How to Bust Your Mental Blocks
Date Posted: February 26th, 2010
If your subconscious isn’t fully on board with your goals, it doesn’t matter how much you improve your environment. You will fail. Maybe not initially–will power can do a lot–but eventually you’ll stop doing what you’ve intended to do.
If you want to take up running, but believe that if you do you’ll ruin your knees, you won’t run.
If you want to get out of debt but believe that your life won’t be fun anymore, you won’t get out of debt.
If you want to work on your blog daily, but believe your voice isn’t worth being heard, you won’t write.
Of course there are ways to combat each of these mental blocks. If you’re the runner afraid of bad knees you can run barefoot and take up Chi Running. If you’re afraid of deprivation but want to get out of debt you can work on paring down the stuff you don’t care about. (Is it possible to feel loss over something you don’t care about?) If you’re the insecure blogger you can practice writing in your journal or educated yourself so that you are worthy of being heard. The real problem is not the blocks themselves, it’s that we often don’t know when we are mentally misaligned.
So, how can you know when you’re mentally misaligned?
One way is to align your environment, try to achieve your goal, and see how you do. If you fail after aligning yourself with success, there’s a good chance your subconscious is working against you. Ask yourself why you think you failed. “I’m not disciplined enough” is not a good answer. Look deeper. Ask yourself why you don’t want to succeed. If you really can’t think of any reason why you aren’t able to achieve your goal, work more on aligning your environment. Then try again. If you fail again, and there’s still no physical reason why you’re failing, your subconscious is involved. Some part of you doesn’t want you to succeed.
Some good ways I’ve found to get my subconscious to reveal what it’s saying.
Thinking: Just plain old sitting around and thinking about it. I ask myself, “why am I failing at running” and I hear back “because I don’t feel good when I do it”, “because I’m afraid I’m doing it wrong and will injure myself”, “because if I go through the whole ritual (warm-ups and stretching) it eats my day”, … These are my mental blocks. This can be the fastest way to get answers from your subconscious, but in many situations it doesn’t work. For instance, if you feel embarrassed by a certain belief you need a lot of practice to be able to hear it. Thus, while this tool is very powerful, it won’t always work, especially if you don’t have much practice with it.
Writing: Writing acts as assisted thinking. Sometimes I have a lot of ideas floating in my head and I just need to get them all down somewhere. On paper, on the computer, doesn’t matter, just as long as I’m not thinking in circles. And once in a while I’ll get lucky. I’ll see something I’ve written down and a lightbulb will go off in my head. Maybe that embarrassing belief is now so painfully obvious I can’t miss it… or something.
Talking: As useful as thinking and writing are, they’re both solo activities. They work only as well as you know how to use them. Other people have the advantage of being able to see your subconscious at work. They can tell you you’re yelling when you don’t realize your are. They can tell you when you’re using negative language when you don’t realize it. They can tell you why they think you’re having trouble completing a task. Sometimes they’ll even be right, but even when they aren’t, you’ll learn something.
Reading: When I’m really stuck, I turn to books. I’ll pick something related to solving my problem, and usually I’ll get some kind of insight while reading it. The book may not directly solve my problem, but, solely by virtue of being on the same topic, I’ll usually get at least one lightbulb moment. Going back to the running example, I know I want to run so I might read a book on running. While reading the chapter on “treating injuries” I might finally hear the little voice in my head complaining about ruining my body. In spite of the book not addressing that particular problem, I still would have had a realization about the problem.
In short, you can’t bust your mental blocks until you know what they are. Taking some time to think, write, talk, and read about the areas where you haven’t been successful can help you figure out what those blocks are. Once you know, the solution to your problem is usually straightforward.
