Whats coming out of your eyes? A self awareness that “you know that you know”, or a doubtful “I think I (k)no(w)”? What’s it going to take to change that?
Is Your “I Know” Genuine or Fake?
People can sense whether you are faking it or whether you are speaking with authenticity, can’t they? With the right self awareness, so can you too, right?
With such authenticity, body language and words and intent are aligned as one. Not like when the mouth is wording yes but the head actually shaking instead of nodding as you are saying it.
As the title suggests: until you authentically know and with complete self awareness, you are saying “I know” but inwardly still saying no, so you are actually saying “I (k)no(w)”.
When you get to that point where you really and truly know, there is a belief; a conviction: a knowing that you now know that is unflappable and unstoppable. It transcends from “to seem to know” into a very confident “I now know”.
Some Great Personal Breakthroughs
In my last blog Crafting Personal Breakthroughs I spoke about this. These last 2 weeks I have had a number of my own personal breakthrough situations and ones where clients have called or emailed me with incredible breakthrough stories.
Ones that proved once and for all for them (and for me) that an old habit or behavior pattern that had been holding them back for so long and depriving them of so much was ultimately broken and let go. They thought such breakthroughs had been the case many times but found that the old habits still came back again. But this time was different. Something had changed deep inside and the transition was done. That old pattern will never bother them again.
In my own case, I achieved a very significant monthly goal within the first week of this month. One I had set so many times, over such a long period and never achieved. What’s changed? Hard to put a finger on it, but that’s how life works. It’s usually not just one thing but a whole bunch of things that had to be changed over a period of time, developing a self awareness of what’s holding us back, replacing old (bad) Habits, before there is such an overall shift; not only at a conscious level (words) but also at the unconscious level from the still dubious “I think I (k)no(w)” to the very definite “I know”.
One of my clients has had a long standing personal belief about his being taken seriously. He experienced a situation recently where his left brain mind chatter showed him that it was playing out again. Of course this resulted in him beating up on himself again. This pattern has plagued him most if his life. I sought his permission to share it with you because of how strong a learning it can be. Let me explain.
He had flown overseas to present the plan and strategy for his new role to the business owner (one in Africa we used to call “the Makulu boss”) and was waiting to see him, always waiting to be called. It took a couple days of waiting. Each passing hour leading to each passing day was creating a deeper, blacker hole of despair into which he dug himself. His left brain kept feeding him confirmations like “See, you are a nobody. He won’t see you and take you seriously. He has more important stuff to attend to. What makes you think your role is that important that he will see you” and so it went on and on and on. Deeper and deeper he spiralled. If you have done the excercise I outlined in Managing Your State you will know how powerful a negative (or positive) grip our Self Talk can have on our thinking and our Self Doubt and our Self Worth at any time. In his case it was rampantly negative to the point of being debilitating. Can you imagine his nights?
Self Awareness And The Power Of Our Left Brain Mind Chatter
To illustrate this, I like to use the example of the story of a dead body that had been found in a refrigerated rail-car on a rail-siding. Investigating this death it was found that the deceased person had been locked into the rail-car thinking the refrigeration was on and that he was dying of hypothermia. With chalk, he had written up on the inside wall of the car the (perceived) deterioration of his life force as it progressed until he finally perished.
Truth was the refrigeration wasn’t on, but he believed it was. The entire life force depletion was “made in the head”. He was so stressed that he let his left brain mind chatter talk him into it that he was in fact dying, to the very point that they actually died. Wow, hard to believe, isn’t it? But true. So please never underestimate the devastating negative power your self-talk can excercise over you, if you allow it to.
Conversely I hope this story can help convince you how powerfully you can instead leverage your positive self-talk into belief that you can move mountains. I have learned to know that you can. How? Because of the number and extent of such breakthroughs I have helped so many clients achieve for themselves and their businesses.
My client I was talking about finally chose to snap out of this black picture he had allowed his left brain to talk himself into. Summoning his courage (remember that action cures fear), he just walked into to the boss” office, and said: “right I’ve waited long enough now, we’re going to do this thing”, and sat down.
Instead of the scheduled hour they emerged from the one on one meeting 5 hours later, both extremely energized and animated, aligned and in “violent agreement” about what was required in the planned and authorized actions. He had approval to implement all the changes everybody knew needed to occur, but nobody up to then had known how or how to convince the boss of. And all this from a boss-man who was known to “suffer no fools”, give people minutes, not hours of time and with the shortest of patience, fuse length and attention span.
Managing Pain – Do You Cure It Or Just Tolerate It?
Think about your emotional and psychological pains – what I often call ego fuelled pain – have you developed strategies to help them diminish or have you just learned to tolerate them?
You see, what I’ve learned is that we don’t feel sad or angry or depressed; we run an unconscious level pattern or strategy which makes us do sad or angry or depressed unconsciously and actually by (inner) choice. It’s a well-practiced behavior pattern, one who’s playing out helps us get what we want (the secondary gain) and has been honed to perfection. We do it so well we don’t even notice it any more. It plays out unconsciously and unless we develop a self-awareness of it and arrest it, it becomes that above mentioned left brain mind chatter that we so often give so much debilitating power to.
So let me ask you this question. When is the pain of staying the same going to become greater that the (perceived) pain of change? When are you going stop being the dog lying on and tolerating the nail and get up and get off it?
Most of my own breakthroughs and those that made the biggest differences for my clients were where we have identified such deprecating thought or behavior patterns and replaced them or changed them into positive ones. Everybody can. Most don’t.
Are You Taking Control Of Your Life Or Calling It Fate?
Jung said it so well – “until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.
In my book “Life Learnings of a Life Coach” I speak of identifying and overcoming obstacles that are holding us back.
At the end I relate the story of a glider launch I personally experienced where we were winched up through a long cable attached to a massively powerful motor on the back of a truck at the other end of the runway. First we were hauled towards it with accumulating speed, and then we took off and started a long arc into the sky before we reached its apex. At this point the pilot needed to disengage the cable, or we would have completed the arc and plummeted into the ground in a miserable heap at its other end.
What a wonderful metaphor my client actually used in describing how he felt about his breakthrough. He is now like the glider, free to roam and do as he wishes to meet his objectives; never to be plagued by that cable again…
So What Next?
So if the above stories are resonating with you, what is it going to take you to define what’s holding you back and craft your own personal breakthroughs so that you will look back at some remarkable point in your life and be able to say with absolute conviction and authenticity “I now know that I know, that I know”. And that the word (k)no(w) is no longer embedded in that phrase. Gone. Forever banished from your left brain mind chatter.
Of course, depending on how big this might be for you, and what energy you are willing to invest in this, it can occur in the next weeks, or months, but maybe also years. Does it matter how long it takes if you know that if you engage it, that it does happen?
And if you you see the value of that, and want to be sure that you engage it once and for all and head on, without being able to cop out, why not engage a coach to help hold you accountable? Go on, call me and Let’s Talk Coaching
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