When you think about yourself in the third person, you’re thinking about the way you appear to the people around you in your life. You’re thinking about the interpersonal image that you’re communicating to the world. The existentialist Jon Paul Sartre constantly reminds us that being a good human means taking responsibility for your actions.
When you behave in certain ways you’re taking on the responsibility to show the world how you think a person should behave in that context.
That’s why our image of ourselves we hold in our minds should be consistent with the kind of message we’re sending out to the world.
I’ve talked before about my love for affirmations and what they can do for your life. I’ve even experimented on myself with a number of different methods for developing effective affirmations, and it hasn’t all been easy. I’ve had a mixed bag of experiences while trying out things like positive self talk during the day while I work, practicing positive visualization while I fall asleep at night, things like that. I’ve had some positive effects and some negative effects but after going back over my own experiences and notes carefully, certain trends started to develop that made the difference between affirmations being effective and affirmations failing to make the desired change.
This key factor determines whether your self talk is going to be effective… and its truly simple.
Think about it… Focused-Awareness Blog has been rolling around the ideas required to align yourself with the kinds of things you want to accomplish and BE in your life. Everything is about where we place our attention and the kinds of thoughts we think. We practice seeing in our minds eye, visually, what we want to achieve. We verbally repeat the commands to ourselves that we want to ingrain deeply and start to live by. We take care of our body/minds to optimize as best we can our potential for awareness and more expansive self growth. But none of this will truly change you without one simple thing…
The assumption of change.
This idea goes by different names in different self development philosophies but the jist is simple… if you aren’t acting AS IF your visualizations and affirmations are true… YOU WON’T CHANGE!
I know this is shocking to alot of arm chair self development people who enjoy cracking open a good Tony Robbins book and indulging in a fantasy of actually getting off their ass and changing themselves but its true.
No amount of mental energy is going to cause you to change if you don’t walk out the front door and start occupying the frame of mind that you want to act from. Its that simple.
I was practicing a technique some people call Mirror Affirmations, which is really just the simple act of making solid eye contact with yourself in the mirror and repeating what it is you want to believe about yourself. Basically affirmations in the mirror, you get it.
I spend most morning doing my little routine which involves some meditation and grounding practice but I’ve been mixing in the whole mirror affirmation thing after I brush my teeth, before I head out the door. The results were suprising.
Growing up I had what you might call confidence issues, which if lefted unchecked I might still have to this day. So one of the important qualities I like to try and ingrain in myself in an unapologetic/confident attitude about who I am and what I want from this life.
Now all that is fine and I’ve made all sorts of progress but the real changes in my internal frame have come from this assumption of change that is so important.
If I do the mirror affirmations and walk out the door telling myself ‘Ok, I’m going to have a great day today, I’m walking tall, feeling good, grounded and mindful’ etc that might help me start to take actions in that direction, but I think for most people who practice affirmations they quickly find that its not just as easy as telling yourself the magic words and heading out there. You have to DO something about it.
When you practice a lot of affirmations yet walk around still acting and behaving the same way, what you’re really doing is draining your positive statements of their power.
Think about it…
If I tell myself all day long that I’m confident and assertive and I walk into work that day and fall right back into my old behaviors while still using these affirmations, I’m creating a negative association in my nervous system between SAYING I’m confident, and ACTING unconfident. I’m literally making my positive affirmations work against me.
This is why the assumption of change is so critical. For deep seated habits and belief patterns change isn’t always simple. Its not as easy as just performing some NLP move and WHAM you’re all better.
Thats why for me, I know that physically pushing myself into areas that make me confident is the first step and using the affirmations to change my internal frame comes second to the real world effort.
Thats what I’ve learned from using mirror affirmations. When I know that I’m going to push myself into encounters today that will make me grow as a human, then those affirmations and positive statements can be support beams helping me feel congruent with the way I’m acting.
So here’s a little challenge for the folks who have been keeping up.
Make a commitment to yourself to do one thing that pushes you into being the kind of you want to be. If you’re terrible at saving money, make a serious commitment to stop spending frivolously even if you can only manage to really commit to it one day. Maybe you’re shy and you make a commitment to meeting at least one new stranger a day for a week. Whatever it is, take a moment to really appreciate the importance of making this commitment to yourself and enduring whatever suffering it might cause you to break those old patterns.
Now that you know its something you’re really going to do whether you want to or not, you can start working on the part of you that ‘wants’ to do it. Now try those affirmations, visualize yourself from the outside being the kind of person you really know you are. Look yourself in the mirror and remind yourself that your doing this no matter what so its time for your mind to jump on board.
The key to making the switch is behaving as if its already true. Remember the assumption of change and don’t wait to start being the person you aspire to be.
Thats when these tools work. No one is demanding perfection or an instant 100% change, all you really need to do is make that initial commitment, that you will DO something, then tech like affirmations and creative visualization really start to make the difference.
How do you see yourself every day? When you’re having a thoughtful moment and thinking about what you want to become in the future, how do you see yourself? do you spend time rehearsing in your head the kind of future you would like to see yourself in… or do you use most of that time to visualize all the negative things that could cause your plan to fail?
I’m guessing that for a lot of people unfortunately the second one is true. Many people have a tendency to focus the majority of their awareness on the possible bad outcomes of any kind of new endeavor. We have a built in theater in our own minds for the evolutionary purpose of seeing into the future and avoiding danger… so its no wonder that for many people thinking about the future has more to do with fear than it has to do with possibility.
We all see ourselves in third person from time to time. We imagine ourselves from the outside almost like a character in a movie, going through the slides from our favorite scenes. Its easy to imagine yourself at least for moments far off into the future where you’ve accomplished the kinds of things you only dreamed were possible. But the next day when you wake up that sense of where you wanted to be has faded into the cold reality that your present negative habits and fears of making changes right now override that desire to evolve.
For example take a habit change like wanting to get up earlier every morning… Your sitting there reading a post online about the many benefits of being an early riser and you’re seeing yourself in your minds eye, getting up, stretching your arms, well before the sun has come up with a smile on your face. You go to bed that night and you set your alarm for 5:00 am and doze right off to sleep. The next morning you wake up at five to the sound of your alarm and roll over almost instinctively and hit the snooze button falling right back asleep till your usual seven o’clock or nine o’clock or whatever rolls around. Merely having a clear visualization of what you would like to have accomplished in the future doesn’t necessarily give you the willpower or perspective to break free of the daily habitual patterns that stop you from making the first step.
Maybe you’re about to go into a big meeting where you need to make a good impression, you know just how bad you want to succeed at this yet all you can manage to think about as you go into the encounter is all the negative experiences you’ve had with meetings. Reminding yourself of all the things that can go wrong as if any of it can help you do what you need to in order to make the encounter go right. Your mind makes a habit out of its usual fear mongering and before you know it you’re blowing every opportunity because all you can visualize is how its going to fail.
I’ve been trying lately to take into account all the ways my mind uses my fears and past negative experiences to keep me stifled in a sense and inhibits me from taking risks and going after the things I really want. I’ve always had to deal with a mental habit I picked up early in life, where I tend to see the ways I could fail or make a fool out of myself easier than I can visualize how its going to look to succeed and really be the kind of Chris I want to be. The habit is anchored deeply in my unconscious as it is, but with enough positive reference experiences I’ve slowly began to push myself through those barriers and watch myself do things I previously didn’t think I would ever have the willpower to do. Taking charge of your negative thinking habit can be one of the most important first steps on the road to discovering what the limits of your actual potential really are.
So how do you break through this habit when it takes a little more than ‘just thinking positive’? We all know that we have dreams and aspirations but what is it that makes the negative images and possible failures habitually spring to mind and stifle our ability to change our ways? Its simple really…. the negative patterns are just habits themselves. My tendency to think negatively or cynically about the possibility of success begins to break down when I do two things:
1. Intentional Positive Visualization
This means sitting down every now and then and taking a few moments to actually visualize what it is that you really want to be or do. See it in full richness and color, exploring both the way your dream looks from the third person outside view and the first person account seeing what success will look like when seen through your own eyes. When you catch yourself engaging in those negative visualizations again, change their color and push them away in your minds eyes, intentionally bringing in the successful images you were visualizing before. Repeat this kind of visualization as often as negative thoughts occur, changing the color or sound of them, playing cheesy music the background, then pushing them farther away, drawing those full color images of success closer, training your mind to associate thinking negatively with the desire to shift into something more positive.
2. Visualized Steps
This is something optionally that I’ve found of great use when dealing with changing personal habits of all kinds whether they are just ingrained in the body or whether its a negative mental pattern that is engraved in my consciousness. We were talking a little earlier about how easy it is to visualize yourself successful in say five years time or something, but when you wake up tomorrow taking that first step in the face of all the negative habitual patterns you’ve built up daily can be nearly impossible. So my remedy for this kind of thing is to spend a little time after you have doing some intentional visualization to visualize clearly, in color, in third and first person, not just what success will look like for you in five years time, or what its going to look like when you’ve already succeeded but also what successful decisions you’ll be making just tomorrow when you wake up and start your day. See yourself making those first steps with the deep intention of creating new patterns and new habits for yourself and remind yourself how amazing its going to feel when all that discipline pays off. Make it a new goal to break down the big goals and single task on each one of those steps. Its not about making it all in one day, its about discovering the deep capacity for sustained change inside yourself when you give up those old belief patterns.
3. Follow Through
Like all the change technology we talk about on the blog, its only effective with the right attitude and follow through. No magic hat trick is by itself going to be sufficient enough to undue countless years of negative thinking… unless you yourself have made the clear decision to be done with it… and under no condition allow yourself to ever look back on those limiting beliefs…. you will never manage to accomplish the things you wish to achieve in the time you have. If you decide for yourself that you will accomplish your goals no matter what, and only use these ideas as far as they solidify your resolve on that path, you can’t go wrong.
Breaking down the entire process of visualization like this into both the practice of seeing your end goal, and visualizing the steps between here and there as individual goals in and of themselves to rehearse will give an added advantage to your visualization practice and help you start to see success right now…before it even happens.
There is something to being genuinely happy. It’s a feeling, but its also a pair of lenses that color the world to contented eyes. Some days I dive right out of bed. My feet skid as I fill my coffee cup and burst out the door, challenging the day to hit me with the best it’s got. There are other mornings when I meet the sun with glum acceptance. Sometimes we really have to make a conscious effort to get up and have a freaking awesome day.
What do we actually do to make that happen. What do we tell ourselves to get over out of that rut. There are a host of subtle and not so subtle cues our bodies and minds will take heed of. Cues we can use to change a negative set of physiological and emotional sensations positive.
The problem, and solution is the dualistic nature of being a conscious being. When we are unhappy and talk ourselves into a better mood, who did we talk to and who did the talking, and which place wanted to be happy, and which area was slowly convinced out of the doldrums of depression.
I’m not going down the neurological/neurochemical road. There are plenty of studies on serotonin, dopamine, even vitamin D and omega threes and their respective effects on our mind and mood. I also don’t want to go into the philosophical who’s who of the whole duality paradox.
Rather, I wanted to talk about the techniques and outlook I use to stay in a positive perspective. That’s not to say, wear a stupid grin all day as everything around me falls apart. I’m not talking about denial and acceptance of bad situations or passivity. A positive outlook might not always mean gleeful, but it does mean forward thinking as opposed to forlorn.
First of all we all have crappy days from time to time.
At least we may wake up that way. Once the first tentative toe ventures out of bed we have to make a choice. It seems cliche to say focus on the positive. And it’s not constructive to ignore the negative. When we find ourselves in a situation that makes us unhappy, the key is to focus on the fact there is always an exit, an escape route. The simple act of looking for and discovering the exit, that inevitably exists, is a constructive and enjoyable process. This might start as a simple goal, the idea will grow in our minds. In its abstract state it can be hard to keep it in focus.
I am not an artist by nature. Making my hand produce the shapes and forms I envision in my mind is something I have never really mastered, or even become passable proficient. When I do create art it is often to give shape to an abstract goal or aspiration I have rolled over and over in my head with out a solution presenting itself. I create an image to concisely represent what I want to express or achieve. Focusing on the image allows my brain to find new ways to think about the situation. I can build on the idea conceptually instead of logically, unhindered by what I think I know.
Our earliest ancestors may well have used this
technique to gain confidence before their daily trials
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Give your escape route an image, be it a new job; apartment; direction, something you can call on to invoke a positive perspective. Make sure the ideograph is something solid you can keep clear in your mind. Sketch it roughly from time to time. Add to your image as your idea grows. I like to fill mine with symbolic imagery. Maybe a thorn bush to represent adversity, or a mountain peak as a representation of a goal I want to attain. Feel free to be more creative, or cornier, whatever works for you, that’s the important thing. These images are yours, you don’t necessarily have to display them, they can even exist solely in your mind and have no physical state. They just have to be strong enough and clear enough to be useful to you.
This is not a Secret
There is nothing magical about this image, nor is there anything metaphysical about the intention that will bring you closer to your goal. There is, however the real effect of conscious intent spurring actions that moves one towards an aspiration. I can ask the universe for something that I want, but to actually get it, I have to realize that the only component of the cosmos I can count on and control, is me.
Anchoring a nebulous concept or goal to a clear picture allows me to keep and build on an abstract idea in my head. As you work on the image, either in your mind or on paper, the symbols become ingrained and the idea can form in the back of your mind with out being bogged down by details or by our insecurities. As the image becomes clearer and more defined in your mind new avenues and intricacies will become obvious.
Focus on the negative, and let it propel you to your goal
What ever the external source of the unhappiness, there is a solution. The origin of our misery can often be the conscious denial of the obvious way out. It may be the fear looking for and not finding a new job that keeps us in one we hate. The simple fact that the door is right in front of our face makes us hate the job we have all the more. It is the fear of making those tough long term decisions that can create so much of our suffering.
There is no situation our minds led us into that our brains can’t get ourselves out of. Sometimes we have to make a tough decision, sometimes our situation must become more unpleasant for a time before it improves.
The power of an image is that its sums up in our heads an entire, sometime seemingly insurmountable, situation. There is a time and place for logical planning and sober calculation. When you hit a wall in that line of thinking, as we all sometimes do, or when the solution is right in front of us and we have to call upon an inner strength or ingenuity, some abstraction can get us thinking of the situation in a new, positive way, from a more productive perspective.
So after my last post which was decidedly a little anti-tech, I’ve decided to switch it up and offer a couple useful pieces of NLP knowledge that I use to keep my state positive and happy. I shouldn’t have to remind everyone though that over dependence on this kind of thing is not healthy at all. This sort of technique is powerful and does produce immediate changes, but changing your state is only part of the process. The real insight comes when you start to realize that any changes you make could have been made anyway with no technique at all, the technique gives you something to use and believe in until the desired state is only a thought a way.
For example, I once read a story by a guy who was notoriously good at meeting women. He said that in high school he had been terrible and lacked any inkling of social intelligence. Needless to say, his love-life was non existent. When he started to learn a few interesting lines or some good jokes to open up conversations at bars, he thought it was kind of tacky to have a canned introduction, but they gave him something to say so he wouldn’t end up standing there shuffling his toes looking bored. He eventually found himself doing better and better, able to relax and open up, be confident and meet the kind of people he was interested in. He started to realize that the openers and routines that he used to use weren’t necessary and he could just walk up to a girl and confidently say ‘hello’. The openers weren’t that impressive in and of themselves, it was the confidence they gave him which was making others interested in meeting him.
Using these kinds of NLP techniques is the same way. The change you’re trying to make is really only a thought away, just like the process you go through when you remember something. You don’t need to rub your elbow or say some magic phrase to remember something, just the simple desire to do so and it happens. The process of self change can be just like that when you build up enough reference experiences to realize that change doesn’t have to be hard.
In the meantime getting to the point where you have those reference experiences can be difficult. That’s where these kinds of tools come in. Use them to get where your going then leave them behind once you get there.
That’s where the idea of spatial anchoring is going to really help you. We’ve talked about the notion of anchoring before but in this post I want to focus on anchoring’s relationship to the environment around you. I.E. Spatial Anchoring. Here’s an example:
The Visualization Walk
Find a place where you’ll have five or six feet of floor in front of you and behind you. Standing where you are, close your eyes and imagine a quality of yours just as it is. For instance if your trying to build more confidence, start by imagining a situation where you exhibit the level of confidence you have right now… however much or little that is. Make an effort to see yourself first from the third person, as you imagine you appear to others, then imagine seeing the same situation through your own eyes, in the first person.
Remember to make the picture bright and clear.
Really spend a minute or two feeling this state out. Its not just about seeing the image, its also about getting into the sensations in the body, the sounds, everything. Do whatever it takes to bring this image alive to you.
Now were going to take a step backwards. When you step backwards imagine your confidence decreasing. Think of a particularly un-confident scene from your life. If you have never felt less confident than you do now, make up a scenario that to you would seem a notch down from the situation we imagined at first. Feeling yourself getting less confident as you take a step backwards and notice how easy it is to move into a worse state than the current one. You simply subtract a certain amount of confident qualities from the last step. Adding qualities should be just that easy.
Now take one more step backwards and really get into the worst possible version of the state you’re working on. Imagine yourself at your least confident, least secure, least whatever and really get to know that nasty state. Remind yourself as you imagine it first in third person, then in first, that moving down in state is simple, just as simple as moving up.
Now step forward. Spend a second or two back at this point before taking another step forward and into the base level state we started from. Now I’m sure you can guess what to do next. Take a step forward and into a more confident you, a calmer, healthier, happier you. This is where you have to actually use that third person view to really see what kind of qualities you need to amp up to achieve the state you’re pushing for. Remember how easy it was to turn down certain qualities and imagine yourself worse off, now we’re doing the opposite and spotting those qualities in yourself that your higher You would possess. Maybe she stands a little taller, has better posture, maybe she carries herself with a different calmness and more grace. Maybe he’s reading more and going to bed early, maybe hes out socializing at night and going to bed later, its really up to you but remember to make the picture big and colorful. Make it as real as your mind’s eye can make it.
Once you’ve spent enough time in that higher state, open your eyes and march confidently back into the world. Know that at any time you can turn the space around you into a sliding dimmer switch of resourceful abilities. You can turn the volume up on the qualities that you already possess and become the kind of person you’ve only been dreaming of becoming.
That’s just one possible way to do it. You get the basic idea though. When you use spatial anchoring your teaching your nervous system to associate certain parts of the environment with certain types of states. By stepping backwards first into a lesser or more negative image you’re brain is getting the idea that each state is really just a combination of certain emotions and images in your mind. By changing our relationship to them and exploring how easy it is to make them worse, we also notice how flexible a state is and how easy it can be to imagine ourselves better.
Now go out and do something useful with that resourceful state, don’t just sit there feeling good, go make the world a better place.
I read a fair amount of psychology /self improvement literature and I’ve mentioned before how I consider myself a bit of a self help junkie. However there is a such thing as going overboard with it and a number of gurus and talking heads you’ll come across online are definetley capable of taking the idea of self improvement way too far.
My friend Rob calls it ‘the endless pursuit of tech’. The idea that becoming a better you is not only possible but hey… it should be easy. Tech refers to exactly the kind of stuff I love and the core ideas behind this blog. Think NLP, Tony Buzan, Lucid Dreaming, Meditation, all tools to change your consciousness, change your state, and eventually change your life conditions. Psychological devices that are designed to make the transition easy… like pressing send in your inbox.
Well in this post, I want to talk about something totally different than Tech… I want to talk about the opposite of tech. Good ole’ willpower.
Plain old fashion just doing it. I know it seems almost too simple to even write about.
Today at work I found myself engaging in an ancient piece of human communication technology called ‘talk radio’. Just one minute of talk radio commercials will hammer it into your head how much of a million dollar industry self improvement tech has really become. There’s an easy way to do everything now a days. There’s an easy way to loose weight, to become a millionaire, get out of debt, meet women. There is a special little gimmick around every corner that offers you the magic cure. Are there easier answers out there? or is this kind of marketing just creating the impression in alot of peoples minds that self improvement techniques are all bunk and the only people who succeed are those with success in their genes?
I’m afraid the answer, like many answers in life, is neither black or white. There is alot of great techniques out there, hopefully you’ve already read about some of them here on the site, but what about the no-technique approach? What if for some of us… the reliance on ideas and philosophies about HOW to “do it” is the very thing that keeps us from the simple doing of it.
Many people thinking having information is a good thing. having techniques means your equipped. You hear therapists and self help gurus of all shades saying things like ‘ you need to understand your problem clearly, you need to become aware of the situation, visualize success, change your modalities’ all great advice, for certain things and certian people. But here are strong cases that occur in real life, and often times having a knowledge of different change modalities like NLP or something will obscure the clarity of purpose a person has about reaching a goal, when they are waiting until they feel like it to make that next leap.
Over thinking can occur.
One of the important aspects of living the life of constant improvement is being able to push yourself to make an attempt even when you have a very slim chance of success.
You’re building the Do It habit.
The Do It habit is basically the simplest form of self improvement philosophy ever.
Most of us at some point or another do make a decision to do something different with our lives. Perhaps we’re a bit over weight, maybe we’re in debt, whatever it is… we decide one night and emphatically declare to ourselves that we are going to make a change now. How often do we make that first decision under the influence of strong emotions? How often do you wake up the next day to begin your new habit or your new pattern and find that the subsequent individual choices you have to make after the emotional honey moon wears off is part of the challenge?
Its easy to commit to quitting smoking when your aunt gets emphezema. But a week or two down the road when your work buddies are stepping outside to smoke, those neural pathways will light right back up. The emotional state that made your decision to quit so clear now seems hazy… and its not such a big deal if you don’t stick to it… or just have one… you can always start again tomorrow…
Discipline in certain circles has a muddied meaning it’s started to aquire alot of negative associations with it. There’s a growing idea that a person can only conquer a fear by getting over that fear mentally first. Or a person can achieve a goal only by visually believing that they can do it. The do it habit is way different in this respect.
Its about doing it even when you don’t think you can, and even when you don’t feel like it.
Out of the comfort zone and into the sky.
When you start on day one of any new goal or task its easy to get daunted thinking about all the decisions that your going to have to make a head of you. If your starting to hit the gym and get in better shape then you know its not just about making the initial decision to sign up, but making the decision every single day to put one foot in front of the other and go… whether you feel like it or not. You won’t get your perfect body in the first visit… but what you do get is a positive reference experience.
The more you see yourself doing what you want to be doing, the more you believe in your ability to do it. It never occurs to classically trained pianists from a very early age how amazing their skills are because they have no reference experience to what its like to NOT be good at playing piano.
Likewise many people who begin a new habit, or try to break an old reoccuring fear will have only negative reference experiences at first and its important to force yourself, against your own comfort, in order to achieve that first taste of success. Momentum is the key word here… like attracts like. But the only way to get out of a really serious funk is to stop perpetuating the idea that your failing… force yourself to take one step in the right direction every day. Eventually it will become so easy you won’t even need to think about it anymore… goals will accomplish themselves, all you need to do is prove you’re worthy of the challenges and just do it.
Related reading on the web:
Just Do It – another post with some tips for doing it. Remember the key is action without over-thinking though! Self Acceptance Vs. Self Growth – A great post by Steve Pavlina about the line between accepting yourself for who you are and pushing yourself to new levels of growth. Pushing yourself to the Limit – The story of a man who pushed himself physically and mentally to run his first triathlon with only 32 days of training.
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