(Note: The following is an excerpt from my book, What Color Is Your Sky? which was taken from the chapter titled: Honor Your Soul)
It is hard to think positively about success if you perceive it as adding more obligations to your already incredibly busy life. Indeed, you have to think about debts, your boss (and maybe even your boss’s boss), the economy, the polluted world, the uncertain future, your kids, your in-laws, the occasional illness, your frustration, your fatigue, your weight, whether you need more sleep or exercise or to stop smoking, dealing with email at work, attending countless meetings, finding ways to pay your bills, improving intimate relationships, watching that next episode on TV—the list goes on.
Added to that are our mental footprints of the past: limiting beliefs, past wounds, traumas, fears, the negative experiences that are hard to put behind us. Then add to that the imprints of our social status and upbringing: our culture, the good and the bad. And, worse, add to that all the people who will put down your new ideas, the naysayers you will have to learn to ignore.
Quieting the Mind is the first step to overcome our low self-confidence
With all this weighing on you, it seems difficult to even envision going further and dreaming, doesn’t it? But it’s really not. You need to quiet that miraculous mind of yours that lives in the past or the future, instead of the present. Before revealing your dreams, before defining success, we need this mind to focus on nothing. How can one dream without restraint when looking through such clouds? The dream would be limited to dealing with obstacles and tainted by all this neurotic brain activity.
Quieting our own minds is imperative to clarify our true aspirations, and to understand the self-imposed sabotaging mechanisms at the root of our low self-confidence. Quieting the mind is the first step toward finding our purpose and identifying the values we want to live by. This type of exploration and change is a maturing process. It is not an instant shift. There are no credible overnight recipes or speedy toolkits here.
To succeed in an organized way requires that you learn the needed skills for your journey and that you also get the powerful self-saboteur that is stuck in your cavernous hidden zone under control. This self-saboteur feeds on the unconscious limiting beliefs that operate inside your psyche, whether from the results of life’s traumatic events or indoctrination from our environment.
Surrounding yourself with people who provide you encouragement and well-structured feedback is a great first step. Eliminating conscious or unconscious criticism around you is another significant step.
Keep in mind that this does not replace the deeper psychological work that may be needed, as some dark processes in your psyche might require added time and effort before they can withstand light being shone upon them.
Here are a couple of practices that can help you navigate your way out of the cavern.
The Observing Your Beliefs Practice
Objective: To examine your beliefs and to find out how they impact your success.
End results: You discover your internal mind processes, re- structure your decisions, positively impact your reality from new choices.
Instructions: In your notebook, list three to five beliefs you hold about:
• yourself
• your family
• money
• your close environment (work, social life)
• your work
• your abilities to create success
• the future
For each belief you describe, note whether you perceive this belief as encouraging (mark it with an E) or limiting (mark it with an L).
Now, on a scale from 1 to 10, rate those beliefs, with a 10 being a belief you hold totally true and a 1 being a belief you feel very doubtful about.
Then observe whether this belief originated from you or from somewhere else—was it your choice to believe this or did someone or something impress it upon you?
Ponder what you are learning about yourself. How does this impact your behaviors and your capacity to create your future?
The Quiet the Mind Workshop
Developing one’s emotional intelligence and training one’s ability to be a conscious witness to one’s life is the most powerful combination to discover the magic in your life. Quieting the Mind is one way to achieve this. In my book What Color Is Your Sky? I develop further methods and practices to quiet the mind, anytime, anywhere.
A faster and more powerful way to fully experience this is to attend a workshop out of town and disconnect from your daily hectic life. It makes a HUGE difference. This is not about taking a vacation; this is about distancing yourself from the stress, the pollution, the noise, the intellectual busyness, and the suffering created by your mind.
I invite you to my upcoming workshop Quiet the Mind, a powerful personal exploration into mindfulness, emotional intelligence and falling in love with life again, and applying it to improving both your personal and professional performance.
Click here to find out the details of this potentially life-changing Quiet the Mind workshop.
Are you facing serious transformational challenges in your company? If you are, why not take a look at this case study, or contact me to arrange a quick, no-cost, no-obligation chat about how we can team up. Simply drop me a line at sky@herve.com.
