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.
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.
There’s a been a lot of talking, blogging, etc. recently about hacks and tweaks we can use to get more out of, and have more control over our time and our lives, but I think there’s something to be said for being out of control, sometimes. Not running a muck in the streets, but rather appreciating the times where we don’t have that much sought after control over our time and place.
One example I can think of would be just a week or so ago when I crossed the country to see the Florida side of my family. Flying there to meet them presented an opportunity to abandon the illusion of complete control. Once I began my journey I gave up my control over my time and place. I had made the choices that brought me to that improbable seat, blazing across the sky at a few hundred miles an hour.
But once in the sky I was completely at the will of circumstance. In reality happened much earlier. Upon entering the airport my rights were waved and my control was relinquished. Even earlier than that I was on the shuttle to the airport where my fate was largely dictated by the driver and even to some extent by the state of other drivers around and for miles ahead of us. My helplessness didn’t ever enter into my mind, I just read comfortably and enjoyed the fact I didn’t have to keep my eyes on the road or sky. Even waiting in the airport I felt free, sick of watching news, but I had no obligations, none I could fulfill anyway. I couldn’t really even get any work done.
Certain situations readily allow me to give up that control, and really relax. During my delightful trip I missed a connection and became waylaid in the Atlanta airport, what’s that old joke… “when you die, no matter if you’re going to heaven or hell you still have to go through the Atlanta airport.”, anyway, I had hours and hours to watch cable news and drink coffee before the next connecting flight. I saw a lot of people in a similar situation, some people seemed to be enjoying it as much as I was, others hated it. They paced, pestered the poor gate attendant, made phone calls to loved ones and acquaintances to lament and modify plans, and still got to where ever they were going at the same time the calmer passengers did. Maybe thay had more pressing plans, maybe they were on the run, but most likely they just really WANTED to get to their destination and hated the inconvenience, and loathed not being able to do anything about it.
Here’s a delay much worse than mine.
Relinquishing this power is illuminating, if not even enjoyable. Not enjoyable because I’m a masochist or because I like waiting in lobbies in strange cities, but rather it was an agreeable exercise in giving up control over my time and place to some extent. Being productive means allotting time for work, creativity, family, and yourself. That You time is time to be out of control, to do that responsibly we have to have the rest of our time managed to some extent. I talked about this a bit in “Externalize Your Mind”, being ‘on’ 24/7 is neither healthy nor a productive long term paradigm. There are many other times all though out our day when we don’t have complete self determination, at work, on the road, and if we are at our core uncomfortable with that fact, we are crippled in our efforts to enjoy and get the most out of life.
When to give in:
When things are automated. If the gears are running, ie. the wing are being de-iced or what have you, experts are on the job. Automation can also refer to when your plan is made, hatched, and you could sit, sweat and tweak it, or you can let it go. Another example is when you have that goal in your mind, the seeds have been planted, and all you can do is stay on course and watch what happens. Trust the actions and choices you have made to bring you to this point. You can evaluate them, but sweating over them is useless.
Traps:
The Illusions of Imprisonment – Sometimes we think we have no control when in reality we have willfully given up that power. If one hates their job or where they live and consider themselves “stuck”, they are usually free to go and improve their situation at will, but are to afraid to leave their self-constructed prison, unless it really is prision. The unincarcerated have alot of freedom to un-stick themselves.
This young man is a sad example of theimprisonment illusion, please excuse the harsh language at the end.
False Productivity: Distracting ourselves with the illusion of productivity by doing anything we think might have an effect instead of doing the things that matter. Sometimes when we have no control because we HAVE TO focus on one thing, and I am guilty of this, we do every little thing we can to excercise some control, like the passengers who berate the attendance when no one can get the plane moving any faster.
So when in life do we have any control at all? We have to make the decision to get out of bed. There is no easier way to do that then when we can being present in your moment and enjoying it. In one way or another we are all stuck in our moment and when can realize that every moment is equally important we can accept our time and place not as compulsory but rather the result of a string of conscious choices we have made and become ok with having made them.
Time for a little update on my sleep suggestion experiments that I wrote about in my last post. The last few days have yieled some interesting findings in terms of the potential and the downsides of sleep suggestion. When I say downsides what I really mean is the accidental misuse of our pre-sleep time that leads to negative emotions and beliefs into the next day. Most people are suffering from this kind of negative influence at some point in their lives.
We’ve all had the experience of waking up in the morning and just feeling sort of down without knowing why. Maybe later on when your doing the laundry or some other random chore a dream pops into your head that you remember from the night before and your mood upon waking makes perfect sense. What about the dreams and unconscious emotions that occur during sleep which we don’t consciously remember the next day? That’s why its so important to understand this intermediate state and consciously direct it.
Friday night I went to sleep at the usual time for me and neglected to practice my positive sleep affirmations before dozing off. Instead my mind was reeling over what had happened that day at work and constantly replaying some of the negative feelings I was left with that afternoon. I eventually managed to fall asleep and loe and behold what sort of dreams did I have? dreams about my negative encounters at work.
So I learned a valuable lesson when it comes to the moment before sleep. We either use it, or we let it use us. There is no neutral pattern here. A person can learn to consciously clear their mind out of all thoughts but for those of us who don’t live in a monastery its important to make this white noise less nonsense and more useful.
The moments before sleep at night are ripe with potential to either change our preset beliefs in ourselves or to re-enforce them, which is what I’m afraid most people do.
How many people who complain of sleeplessness at night are thinking about all the awful parts of their day as they fade into the hypnagogic state at night? How many people who wake up unrested in the morning, even after seven or eight hours of sleep are just suffering from the after effects of bad dreams and a restless mind?
In short I’ve learned in the last few days that not using this crucial moment will lead to random negativity building up.
The experiments continue and I will definetely be updating more as I learn more about this process myself. There have already been some interesting stories and comments from everyone about their own experiences with auto suggestion and sleep which I will be getting around to putting online soon. A major hope for the blog here is that it will become something of an information hub where the comments can help spread your ideas to others. So thanks and look forward to part 3 here shortly.
-Chris
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