This week’s question from our portal “Ask Us Anything” comes from Bill:
I’ve noticed that after a night of sleep, I wake up every morning in a really negative state, emotionally, and I’m noticing myself in the victim triangle. It takes a lot to get through that and get back into a productive mindset. I’ve had it since I started my business, probably a couple of years. I think it’s tied to fear, fear of free-falling into self destruction, the business failing. There’s probably stories from my childhood, middle class mindset, and other things mixed in there, too. How do I stop this from happening?
Let me explain what’s happening: every human being has a sabotage pattern, an unconscious pattern in your mind that’s basically like an autopilot on an airplane. If you start to deviate in your thinking, your being, your feeling from the set pattern you already have, it’s going to try to get you back on course to the original pattern. Starting the business alone was a deviation. Your subconscious goes, “Oh shit, he’s going in a different direction, we need to reroute the plane.”
Here’s how it does it: it creates either an internal reaction, an external reaction, or an external circumstance that gets you to pay attention to something different than what you’re doing. In your case, it’s how you feel when you wake up. It’s trying to get you to engage in the conversation of that difference. If you engage in that conversation and stay in it, eventually you’ll agree with it, and then you’ll automatically go back to the old pattern. It’s extremely deceptive, it changes the way you see everything, by sleight of hand, by getting you to engage with it.
The fundamental value system of middle class people is to be a good person, to do the right thing, to be responsible, to put other people first. So when your mind is taking you in a different direction, you start compiling thoughts based on those values, maybe I shouldn’t do this, maybe this is more important, maybe I’m being selfish. And the second you agree with it, you make where you were going the enemy, and you give up. That’s how a sabotage pattern works. If a person’s not aware of how they do it uniquely for themselves, they’re very susceptible to it, it keeps people where they are their whole life. Most of the time it talks them out of it before they ever even do anything.
As for what you can do about it, I would recommend something you really like, that you do effortlessly. But there’s a component where you speak to your mind as if it was an entity trying to hold you back: “No, you’re not. You’re not going to do this to me. This is the direction we’re going. Get the hell out of my head.” That’s exactly how you handle it. And then you focus on something you really enjoy, I don’t care what it is, as long as you like it, and it helps focus your mind in the right direction in the morning.
The more you do it the easier it gets. But no person ever completely overcomes this, think about an airplane, all the routes it’s flown, stored in that computer. Your mind has so many messages, so many triggers, so many things of importance, that different things can come up at different times in your life that you didn’t even know were there, age related, situationally related, child related. The best way to handle it is to adjust it in your mind so it’s incongruent for where you’re going, so you can notice it rapidly, and then you can take action to get back on track with where you want to go.
