To reach your goals, you have to, believe it or not, get out of your head

My mentor and teacher once told me; "You will not find the answers in your head". What he meant by that was that it is not always so that overthinking with an over-active analytical, left brain is helpful. Sometimes we need to do things slightly different to be able to move forward. To me his statement was a bit hard to understand at first, but through my own experience I realized that he was right. I became aware of the fact that no one had ever taught me how to use the right side of my brain and even my body to get answers.  

Left Brain vs Right Brain

When I use these terms it is of course very simplified as our full brain works in a complex manner, and most of what we do requires us to activate our full brain. 

I use the terms to illustrate the point that the left brain often is associated with logical thinking, analysis and objectivity, while the right side of the brain is often associated with creativity, imagination, visual imagery, intuition and emotion. 

In our society we tend to favor logical thinking, analysis and objectivity. Our whole education system and most of our jobs are based on it. In Tech I even hear the idea of using Clean Language to take emotions out of the conversation. I find it fascinating. I believe that these kind of solutions comes to us because we don´t know how to consciously activate and use our emotions, our creativity, imagination and intuition. When we learn how to do this we become much more effective in reaching our goals. 

Using More Than Your Rational Brain

Learning to use more than your rational brain is something I can recommend to everyone. I have practiced this for quite a few years now in my own life and it has helped me to break free from old patterns and beliefs and connect to and consciously activate different parts of my system, including my emotions. Emotions for example, carry information and give me a richer experience of conversations, situations and events. What I have learned is that this information is not available to me when I am stuck in my own head. 

I used to allow my rational brain to function more or less as if it was an AI-ChatBot that constantly generated a lot of content without me ever asking it to. If I allowed it to it would just go on in a never-ending stream of thoughts, making more noise than anything else. 

I have learned that it doesn´t have to be this way, I can consciously and deliberately start and stop my stream of thoughts, or simply observe them. I can even decide to consciously enter into a process of creativity, imagination and intuition to get access to more information which would be inaccessible to me if caught up in an endless stream of thoughts. It is in the stillness and conscious use of the mind that new ideas pop-up. This is where problems gets solved in new ways. 

What is even more important is to learn how to upgrade the subconscious mind when its software becomes outdated. You know it is time when you find yourself resisting change or you are stuck in the same pattern again and again. This is when it is time for an upgrade. 

Upgrading your Belief System

Because you receive and process endless information daily your mind will store its learnings in the subconscious mind and belief system so that you don´t have to think about all the information you receive in a day, such as experiences, interactions with others, and simply being awake needing to do a series of activities every day. For all of this to happen effectively your subconscious mind will receive all information from your senses, it will process it, delete what it doesn´t need, and generalize it, that is create patterns. This is done to create a program that your subconscious mind can run on so that you learn and can function effectively,  

You can see your mind as an advanced inner technology where your brain is like a computer and your belief system is like the running software on the computer, and just like any other software your belief system requires frequent updates. Your phone and computer will tell you when it is time for an update and you can choose to do it when prompted or you can postpone it until later. In the same way your inner software will tell you, but with different prompts, when it needs to be updated. You will know that an update is needed when you observe yourself caught up in unwanted behavioral patters or you start hearing the same story on repeat in your head. These are signals that it is time for an upgrade. 

The challenge

We are rarely taught how to work with our subconscious mind, our belief system,  so what we do when we want a change is to think about it rationally and then try to think ourselves into change. The challenge is that if your subconscious mind is not onboard with the change, you will find yourself unable to stick with the "thought" and new behavior. You find yourself going back to the old behavior or even in  self-sabotaging or loops of behavior that do not contribute to get your to where you want to be. 

This is especially true if you are working on a change that is big, In this case the software upgrade must be done in several steps otherwise the gap becomes too big and the new software cannot run in the old system. Therefore it is important to learn where to start and how to work in a consistent way with your own software upgrades. 

Getting out of your head

You know by now that it is important to get out of your own way, that is get out of your head by stopping your inner AI-Generator and instead use your mind in a conscious way with specific practices that support your change process to happen in an effective way.

I usually work in a few steps; 

• Develop you own value system, free from that of your parents and your family system
• Resolve unwanted existing patterns that hold you back 
• Becoming intentional and consciously co-create new beliefs 
• Confirm a deep sense of knowing, and that your new beliefs have become your now beliefs.  

Since the subconscious mind is the intuitive, creative part capable of using imagination, the upgrade is done through guided visualization that work on each of these specific topics. The surprising part is that when you start working in this way change happens fast. It does require an intentional practice and a decision to do it, but as you start this practice you will notice that suddenly a lot starts to move towards your goals, including your relationships and your outer environment, just because you change.  

If you are ready to try this out, check my Conscious Living Circle to get started.