Are you willing to go deeper to see the changes you want?

We are all a little bit like the character Shrek. We have ‘layers’! Now, whether you are a parfait or an onion is up to debate, but we all basically work the same!

We will live what we believe. We might even believe a truth about something external, such as ‘Exercise is good for me, I should do it”, but until we internalize it we will never apply it, at least not for very long. If  ‘internally’ your thoughts are:

  • I’m basically lazy, I never finish what I start
  • I’ve tried exercise programs before, they don’t work for me
  • I don’t have the energy right now
  • I hate exercise, it’s not fun
  • Blah de blah and so on…

Then you will ultimately listen to your thoughts about yourself. You do what you think. So you must change what you think to change what you do. It only makes sense.

I once built a Joomla website with my husband. It’s a little trickier than this WordPress site. Each page has many layers. If you want to change something on a page you have to go to the appropriate layer to change it. The problem might be 3 layers deep. You cannot change it by working on the top layer.

Most of us try to change things in our lives by working on the top layer, the layer we ‘see’ – our actions. We don’t realize our actions stem from deeper layers – our thoughts and beliefs. As you can see in the diagram above, there is a layer between our BELIEF and our ACTIONS, it’s our THOUGHTS.

Too often, we change our belief about something by learning new information somewhere; we decide we want to follow that belief and change the current pattern of our lives, but just wanting to change gets us nowhere. We get frustrated and add to our growing pile of negative thoughts by further establishing the “I just can’t do it!” mind frame.  We need to daily replace old thoughts with new ones.

For tips on how to do that look out for the upcoming article in the Brain Change series :Brain Change Part 3: Overcoming Resistance. Also, if you haven’t read it yet, check out Brain Change Part 1: Re-train Your Brain.