One of the big advantages to being an active life coach is that you get to see the resistance and blind spots of a lot of people every day and you can’t help but realize over time that you have the same ones. One of the biggest problems that people struggle with is programming their own minds with limiting beliefs that prevent them from achieving what they truly want in life AND not ever being aware that they are doing it. I call it “walking a path” and so many people walk a path that they don’t really want to be on without ever being aware that they are walking it.

Listen to the conversations around you sometime and you will quickly be able to see it in the language that people use when they talk about themselves:

• I am really good at starting things but I don’t ever follow through on stuff.
• My dad was the same way, I guess that’s where I get it.
• I have been clumsy my whole life, it’s just who I am.
• I am just not a good at organization

These are lies that we have told ourselves so long that they become like a nice worn path thru the woods to grandma’s house….we walk them without ever considering that there may be a better way to get to grandma’s.

The first time you walk thru the woods you don’t create a nice worn path…you have to clear out some underbrush and weeds but if you walk the same path long enough if becomes nice and clear and easy to walk, likewise, our brain will build additional neural pathways to make it easier and more efficient to have a thought if we think it repeatedly.

So if we know that our brain likes to walk clear paths and we know that it is capable of building new paths how can we use that information to make our lives better? We just have to walk the new path long enough until it becomes comfortable AND stop walking the old path so that it grows up and is harder to walk!

Let’s look at a practical example. You constantly tell yourself you aren’t a morning person and consequently you find it difficult to get up and get going in the morning, based on reading this you decide that you aren’t going to walk that path anymore and you are going to build a new path. First, every time you hear yourself say that you aren’t a morning person you stop and correct yourself. You write an affirmation that goes something like, “I wake up energized and refreshed, anxious to get the day started.” And you read it to yourself outloud ten times a day. You begin to describe yourself as a morning person and soon you begin to believe it. More amazing than beginning to believe it you will truly become a morning person and wonder why you ever didn’t like them.

Many people who read this will discount the power of overcoming your limiting beliefs. They will tell themselves that this doesn’t work enough times that it will be their path, some will open their minds to the possibilities of a new way and they will reap the benefit of this truth. The naysayers will say that they were just lucky or attribute their new found joy to circumstance or connections. Those who learn to overcome their limiting beliefs will know they have learned a truth that gives them an advantage and they will learn to apply it in all areas of their life.

It’s not a bunch of new age psycho babble, it is pragmatic advice that is backed up by neuroscience. Change the way you think and it will change your behavior, change your behavior and it will change your results, change your results and it will change your joy. Enjoy your path finding!

“Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives. The vision of your true destiny does not reside within the blinkered outlook of the naysayers and the doom prophets. Judge not by their words, but accept advice based on the evidence of actual results. Do not be surprised should you find a complete absence of anything mystical or miraculous in the manifested reality of those who are so eager to advise you. Friends and family who suffer the lack of abundance, joy, love, fulfillment and prosperity in their own lives really have no business imposing their self-limiting beliefs on your reality experience.” ? Anthon St. Maarten

Article from Chuck Bauman Lifeonaire Coach who will be teaching at the 3 Day Lifeonaire Retreat in Kansas City the first week in March.