It All Starts With You.
The title “It all starts with you”, will be one of the most important concepts you will ever read and understand in your lifetime. This is either the first time you are being exposed to this thought, or it is a simple reminder of something we can lose focus on because of all of the distractions that consume our daily life. Either way, the power in this statement is endless. We all have the ability to sit down and think about what is happening in our lives. Sometimes we reminisce about great memories. Sometimes we think about hopeful thoughts and imagine exciting visions of the future. Other times we replay sad or traumatic moments. All of these thoughts affect us and ultimately shape how we respond to the present moment. The thoughts we learn to replay and focus on the most, are the ones that will directly impact the path towards our future.
Learning to control how you think about your past and being able to shift that control into what you want your life to look like in the future is a practice that takes patience, attention, and effort. It all starts with you and the awareness of your thoughts. When you find yourself thinking and you start to blame your current situation on a friend, or a family member, or whatever else you can come up with, you take the power away from your own ability. You pass it on to someone or something else. This type of behavioral patten won’t create the best outcome for yourself. It allows you to procrastinate the necessary action of taking responsibility for your behavior and ultimately your life. The choice is yours. Before hearing that, were you even aware that you have this choice? If you weren’t, good, now you do and you can explore that thought. If you did, good, now this is simply a reminder to continue to explore that thought.
We behave through a series of programs we have been learning and running for our whole lives. Until you become aware of how your conscious and subconscious brain operates, it is difficult to change. You cannot change something that you are not aware of, unless someone around you understands how to help change your behavior. There are many therapists, coaches, shamans, etc. that can get an individual to stop destructive behaviors and shift them into acting in ways that benefit their personal growth and progress. The individual going through the training may not understand what is happening and why, but their awareness opens up and that becomes a starting place for self discovery.
It is imperative to spend some time learning how to critically think. You should really care about this. The ability to critically think for yourself allows you take ownership of your life and your decisions. Having the ability to look at information presented to you, and to be able to ask the right questions in order to thoroughly analyze how the information can be understood and then acted upon by you in the best possible way, is something you have to practice. It becomes easier and gets better with time and experience. And the only way you get experience is by doing.
The ability to observe without judgement is one of the highest form of self mastery. Judgement is not bad. Judgment is actually great when you can recognize and understand the patterns by which you judge. We as humans are built to recognize patterns and to be able to quickly decipher them in order to make the best decision, depending on what is happening around us. If we are trying to accomplish a certain goal, when we identify a pattern that seems to be helping ourselves or someone else, we study this pattern and make it a part of how we move forward with our time and energy.
In our lives, we all have those patterns that don’t help us. These are the hardest to identify and change. A lot of times it is simply because we haven’t thought about it. Other times it is because we haven’t come across information that makes us think about our own patterns. When we take the time to become aware of what we are doing and can recognize a pattern that does not help us, ONLY if our awareness of this patten occurs can we reject it and change it! If you are not aware that a certain pattern is present, that action is operating unconsciously(which most of them are).
Think about the first time you learned to do something. When we are taught and start establishing that behavior or use of the information in our life, we rarely ever think about it again and just carry on doing it. Who you are taught by and how you learn it matters. What you learn and how to think about what you learn, shapes your minds perception. This idea became so interesting to me to think about because of how many tasks we are able to carry out that become “second nature” or habitual that once was something we didn’t or couldn’t do. These habitual actions were learned and practiced, and eventually overtime became patterns of behavior. Essentially programming. They came from an initial day of learning followed by days of repeatedly DOING. The doing is what creates the reality of the constant pattern.
To use a simple example, let’s look at walking. Were you ever taught to walk and use your body in an effective way after you first learned to walk as a child? Maybe you were, but probably not. You probably started stumbling around and when your family cheered you on, you went a couple steps and then fell again. But you kept getting up and trying again, and that’s how you learned to walk. Then you never “learned” this again did you? Unless you take pilates or are an athlete, dancer, or take going to the gym very serious, the answer is most likely no. Now some might not initially see the importance in this because you can already walk, so why spend time doing something you can already do?
Well, when the objective is to the able to walk from point a to point b, when that gets accomplished, that’s all that matters. But having the body awareness to do this effectively can pay dividends for the rest of your life. Walking is the primary form of movement for humans to move through space. Do you walk around with confidence? Do you have back pain? Are you setting yourself up with knee issues? If you lose your balance, does your body awareness allow you to stay as safe as possible? Or are you just on autopilot from learning that behavior as a child and now whatever happens to your body while you walk is whatever happens to your body? There is a reason athletes, dancers and people into fitness do certain physical moments over and over and over again. Creating body awareness is key to thriving in your physical body in ways that undoubtably benefit your life past the ability to simply walk from point a to point b. This applies to everything, walking was just a basic example. You don’t need to be an “expert” or a “professional”, you just need to care enough to learn and become more aware about what you are doing. We sometimes neglect the importance of improvement, until improvement is the only thing left to do.
If you knew there was a better way to operate and exist in your life, would you choose it? I bet if given the option, you would want to implement that better behavior into your lifestyle habits. The problem is, most of us are not aware of how much we are hindering our best selves by not becoming aware of the daily actions that will provide us with better behaviors, emotions, and ultimately great life results.
Not being able to do something is what can create lack of confidence. It creates self judgement and contempt. For example, if you are with a group of friends, and you are hiking, and you get to a steep incline and you don’t have the ability to overcome this, you start to question your abilities and yourself. If your friends all have the ability to climb, and you do not, you become self conscious. What matters next is the response to the challenge. Is this an opportunity to improve something you wish to be able to do, or reject it because it does not really benefit your life? This is solely up to you to decide. If you do not care about it, then it is easy to reject and accept that it is not something you care to be capable of. We all have different interests and we all have different abilities. We just need to recognize what allows us to be as ABLE to take full advantage of the things we care about.
So figure out what you want to do and identify the things that make your life better, and do more of it. Be around people that help cultivate your best abilities and inspire your best mental state. But more importantly be that person for yourself. It all starts with you.