What’s your story, what is it you’re telling yourself, what are the dominant thoughts?
Where do you default to when not focusing on a task. What is the central theme of your thinking, struggle, ease, lack, abundance, failure, success, joy. Whatever it is will become your experience.

Describe the most enjoyable and adventurous story to yourself and that will be the experience. Set goals that bring those ideas out into the world. Open the mind, read and explore widely, entertain big ideas. Enjoy all the same sorts of successes and failures but this time they are all contributing to something outstanding. One single decision can ripple out into a completely new life, it could happen today! 

“The key to warriorship is not being afraid of who you are”. Chogyam Trungpa. Richard Strozzi-Heckler adds “When we are no longer afraid of who we are, we act from integrity and authenticity “. Two extremely interesting guys converging on the same issue.
This is absolutely huge with a lot of people I work with, and myself as well.

There are many, many layers of conditioning that tell us to stay hidden, to not rock the boat, to maintain the status quo, to not speak up, to put others first, to not value ourselves or our message. Since childhood we’ve made literally hundreds and hundreds of silent agreements over the years that lock us into silence. It’s this that we go up against when we endeavor to step up and activate big plans.

There’s no one holding a gun to our heads saying “stay small, shut your mouth, do what you’re told”, it’s pure conditioning. Remember, what we think we are and what we tell ourselves we are is vastly different to what we actually are. Awareness is always the first step, we are not limited, we have silently agreed at sometime that we are, we are not small, we have silently agreed to be small. It all comes down to our individual conditioning. Become aware of it and understand it’s not who we are it’s who we’ve been trained to be, and being kids when this stuff goes in, we silently agree. Much of the path is de-conditioning or unlearning this learned helplessness, we are so much more than our pasts, the best is yet to come.

Motivation, inspiration, intention, all fantastic energy sources to achieve goals and outcomes. They do however wax and wane, just like any other energy our motivation is in a state of movement , it can be compared to the waves on the surface of the sea. There’s absolutely no need to feel down when motivation seems to weaken, what we need to develop is access to deeper levels, we need to go beneath the fluctuating waves at the surface. Sitting down with pen and paper and going into what we’re actually here for, attaching ourselves to some mission that is greater than just us is hugely fortifying.

Finding meaningful work is highly protective against things like depression. Aligning ourselves with a purpose is powerful and gives an almost endless supply of motivation. There are some amazing people doing similar things out there, we align with them, we boost our inspiration by connecting with them. Look for the deeper currents today, relax into them, they move slower, give a longer lasting energy, make us feel strong and capable, give the ability to see further, to do more. Being on the surface is taxing and rough, down deeper we have more control, we go at our own pace, we have time to enjoy the day, its quieter.

Negative emotions like anger, fear, blame, anxiety, guilt, depression, regret, stress and shame shut down the brain regions that handle rational thinking. Decision making, memory, creative thinking, problem solving, positive perception, they all go offline while we’re in negative states. In fact blood flow to the pre-frontal cortex, the thinking brain, is reduced by up to 80%, we get primal and reactionary. Because the body reflects the mind neurotransmitters will create a feedback loop that only reinforces the mental state. We will go from thinking about guilt etc to experiencing it as a physical reality, we can dig very deep holes here if we don’t understand this mechanism that lies outside of our usual learning and education. Personality’s and behaviors can actually form around this undirected thinking, medication can follow. 

How to get out these negative feedback loop? Simple, state change.
We can interrupt a feedback loop we don’t like at any time by placing our minds on what we do want. Consciously chosen, outcome driven statements that we repeat to ourselves combined with deep belly breathing and visualising what we want will break the chain. It’s the same, where as before we went along with our thinking unconsciously and got ourselves into all sorts sticky situations we now, as mature adults, CHOOSE where we want our thoughts to take us. Thoughts become things, what we focus on we strengthen. No one is ordering us roll for hours or days in negative states, we choose to. We can reduce their effects to feedback, information, data, that’s telling us something is off, and we can adjust as, when and how we need to in the flow of the moment.
The choice is ours, the power is ours and the ability is already hardwired, it’s just awakening to what’s already going on unconsciously and making it a conscious process. This is called liberation in some circles, no more enslavement to the mind.