Part 9 in the MindValley Reunion=Mind Blown series, which continues next week
After years of personal development study and practice, I was amazed that I could be made aware of a truth so obvious, and so fundamental, yet never realized its prevalence and the vast impacts that it has on so many lives. It is why Marisa Peer is the most quoted expert in Vishen Lakhiani’s book, Code of the Extraordinary Mind, and among my blogs.
There is a reoccurring automatic thought (some experts call them ANTs – Automatic Negative Thoughts) that many other thoughts can be traced back to. And if you have felt as though you have fallen short of your personal goals, or that your life is not living up to a par you have established, even if by most standards your life is good, this is often the thought responsible for that feeling.
As a world-renowned hypnotherapist who has worked with youth and the destitute as well as the rich, famous, and even royal, Marisa has seen this thought play out in so much needless suffering. This thought causes marriages to fail. It causes emptiness even when resources are full. It causes people to hurt others. It causes suicide. It causes addiction.
This thought is, “I am not good enough.”
Can you see anywhere in your life where this thought, which by now is most likely a belief, impacts your decisions, which impacts your results?
Have you ever shied away from speaking with someone? Have you ever decided a goal was “too big?” Have you pushed love or friendship away because you felt at some point it would go awry?
When you look in the mirror, what is your internal dialogue? When you see someone with an outfit, haircut, or career you admire, does it make you feel good, or worse?
If you are reaching for really big goals, why? Are you doing it for you? Are you hoping that by achieving big goals you will feel like you are doing enough? Are you hoping that it will make someone proud, perhaps someone who never seems fully satisfied with your efforts?
When you do experience success, do you feel ease or do you feel something else – anxiety, pressure, fear?
A couple other common pervasive and limiting beliefs are “It’s not available to me” and “I am different, so I cannot connect.”
Really take a look at this, because converting these thoughts and beliefs into positive supporting thoughts and beliefs will change your life for the better.
Here is a simple pattern that we can observe easily:
A thought, especially one that is reinforced with evidence or one that recurs, becomes a belief. Beliefs drive our decisions, which become our actions or inactions. These actions or inactions become our results.
Neuroscience has helped us understand better how our brain operates, and how neural pathways are formed that make certain things automatic, and they become habits. Habits are behaviors that we don’t think much about – we just do them. This is supposed to be helpful to our survival, except that this is how bad habits are formed.
Chances are that if you have identified this thought at work in your life, it has been at work for a very long time – since you were a child.
The traditional treatment for this is therapy. Marisa points out, however, that it is still highly inefficient and based on the fact that some people spend years in therapy without vast transformation in their lives.
Newer discoveries in neuroscience have found that we are more capable of changing our brains than once believed, and that it doesn’t have to take years to do it, and to see results from it. Hypnosis has been scientifically proven to be effective in accelerated, even instant, resolution of bad habits.
Marisa has been working with some of the top neuroscientists to develop a program called Rapid Transformational Therapy, and at the MindValley Reunion in San Diego in August, she brought us through 4 of the 7 modules of this program, which is based on practical neuroscience and teaches you to be your OWN healer.
If you have ever tried to change before, you know how hard it is, and this is also thanks to our brain and its tendency to want to protect us. When anomalies in patterns or our environment occur, our brain naturally fires synapses and releases hormones that we experience as unease or even anxiety – our heart rate increases, our breathing gets short, our muscles tense up, our palms may sweat. This can feel uncomfortable, and depending on the level, can even feel painful. If we do nothing to intervene with these responses, we will naturally be inclined to avoid things that create these responses. We may even use our logical brains to validate our need to avoid them.
By becoming mindful, we can choose to be more conscious than subconscious about our reaction. We can ask questions that our mind will naturally answer, such as, “Is my life being threatened?” We can also manipulate our physical response by choosing a slower breath and relaxing our muscles. If we can make this a practice, we can create new responses to change, and even associate positive change with good feelings, and release dopamine instead of cortisol, which will make us crave change and the good feelings we have started to generate. The thing is, this practice still takes significant time.
What Marisa has done is leveraged what we understand now about the brain to build neural pathways in ONE short session.
Here is the GREAT news > Right now MindValley Academy is offering a FREE 30-minute Masterclass so that you can experience this for yourself! I have no idea how long this will be offered, so do not hesitate to sign up now!
In the meantime, if you feel brave and see how it can serve others, share with us in the comments what you discovered about how these common thoughts and beliefs have impacted your life.