Let’s take a quick look at how most people try and change their lives. Most personal change tools fall into 4 categories.
One – Make you feel good about life. Sounds good but the truth is that so does a bottle of gin, and the effects last just about as long as this type of change. Just changing your feelings about how your life stinks is not much help. “I have no money, no job, no social life, but….I feel great”, is not a very good change to make. It makes you stop moving and settle for what you have.
Just feeling good is not the answer even though when you are feeling bad anything seems like a better answer . What happens is that the good feeling does not change anything and the bad feeling comes back. Then you have to do it all over again. You end up going to endlessly doing the same thing over and over again to chase that good feeling while your life only gets worse. Endless fire walks…Endless therapy….Endless seminars…. Endless promises.
Two – Suppress bad feelings. Yes bad feelings can get in the way of getting things done. Yes it would be great if they would magically disappeared. It seems to make sense that if they would just go away that life would be amazing.. Many people spend their lives avoiding pain. They avoid any negative people or situations, but…. the problem is that they end up even more fragile and delicate, and in turn have to avoid even more situations and more people. It is a negative spiral.
You have to learn how to deal with feeling bad. Popping a magic pill to flatten out all of your emotions does not solve anything. It just helps you hide from the feelings. Any process or medication that numbs you to what life feels like is not really helping anything. Yes it feels better for a short while but you will have to do whatever you are doing….FOREVER….unless you learn to address those feelings. If not you will have to take medication of some kind forever. That may be pills, drinking, or the revolving door of some kind of therapy. Even worse, much of the time even without the negative emotions, you still can’t do what you want, so you remain stuck.
Three – Overpower Problems. The power of positive thinking sounds like a great ides until you realize how much effort it takes. Who wants to have to force positive thoughts into your head all the time? It is like having your dog leave you a little present in the middle of your living room floor and instead of cleaning it up you just add perfume to is and pretend it is not there.
I know… every outdated self help book on the planet tells you about being positive. It does not matter if you use affirmations, amplified good feelings, inspirational quotes taped to every mirror or even playing self help tapes in every room of your house all day long…I knew someone who actually did this…sticking good feeling on top of bad ones and pretending the bad feelings or problem is not there will never work.
The reason is simple….the problems take no energy to exist and eventually you will just get too tired to keep those positive emotions going. Then the problem will be there waiting to pounce on you because you have not solved anything. Then you will have to do it all over again… once you’ve rested up.
Four – Reprogramming… I have studied many things that claim to be able to just reprogram your mind. Some get better results than others. The problem is that the brain is not a computer. It is nothing like a computer. No matter how many bad metaphors you hear, the brain can’t be like a computer because computers don’t have emotions or consciousness….yet 🙂
Reprogramming tries to bypass old programming without solving the problems that created the old programming. So it is doomed to fail since the old programming is still there or the environment that supported the old program is still there. Sooner or later the new “program” will begin to fall apart because the old environment is still there.
Let me add one more…. Talk about your problems and try to rationally solve them. After you have lost all your friends because they are sick of your whining you can hire someone to go and talk to for $125 per hour. After 6 to 9 years of paying for their beach vacations you might begin to understand that just because you realize that somewhere in your past you had something happen, that nothing has really changed other than a firm idea of where to place blame.
That might feel better because then none of your problems will be your fault, but still you will find no real solutions other than to take your talk therapy to the next step of self-healing. Another 8 years and maybe paying for college for their kids might do it.
What is the answer? As I said we have cracked the code to changing your life. It is so simple yet so powerful.
More to come…….