Think of your mind as a file cabinet, if you opened a drawer right now…drilled down to the ‘S’ tab…what would you find under the tab titled Success?
Do you even have such a tab?
I want to invite you to start looking at your mind like a file cabinet or a toolbox, a place where you store and organize information/tools for future use. The contents of your file cabinet are based on your experiences, what jobs you’ve performed in the past, what assignments or projects you’re currently working on, what obstacles you’ve tackled, where you’ve lived, etc.
Depending on your level of “Make it Happen-ness” (yes, I made that up)…your file cabinet is either full of useful resources or lacking appropriate information. Just as a file cabinet serves whatever purpose you choose, if use it as a coffee table, so be it, if you use it as a catch all for junk mail, so be it…it doesn’t care what you put in it, it’s job is to hold stuff as you process it…so too is the mind! It’s purpose is to process and store what you put in it.
Your subconscious mind thinks in colors, pictures, and energy! Your mind doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and fake, true or false, good or bad…it only knows experiences. Our experiences shape our minds, and the deeper more profound the experience…the deeper it gets engrained in our subconscious mind, we start saying things like “that’s just the way I am.”
We have been conditioned to believe that bad things are supposed to happen to us and when something good happens it was “good” luck. This has left us in a perpetual state of “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
The purpose of this article is to assist you in re-training your brain, to expect good things to happen to you, to know you are a winner, you are destined for greatness, and you’ve GOT THIS!
I challenge you to forget every limiting belief you have about yourself and your abilities. I don’t mean for this to be some airy-fairy hocas-pocas stuff…
I’m talking about real brain training. Have you ever been on such a high-flying disk (in a mental state of bliss and awareness) that you were afraid to stay there because of what you thought was about to happen next? You just experienced some joyous thing in your life, you’re celebrating, people are celebrating you, you’re feeling like a million bucks, then all of a sudden…some unfortunate incident happens and you find yourself saying “I knew it was too good to be true.”
You come crashing down from your high place up north, because some tragedy happened down south.
What happened here, why does this happen, why do we do this to ourselves?
Remember your mind as a file cabinet, this happened because your subconscious mind remembered the last time something joyful or pleasant happened, it was followed by misfortune (completely unrelated to your) so it went to your file cabinet and pulled out that file titled “bad things always happen to me.”
When I was a kid learning how to ride a bike, I remember my cousin telling me “Get up and get back on, keep doing it until you stop falling.” I thought this was the worst advice ever when I was a kid getting all skinned up! As I grew older, I realized…I was TRAINING my mind to associate riding a bike with pleasure instead of the pain of falling.
If I had stop at falling down, that would have been my new truth and the neuropathway would have been formed that riding a bike is painful. Our subconscious mind picks up on subliminal messages and programming all around us both past, present, and future messaging. It is for this reason that you must stand guard at the door of your mind…only granting access to those things, images, messages, and people whom you trust.
I want to share with you a few ways you can Dominate Your Mind, and Stop Letting it Boss You Around! I hope these tips and techniques serve you in a way that empowers you, as they have for me…as well as many of my clients.
1. Your Subconscious is Your Ride or Die
Your subconscious mind is like your BFF, it will never call you a liar or want to see you not have the things you told it that you want. So if you say to yourself “I can’t do that, I’ll never be able to have that, that’s impossible” your subconscious will do everything it can to prove you right and not make you a liar. I have a best friend that I LOVE TO DEATH, I consider her my ride or die for sure! If I make a bad decision, she’s right there with me, we will both regret it later! Lol If I rob a bank, she’ll be driving the get away car…NO MATTER WHAT! Think of your subconscious mind as your ride or die, it doesn’t care if the information you allow to enter it is right or wrong, true or false, it just wants you to get what you TOLD it you wanted…it wants to make you happy! (S/N: My BFF would first try to talk me out of robbing the bank, but if I insisted…she’d bail me out)
Here are a few things you can do today to STOP being Bullied by Your Mind!
2. Check and Challenge Your Habits
- There is a system to being successful at anything in life, and those of us that seek to be successful must follow the that system, to an extent. The science of success is no secret, those that have done it before left clues and I encourage you to pick them up. If you study the most successful and influential leaders of our time, you will see a pattern in their habits. Habits start in the mind, and from there they form our behavior, and ultimately leads to our outcomes. (Success as it’s used in this article speaks to both life and business)
- Try not to group your habits as good or bad, get specific and try grouping your habits as necessary, critical, and flexible. For me, the habits that are critical are those that MUST happen everyday in order for my brain to be in peak performance status. A few things for me are daily meditation, exercise, and reading…I MUST do these 3 things every day. I handle these habits carefully; making sure I don’t ever get so hurried that I neglect to do them. Now, my mind won’t even function without them…muscle memory, I do them without even thinking about it. I had to re-train my brain to think this way, it took time and discipline. It’s MY responsibility to manage my life by managing my habits. Habits run 99% of our lives, anything with that much power over your life…deserves your undivided attention.
3. Gain and/or Dump Knowledge
- When it comes to retraining your brain, there are going to be some things that you need to DUMP or Unlearn. Most people are living their lives based on standards or beliefs adopted years ago or given to them by someone. The next time you accept a limitation as real by saying “that’s just me, or that’s just the way I’ve always been”, I encourage you to challenge it. Ask yourself “when was the first time I accepted that about myself”. Challenge your identity of yourself, if it doesn’t reflect the person your want to be…dump it!
- Once you start challenging and dumping the things that no longer serve you into greatness, you can start replacing those thoughts with new standards for yourself…ones that YOU decide! Read books that talk about doing the things you want to do, being the person you want to be, having more of the things you want.
- Listen, Learn, Observe, and Duplicate!
4. Take Radical Action to Reinforce the New Pattern
- You can’t just tell your mind something isn’t true and expect it to believe it. You must take rapid action to disprove it. Remember, your subconscious only knows experiences; so in order to override the previous messaging…you must start creating new experiences to support your new mantra! If your new mantra is “I’m a winner”, then go win something…anything!
- Once you set a goal, perform some ACT that will solidify that goal! If you say to yourself, I want to start eating healthier, get up and eat a piece of fruit, go prep a meal, go trash your unhealthy food…DO something to create a new experience that agrees with your new self-talk.
- Stop treating your mind like a pesky little brother! Your mind is small, but it’s POWERFUL beyond measure…respect it’s power!
In applying any of the tips I’ve mentioned above, make sure you know and understand why you’re doing it. Make sure you know what goal you’re trying to hit…because it’s hard to hit an unspecified target. When I first started doing this work in my own life, my target was general and broad…I just wanted to be a better person, a better version of myself. As I continued the work and started helping others, my target became clearer and clearer. You will never be able to out hustle or out grind personal development, you must raise your standards and demand more of yourself!
You can’t skip this part of success, there are no short cuts around it…and the first step is get your mind right and clean out your file cabinet.
See you next month for another session on personal development!
