The ONE Reason you’re NOT Achieving your Goals
TRANSCRIPT
Where your mind goes, you follow, right? If your mind is a hot mess and you’re not showing up in the capacity that we know that God’s designed you to be, we then second guess. We self-sabotage. And sometimes we wonder, a lot of my students and clients have said, “I really have these big lofty goals. I want to speak on a stage. I want to write a book. But I can’t seem to get through these walls. Or I keep hitting these glass ceilings, like what is going on with that?” And oftentimes, and I always say, “It’s not your fault, it’s your brain putting the brakes on your potential.” So especially if you see, you feel like you you’re called to more, and as we know, God calls us and then equips us. So we kind of have to figure this out. It’s not exactly the world’s way of doing it, right?
The thing is, sometimes we can get in our own way if our mind isn’t right, if we’re coming from what Joyce Myers calls, stinking thinking, if we keep criticizing ourselves and being really hard on ourselves, being judgemental and not showing up where we need to be, we won’t send the email. We won’t pitch our speaker reel. We won’t show up and be what we can be if we keep just saying, “Oh, that’s not for me.” And it’s often time, it’s more than just confidence.
That’s why I say, sometimes I liken it to go into the gym. If you’ve gone and you’ve learnt and exercised certain muscles, they’re going to keep doing the same thing unless you learn to retrain them. And for me, I think it’s really pivotal that having your mindset right, really directs your direction and your decisions, so that you can have a successful business and a successful career and a successful life, really. So I really think it’s key to everything.
When you know that you have the power to rewire your mind, it’s amazing the possibilities that open. Because oftentimes we will judge our circumstances and our situations based on the past, but we haven’t lived in the future yet. But how we allow ourselves to think about the future is to dream big. This often comes down to culture or how we were raised.
If you were raised in a family that never aspired to more, it’s really hard to push out of those comfort zones. But for many of us, I’m sure that are listening today, have big dreams, have big aspirations, but we don’t know how to connect the dots. And oftentimes it’s just having the confidence. And here’s the thing I’ll say about confidence, you can’t wait to feel confident. Confidence is a choice, it’s not a feeling. You get confident by taking action. So when you take that step, when you send an email, make the phone call, then you get more confident, because then evidence starts to show.
Often what happens in life, and women especially, we wait for that feeling of motivation or confidence before we feel like we can show up and be who all we are meant to be. But you have the power through choice. And through your own decision making that you can decide today, “I don’t want to repeat what’s been in the past. Even if what I was taught was a certain way, I want to reshape and reform my mind by rewiring it, by going back and sometimes undoing past patterns.” And then rewiring really means it’s like putting the new habits and formations, so then you can start through repetition, the new thing.
There’s the same thing about actions, right? If we go to the gym and we do, we practice, we get better at it. In anything, art, sports, business, anything, the more you do, the better you get, right? So just think if it took you a hot minute to get into this mess, it’s going to take you a little bit of a while to get out of it. But the good news is you can rewire your brain, you can change your thoughts.
Because neuroscience and the neuroplasticity, the science is amazing. It’s starting to really confirm what the Bible has always said, that you can renew your mind daily, because it’s a muscle. Just like if you don’t go to the gym, your muscles will atrophy. You need to use your brain in the right way. But it really comes down to the fact that it’s choice, and it is possible. So believing in possibility is really the key to getting you moving.
The next step is being intentional.
Intentional thought processes are, instead of allowing the every thought that pops into your head, just to believe it as if it’s truth, is to start to question, “Is this truth or is this a lie? Am I believing something that’s maybe not necessarily true, even though it feels like it’s true to me?” It might be a truth, but not the truth. And what I mean by that is, maybe you were told something when you were a kid, especially those who maybe came from abusive backgrounds or were not really encouraged, maybe had bad parenting. They have this wiring in their mind that says, “You’re not good enough, you don’t know enough, you’ll never be enough.” And unfortunately, that little tape plays over and over again. So once you become aware of the fact that this tape is playing, we can hit the pause button. But now what we need to do is replace it with the new tape by being intentional, deciding what you want to think and actually, a good exercise is to take pen and paper and start to write down your actual thoughts, like what am I thinking? What am I feeling? And what are the results I’m creating through this thought pattern?
Then on the opposite side of the page, do the intentional version of it. What do I want to be feeling? What do I want to be thinking? And what are the results I want to create? And then you basically shift your focus on the intentional part and practice it through repetition and positive reinforcement. Because if you remember, as a child, if you went to the beach or you went to a fair and you went to a party, you know, you have those memories locked in because they were positive.You remember the ice cream and the balloons and the fun and the joy.
You didn’t remember the homework you had to do that week, but you definitely remember the fun you had. So that’s why I say this process doesn’t have to be hard. It can be fun, as long as you are doing it through repetition and you’re doing it through choice, through that intentionality, and you’re making it positive, so your brain can really take this on as new, which proves that you can teach an old dog new tricks.
For us adults, the good news is we can rewire our brains because definitely, I mean, if you think about it, the Bible’s already told us how to do this. We’re just like, “Oh, really? I didn’t know that was a thing.” Like joy, finding joy, right? There is a difference between joy and happiness. And I’ll say that happiness is always dependent on happenings, which sometimes can feel out of your control. But joy you get to choose. So you can find joy, you can find the silver lining, you can do all things with a joyful attitude, and then everything becomes more fun.
If you enjoyed what we had to say today, make sure to go to the link, mimikacooney.com/rewire. And that is actually a 30 minute free training, which goes a little deeper on the neuroscience and rewiring your brain as we talked about. And it gives you some tools and some action steps that you can take and to help you understand, because sometimes neuroscience can seem new and seem scary, but it really is fascinating when you start to dive in and realize that you have the power to change your thoughts, to change your actions, and to change your circumstances simply by changing the way you think.
I would encourage you to go sign up for that. As I said, it’s completely free and it’ll give you some more tools and dive a little deeper, especially if you’re new to neuroscience or this is the first time you heard about it, it definitely will be worth your while. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure to subscribe to our channel. Click the button and the bell so you get notified when new episodes come out. If you’re listening to our audio version, make sure to subscribe and rate and review.
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