CHANGE YOUR LIFE IN 4 STEPS
Updated: Feb 15, 2020
Life change sometimes isn't easy darlin', but we can start with these 4 steps.
We All Have Areas in Life We Want to Improve.
Maybe you want that windfall of benjamins flowing into your bank account each month rather than stressing about your rent getting paid. Perhaps you want an instagram confident bikini beach body this year. Or you're truly ready to launch your career into the success atmosphere. Reaching for more is a healthy part of our evolutionary nature (as long as it comes with another healthy set of gratitudes for the present moment). In order to align into a state of having these new experiences of life, a dose of CHANGE is required.
"If you keep doing the same thing, you're going to keep getting the same results."
Want to pinpoint which areas in your life to focus on? Check out our Life Wheel first.
Change Starts in the Brain
The key to making ANY changes starts in your BRAIN.
Have you heard these sayings?
"As Above, So Below"
"As Within, So Without"
They basically mean: your internal world reflects onto your external world.
So your internal thought patterns, emotions, and stories you tell about yourself and the world around you will reflect onto your world and create your experiences of it.
If you first change your internal world (which starts in the brain), then you'll see changes in your life around you.
This is where neuroscience kicks in to help.
Neuroplasticity.
NEUROPLASTICITY is our ability to physically change our brain by way of training.
It's a SUPERPOWER worth understanding and exploring.
Every thought pattern or habit we have is a pathway of neurons that light up in the same way each time in our brain. The longer the habit or thought has continued, the stronger the pattern is.
Think of a hillside with rain flowing down it through the seasons. Over time, the water will dig into a natural stream or river. If you wanted the direction of the water to go another way, you would have to manually dig another trench, to direct the water flow into a different direction.
Your thought patterns and habitual actions are similar in your brain. They've built a 'river' that naturally flows in the same way each time by default. In order to make changes in the brain, you must, with deep awareness and consistency, create a new path and train yourself to take that path instead until it becomes the dominant perspective or habit.
BOOM. Honey, that's how you reprogram yourself.
4 STEPS to Change That Brain
When we make a change in the brain, we'll see changes in our life. The tricky part is it requires CONSISTENCY to make the new thought pattern a new habit, and that my friend is the juicy work summoned by you and you alone.
Here are the 4 simple steps to START CHANGING YOUR BRAIN:
1. SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE
Let's say you have some beach body goals and want to stop eating donuts (I'm so sorry for your loss). First you shift your perspective on eating donuts and reframe it. So rather than "mmmm tasty squishy glazed deliciousness that will make me happy forever"… you change that to: "I'm currently having an intense craving for this sugar recipe. Eating this will set my health goals back and I choose my health goals over this."
2. CREATE AWARENESS AROUND YOUR BRAIN'S RELAPSES
Your brain will naturally want to go back to it's default pattern of thought. So now every time your brain tries to sneakily convince you to just sink your teeth into that soft, fresh, glazed doughy heaven, become increasingly aware of your brain just 'glitching out', trying to go down it's old stream on the hill. Say to yourself something like "Oh, brain, I see you, that's just you glitching out trying to go down your old programming. I control you now. I'm choosing something different."
3. REDIRECT YOUR THOUGHTS / ACTIONS
This is where you actually CHOOSE and DO a different action. Maybe it's drinking something fizzy and satisfying, or eating a piece of fruit instead. (I have a monster of a sweet tooth thanks to my many happy memories of cake for breakfast, so when I go KETO, I reach for a spoonful of peanut butter, or pamplemousse soda water)
4. BEGIN TO REVALUE
Over time, your new empowering choices will reap juicy results in your life and you'll VALUE the new choice more than the old. The more you value the new positive benefits, the more your brain will become addicted to the new rewards rather than familiarity of the past ones. The old choices or thoughts will slowly fade into the distance. With this new practice of yours, you'll gain confidence, awareness, and a power-up.
This, of course is a continuous practice (or sadhana, as I like to refer to it in NEUROPEAK). It really is as simple as 4 easy steps, yet as complicated as our old habits like to hang on tight. These 4 steps need to be repeated over and over again to truly take hold. Our mind is a cloud of electrical signals that have been programmed over time, entangled with our excuses, our rationalities, and our shaped perspectives. Gaining awareness is the first step in truly reclaiming our power back over our mind first, and our life.
Want to Dive Deeper?
Neuroscience has been making leaps in advances in the way we understand the workings of the mind and how to redirect it. Our brains largely work on a habit system and the above 4 steps give you a great tool to work with to start catching the triggers that lead you down a habit system that no longer serves you. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D. cultivated his work around breaking free from obsessive compulsive disorder in his book Brainlock. We tend to look at O.C.D as a disorder because the compulsions seem irrational. Yet, the compulsions are simply habits that have been deeply formed in the brain. Unlocking O.C.D is the same as unlocking any habit really, in varying degrees.
In our program NEUROPEAK, we leverage neuroscience and give you a step-by-step process to make lasting changes and transformation in your life. You'll discover how to eliminate the mental and emotional obstacles that keep you stuck and have tools to re-wire your brain to create the life you truly desire.
