Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

Today I’m going to give you 7 simple steps to increase your sense of being able to do things, and dissipate what’s holding you back. For subscribers to my list, this month’s free resource is an audio version of the steps, and I’ll send you a separate email about how to download it. (You can join my free resources list here.)

“I’m in two minds about whether I can do that.”

“I’ve half a mind to do something about it.”

Do you use these phrases? Do you ever go to do something challenging and feel an internal conflict, as if part of you believes you can and part of you is convinced that you can’t? Does it hold you back from doing things you would really, really love to do?

This is completely normal (or at least usual). We all feel it sometimes. Just yesterday I looked at several opportunities that could help me grow my business and thought, “Nah, I can’t do that.”

Here’s why we think that way.

Our inner Clydesdale still thinks we’re little

photo credit: jemsweb
Here’s how you train a Clydesdale. Clydesdales are enormous horses, far stronger than even the strongest man. But if you pick them up a lot when they’re little, you train them to believe that you are stronger than they are, and they keep believing it deep in their placid horse brains – even when it’s no longer true.

We spend most of our first few years of life – up to the early school years – pretty much believing whatever we’re told. We don’t have a lot of ability, at that age, to interpret or analyse the world. We don’t have the knowledge, and we don’t have the skills. So we rely on what other people, especially our parents, tell us is true.

Unfortunately, even the best parents will occasionally (and the worst parents will constantly) tell us that we’re not good enough or we can’t do things. And, in fact, there are a lot of things that a child can’t do.

But, just like the Clydesdales, we retain a vague impression that we can’t do things into adulthood.

Stacking up the evidence

photo credit: tanakawho
One of the key ways that our minds group things is by emotion. If you’re depressed, for example, you’re more likely to remember sad events, while if you’re happy, you’re more likely to remember happy events. Psychologists call this “state-specific memory”.

Because you will always, inevitably, have a stack of experiences around the theme “Can’t do this”, every time you find something you can’t do, you add it to that stack.

Every time you succeed, every time you can do something, that memory goes into a different stack, because it’s connected with a different emotion. The stacks build up in parallel, never communicating, because there is no bridge between them.

And when the situation arises that poses the question “Can I do this?”, both answers are there. You’re in two minds. On the one hand, you have all kinds of experiences saying you can’t do things. On the other hand, you have all kinds of experiences saying that you can. Whichever one shouts louder – whichever stack is higher, or whichever one can find more similarities with the current situation and the ones it has stored – will tend to win out.

Collapsing the stacks

I said a moment ago that these stacks don’t naturally connect, because they don’t share an emotion (even though they come up out of your deep mind into your consciousness at the same time, hooked by the same situation).

What your consciousness can do, though, is deliberately create a connection. Neuro-linguistic programming talks about this as “collapsing the anchors”. I’m going to say “collapsing the stacks”, to keep the same image going. You could imagine that the two stacks are piles of evidence, documents and photographs, stacked up on one side or the other of the case. Your consciousness is the judge. It’s going to bring all the evidence together into one coherent view of reality.

Here’s today’s simple 7-step exercise.

1. Hold out your hands in front of you, palms pointing up.

2. Let all the thoughts and feelings about “I can’t do it” flow from your head down your arm and stack up on one hand. Sit with that until you’ve got the stack, all those photos and documents, all those memories, sitting there on your hand.

3. Now on the other hand stack up all the evidence that you can do things. Think of all your successes, all your growth points, all the times you did things well. Let those photos and documents stack up on that other hand.

4. Balance the evidence. Move your hands in a weighing motion, and feel how the hand with “I can’t” is getting lighter and lighter, and the hand with “I can” is getting heavier and heavier. It’s as if all the old evidence is shrinking and even evaporating, those old documents and photos curling up and shrivelling and fading, so that hand is getting lighter and lighter. And at the same time, the other hand, the “I can” hand, is getting heavier and heavier, as all those documents and photos become clearer and more vivid and carry more and more weight.

5. And now the “I can’t” hand is getting really light as all of that evidence just fades into mist and smoke and ash and is blown away by the wind.

6. Now bring the two hands together. You need both hands because the stack of evidence that you can do things is just getting so heavy, your arm is being pushed and dragged down by the weight of it, and you need to use both hands.

7. And now complete the image by letting all of that evidence flow back up and stack itself up inside your head, neatly stacked, easily accessible any time a situation comes up where you’re deciding whether you can do something and meet a challenge that presents itself to you.

Once again, subscribers to my mailing list get an audio talkthrough of this technique as this month’s free resource. If you’re not on the mailing list, enter your email address here now and (during September 2010) there’ll be a link on the Welcome email for you to download the audio track. I give a different free resource every month, and there’s an immediate bonus for signing up as well, plus you get all my blog posts and occasional special deals on my courses and other material. It’s well worthwhile.