Stress is so common now that there is an American Institute of Stress. Unfortunate. I read a statistic recently that 75-90% of all visits to a primary care doctor is due to stress. What is stress?
Essentially it is an emotional dis-ease. It is a chronic feeling of overwhelm, insecurity and feeling out of control in some way. It is a perception based in danger or threat. And the good news is, it is by far psychological. I say “good” in that if you learn how to change your mindset, you can change your level of stress.
I know from first hand experience. It’s not even how much you do, as it is how you are thinking ABOUT what you are doing. It is generally not due to a real physical threat, only one in your imagination.
If you set your intention to change, and find someone, like me, who understands how to consciously calm down your brain, and reframe the way you perceive life, you can shift your reality from one based in fear, dread and unhappiness to one that is expansive, abundant and out right peaceful. Does it take effort?
Yes, and probably not as much as you think. However I will say, if you think you can change your life without any determination or commitment, you are just going to continue to stress yourself out.
Eliminating stress is really an inside job. Once you change your inner reality, the outer will just line up – it’s magical how that happens.
Is your Mindset dialed to wealth or debt? Success, or fear of failure? It matters to your money where you keep your focus as it will determine what actions you will take unconsciously. For example, most people want to have plenty of money even if the say otherwise. How do I know? As Emerson said (paraphrased),
“I can’t hear what you say because what you do speaks so loudly”
If someone is playing the lottery or working multiple jobs, they have a value placed on obtaining more money for whatever the reason. Considering the level of consumerism and debt in this country, for many people, it is not just to survive that they are working and getting in debt.
Now here is the conflict. Whatever the dominant belief or “vibe” that you put out to the universe will be reflected back to you. The stronger vibration wins. What I mean is, once you realize that your situation and circumstances are reflecting what you feel or believe instead of what you “think” you want, you can begin to see what is really going on. It all boils down again to learning how to manage your own thoughts and feelings, which like anything else, becomes easier once you take the time to learn how to do it.
Now take for example, this issue of focus. You may be an entrepreneur or professional and you want financial success. If you keep talking about how bad things are, or regretting previous decisions, or focusing on your debt, you are giving your energy and attention to this and this will stick like glue to you until you stop it.
Or, if you think that money is bad, or rich people are evil, or that money and spirituality don’t mix and you consider yourself “spiritual”, then you will have inner turmoil over having money. Then there are beliefs such as what could have been passed down through religion or those around you.
What is mindset? Think of it as a radio station that has a frequency that you must dial into. Your mind set tends to be set to a certain way of thinking and keeps bringing the results in your life. It has to do with perception.
If you want to expand the vision for your life, your have to be willing to turn the station from where you are to where you want to find yourself. You have to be willing to open your mind and consider new possibilities.
Or else how are you going to even begin to see a new vision, you keep looking at the old stuff around you, which is yesterday’s vision. So what are the ingredients to mindset? Thought, emotions and feelings. This trio forms the basis of your beliefs, and beliefs are just thoughts and feelings that you keep reinforcing through your perception, HOW you perceive the world.
It is your nervous system’s job, which includes your brain, to make you right and keep looking for and finding what you program yourself to believe by the thoughts, feelings and emotions you experience.
Most of this is done unconsciously, so if you want to change your dial, you have to learn how to consciously switch the dial. Now while this is not necessarily a quick fix, it just depends on your willingness to grow.
If you are looking for the magic pill, you will not find it here, yet, change does not have to take a long time or be a long, drawn out process. That is, if you are willing to be open-minded and develop some discipline along the way.
One of the first steps would be a willingness to change.
1. Set Intention to change
2. Start to see responsibility as the “ability to respond” instead of a dirty word
3. Realize that much of what we are conditioned to think about the world is what is keeping us from living empowered lives. Your life is a reflection of your beliefs. So you have to open your mind to think new thoughts for new results.
Mindset can make you or break you in business and in life in general. In general, I think it is safe to say that mindset rules your life. When I say mindset, I am referring to your belief (thoughts and feelings) and whether or not you are open-minded or stuck on robotic behavior.
Of course, if you keep doing things the same way, you will keep getting the same outcomes. I’m not finished reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, so I want to reserved my full opinion, but so far, I’m not clear if he is saying the we are just victims of circumstances or if the Universe plays dice with the lives of people – what?
I don’t see it this way at all, and I fully believe that there are no coincidences. While being given extra advantages and being born during a certain era affords unique opportunities, whether or not we take advantages of these opportunities is a choice we make based on our mindset.
Our way of looking at life will determine what we see. In the book, Gladwell references a sociologist by the name of Robert Merton who coined a term called the “Matthew Effect” which references the book of Matthew in the Bible chapter 25 and verse 29 which is as follows:
“For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him”.
When I was a kid I use to take this literally and think that somehow it was not fair or that it was saying, “the rich get richer and the poor gets poorer”. This is what I was taught. I don’t see it this way now at all.
My understanding of Merton’s take on it was that those who are already prominent in their status are more likely to get more attention than those who may be just as capable, but less recognized. These different interpretations are all examples of HOW we look at something determines our interpretation and application to our lives.
MY take on it these days is this: If you have an abundant mindset and you are not fear driven, but feel that you have plenty and expect to multiply instead of contract, you will put out to the universe a “vibe” to attract more.
If on the other hand you are afraid and worry about losing what you have all the time, you build a lack consciousness and lack begets more lack. When you read the parable to this conclusion in the Bible, you will see that the servant you had less and “was afraid” of losing his little, not only lost it, but experience torment as well (I would say anxiety and worry are forms of torment alright).
Here’s my overall point – focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want. I use to talk about what I didn’t like, didn’t have or repeat the problem on the table over and over in conversation. Then I finally realized one day that the more I talked about it, the worse I felt.
Empowerment for me is about being able to do, be or have what I consciously choose to experience in my life, including positively impacting my world. It’s about being able to create what I want instead of floundering or feeling like a hapless victim, waiting for the next wave of situations and circumstances to “make” me unhappy.
I figured out a long time ago that if I have to wait for someone else or some circumstance to make me happy, I would probably live and die first. So, I decided, to turn my focus, a long time ago, to finding the path that could take me to my destiny. I think that there is fate, and then there is destiny.
Our destiny is paved with love, joy and peace – regardless of outer circumstances. Our fate is what gets played out based on genetics, karma, childhood experiences and the hand-me-down knowledge that we use in our life without questioning it. My fate was not getting me what I wanted, in fact I did not feel very empowered to go in the directions of my dreams and certainly I did not see then how to make it a reality.
One thing I have discovered is that when there are blind spots in the way, even if someone hands you the treasure map, you still will fall into a ditch and not find the goods. This is what a WHOLE lot of people (I know from my own past personal experience as well), do every single day. Instead of using wisdom and courage to eliminate these blind spots, we somehow think that we can live on a whole new higher level and still keep our bad habits and low self-images running rampant through our minds.
I saw again a movie called “The Kid” with Bruce Willis. I first saw this movie ten years ago and I rented it to watch with my husband last week. This is a great movie to give you an example of how our wounded “inner child” can run our lives in so many ways.
Quantum Physics can substantiate that everything is energy – yes EVERYTHING. This includes you! Now about ten years ago, when I was in a different place, if someone started talking about energy, the judgment would be that it was “woo-woo” or “new age” (this is such a subjective term).
It was said in a spooky negative way in the circle of people that I knew then. Even now, there are still those who think that energy is something spooky or “other worldly”.
The fact is, you don’t know what you don’t know. This is why we as humans only use about 90% of our brains capacity; we are afraid of looking at or learning about anything new that does not neatly fit into our existing paradigm!
I was talking to someone recently who made this comment about us not using our brain, and when I shared with him some of the most recent findings in neuroscience, you can probably guess what his rather typical response was – “I don’t know if I can believe that”. This is so common.
Stress is so common now that there is an American Institute of Stress. Unfortunate. I read a statistic recently that 75-90% of all visits to a primary care doctor is due to stress. What is stress?
Quantum Physics can substantiate that everything is energy – yes EVERYTHING. This includes you! Now about ten years ago, when I was in a different place, if someone started talking about energy, the judgment would be that it was “woo-woo” or “new age” (this is such a subjective term).
