Unlocking your unlimited potential. What does that even mean anyway? You hear people, coaches, influencers talking more and more about how they made mindset shifts, took massive inspired actions and are now living a life beyond their wildest dreams! Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Sounds gimmicky and like they may be trying to sell you some good old fashioned snake oil!
Friends, it’s not snake oil though. While I don’t care for a lot of the tactics some people are using recently, mindset and awareness are not some magical, mystical practice that is reserved only for the purest monks in Nepal. Mindset shifts and thought awareness is a practice available to everyone, it just takes a lot of practice and perseverance. It’s also a lifelong practice—not a one and done kind of thing. Mindset shifts and awareness ARE the keys to success, and it is a daily, hourly, sometime minute by minute practice.
Your brain is a muscle, much like any other muscle in your body. It will get stronger, unleash more power, and continue to evolve as long as you work it, stretch it, challenge it. Left to its own devices however, it will wander, get lazy and soft, and will eventually lead you through your life with fear, judgment and keep you playing small. Your brain’s job—dating back to our cave days—is to keep you safe. Keeping you safe though, has evolved since those days when humans were not at the top of the food chain, fearful of being eaten by saber toothed tigers or whatever other large creature was roaming the shared territories. There are no longer dangers like that in modern days, but the human brain hasn’t caught up with that progress yet. It maintains the fight or flight reaction that rules so many of us, day in and day out. I call that part of our brain the “lizard brain.”
Through science, we now know that our brains have about 60,000 thoughts every day. Most of those have been repeated so many times in our heads that they run on autopilot now-we’re not even aware of the majority of thoughts swimming around up there! I don’t know about you, but that is a little scary to me. To think, my actions, my behavior is being caused by thoughts I don’t even know are there?! And what does that mean for my results? Unintended results are not how I want to live the rest of my life. And in retrospect, I see that is exactly why I was getting the results I was experiencing. And that’s when I decided it was time for massive changes. I wasn’t “happy,” with anything really—where I was professionally, the person I had become—the mom, sister, friend, partner. I didn’t feel inspired and my emotions were ruling me. I felt like the world was out to get me, that I couldn’t get a break and that life was just unfair. I was depressed, angry, frustrated and generally just unpleasant to be around. I hadn’t always felt that way and I didn’t like feeling like that…so what the hell was wrong with me? And how did I change it?
First step was to hire a coach. I needed someone outside of me, an objective person to help me sort through what was happening. At that time, I also didn’t truly understand the effects of my thoughts on my feelings and my behavior. I was operating under the assumption that my life was out of my control, that the world and the circumstances happening around me had more impact on my life than I myself had. The thing is, no one ever teaches us how to manage our brains, that our thoughts are what are creating our feelings and our perceived reality. Can you just imagine how powerful and what a different world this might be if we learned this in elementary school? And why isn’t this taught at an early age? Why do we continue to perpetuate this total lack of awareness?
Hiring my first coach was the single greatest investment I ever made in myself. It helped me get out of my head, out of my swirling, unproductive thoughts, and gave me tools that I still use to this day to manage the thousands of thoughts that play on repeat in my brain. She taught me to reach deep and find the self-confidence and self-love that I lost so long ago. She gave me the tools I needed to restore my self-worth and to find the fire that was still burning deep inside of me to live out loud, to be me-the real, genuine, authentic ME! She asked all of the questions to help me find my own answers and solutions that I so desperately needed to rediscover my own superpowers. That my friends, is priceless!
So, what are you going to do with your life? Continue to live on autopilot, letting your brain wander aimlessly, taking you places you don’t want to go, never wanted to be? OR are you going to get busy, do the work—day in and day out, and live the life of your dreams? Are you willing to step outside of your comfort zone and do things you’ve never done before, to have the things you’ve always dreamed of having? Are you going to live as an example of what is possible??? YOU ARE WORTH IT!! Every one of us is worth it!
