Change Your Story to Thrive

How do you change the story you are telling yourself so you can be freer to experience more of what you want in life?  The start point of any story is to become aware of how it was written and the purpose behind it.  So, how was your story written?

We are taught many things in school but the one fundamental most powerful segment of information seems to have got forgotten about, how we are preprogrammed.  From birth until about 7 years old our human system is the equivalent of a sponge, soaking up all of the information around us, watching, listening, mimicking those people that we spend the most time with.  Everything on the TV, the conversations of our caregivers, the other children we see are all having a massive impact on what is being installed into our system.  We are learning machines at this early age, not consciously aware yet just absorbing it all in.  Our emotions are taught to us and how to use them in different situations, the belief systems that we will adhere to later in life are set in and also behavioral responses.  Knowing this means that you can start to take a look at those early years and work out where and from who you developed the ability to be you.

Have you noticed that you have similar language patterns to family members?  How aware are you of the family beliefs about money, work, relationships, people that are held?  Do you ever find yourself in conflict with an action or belief or thought that you think and wonder where that came from?

Everybody on this planet is born with the same opportunities and possibilities laid out before them but the early years of programming can seriously limit someone or massively expand their awareness of what is possible in life.  I remember once being told the story of 2 young boys who were taken into care because their parents were drug users.  They were separately adopted to 2 similar middle-class families and years later were revisited to find out how they had got on.  One of them was a drug user, on the dole, and had nothing to his name, the other was a company director with a nice home, family, and children.  When interviewed separately about how and why they had got to where they were, the first said “my parents were drug users so I couldn’t expect anything else from my life” and the second said, “my parents were drug users and I didn’t want to go down the same road”.  It is interesting isn’t it, how they made different choices yet came from the same background?

And this is the point of life when we become aware of how we have developed our habitual processes, behaviors, beliefs, and emotional intelligence, we can then start to own it and unpick it so we can utilise the best and challenge or change those aspects that are not supporting us to reach our desired outcomes in life.

The human system is fascinating and powerful.  It processes billions of bits of information per second and filters this down to a usable amount based on what is currently important to you and also what is in your storage facility from the past.  We run on autopilot 95% of the time and the majority of what we do today is just a repeat of what we did yesterday.  The system has to have autopilot responses, could you imagine waking up every morning and having to relearn everything you currently know?  It would be exhausting, wouldn’t it?  Imagine now having to learn each time you woke up how to get dressed, walk, talk, read, write, drive, eat and then just spend a moment looking around you and notice how you know the name for everything in your environment, chairs, pens, cups, phones, windows, doors, how long would it take you to leave the house if you had to go through the process of learning everything again from scratch?

This may seem like a silly thing to say to you but this is fundamental to understanding how to create change.  Until we become aware of the behaviors and habits that are not supporting us, it is a massive challenge to change anything. So the start point is to simply become present with how you feel and what you are doing. Are your feelings and actions getting you good results, if yes, then amazing keep doing them, but if no, then look to purposefully changing those responses?

My suggestion to people who want to change the results they are getting in life is to first look at how you feel throughout the day because feelings and emotions drive our initial behaviors.  When you wake up, do you get up feeling good or do you dive out of bed stressed after hitting snooze 20 times?  Your state matters and how you feel first thing will dictate how the rest of the day pans out and how you respond to situations that arise.  So, if you want to create change in your life, start with simple steps and focus on one aspect until you have required the desired result.  Begin with your morning state first, create the way you want to experience the day by spending some time on waking tuning into the body to notice how it feels, what thoughts you are having, and then stay there in the bed until you have the thoughts in the right place and you are generating the feelings you want to feel. If you are a snoozer, I also recommend turning the snooze off and have the extra time asleep.