80% of People Do This Without Realising What They Are Doing

People frequently come up to me after hearing me present this talk at seminars and say something like, “I love your message, but I can’t even find all the clustered beliefs that are tying me up in knots and stopping me from achieving my potential! What can I do?”

The question is triggered by their realisation that, like the majority of the population, circumstances and life experience have built up unconscious patterns that are sabotaging their success.

Are You Your Own Worst Enemy?

Wendy, one of my clients had a problem with procrastination. She’s amazingly skilled at her core proficiency, and has deep skill in other areas as well, yet she’s constantly finishing things up at the last minute and racing the clock to fulfil her commitments. This isn’t great for her reputation, her health, or her own self-image.

Wendy had tried every productivity hack on the planet as far as I could tell, and every defeat dug the seeds of doubt and procrastination more deeply into her mind because they entrenched her belief about what she could and (mostly) what she couldn’t change or do. It was a classic case of “one step forward, two steps back” with the added twist that every one of these steps back gave her unconscious mind more ammunition to use against her.

Awareness is NOT Enough!

Even when Wendy realised what she was doing and the cost she was paying for it very little changed. As she said, “The power of my past is just too strong for me. Something happens, and before I know it the flow of habit sweeps me into that same sequence of self-sabotage. It’s not evil, or cruel, or morally outrageous, but it’s incredibly destructive… and I can’t beat it!”

BUT… There is a Solution!

On a Profitable Business Accelerator (PBA) live call a couple of months ago, we used a simple process to help each of our participants (including Wendy) let go of the clusters of beliefs and behaviours that were no longer serving them.

This is How it all Starts…

  1. An interaction doesn’t turn out the way you want it to… you lose a sale, break up with a lover, argue with a friend, are disappointed by your kids, break your mum’s favourite vase etc.
  2. Your itty-bitt-shitty committee tells you… what a bad person you are, how you always mess things up and fail, that you’re selfish, that you’ll never succeed in life, and your kids will end up a mess etc.
  3. A similar situation rolls around… and your itty-bitt-shitty committee leaps into action reminding you of all your past failures, horrible outcomes, and what a bad person you are;
  4. You follow the prompts made by your unconscious mind… and history repeats itself. Again, and again, and again, each time reinforcing your internal chatter and your external behaviour.

This pattern is developed early in life and your reactions are strongly influenced by the expectations and responses of people around you in early childhood. It can be reversed, but the usual way of doing so is one incident at a time: a slow painstaking process, that unfortunately is rarely effective because you deal with a couple of situations, but there are always new ones popping up and reinforcing the old patterns before they are obliterated.

The process we use is like peeling velcro apart: it rips all the hooks and claws apart in a few minutes so that you are ready for a fresh start the next time a similar situation emerges and can choose your behaviour freely. It sounds brutal, but it’s incredibly freeing.

As you know, I’m all about empowering my clients and facilitating their success. Nothing worthwhile comes without work, but if you can get your Unconscious Mind supporting you in the background (rather than sabotaging your efforts), then suddenly your work becomes easier and your results are more satisfactory.

If you’ve done your NLP Practitioner or Master Practitioner Certification with LifePuzzle you’ve already experienced the energising power of this process.

A Quick Self-Evaluation:

What patterns of behaviour are you are running that aren’t serving you?

Stop looking at them as individual incidents and notice how they cluster together.

When your itty-bitt-shitty committee starts whispering negative thoughts in your ear, ask yourself:

  • What is this particular situation or behaviour an example of? and
  • What can I learn from this situation or behaviour?

Once you spot connections and identify the clusters of similar behaviours you’ll be able to  dissolve them all using Time Line Therapy®  and create the future you really want.

… but you can change that.

“The only person over whom you can and should have total control is yourself. Don’t give that autonomy away… especially to people you don’t like.”

Have you ever said things like,

  • “I will clean the bathroom when my husband stops leaving his toothpaste on the bench?”
  • “I will wash the dishes when my kids stop leaving dirty dishes in the sink.”
  • “I will forgive my mum when she apologises for making my life hell.”
  • “I will talk to my brother when he stops telling lies about me.”
  • “I will raise my prices when the economy improves.”

Ok, so your version may be slightly different to the examples above and could well involve serious physical and emotional harm, but I hope they’ve got you thinking about the ways that you are making your transformation dependent on someone who doesn’t care about your happiness or doesn’t realise that you are dependent on them for happiness.

If you often say things like this, then you are dangerously vulnerable because you have made your happiness dependent on someone over whom you have no control. Even worse, that ‘someone’ is often either impersonal (“the economy”), uninterested in whether you write a bestseller or not (“your kids”), or potentially malicious (the perpetrator).

Don’t Make Your Happiness Dependent on Someone Else!

The truth is, the only person’s behaviour and attitude you can change or control is your own. Unless you have the force of the law behind you, you can’t make anybody apologise, repay, or otherwise recompense you for any damages that you have suffered… and outcomes-at-law are often disappointing as families of murder victims often discover.

If that’s the case, then doesn’t it make sense to ask how you can control and change your own outcomes, without waiting for someone else to take the initiative? And, doesn’t the thought that you could control your own destiny and well-being excite you?

Tough Situations Can Be Overcome

Before I tell this story, I want to make it 100% clear that I’m not justifying abuse, violence, war, or other horrors. Sadly, they happen… and our best efforts don’t seem to do much to stop them. The past is past, we can only change the present and (indirectly) the future. I’d be betraying my own integrity if I didn’t share what I know about setting people free from PTSD, trauma, and other emotional chains.

One of my clients had been abused by a relative when she was 8 years old. She was 48 when we started working together and the scars of that abuse were affecting her work, her marriage, and her kids, as well as her health. During our initial H.O.W.T.O. Session I asked her if she really wanted to release the hurt and anger she had been carrying for so long. She said, “Yes,” so we went straight into a Time Line Therapy® process.

Thirty minutes later, she walked out of my office looking 10 years younger. Over the next few months as we continued to work on the habits and thought patterns she had developed every area of her life started to change for the better. Her health improved, her relationships with her husband and children were transformed, and opportunities opened up at work where previously she had been frustrated.

As she said, “Chandell, I realised during the H.O.W.T.O. Session that I’d been letting this evil man control my life for forty years! As if his original actions hadn’t been damaging enough! I love what’s happening in my life now, but mostly I love the fact that using Time Line Therapy® I didn’t have to dredge through the memory in order to release it. Before that process I don’t think there was a waking hour when he didn’t come to mind, since then, I’ve got bigger and better things to focus on.”

To the best of my knowledge she’s never met her abuser again, so she never got the satisfaction she’d clung to all those years, but she’s free of his power anyway and she’s gone on to do amazing things!

No-one Will Ever Know… or Will they?

“I’m great at covering up my feelings, so my boss will never know I can’t stand him.”

“My husband will never know how angry I feel…”

“My sister-in-law won’t know how much I despise her…”

In NLP we talk a lot about the role of physiology in communication. Your physiology includes your deportment, your facial expression, and your tone of voice. If you are angry, resentful, anxious or in any way secretly unresourceful others will detect it. They may not know what they are picking up, but they will know that something is incongruent and they will respond appropriately.

Therefore, quite apart from the fact that you’ll feel much better about

  • yourself,
  • your life,
  • and the situations you are facing,

It’s important to deal with your negative emotions and limiting beliefs for the sake of your communication and relationships with others.

This is Not Just a Personal Issue… it Affects Your Sales

In my book, “Confident Closing: sales secrets that grew a business by 400% in six month and how they can work for you” I talk about the fact that we’re all in sales. Everyday you need to sell your ideas, opinions, skills, and knowledge to friends, family, and colleagues even if you aren’t officially in a ‘sales’ position. Your happiness does depend on your ability to this successfully.

Unacknowledged limiting beliefs are often the reason why you fail to sell yourself and your ideas. Your listener or prospect picks up on your secret thoughts of inadequacy and you end up sabotaging your outcomes without realising it.

Visualise your greatest dream or highest goal:

  • On a scale of 1-100, how convinced are you that you will achieve it?
  • If you didn’t score 100%, what or who might stop you from achieving it?
  • When did you decide that?
  • Now ask yourself, what is there about this situation that I can control and what do I need to let go of to make that happen?

Most people will make excuses for themselves and provide reasons why they can’t move forward. If that describes you, then you have some issues you need to deal with so that you can achieve your goals faster and with less friction. If you’d like some help or want to learn more visit the Personal Breakthrough Session page on this site or email Ken: support@lifepuzzle.com.au and ask him to send you information about booking a Time Line Therapy® session with Chandell. This powerful technique can help you quickly and easily disperse the negative emotions and limiting beliefs that are standing between you and your goals.

#TuesdayTips

When we have a problem, we are constantly looking for a solution to that problem.  The difficulty with that is that energy flows where attention goes – so if we’re not careful we can end up having all our energy sucked up in experiencing the problem, rather than looking for a solution.

When you have something wrong – whether it’s a physical sickness, or depression, or whatever you are focused on the problem.  But that makes it grow even bigger in our minds, and sometimes in our bodies as well.  If other people know about the problem, they are also focused on it and so the whole issue snowballs.  The other aspect of this is that sometimes we get attention from other people because of our problems.  That’s called secondary gain.  Your problem attracts attention, so you go around telling people that you want to solve it, but you’re not really looking for a solution at all – or at least, not after the first few days, because you like the attention it brings you.

Another issue is called a double bind –  you’ve probably experienced this sometime (I know I have!)  We enjoy complaining about our problem, but it also gives us a reason not have the thing we want.   Like if I don’t have the confidence to ask for business, but I also don’t really want to ask for business because I think that would be pushy, that’s a great double bind.

We’ve all been taught things that aren’t necessarily helpful or even true, but they shape the way we react and they tie us up in knots.  It might be that you were taught that it was rude to ask personal questions – so you really want to know what’s going on in someone’s life, because you’ve hear rumours or seen things that make you concerned for them, but you truly believe it would be rude and prying to ask.  So you say nothing, but you still want to know – or you do ask and feel embarrassed, as though you were eavesdropping.

Let me give you an actual example – I had a client who was in direct selling and she came into the office to do a process called Time Line Therapy™ which is about letting go of negative emotions from the unconscious level and it’s a process that takes as little as 2 minutes for most people to let go of a major negative emotion – we do it for anger, sadness, fear and guilt.  So this lady comes in and we let go of anger perfectly, we let go of sadness perfectly, we got to fear – and we always ask the unconscious mind for permission to let go of the emotion.  So I said,  “Okay, so is it okay for your unconscious mind to let go of the negative emotion of fear today and for you to be aware of it consciously?” and she said, “No.”

So I reframed and said, “I want to remind your unconscious mind that its highest prime directive is to preserve your body and keep it safe and so holding on to this negative emotion is actually not in line with its highest prime directive.  So, knowing that, would it be okay for your unconscious mind to support us in letting go of the fear today and for you to be aware of it consciously, knowing that we can keep the learning and let go of the negative emotion.” And she said, “No.”

I was pretty curious about this, because this is the first time that this had happened to me – most of the time, with a bit of a refrain to the unconscious mind it loosens it up and they say,”Yes.”

So I said, “Well, could you ask your unconscious mind why? Just tell me the first thing that comes up.”

And she replies, “Because if I let go of the fear then I won’t have an excuse.”

Ka-ching! Secondary gain!  It’s a lot easier for people to accept you saying you’re afraid to make a cold call.  They’ll accept that because fear is an acceptable excuse and then people will feel sorry for her and make excuses for her.  Whereas if she says, “I don’t want to do it” which is what it was really about, people will say “Don’t be lazy, get over it.”  So by having that excuse or hiding behind the fear I can be okay with the fact that I don’t want to do what I should do and what I have to do.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) teaches us that our unconscious mind wants clear direction.  What could be a clearer direction than focusing your thoughts on something day-in, day-out?  And if all your friends and relations are also focused on that thing then you really do have a problem!  Maybe that’s why our forebears didn’t talk about their problems – and perhaps the idea of a stiff upper lip has its advantages – as long as we can channel our thoughts as well!

The challenge is really to find a healthy solution to the problem of energy flowing where attention goes.

Here’s the simple steps I teach my clients:

  1. Acknowledge the problem, name it, and recognise how big it is (or not) – as long as you pretend it doesn’t exist you can’t deal with it effectively;
  2. State clearly to yourself (and anyone else you talk to) that you are looking for a solution, and set a (short) timeline for action;
  3. Don’t talk about your problem, talk about potential solutions and acknowledge your deadline to anyone who asks;
  4. When your deadline comes, take the first step towards the best solution you have – it’s easier to guide a moving ship than one that’s dead in the water.
  5. Find something positive in your life and focus on making that even better.

If you take those simple steps you’ll find that although they take discipline, they don’t absorb your energy completely and the end result is that you still have energy to get on with your other responsibilities which means you’re not making the problem worse by letting other areas of your life get out of hand.

Meta Description:  Problems need solutions, but we need to be careful not to give them too much attention or we’ll be consumed by them because energy flows where attention goes and the last thing you want is to put all your energy into a problem.

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By popular demand we have turned many of our multi-day workshops into multi-week online courses with a live day to kick them off. Learn more at https://businessgrowth.mykajabi.com/masteryoursales

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