Keep Your Focus on You, not Others
As I spoke with them I wanted to interrupt to say what someone else says or thinks doesn’t matter, but what you think about does.
It’s challenging to help others break out of their thought patterns to move to a different place in their own life because of all the beliefs, assumptions, and history we have as adults. Kids are better off because they haven’t had all the social conditioning.
So how do you break free of the imaginary chains you’ve unknowingly created for yourself?
It starts with being the fly on the wall in your head. First, you have to notice your thinking. If you’re not aware of it, anything we say won’t make a difference. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with your thinking patterns, you’re ready to take action.
When Peter and I started this process years ago, it’s still fresh in my mind how difficult it was to maintain the effort to catch myself going down the negative rabbit hole. It started to really take hold when the consequences were unbearable to think about. Painful feelings of failure, the imminent destruction of our business, and a real pain in our relationship were what literally forced us to consistently stay on track.
This is why you hear about how people came through traumatic experiences as changed individuals. The status quo was too painful to maintain. They forced themselves into a new place because their current one was too difficult to maintain. Maintaining the consistency of shifting your thinking from the past is the hard work that’s required of you to make lasting changes in your life.
Creating patterns and building new ways of doing things is another way to make shifts without having to go through trauma. Morning routines, group accountability programs, and tracking results are all ways to set up new patterns in your life.
What about you? Are you ready to create new habits and ways to be accountable to yourself to make the shifts you want in your life?