Self-Imprisonment to Self-Empowerment
Most humans reach out to me wanting to improve or change some aspect of their life by using hypnosis. Unfortunately, they don't understand that they don't need to be hypnotized—they need to be dehypnotized. Humans need freedom from the social hypnosis that they have bought into over the years.
I have heard many explanations from humans about why they behave the way they do:
"My parents are large, and it's in my genes to be big."
"I was always picked on as a child."
"I have never been able to change."
"I can't make friends with others because my mother always told me that 'I should be seen and not heard.'"
"I'm too old to change now!"
These are the result of years of learning and reinforcing limiting beliefs.
How do two humans go through the same experiences yet have two very different outcomes?
I know a couple of humans who were made to eat everything on their plate as a child, became overweight, and were teased at school for being fat. One human is now a triathlete, and the other went the opposite direction.
Why?
The map is not the territory. In other words, our perception of the world is not reality itself but our version of it—our map. No two humans have the same map. While we may have similar experiences, our interpretations of those experiences are different.
Our maps are created from the information we take in through our five primary senses. Our senses bring certain aspects of the world to our attention, which go through neurological processes, forming our values, beliefs, rules, and capabilities. These are often expressed consciously, yet most of the time, they operate outside of our awareness. Most of us don't realize that we can change them, so they serve us in better ways. As a result, we unknowingly place ourselves in a mental prison.
How do we break out of this self-imprisonment and move to self-empowerment?
The first step is to realize that we can make that change, and it starts with adopting a simple belief—the past does not equal the future.
It doesn't matter if you've held your beliefs for a day, a week, a year, or a lifetime. What's important is that you realize that it doesn't matter. All that matters is your ability to recognize where you're at right now, where you want to be, and formulate a plan to bridge the gap.
Suppose you're teaching a baby how to walk. Over and over and over again, the baby keeps falling and prefers to crawl instead. How long would you continue to teach the baby to walk before you just gave up? You wouldn't give up, would you? You would keep trying to teach the baby how to walk no matter what happened in the past. That attitude is the same one needed to break the pattern of self-imprisonment.
Regardless of how many times you've lost weight and gained it back, sabotaged a relationship, or failed to stop yourself from losing your temper at something minor, you can break the pattern and accomplish your goal.
You can only fail if you give up.
Imagine the following: A young man and his family are forced out of their home—he must work tirelessly to support them. A couple of years later, his mother dies. He starts a business and fails. He then runs for state legislature and loses. During that same year, he loses his job. He then decides to go to law school, but he isn't accepted. So he decides to borrow some money from a friend to begin another business and goes bankrupt within a year. He spends the next 17 years of his life paying off this debt.
He runs for state legislature again and wins this time. He gets engaged to be married, and his fiancée dies. He has a total nervous breakdown and stays in bed for six months. He wants to become a speaker of the state legislature, but he is defeated. He seeks to become an elector and is again defeated. So he then runs for Congress—he loses. Three years later, he runs for Congress again— this time, he won.
He does a great job but loses when he runs for re-election to Congress. Next, he seeks the position of land officer in his home state and is rejected. He then runs for Senate of the United States—he loses. Next, he seeks the Vice-Presidential nomination at his party's national convention and receives less than 100 votes. Two years later, he runs for U.S. Senate again and again loses. Finally, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States.
Every failure is valuable.
Think of failure as learning what doesn't work. You can then take what you learn and alter your approach until you get your desired result. Knowing what doesn't work is important information for breaking out of the pattern of self-imprisonment and moving to self-empowerment.
Who are you?
I get several different responses when I ask this question: a blank stare, a shallow answer to brush the question aside, and sometimes a well-thought-out answer.
You must look inside at who you are now and who you want to be by asking questions like:
If there were a definition of you in the dictionary, how would it read?
Is that definition the way you want to be remembered?
If it isn't how you want to be remembered, how can you change it?
Take a moment and think of how you would like your definition to read. Begin by completing the following sentence: "I am ___."
"I am" is a powerful statement because it defines you. It's your identity—what you are certain about in yourself. Your identity encompasses the beliefs of what you can or cannot do, what is possible or impossible, and true or false.
Have you ever said, "I could never do that," or "I will never be able to lose the weight and keep it off?" It's important to know that we not only define ourselves by who we are, but we also define ourselves by who we are not. How much you use your capabilities depends upon the identity you have about yourself.
We all take consistent action on the views that we hold about ourselves, whether those views are true or not, because one of the strongest needs in humans is the need for consistency. We've all been conditioned to value consistency throughout our lives. Think about it. Do you want to be viewed as wishy-washy, scatterbrained, or hypocritical? No, I bet you do not! So, as you tell people who you are or what you're all about, you feel pressure to keep your identity consistent. Humans view consistency as trustworthy, loyal, and stable. It makes us feel good to have others view us this way, doesn't it?
Some humans have an identity that they will lose weight and then gain it back. They will tell you (and themselves), "I'm a yo-yo dieter," and they're proud of it. It gives them something to be certain and consistent about. Some humans who have excess weight say, "I'm a fat person." This human's sense of certainty about their identity will determine their behavior to keep them consistent with who they believe they are.
Even though parts of our identity may be destructive and disempowering, we need that certainty and consistency. So, changing your identity is the path from self-imprisonment to self-empowerment.
Humans who are overweight must change their identity from "I'm a fat person" to “I'm a fit and healthy human being." This simple change in identity will shift their behaviors such as diet, exercise, eating habits; and create the changes that are consistent with their new identity.
But how do you change your identity?
Decide to change. I advise my clients to "act as if." If you act as if you already are the person you want to be, your mind will get the idea and develop the habits needed to make this a consistent part of your life. Commit to your new identity by telling everyone around you. Live it every day, and it will become conditioned within you. So, ask yourself... "Who do I need to be to accomplish what I desire?"
The metaphors that you hold about life determine the direction in which you move.
What is a life metaphor?
Life metaphors are global metaphors—metaphors that define your entire life. It's how you view the world. For example, in the movie Forest Gump, Forest has a life metaphor—"Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."
I've also heard people say, "Life is a bed of roses."
How do you describe your life?
Is your life metaphor consistent with your new identity?
A metaphor can also apply to a specific part of your life. For example, your business life, a relationship, or losing weight. I have clients who tell me, "Our relationship is a dumpster fire." Unfortunately, this is not the most effective metaphor to hold when working on a relationship.
I had a client tell me, "If I lose weight, I'll receive more attention. Getting more attention means men will hit on me. Losing weight is like death to my marriage." As long as she had this metaphor for losing weight, it was impossible for her to stick to any plan.
I had another client whose metaphor was, "Reaching my ideal body weight is as easy as learning to ride a bike—once I learn, it will be with me for the rest of my life. I just need you to show me how."
Both of these clients lost weight, but who do you think reached their goal first?
Are your metaphors helping or hindering you?
How could you change your metaphors to help you reach the goals you want?
Don't underestimate the power of your words.
When you're defining your identity and describing your metaphors, be brutally honest with yourself. Words have the power to make you laugh, cry, hate, and love—use words to your advantage. You must realize that the words you habitually choose affect how you communicate with yourself and, therefore, how you experience life. By changing your words, you change how you think, feel, and live. I have heard people say that they're big-boned, thick, or large. They cushion what they are... obese. It's challenging to be motivated to lose weight when you feel it's inevitable to be overweight.
Ask yourself what would motivate you more if you wanted to lose some pounds:
"I'd like to lose weight, but I'm big-boned—my whole family is."
"It's not my bones that are the issue—it's the fat around them. I'll show my family what's possible."
If you want to make a change, start by describing your current state in a way that will motivate you to make that change—don't sugarcoat it. Humans make real change when they go through threshold—that point at which you say, "Enough is enough. That's the straw that broke the camel's back."
It's important to realize that words shape our beliefs and impact our actions. If you want to change your life, you need to consciously choose the words you're going to use and continually strive to expand your level of choice. The words you choose to describe your current state should motivate you to change and move away from that state. The words you use to describe how you want to be should inspire you to move towards your goal.
Humans with metaphors such as "big-boned" and "thick" have learned those over the years. The experiences that created and reinforced their beliefs are called references. References provide the essence, or the building blocks, for our beliefs, rules, and values. A larger number and higher quality of references enable us to evaluate better what things mean, what we can do, and our potential choices. I use the term "potential choices" because we often fail to organize our references in a way that strengthens us. For example, a human may have tremendous certainty that she can do her job better than any other employee in the company. But when she thinks of losing weight and being healthy, she can't seem to bring up that same sense of certainty that would help her reach her goal.
References are all the memories of your life that you've recorded in your mind. Some references are learned consciously, and others unconsciously. Many are the result of experiences you've had, and others come from the information you've learned through reading and other means. And just like any other thing we learn, we filter the data as it comes in, and we make it fit our reality.
Think of a belief as a tabletop, and the references are the legs of the table.
I hallucinate that you have a belief that breathing is good. You have references that support that belief. For example, you've probably tried to hold your breath and found it wasn't a long-term endeavor. Maybe you choked and realized how bad it was not to breathe. Perhaps you had a terrifying tumble off a surfboard—like I once did.
The more references you have to support your table, your belief, the stronger that belief will be.
The key is to increase the references that are available within your life. Seek out new experiences that support the way you want to be and who you know you can become. Your imagination provides a sense of certainty and vision that goes way beyond the limitations of the past. As you expand your references, you'll begin to grow in your life. Seek out the information and humans to help you close that gap to where you want to be.
The responsibility ultimately comes back to you. Dehypnotizing yourself and moving from self-imprisonment to self-empowerment is easy to do, and it's also very easy not to do. Will you choose to be brutally honest about where you're at in life and have the courage to imagine where you want to be? Who are you, and who do you want to be?
Will you take a look at the references you've been using up to this point and then do whatever is necessary to build new references?
Read the books you need to read.
Talk to people who already accomplished what you want to achieve.
Attempt new ways of reaching your outcome.
Make yourself feel a little uncomfortable with something out of the ordinary for you.
Are the metaphors that you use to describe yourself, your life, and your ability to reach your goal helping you or hindering you?
These are the questions that you must ask yourself because questions are the answer. Remember, it's not the events that shape your life that determine how you feel and act—it's the way you interpret and evaluate those events.
Successful humans ask better questions, and, in turn, they get better answers. The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life.
In addition to the questions I pose throughout this article, what other questions can you ask yourself to help you move from self-imprisonment to self-empowerment?
The difference between humans is the difference in the questions they ask consistently. Follow the old saying, ask, and you shall receive. So, what are you asking for?
I want you to leave this article asking yourself questions—good questions. Questions like:
"How can I make my life better and have fun doing it?"
"Who will I have to be to become the person that I know I deserve to be?"
"How much fun is the journey going to be from self-imprisonment to self-empowerment?"
Have fun with it!