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Negative Self-Talk Eliminator

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Energize Your Life – Use Your Brain For A Change (Part 3)

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(…continued from last week)

Evaluate Your Beliefs

It’s not what occurs around us that makes us who we are, it’s what that experience means to us. It’s the pain or the pleasure. You can have two children, same class, about the same grades, same level of intelligence, doing the same thing. They’re both working hard at their homework and they’re having a tough time.

One says, “I give up, it’s just too hard.” They feel dispirited, down, they quit. The other who’s struggling says, “Well, I’m making a little progress and I’m learning more so this is great. It’s going pretty well I think.”

Or what about two people who want to learn to play the piano. Going through the basics, working on learning what you’re doing, you learn your chords, you learn the progressions, you learn all those things.

But one of them, because it’s too much work, gives up. They quit, they drop out, they don’t go any longer. The other diligently sticks with it, takes the little steps, the little strides, and over years of practice becomes an excellent musician.

See it’s not the piano, it’s not the homework; it’s the way that those individuals interpret the work on the piano or the homework. And the pain or pleasure that they receive from it that either helps them move forward or blocks them. The meaning they associate to their study or the piano practice is what makes the difference.

They will either be encouraged or discouraged by what they focus on most around the pain or the pleasure. From those interpretations of experience, those people grow their beliefs. Their beliefs spring from these focuses of pain or pleasure. Your beliefs are really just generalizations about what your pain and pleasure means.

Let’s say you lived your whole life at the Arctic Circle. You never left there. You lived on the ice by the ocean. You ate fish, you hunted bears, you caught seals, you built your igloos; you lived at the Arctic Circle. You did not swim in the ocean because it is so bloody cold that if you got in the ocean for any period of time you would get hypothermia and die. Absolutely, you don’t swim in the ocean.

Well let’s say you’ve lived your whole life at the Arctic Circle and somehow you wind up in Hawaii and somebody goes, “Let’s go swimming.” You look at that water and go, “What are you, nuts?” Water is a bad thing. Ocean water is not good. Even if you know that it’s not cold, there is a timidity about getting in it that’s huge because you have all of these bad associations with getting in the water of the ocean. It’s a conditioned in process.

It’s kind of like Pavlov’s dog and the bell. Pavlov got these hungry dogs, showed them food. While they were waiting for the food and salivating he’d ring the bell. He did that over and over and over and over and over. Finally, even if the dogs were full he would ring the bell and they would automatically start salivating. It got conditioned in. The cold ocean you don’t get in. Even in Hawaii the ocean’s still a thing not to get in; Pavlov’s dog and the bell.

A couple I did therapy with a number of years ago had a major communication breakdown. They lived together for a while. It seemed to go pretty well, got married, started raising children. But there’s one thing they never quite got past and it finally just erupted a few years into their marriage.

The gentleman grew up in a family of what I call screamers. If you didn’t get your way you yelled and hollered and stomped your feet, and you ranted and raved until you got what you wanted. If there was a problem you screamed at each other until you figured it out. You stood and you went toe to toe and you just did it until it got handled.

On the other hand, in her family everybody would sit down and talk about it calmly. She would never think about yelling at another person. You discussed things. You did’t yell.

So what happened was that over time, as conflicts came up, he reverted to his normal pattern, she reverted to her normal pattern. He thought that she didn’t care because she wouldn’t yell. She knew he didn’t love her because he was yelling at her. It was just out of control.

He had to learn to mitigate his style a little bit so that he could still let her know, “I care about you but this really frustrates me.” And she could get a little more passionate about it so that he knew she really meant it. The meaning of the signals gave pain or pleasure. If you’re a screamer you relate one way. If you’re a quiet talker you relate another. It was gigantic.

So the meaning of the signals shown gives the pain or pleasure. One, most people do not slow down enough to consciously think about their beliefs. Most of us just go through our lives. We have the beliefs we have but we don’t think about where they came from. We just keep on truckin’.

Number two, beliefs in many cases are based on misinterpreted data like this couple. If you yell you don’t love me. If you don’t yell it means you don’t care, right?

Number three, once we adopt a belief we think we’re always right. That’s that, this is the way it is, it’s the gospel truth and my belief is reality. Don’t cross that line. How crazy is that?

An example of that was a past client who suffered from low self-esteem and a feeling that nothing was ever good enough. He really didn’t know exactly where this came from but he knew it probably came from growing up as a kid.

He grew up in a rural family in a small town, where his father was a hellfire and brimstone preacher for the town church. His father also was a drunk. Mom just happened to be major passive-aggressive who wouldn’t confront anybody for anything.

If Bob did well; if he got good grades, if he played great baseball or football, if he caught a large fish, if he did a debate with the debate team and it went well, his father would say, “Don’t get cocky. You’re being vain.” If on the other hand he perfoprmed poorly, then he’d hear, “You didn’t try hard enough, or You are being lazy, or You’re a worthless bum.”

See no matter what happened he couldn’t win. If he did well he was being egotistical. If he didn’t do well he was being lazy. He couldn’t win for anything. What had to happen and what we did, is we began to sort some of these values and beliefs that made sense. Some did, some didn’t and some were flat out wrong.

He consciously evaluated these beliefs. He kept some of them that he saw value in. He rejected others that he knew to not be true and in his guts did not fit for him. In one session he went from zero to hero inside of himself. He went from blah to on fire, from low self-esteem to absolutely ready to rock and it stayed.

He made a conscious decision through thinking about his values and sorted out ones that really fit for him now as an adult, and leaving behind those other ones, because they were driven into him when he was a kid.

We each need to take the time to sort those values and beliefs and make sure they align with our pleasure and pain principles of today so that we can get what we want when we want it. And we can run our brains effectively so that we can energize our life moment to moment.

(to be continued…)


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