One of the main roles of our unconscious mind is to keep us safe. We learn through seeing and hearing other people’s experiences and from experiencing things ourselves.
We start our conditioning at a very young age. Between the ages of 0-6 years old we are like little sponges learning how to be little people and we pick up everything that is happening around us; everything from what our parents are saying and what they are doing, what the media tells us, what people say or do at school. Before the age of 7 or so it is like we are in a trance and just downloading all of this programming for us to use to help us through life later on. So if we see someone on TV being embarrassed by getting up to speak in front of their class at school, we can automatically take that on as “the way to survive in the world” and it can become one of our fears, even if we have never experienced public speaking! If we see our parents being miserable going to work, we can unconsciously take that on as what it means to go to work and grow up unconsciously believing that you have to be miserable at work to survive in this world.
The thing is, having all of these fears is like being trapped in a box of fear. If we grow up with all these fears and never really challenge them, so if we were to always avoid public speaking or get up to do a presentation and think “I’m so bad at this, I always embarrass myself…”, our fear grows and it’s like that box of fear that we are already in becomes smaller and smaller and more and more restrictive, until even the thought public speaking puts us on edge.
It’s like a baby elephant being tied to a rope on a big stake in the ground. After initially struggling against the rope, the baby elephant learns it can’t move while the rope is on and doesn’t bother to struggle against it any more. While the rope may stop the elephant when it is a baby, even when the elephant grows up and could easily break free of the rope, it doesn’t even try to struggle because it has learned that struggling is useless. It has trapped itself in a restrictive box of what it can and can’t do; of what is and isn’t possible.
It’s exactly the same with us. While a lot of the fears we have may make sense when we are younger as a way to “keep us safe”, as adults these fears and patterns of acting and being very seldom serve us. We need to challenge our fears and our beliefs of what we can and can’t do. The easiest way to do that is just to act, in spite of the fear. The more we act and get results, the more we show our unconscious mind that there is another way to be – that public speaking or whatever our fear is won’t kill us; that in fact we could actually be quite good at it. The more we act, the more we start to expand the size of the box we trap ourselves in.
So challenge yourself, do one thing that scares you today. It is the only way to grow.
-Kim Tiong
Join NLP Practitoner and Life Coach Kim at her
Discovering You Workshop
When: Saturday 10 October 2015
Time: 2:30pm – 4pm
Cost: $25
Prebooking Required: Phone: 0409 005 615 Email Kim: click here Website: Visit Kim’s website