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To change your life, you must first change your mind
Why do 80% of professional athletes go bankrupt and 70% of lottery winners file for bankruptcy? Because they’re doing this one thing wrong. Find out below and avoid this mistake more easily by getting your free copy 5 building blocks for a happy gay life Here.
The mistake of trying to change your life before changing your mind
When we were drowning in debt, we looked for a way to pay off our debt quickly. We’ve considered loan consolidation, refinancing, bankruptcy, and even borrowing from our 401(k)s.
The loan consolidation company we worked with was credible, had reasonable fees, and tried to help us. The problem wasn’t them.
The problem was us.
We hadn’t changed our attitude at the time we hired her, and so the job was just more money. We were lucky because we read horror stories about debt consolidation companies.
Have you considered debt consolidation? Have you considered filing for bankruptcy? Have you considered borrowing from your retirement savings?
Eight percent of Americans who file for bankruptcy file more than once. On the one hand, that is small. On the other hand, I’m surprised that bankruptcy is so painful that someone would file for bankruptcy twice.
After spending our adult lives in finance, we would have to be in big trouble to borrow from my 401(k) account. So we were surprised that even a third of Americans do this.
There are all kinds of ways to get out of debt, some better than others. Every single one is serious.
If you’re not in the right frame of mind when trying to fix a problem, no matter what the solution is, it can make a dangerous situation worse. This is because our thoughts (usually unconsciously) cause our feelings. Our feelings create our actions. Our actions lead to our results.
It was our experience with debt that taught us why our lives wouldn’t improve until we changed our minds.
Contrary to what scientists once believed, that our brains were static, science now shows that this is the case The brain can reorganize itself by forming new neural connections or pathways from negative conditioning to positive conditioning.
This is the science of neuroplasticity, and neuroplasticity can be used to help you change your mind and then change your life. The Mayo Clinic calls people’s current beliefs about themselves, whether true or untrue, “fixed mindsets.” Fortunately, it is just as possible to have a “growth mindset,” where we shift our subconscious thoughts to the positive.
This is what we outline below.
At this point, it is important to mention that science also shows that the use of psychedelics can support neuroplasticity. Influencers like Michael Pollan, Jason Silva, Ram Dass and many more have spoken out in support of their efforts. Pollan wrote How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendencewhich was very well received.
Using psychedelics to alter our neural pathways and alter our lives, while feasible, is outside the scope of this website. Everything we did and are sharing with you below is something you can do with your mom.
So how do you use neuroplasticity to adopt a growth mindset and transform your life? Follow these seven steps.
1. Discover your truest hopes and dreams
Don’t you like to dream of bigger and better things? We do!
Think about the last time you bought a lottery ticket (as mentioned above). The best part about having a lottery ticket (literally for most lottery players), since most of us never win, is dreaming about what we’ll do with our multi-million dollar winnings (go not bankrupt).
To truly change your mind, first start with your hopes and dreams, your purpose and your why. In Man’s search for meaningVictor Frankl said: “If you have a ‘why’ to live, you can endure almost any ‘how’.”
What is your why?
What are your truest, deepest hopes and dreams? What’s on your bucket list? Where would you like to travel? What does retirement look like? Who do you want to be?
Most of us don’t know what we want, even though we’ve spent so much time with ourselves.
It’s not about what your parents, extended family, friends or colleagues want for you. It’s not about what your community or society wants for you. Above all, it’s not about what you are think You should want something for yourself, because of mom and dad, because of the kid who wasn’t your friend in elementary school, or because of what’s on TV.
Find out who you are and what You want. The irony is that with all the external pressure you put on yourself, no one really cares, or at least not as much as you think. So determine your goals that you want to achieve your Dreams.
A great way to document your vision for your best life is Create a vision boardeither virtual or physical. Our screensavers for all of our devices, including our TV, feature some sort of vision board quality/ambitious imagery. We also have our physical vision boards.
All of this constantly reminds us of our goals and ensures that they always remain at the forefront of our minds. These repetitive memories seep into our subconscious and change our thoughts, then our feelings, then our actions. . . and then our results.
Until we figure this out and do this exercise ourselves, we have lived up to the gay stereotype of living fabulously but being incredibly broke. That’s because we’ve been trying to make amends for our past and live up to our community’s definition of “fabulous” (i.e., “worthy”). Feeling unworthy – not good enough – led us to do stupid things that led to stressful and disappointing results.
2. Decide what you need to achieve your hopes and dreams
Once you figure out your biggest goals and highest dreams, Find out what it takes to make your dreams come true. This exercise invites you to dig deep and consider what is really stopping you from living the life you want.
We asked ourselves, “How do we get out of our financial hole?”
Are you spending more than you earn? Did you choose a career to make your mother happy? Are you dating the wrong person because you’re afraid of being alone? Does pride stop you from saying “I’m sorry” to someone?
Once you’ve identified the root cause of what’s stopping you from achieving your hopes and dreams, consider what you can do to overcome those obstacles. For us we had to stop spending so much money and Find out how we can pay off our credit card debt quickly.
For you, it might be figuring out how to make a career change or focus more on what you would like to do. You might be breaking up with the wrong person in order to potentially find the right person (or learn to love yourself more). Or they have to find the courage to finally say, “I’m sorry.”
This exercise is difficult because it requires you to face your fears and have courage. It is only successful if you are honest with yourself and really find out what is holding you back from your true goals. Being honest with yourself is hard, but not being honest with yourself will only lead to more disappointment.
3. Figure out what you are willing to do to achieve your hopes and dreams
Finally, decide What are you ready for? to make your hopes and dreams a reality.
Robert Collier said, “Success is the sum of small efforts – repeated day after day.” So what habits will you break and replace with to be successful? (In the second exercise of the Fabulous Life Combo we show you how to break bad habits.)
Everything, every dream has its price. This is the law of compensation, the eighth law of attraction. But you must be willing to pay the price or your efforts will fail.
We had to ask ourselves, “How far are we willing to go to achieve financial freedom?” Our answer was everything. We’ve stopped traveling, stopped eating out, stopped going out as much, are careful about our spending – everything and more.
How interested are you in getting that other job? How much do you love yourself that you leave the person you no longer love? How much do you miss the person you can’t apologize to?
Ultimately, how much are you willing to change your mind and yourself today to become the person you want to be tomorrow?
You may feel like working on all your hopes and dreams is too much for you. That’s okay. Just start. The only way to eat an elephant is to eat one bite at a time (please don’t eat elephants).
But do something, even if it’s scary. Even if you’re just working on a small task to achieve your big goal, do it. Just do it It (Thanks, Nike).
After you achieve that goal, you work on your next task and so on and so forth until you achieve your big, once “impossible” goal. Every time you complete a task, you create momentum. This momentum will lead you to the success you described in the first exercise of the Fabulous Life Combo.
As you progress, periodically evaluate how you feel about yourself and the accountability partner you chose in the Fabulous Life exercise. Then work toward your next goals.
While you do this, They create new experiences that create new neural pathways in your brain. Instead of the negative phrases like “I can’t,” “It’s hard,” “Why me,” etc., you will condition yourself to think (and believe): “I will,” “I will,” “I. “Will.”
Then you start to change your mind. If you need help focusing less on your goals and more on your habits, as Collier recommended above, continue below.
Change your life from the inside out now
As you can see, To truly change your life, you must change within (not necessarily externally).
For example, for most people, making money isn’t difficult; It’s hard to keep money. Like many in the LGBTQ community, we struggled with limiting beliefs about what we were worth, whether we were worthy, and whether we deserved it.
To renew our minds, we had to do inner work. This is about more than just finding the external queues for acceptance and success. We had to accept ourselves and trust that success is ours even if we can’t see it now, because if we can think it, we can have it – Because everything you want wants you.
4. Meditate daily to change your mind (and change your life)
Tim Ferriss from The 4-hour week I once said that there are two habits that every successful person has. They meditate and write in a diary. A good boss of mine once said: “Find out what successful people do and do it.”
So here we go.
Our alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m. every day. We get up immediately, make warm lemon water with ginger, cayenne pepper, and turmeric, and then meditate for eight to 20 minutes. Besides making our lemon water, meditation is the first thing we do every day.
Meditation will change your life for two reasons. First, Meditation gives you space to calm down. No matter where we are and how hectic our day will be, we can find at least 15 minutes of peace. This time of rest reduces stress and clears our minds.
Secondly, because thoughts give rise to feelings, feelings give rise to emotions, emotions give rise to actions and actions give rise to results. Meditation helps us develop better and healthier thoughts.
You see, neurons that fire together wire together, and we’ve had a lifetime of negative thoughts about ourselves and our worth that polluted our minds both consciously and unconsciously.
On the outside we might seem great, we might look confident, and we might even say we felt great, but inside, deep down in our subconscious (the layer that accounts for 95% of all our actions), we felt neither great nor confident.
This unworthiness, however unconscious, created feelings that led to actions that led to results. . . Results we weren’t proud of.
If we stay on topic here, meditation also helps to create new neural pathways. This causes us to get out of our own way and stop trying so hard, or as one of our mentors says, “stop trying.”
For example, finish this sentence: Money is the root of all _____. If you say “evil,” you have a negative money story.
Finish this sentence: Money does not grow with _____. When you say “trees,” you have a negative money story.
Finally, finish this sentence: Making money is _____. When you say “tough,” you have a negative money story.
If you (like most Americans) have a negative money history, then it’s no wonder (like most Americans) that you suffer from money problems. Likewise, we put on exactly what we put out.
You know what Sir Isaac Newton said about motion, right? “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
It’s just science. If you unconsciously think that money is bad, you will unconsciously push money away. If deep down you feel like you don’t deserve financial security, you will forever be financially insecure.
Meditating can help you tap into your subconscious mind to produce healthier (and richer) thoughts.
If you follow us at the Living Fabulous Daily Journal within the Fabulous Life Combo, you will see that you can enter the total of your daily meditation at the end of the journal each day. This way you can meditate more than once a day (it’s so important).
5. Recite affirmations daily to change your mind, it will change your life
After we have meditated, one of us leaves the living room and goes to our bedroom so that each of us can recite our daily affirmations out loud and in the first person (I am, I believe, I have, etc.). Through meditation we have already created a neural imprint of what we want in our subconscious.
Affirmations leave an audible impressionwhich also affects our neural pathways, our best life.
We repeat our affirmations emphatically for five minutes. We each have a short paragraph that we have memorized to repeat out loud. We swap them out occasionally, but stick with the same affirmations until we achieve one of our goals or a goal changes.
Your affirmations should be personally tailored to your hopes and dreams. Affirmations should be specific, clear, and said in the first person using positive, proactive, action-oriented verbs.
6. List your daily goals to change your mind and your life
After reciting our daily affirmations, we go to our kitchen bar to list the most important things we need to accomplish that day. With a clear mind and affirmation of our goals, we write down the most important actions we need to take that day to achieve the best life we have imagined while meditating and reciting our affirmations.
It is important that we concentrate on fewer things. Most of us try to cram too much into our day.
When we feel like we have too much to do, we question ourselves The one Question: What can I do to make everything else easier or unnecessary?
How profound is that? The question is: How can I eliminate non-essentials to reduce my stress? and be more effective and efficient.
The answer to this question is rarely: “answer emails,” “attend unnecessary and unnecessarily long meetings,” “answer unscheduled phone calls,” or “get into the scroll hole on Facebook.”
Use that One thing Rule if you list your daily tasks in your Living Fabulous Daily Journal every day and watch your success.
7. Write down what you are grateful for and watch your life change
Our final morning ritual is to write down what we are grateful for each day. With clarity and concentration, we find it easier to understand what is going on in our lives, what has happened recently or is about to happen (because we have meditated on it).
When we get upset or angry, We are grateful every day to maintain a conscious and subconscious mindset of abundance.
When someone cuts us off on the highway, we think about what we are grateful for. When we spill our coffee, we think about our morning gratitude. When we are stressed or depressed, we turn to our morning gratitudes.
Some days it’s harder than others to list something we’re grateful for. But this exercise challenges us to change our minds unconsciously (inside) and our lives consciously (outside).
7. Write down good things every day before bed to change your life
When we go to bed, we list five things that day that made us happy. This can be anything from a delicious cup of coffee to securing a lucrative brand partnership. This helps turn our final thoughts into everyday positive thoughts.
The makes it easier to fall asleep and lays the foundation for another good day tomorrow.
Finally, be patient with yourself. Don’t get caught up in “the damn hows,” as Mike Dooley calls it Play The Matrix says.
What you want, you want too. We humans get so caught up in the cursed how because we doubt ourselves and then repel everything we try to attract – again, that third law of motion. So be patient and trust in the powers that be (and in yourself).
We repeat these exercises every day to build healthier and more efficient neural pathways. These exercises help us use the science of neuroplasticity to become the best versions of ourselves.
They will help you.
Extra credit to change your mind and transform your life:
- Let go of the past
- Don’t worry about the future
- Live in the moment
- Read more
- Learn more
- Stop being reactive and be more proactive
- Share your ideas more often (and improve them when necessary)
- Write a paragraph (of your book, business plan, personal mission statement)
- Update/review your budget twice a month with the Budget Buster Bundle Here
- Surround yourself with positive, like-minded people
More help to change your life: