#019 - Make Your Mind Malleable

If you are at the point of your journey with yourself where you have done the “looking at your past and your upbringing and understanding how the programming you were exposed to has impacted you, what choices you have made and what you have attracted thus far” – then perhaps you are also at the point where you are taking steps to change all of that. Perhaps in that process, you are also coming into contact with how challenging that process can be. How much more can come up from your subconscious when you seek to step out of what it knows as ‘safe’ and ‘familiar’.

It can sometimes get you on your knees.

Why is this so hard?

Why is it so hard to change this pattern, this behaviour, this way of reacting, this way of thinking, this way of talking to myself?

You probably know on some level that you are on the Archetypal ‘Hero’s Journey’.

It’s not supposed to be easy. The pain and the challenge ARE where the growth is. It’s “where the meat is” in the whole Personal Growth Thing (writing this makes me smile, thinking of the meme of how all the coaches and healers talk about “Doing the Work”). Understanding it all conceptually and psychologically is the skeleton, the structure. It’s very helpful, and a prerequisite to understanding What Needs Doing.

But that alone is not enough. Some people try to avoid it via Spiritual Bypass – kind of dreaming their way to an ‘enlightened state’, in that process denying either their own or others’ emotional experience. Needless to say, this will not work as a long-term strategy, and the Universe will mirror that back to the person, until they are humbled to see it for themselves.

So – what about you, my dear, who knows that you wish to change these things - and you know there is no shortcut?

Well, I wanted to share one tool that can be fun as well as helpful. It is basically this:

Make it a conscious priority to make your mind malleable, and to keep it that way.

“Why?” you might ask.

When we have experiences that cause us anxiety, contraction, fear, overwhelm, stress – all those fun things that have imprinted on our subconscious from adverse experiences in childhood – our minds develop a tendency towards rigidity, as a way to self-protect. So – if you had your fair share of those experiences, then you may be likely to have this tendency more than other people. This can manifest as a need to control, being judgmental (not just discerning), struggling to understand other people, their perspectives and their viewpoints. It can show up as tendency to overthink, overanalyse and to struggle with uncertainty.

I think the main energetic underlying all of it is Fear.

If that resonates with you, you may intuitively understand already how being in this perpetual state of Fear will limit you and your opportunities. Perhaps you can almost feel the way in which this Fear you hold is like a Teflon coating. It repels things that you would actually want to have or to experience. It causes you to let moments slip away, rather than seize them.

Energetically, Fear causes you to be closed, almost caged inside your own mental cell. Repeating the same narratives, the same stories, the same negative thought loops about others or yourself. As a result, these particular neuropathways get stronger and more powerful – whilst other ones lay dormant, forgotten about. You are probably completely unaware of their existence, even.

If we have always been afraid of public speaking and the handful of times we tried it – it went badly – then it’s likely that our neuropathways are laid so that we may believe ‘I am bad at public speaking. End of’

After years of this being reinforced through our fear-fuelled negative thoughts, perhaps some bad experiences and perhaps a general tendency towards rigid thinking – it can feel nearly impossible to conceive of the possibility that one day we would believe, for example:

“I can speak publicly with confidence, grace and humour”

To some extent we can use ‘mindset tools’ to plant and nurture this belief in our minds – but it will not really sink in until we start having experiences in the real world that begin to confirm that belief. That’s why affirmations can only go so far – although they can be a very helpful part of the overall process, if used correctly.

Sometimes the fearful, rigid mind can end up self-sabotaging in this tender process. Instead of allowing for the new ‘Higher self-confidence’ experience to materialise – it ends up seeking to further confirm the negative belief instead. We drop the ball, we spill the sauce – that very thing we tried to avoid so hard – we end up doing because our anxiety made us hold on so tight.

If instead we make it a priority to increase the malleability of our mind – we’re allowing this process to take place in a more conspicuous way. We build it as a general aspect of our personalities, of our minds. We show ourselves that we are a person who is capable of change, who is capable of changing the way she thinks, capable of changing the thoughts she believes. This can have powerful ripple effects in all areas of our life.

So how would we go about this?

Well, that part is the fun part. It’s like a game, an adventure, an exploration.

I remember hearing about how some successful guy somewhere (Bill Gates?) said he, once a week, buys a magazine in a subject field he knows nothing about. This is a way to expand your horizons, stretch your neuropathways and shake things up a bit up there.

You could do a similar thing with TV shows, the places you visit or events you attend. Meeting new people who are not necessarily who you would normally socialise with is great, too. Approaching online dating as an opportunity to do that can be a way to ‘flip the script’ (especially if you dread online dating) and instead, see every interaction as an opportunity in that regard, even if it doesn’t lead to something else.

For me, especially doing things that are a little bit out of my comfort zone – that I maybe think of as ‘cringe’ or would have judged in the past – are a favourite way of stretching that muscle. It’s like a practice I like to call “Challenging My Own Judgments”. I get curious about my experience with something like judgment – how it feel, how it can change shape and shift.

And quite often, I find myself actually enjoying the New Thing – or aspects of it. And then the ‘subconscious programming’ result is that I am showing to myself how one day I had held particular thoughts, feelings and beliefs about something – and now today, these have completely shifted. The more times this happens, the more it supports my perception of myself as someone for whom anything is possible.

I believe this can be powerful for any person who has, due to early life experiences, been cut off from their authentic selves for years. The person who has been making themselves small, who have silenced or fearfully curated their expression. The person who for years has held a certain belief about themselves, or limiting stories of what is possible for them.

You are not always going to have those beliefs about yourself – if you don’t want to. You are not always going to hold those beliefs about the world, or what is possible for you (again, if you don’t want to). Taking a step, no matter how small, to show yourself you are capable of changing how you relate to something is the beginning of something great.