Harness Your Hero

For every goal, experience or time of change in an area of our life we begin in the mundane or ordinary world, where everything appears the status quo. Or is it? Everything seems ok, but what is ok? and how do we know when ok is actually not ok? Sometimes, a soft small voice inside your head tells you that you are not happy, and that life is not where you want it to be. You can’t quite put your finger on it yet, but you just get this niggling feeling, that there is more to life than where you are at. This is where we live before we start our new journey. We are oblivious of the adventures to come. It is our safe place. Our everyday life where we learn crucial details about who we are, our true nature, capabilities and outlook on life. This anchors us as the human we are and makes it easier for us to understand and truly know who we are: Our identity. Once we are clear on who we are and who we want to be, then and only then can we truly start on our adventure into a better land. The Matrix’s Morpheus put it like this: “It’s that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” Where are you in your hero’s journey right now? Are you happy with where you are? Do you feel that something’s just not quite how you want it to be? that something needs to be changed? Is it something in your environment? Could it be that it is you who needs to make the change? You feel it, don’t you? That there should be something more. That there could be an alternate path that leads you to feel you have a more extraordinary life? Listen to the voice that separates you from your ordinary world, because it’s asking you to take a risk on you. To step out in faith and follow your Hero’s Journey. What does it say? “As we think, so shall we be” ‘As we think’…. Not as we act or as we have more stuff or as we reach great successes, but as we think. Our mind is a high functioning hard drive. It continually receives information and we have programmed it to naturally filter and process that information even while we are sleeping. ‘I have programmed my mind?’ You might be thinking…. Well yes, we each program our minds consciously or unconsciously. So, it is important to understand how we do this, so that we can make sure we are putting the right software in to our minds to run the ‘programs’ that will allow us the most success in our lives. We receive information in a myriad of ways. We can take information in through what we see; visually; sight, what we hear; auditorily, what we feel; kinaesthetically, what we smell; olfactory and what we taste; gustatorily. Every second of every day our body is experiencing things through our senses and transmitting those messages to our brain. Would you believe (fasten your seatbelts) that studies have shown that the brain takes in 200 million pieces of information EVERY SECOND! Now I don’t know about you, but I know that I can’t consciously process 200 million bits of information a second; I would be a Looney tune. Thankfully our brains are a very smart piece of machinery that is created to look after us, so although we receive all this information, we only process a small proportion of it; seven (plus or minus two) bits or ‘chunks’ of information. This is where our ‘programming’ comes into it. At the point where all this information is streaming in through our senses into our bodies, we filter through it and only takes in what we tell it to. So let’s look at this a little further. I would like you to do a little demonstration with me. I would like you to bring this book up close to your face to shut out everything else in the room. Then I want you without looking to think of all the things in the room that are blue. Once you believe you have counted in your head, without looking everything that is blue, then I want you to lower the book and see how you did. Were there more things in the room that were blue that you didn’t count (deleted) did you have a larger number of things than what was there (distort) or did you just take a bit of a guess (generalise). Interesting isn’t it. Are you suddenly noticing blue things that you had never seen before? We set up these filters by telling our brain what we want to see. If you now take a good hard look around at everything that is blue and then close your eyes I am sure that you would remember everything that is blue in the room, but if I asked you to remember what if when you opened your eyes I asked you what in the room was red, you probably wouldn’t do so well as your brain was looking for blue things not for red. Our mind is deleting information all the time as one of its natural roles. That is the reason that we might go into a crowded party and we won’t be able to hear anything and then once we get into a conversation with someone, all the other noises are soon drowned out and if we are engrossed in the conversation we will get to a point where we won’t even hear the other noises. We take in what we focus on and filter out the rest. We filter information by deleting it as demonstrated above, distorting it or generalising it.