The True You

Discovering Your Own Way to Success and Happiness by Uncovering Your Authentic Self and Building Remarkable Relationships With Others

Emma J. Bell

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781630477639
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

The True You is a step-by-step system that will enable you to feel calm, confident and empowered - every day. Development coach Emma Bell shows you how to discard your old programming, uncover who you are authentically, and develop a powerfully positive way of seeing yourself and your potential before adopting the transformational habits that lead to lifelong success and happiness through a unique four-step system.

PART ONE

LEADING THE RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF

CHAPTER 1

THE PINBALL IN THE MACHINE

“Our life is what our thoughts make of it.”

—Marcus Aurelius

Recognizing Your Own Thoughts and Thought Patterns

What is Thinking?

According to a 2010 Harvard research paper, our minds are lost in thought, on average, 47 percent of the time.¹ That means that we are lost in our thinking for almost half of our lifetime—and we are not even aware of it! We think about what happened in the past, what might happen in the future, what he might be thinking, whether it’s raining outside and that you probably shouldn’t have said what you did to your boss. We have a constant running internal commentary going on in our minds: judging, reliving, worrying, lambasting, rehearsing, self-deprecating. In fact, research has also shown that 65 percent of our thoughts are negative and/or redundant, so not only are we lost in thought, we are also wasting our time and making ourselves feel bad in the bargain!² As the researchers from Harvard said, “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”³

What Are Thought Patterns?

It’s been rumored that we have between 60,000 and 70,000 thoughts per day, though those figures do vary. However, the figure that is consistently accepted is that 90 percent of the thoughts that you have today will be the same as the thoughts that you had yesterday.⁴ If we stick to a figure of 60,000 thoughts per day, then you are going to have 54,000 thoughts tomorrow that are the same as the ones that you have today. To put it another way, 90 percent of the stories you tell yourself today will be the same as the stories you told yourself yesterday. Just think about that for a second—and you may well think about it tomorrow and the day after that too! These repetitious thoughts are called thinking patterns and arise from our core beliefs— those things we believe to be true about ourselves and the world around us. We are often not consciously aware of what our specific core beliefs are until we start to notice the repeated thoughts that arise in response to certain situations that we are faced with. Until we consciously question whether that thinking is really true or is serving in our growth, we will stick rigidly to it, and it will be the “filter” through which we assess our experiences.

What Thoughts Do You “Dwell On” and Follow Most Frequently?

Once you start to notice the content of the running commentary in your mind, you will begin to identify the thinking patterns that tend to take up the most space. For example, whenever you are facing a challenge such as delivering a presentation or meeting a group of new people, your internal commentary will take off in a particular direction, and your emotions—and normally the end result—will neatly follow. In the case of a presentation, your thoughts may be fear based—fear of failure by boring the audience, “drying up” or being unable to answer a question posed by a member of the audience. Every time you contemplate preparing for the presentation, that commentary will run and gather momentum. That will probably lead to procrastination and a last minute, rushed preparation of the presentation. You know you haven’t done your best in the preparation and that makes the prospect of delivering it even more terrifying. Sweaty palms, dry mouth, “sponge brain” are the natural physiological responses to your thinking as your stand up in front of your audience in “fight or flight” mode.

If you find that you feel constantly stressed about your workload (at home and at work), you can bet that there is a thinking pattern that causes you to rehearse the same thought-emotion cycle every time you contemplate what you have to get through. You may struggle sticking with diets or fitness regimes, and again, there will be a thinking pattern sitting behind that inner battle that keeps you stuck in the cycle of “try-struggle-fail-what’s the point?” Or perhaps you worry about what other people are thinking of you and often feel self-conscious when in the company of others, concerned that what you say will evoke negative judgments. You may constantly strive for perfection because only the best is good enough. Perhaps you aim low because of fear of failure. Whatever your particular worry, fear or concern, you can be sure that, through your thinking, you are cultivating its continued hold over you. Your thoughts are taking you in precisely the direction that you would least choose to follow if you felt that you were in complete control, if you felt that you could forge a more constructive path by leading your thinking rather than your thinking leading you, and therefore by leading a relationship with yourself.

The Leading Nature of Our Thinking—and Our Tendency to Blindly Follow

Thoughts are neurons that string into place and create the “chemical” of emotion. Every time you have a thought, in addition to making neurotransmitters, your brain also makes another chemical called a neuropeptide that sends a message to your body. Your body then reacts by having a feeling. The brain picks up that the body is having a feeling and so generates another thought matched directly to that feeling. That will produce more of the same chemical messages that allow you to think the way you were just feeling. This could give rise to a vicious cycle, or a virtuous cycle depending on how empowering or otherwise the originating thought was. If you think of something neutral, like a cloud, you may find that there’s really no emotion arising as a result of that thought. But leave your mind to its own devices, and it will conjure up a memory of an experience in the past to do with clouds, and within moments, you will be feeling an emotion: joy or sadness, anger or happiness, regret or longing. Our brain is wired that way. Every thought generates an emotion, and that feeling will link to a thought, and so the cycle continues. Before you know it, you’ve been ruminating for eleven minutes on an event from your past while sitting behind the steering wheel of your car and have no recollection of the last three miles of your journey. Does that sound familiar? Your emotions feel as intense as when you first felt them during the experience that you are thinking of. Your physiology, too, has obeyed the command and is sending adrenalin to help you during the imagined imminent “attack.” Most of us go about our daily lives reliving memories from the past or worrying about what will happen in the future, and we keenly feel the emotions that link to those memories or imaginings. Our thoughts lead us, and we blindly follow, relinquishing all control over our emotions and the direction of that moment. As life is simply a series of connected moments, we fail to lead much of the direction that our life is taking.

Common Thinking Patterns

In my coaching practice, I find that the two most common core beliefs that lie behind thinking patterns that lead my clients to more of the same pain they want to avoid are variants of “I am unlovable” and “I am not good enough.” Obviously, my clients do not enter the room, wailing these words—in fact, they are blissfully unaware that they are simply following thinking patterns that keep ensuring the same (unwanted) results. Sometimes, it isn’t necessary for us to explore the core beliefs that are giving rise to the repetitious thinking—simply working on the thinking patterns themselves will achieve remarkable results. On those occasions when it has been appropriate to explore the core belief, naming it has been like “turning a light on,” and realizing the truth of the core belief for the individual—whether one of the two I named above, or another—has been a stark reality. In fact, tears invariably accompany the recognition of the belief and how it has been leading the direction of their lives and their relationships with themselves for decades. In working through the steps of this book, it might be useful to loosely keep in mind the two common core beliefs, just to see if they may be true for you. However, in most cases, it simply isn’t necessary to go to those depths—but rather simply to focus on what thinking patterns you have been following.

So, What Are Yours?

At this stage, it would be unusual for you to have a revelation as to what your thinking patterns are. But I expect that you are starting to listen more consciously to the running commentary in your head and will already be aware of some of the themes that have been “leading” your perception of “who you are” and what you are capable of. The first step is to gently notice what your thoughts are, what pattern or “themes” they follow and to regard them with interest in terms of how often they recur, how you feel when they do and whether they are leading you in a positive or negative direction. Don’t worry about defending the “truthfulness” of them by looking for evidence to support them—your instinct will be to do that, and I would ask you to resist that instinct at all costs.

Where Do Your Thought Patterns Come From?

We Are All in the Same Boat

The way that we are “wired” means that all of us are in the same boat—we follow the lead of our thinking, without thinking, most of the time. In order to build the desire to take the lead in our relationship with ourselves, by leading our thinking, it might help to understand a little about how the brain and mind work and where our existing thought patterns have come from.

The Science Bit

First of all, let’s look at some of the mechanics of the brain. The limbic system is the part of the brain that carries out three key functions: sensing emotion, making and storing memories and generating arousal. The limbic system could be described as the “feeling and reacting brain” which is interposed between the “thinking brain” and the output mechanisms of the nervous system. The two amygdalae in our brain assist in the production of memories—particularly as they relate to emotional events and emergencies—the development of the fear emotion and also play a major role in pleasure and sexual arousal. The amygdalae are also responsible for selecting which memories are stored and where—based on how huge an emotional response a particular event evokes.

Somewhere between 1 and 5 percent of our brain’s processing power is used by our conscious mind. The remainder—up to 99 percent—is used by our subconscious, unconscious, autonomic and automatic systems. The automatic and autonomic systems mean that we don’t consciously have to think about how to breathe, make our heart beat or digest our food; all that is done on automatic pilot. The greatest part of our brain is occupied by our subconscious mind, and studies have consistently shown that most of our decisions, actions, emotions and behaviors are generated by the 95 percent or so of our brain activity that is beyond our conscious awareness—that means that at least 95 percent of our life is driven by the programming in our subconscious mind. The power of our subconscious is around a million times greater than our conscious mind, and our brains begin to prepare for action just over a third of a second before we consciously decide to act. Accordingly, even when we “think” we are conscious, it’s our subconscious mind that is actually making our decisions for us.

Our brain is a “truth-seeking device”—it is the job of the subconscious to create our reality according to our “internal programming” in order to demonstrate that our current thinking is “true,” and to ignore or rationalize any evidence that might contradict the “story” that we are telling ourselves.

The subconscious mind begins to operate prebirth, while the conscious mind begins its development at around the age of three. We therefore function without the effective “filter” of our conscious mind in our early stages of development. That means that our subconscious mind develops in the absence of our mature and conscious mind; and therefore, our ability to qualify or rationalize negative programming is absent during those early years, including during our “emotional development window.”

Our conscious mind controls our voluntary functions but is able to do only one thing at a time. If you want to carry out two activities simultaneously, then that is only possible when one of them is handed over to the subconscious mind while you focus consciously on carrying out the other. Activities such as driving a car become effortless only because the elements of that activity are relegated to our subconscious mind. An exercise such as simultaneously rubbing your stomach and patting your head is only possible if you relegate one action to your subconscious mind. To put it another way, you start rubbing your stomach and then stop consciously thinking about that action before you start patting your head. I bet you’re trying it now!

The way we are “wired” is to develop this tremendous resource, called our subconscious mind, that takes all the effort out of life by “ritualizing” thinking and doing habits so that we don’t have to trouble our conscious mind with focusing on those repetitive thoughts about who we are and what we are capable of, or tasks such as tying our shoelaces. The downside (and it’s a huge one) is that when we ritualize thinking that is disempowering, we are blissfully unaware that it’s even there—holding us back—while also preventing us from “waking up” and leading a relationship with ourselves by engaging our conscious mind.

The Development Process

As children, our brains begin as a “jumble of neurons.” Every input from each of the five senses then starts to form “programs” in our brain. It’s critical that these programs are established at the appropriate stage of development, because there is a “time window” for doing so; after the window closes, programming limits are set up that are difficult to overcome. While some of the neurons have already been hardwired by the genes fertilized in the egg, they are related to the breathing, heartbeat and reflex functions. It’s the trillions and trillions of remaining neurons that are like unprogrammed software with infinite potential. If the neurons are used, then they become integrated into the circuitry of the brain; but if they are not used, they may die. It is the experiences of your childhood that determine which neurons are used, just like a programmer reconfigures the circuits on a computer. The experiences that you have had as a child determine whether you grow up to be confident or shy, expressive or dull, intelligent or otherwise.⁵

Our early experiences therefore significantly determine how we “turn out,” depending on what stimuli we have been exposed to—or not exposed to—within the relevant development “window.” By the age of six, we have learned how to seek approval and adapt our behavior in certain circumstances as part of our subconscious conditioning. We have already received thousands of messages, spoken and unspoken, which our subconscious mind has absorbed literally without the benefit of rational processing. In short, as a result of our development process, we have acquired thinking patterns, conditioned reflexes and concepts relating to ourselves and to our environment that we are not consciously aware of.

Thinking patterns are formed by a series of neurons establishing a chain set up in our brain tissue. That chain represents a “shortcut” so that an association is formed effortlessly between an event and a conclusion: “Unless I am perfect, I am unlovable” or “I am not good enough” are examples of the core beliefs that can arise as a consequence of the associations that have been formed. Because many of our core beliefs are programmed at an early age, we are not consciously aware of them.

The result of all this is that, as adults, we are likely to have many negative thinking patterns in our subconscious mind that were developed prior to our twentieth birthday. Those may have been planted unwittingly by well-meaning parents, caregivers, relatives, teachers or friends, or by a childhood rejection or a thoughtless threat that made us feel exceptionally vulnerable. For example, if you were told throughout your childhood that you were a capable, lovable individual, and you received positive emotional signals and were highly attuned during your emotional develo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: Leading the Relationship with Yourself
• Part Two: Leading the Relationship with Others
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Notes