The reason why ‘change’ is difficult for most people is because ‘change’ requires you to leave your comfort zone. Your ‘comfort zone’ is made up of your habits – good or bad. Everything you want is just outside of your comfort zone. The old axiom that the only things in life that are certain are ‘death and taxes’ is missing the most obvious part of life: CHANGE. Life is always changing. Successful people have learned to love change. -T. Shea Ellison
Have you ever been driving your car and suddenly realized you left the emergency brake on? Did you just push down on the accelerator to overcome the drag of the brake? “No, of course not”. You simply released the brake… and with no more effort you began to go faster.
Many people go through life with their psychological ‘emergency brake’ on. They hold on to negative images about themselves or suffer the effects of strong negative beliefs they haven’t yet released. They stay in a negative comfort zone entirely of their own making. They hold on to inaccurate or false beliefs about reality or harbor guilt or self-doubt. Therefore, when they try to achieve their goals, these negative images and preprogrammed comfort zones pull them back and always seem to cancel out their good intentions – no matter how hard they try.
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” -Frederich Wilhelm Nietzche
Successful people, on the other hand, have discovered that instead of attempting to increase their sheer willpower as the force to overcome the drag of False Evidence Appearing Real (FEAR), it’s simply easier to “release the brakes” by letting go of and replacing their limiting beliefs and changing their self-images.
It’s time to Get Out of your Comfort Zone!
Think of your comfort zone as a prison you live in – a largely self-created prison. It consists of the collection of ‘can’ts’, ‘won’ts‘, ‘musts‘, ‘must nots, and other unfounded rules or beliefs you’ve formed from all the negative thoughts and decisions you have accumulated and reinforced over the course of your lifetime. It’s quite likely you’ve actually been trained, conditioned or even hypnotized to limit yourself. Sounds preposterous?
Expectation of others and of yourself can literally ‘hypnotize’ anyone into believing something is true – whether or not it actually is. When I was in junior high school, I took my first algebra class and didn’t do very well. My teacher (the football coach) told my counselor that since I had barely passed his class, I probably shouldn’t plan to take trigonometry or calculus when I got to high school. Therefore I was advised to take geometry in the 10th grade, which I did and through high expectation and excellent instruction from my teacher, I earned an ‘A’. This success prompted me to go on and take the two courses previously not recommended, and with elevated expectations, great teachers, and hard work, I managed a ‘B’ in one and an ‘A’ in the other. (Goes to show that perhaps the football coach should stick to football).
It is no exaggeration to say that all human beings are hypnotized to some extent, either by ideas they have uncritically accepted from others, or by ideas they have repeated to themselves or convinced themselves are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect on our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.
Stop re-creating the same experience over and over! Change your behavior by changing your self-talk through affirmations.
Read Chapter 10 to learn the 9 Guidelines for Creating Effective Affirmations or register for The Success Principles Plus! Workshop and together we’ll create powerful affirmations that will change YOUR life!
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