whatever those repeated thoughts, feelings, and actions are, they will become an automatic, unconscious habit.
When the environment is influencing our minds to that extent, our habitat becomes our habit.
This is when you get “stuck in a rut.”
You have formed the habit of being yourself by becoming stuck in your environment.
Your thinking has become equal to the external conditions, and you are re-creating a mind that only re-creates similar circumstances into your reality.
So how do we break free from the Paradigm/addictive behavior?
To rephrase Einstein, we cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.
We have to think in new ways and therefore, feel and act in new ways too.
That’s good news!
We can break free from the paradigm by re-engineering our self-image.
Neuroscience has proven that we can change our brains (and therefore our beliefs, attitudes, and habits) by thinking differently.
Again, This is known as“Neuroplasticity” and We do it through mental rehearsal – repeatedly imagining performing an action or learning new information and applying our lives.
By going through this challenge you are creating new neural connections developing a new awareness of yourself.
Upscaling your brain’s hardware.
In fact, research out of the University of Wisconsin has proven something as simple as attention or focused concentration is a skill just like golf or tennis.
In other words, the more you practice being conscious or mindful or learning something new you the better you get at it.
Ultimately we can make our thoughts so real that the brain changes to look like the event has already become a physical reality.
You may have heard the expression imagination creates reality or thoughts become things..
So to change your life, you must fundamentally change the ways you think, act, and feel.
You must change your state of being.
Because how you think, feel, and behave is, in essence, your personality, it is your personality that creates your personal reality.
So to create a new personal reality, a new life, you must re-engineer the way you see yourself.
To change, then, is to “be” greater than your present circumstances, greater than your environment.
So, if you want to overcome behavioral barriers that keep you stuck, and you want to achieve success in every area of your life, you have to break free from the paradigm, your old self-image, and the deeper mental programming that’s holding you back.
This is why people stay stuck year after year after year..
It’s the paradigm, the mental programming & conditioning that’s holding them back.
Reprogramming your brain might sound pretty complicated, but it’s something you can do at home or in your day to day life..
It’s just a matter of becoming aware of how to do it and where you’re placing your attention or what you give your energy to…
Think of it like fitness for your mind…
I’m going to give you 3 techniques you can start using now, they will help you break the unconscious habit of being yourself so you can experience more self-awareness, happiness and unlock more of your potential.
I want you to become a conscious creator of your life and begin to make shifts within yourself.
So what better way to begin than to dominate the day with a dialed in the morning..
There’s an expression you may have heard,
“Win your morning Win your day” and I can’t agree more.
Most people wake up in the morning and the first thing they do is check their social media and their email.
They’re now on someone else’s agenda reacting to someone else’s stuff, giving them their creative energy vs using that energy constructively for themselves.
They’re on a subconscious program.
The morning is for you, It’s your time to create a great start to your day.
I want to challenge you to remove all social media apps from your phone if you can bear it.
If you did just this alone you would see a dramatic increase in your productivity, your awareness and your happiness.
So instead, when you wake up, ask yourself this one crucial question:
“What is the best ideal of myself that I can be today?”
I ask this in the context of looking at who I’ve been in the past so I can build a better idea of who I want to be now and moving forward.
I ask it in a greater effort to become more aware of my unconscious thought patterns so that I can then create conscious ones.
An easy way to trigger this is to set a label on your alarm on your iPhone or Android when you wake up.
Just rename the label to one of your ideals.
And just like that, it will trigger your awareness and the more you do this you will start to train your mind to think from this ideal.
So it becomes your state of being..
Think of how you can be your best self today, what thoughts and feelings can you cultivate to step into that state of consciousness.
Also, If you’re feeling it listen to a song on your phone that makes you feel grateful and stirs up a lot of emotion within yourself so you can tap into those emotions real quickly.
Feeling you’re ideal…
Next, I want you to shift your attention and visualize and embody the experience of a desired outcome that you want to achieve, a goal you have.
Now the trick is to visualize your goal accomplished.
Don’t simply think of it, looking at it…
Embody what it would feel like to have achieved it, experience with all your senses in your imagination..
This can be quick 30 seconds to 5 minutes…
For example, I will lay in bed while listening to a little music tap into those feelings, and visualize one of my teammates and I having a conversation about the successes of a project we’d been working on, how grateful we are that things worked out well, that the journey was really rewarding.
It was tough but it was worth it.
I would see us looking at each other smiling capturing the entire moment as if it happened in real life.
You use your thoughts to imagine a certain outcome.
A human being always behaves, acts, feels, and performs by what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment.
This is a fundamental law of mind.
It is the way we are built.
The problem is most people are unaware of this and are constantly imagining what they don’t want in their life.
Constantly imagining and reliving the worst outcomes, not feeling good enough, or unattractive, unworthy, unconfident and this is projected in their behavior and actions causing behavioral self-image sabotage.
Remember, your imagination creates your reality.
Mental rehearsal allows us to change our brain – to create a new level of mind – without doing anything physical other than thinking.
It involves mentally seeing and experiencing our “self” demonstrating or practicing a skill, habit, or state of being of our choosing.
Through mental rehearsal, we can employ the advanced faculties of our frontal lobe to make significant changes in our life.
We know that when we think the same thoughts or perform the same actions over and over, we repeatedly stimulate specific networks of neurons in particular areas of our brain.
As a result, we build stronger, more enriched connections between these groups of nerve cells.