During last week’s article, I discussed the importance of ongoing personal growth. It forms the foundation of all your future successes. You can’t achieve what you can’t believe is possible, and possible for you. Today, I’ll discuss in more detail why personal growth makes such a difference.
Sustaining Your Success
As I stated last week, your interior growth is what sustains and supports your success. That means your success can only grow a very short distance beyond where your personal growth is before the weight of it causes a major collapse.
In January of this year, I began to interview and to study the histories of successful people. These were people who built multi-million dollar organizations, and I noticed a trend. They would grow and grow and grow and then, eventually, experience a major collapse. That’s because the personal growth wasn’t in place to sustain them in the direction they were trying to go.
The Hardest Thing to Change: Your Mind
Breaking through your personal belief barriers is the hardest change you’ll ever have to make. Those belief barriers are in place to protect you and keep you safe from harm. The brain sees them as essential to your survival, and it will fight any attempt you make to change the way you see yourself because it views these changes as taking you in a direction that’s NOT safe.
The brain isn’t wrong. You’re headed in a new direction. Where you’re going is not safe. It’s risky. But the risky areas are the places where the greatest opportunity lies. And you must train your brain to do what goes against every instinct you possess: to not only accept the risk but to actively embrace it as essential to your survival. That’s not going to happen without working on your personal growth.
Your Brain Is a Supercomputer
Your brain is one of the most powerful computers ever invented. It can engage in complex calculations at lightening speed. It can take in and absorb data about body posture, facial expressions, tone of voice, and the words being said and calculate how honest the person is being with you and how trustworthy they are based on all that information within seconds of interacting with someone new.
The brain’s computer has its own operating system programmed into it that helps you make decisions without you even being aware you’ve made them. That operating system decides which pieces of information you receive throughout the day to keep and which to discard.
The Belief Based Operating System
That incredibly powerful computer operates on a belief based operating system. Those beliefs are formed from the way that you interpreted past events that happened to you starting from the moment of conception until roughly age 22. From age 23 until age 28, that operating system was tested and refined. From age 28 onward, that operating system works in the background until it is confronted with questions it can’t answer or interactions that don’t fit and it is forced to question the beliefs that form the structure of the operating system.
Belief Begins with Your Story
What you believe does not depend as much on what happens to you as it does on how you interpret those events. For example, if someone you love leaves you and you interpret that event to mean that you are not lovable, that belief of yourself as being unlovable is what gets encoded into the brain. That belief will be taken into account every single time you attempt to enter into a relationship and your brain will look for evidence that proves that you are, in fact, not lovable.
The stories you tell yourself about who you are and what you are capable of doing are the key ingredients in your ability to succeed in anything you desire to do. Personal growth is about identifying and altering those stories to fit the new identity you want to take.
You Cannot Achieve What You Cannot Believe
Your beliefs are powerful. If you want to write a book but you do not believe you can write a book, your brain will examine its memory banks for every instance where you tried and failed and will tell you that you should not invest the time in trying to write a book because you’ve never succeeded so it’s going to be a waste of time.
If you do not believe you are capable of writing a book, it doesn’t matter how many pieces of evidence that are presented to you that say you can. Your brain will actively discard as “untrue” every single piece of evidence and will only accept as legitimate the pieces of evidence that match up with your belief.
Putting Your Imagination to Work
Imagine that you are sitting on a comfortable office chair. The textured blue fabric is soft. The wooden table in front of you is stacked high with hardcover books for you to autograph. There is a line of eager faces wrapped around the building. The doors are about to open. This is your first book signing.
What are you wearing? Who are the first three people in that line? What do they look like? How far did they drive to get here? What is it about your book that has captured their attention and transformed them into eager fans? What city is this? Who published your book? Who else is at the table with you? What is the title of the book? What does the cover look like?
The more vivid the details you can write in the story of your success, the more believable the brain sees this scenario as being because it experiences those things as if they were truly happening.
Want More Help?
If you want more help blasting through your belief based limitations, I’d love to discuss that possibility with you. Schedule an appointment or send me an email at brandy at 40 day writer.com.