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.
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