It is not uncommon to realize that you would like a massive change to occur within your relationship to the world. It is important to realize the past is the past; perhaps you are happy about most of your decisions or perhaps you aren’t, regardless the focus should be on your future. What many people don’t realize, myself included at times, is that all change starts with the mind. It starts with your relationship to the things, the circumstances, and the people who surround you.
If you perceive most of what surrounds you in a mistrusting or negative manner, perhaps you are waiting for the other shoe to drop, or maybe you are waiting for someone to lose your trust. Whatever the case may be, these are all stories that circulate throughout the mind over and over again. Because the brain must at all times reaffirm it’s beliefs (confirmation bias), we will make sure to shape our circumstances in life such that our stories are carried out. If the stories we told ourselves did not carry out, our beliefs would be incorrect which biologically is interpreted by the brain as unsafe.
This is not a tendency of the mind that we should fight, because it is evolution; you will be fighting a losing battle. What we want to do is take this knowledge about our psychological propensities and use it to our advantage. This is just one example that I feel is illustrative of the mindset work that I do.
If you can change the story, you can change your relationship to the world around you, thereby changing the outcome. I used to be a very negative person and I was crippled by the fear of what others thought about me, I was terrified of being judged. This mindset grew into a prison of unhappiness for me, until one day I decided I could not see myself living my future out in this way. There began my journey to rewire my brain and thus completely change my mindset.
But how do we do this?
The brain learns new patterns with which to form new supportive neurons in order to sustain this new experience through sensation and feeling. Don’t try to chew the whole elephant at once though, you must first decide on one thing you want to change about your mindset. It could be your propensity to believe that people are out to get you, or it could simply be that you are experiencing too much stress in your life. Then you must decide what experience you would have to be having instead. Take my example of believing that people are out to get you.
You will want to find a memory from your past, an experience when someone actually was not out to get you. You will recall there was a brief moment of time when your mind was blown, such that you realized briefly this person did not behave the way you thought they would. But then you will remember how your mind simply shrugged it off as a fluke, that person must have been an outlier.
This is because your mind was not trained to believe that someone could help you and that they could actually be well-meaning. Rather it was trained to believe people were going to screw you over. This brief window of time when you experienced the opposite belief system is like gold when it comes to retraining the brain. You will want to take this realization and experience, and continue revisiting the memory every day in a strong experiential way, this way your new belief system will be automatic and natural for your mind.
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