Hey there!

I totally love my clients.

And to be honest I would pretty much move heaven for their benefit.

But...

It's frustrating to see someone with the talent to win in life and at the market place...

Consistently make decisions that work against themselves.

If only they would stop getting in their own way...

They would consistently do better.

Most of us do pretty much the same thing...

We press hard on the accelerators of life...

But we don't care about releasing the handbrake...

Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty - Virginia Satir

In other words...

Most of us would gladly repeat the cycle of predictable misery...

Doing the same thing over and over again...

Even though we know it's not getting us any closer to what we want...

In our lives...

In our relationships...

At the market place....

We typically prefer the familiarity of our current and predictable misery...

Than the discomfort of reaching for a better way of doing things that we're not familiar or comfortable with...

We prefer to borrow other people's versions of miserable success...

Rather than actually make the effort to clarify exactly what we want and intentionally move towards it...

Stop being such a bloody sociopath!

In my hypnotherapy practice...

I have a client in her early 50s...

Absolutely stunning...

Well travelled...

Highly educated....

She started working with me because "I don't want to repeat my mistakes"

She came in pretty hard...

Making it clear that she "knew what she wanted" and what was "important" to her...

"So Victor...focus on the real practical stuff not all this your mind thing"

My Mind thing?!!!

#smh

Well...

Like I've shared with us so far...

There is a big difference between the values we claimed are important to us and the truth about what we actually hold as important in our day to day life...

So...

A few heart breaks and multiple personal disasters later...

And it was finally clear to her that maybe something had to change...

That change that need to be made was on two levels...

Level one...

Actually sitting down to truly think through what she wanted...

This was an eye opener for her...

Prior to actually settling down to do the work...

She always assumed she knew what she wanted...

And whilst it was true to an extent...

What she found was that...

What she wanted was clouded by a number of different things...

Emotions...

Past experiences...

Unresolved trauma...

The consistent not so helpful stories in her....

And so making decisions in her own best interest was particularly difficult.

Level two...

Defining a set of personal rules and assumptions...

That allowed her to play at the highest possible level...

Without having to think through every detail of her day to day life...

In order words...

We created a personal operating system for her.

The clarity of her focus made decision making easy...

Her personal rules and assumptions helped her keep her commitment to her commitment...

The result?

The ability to consistently act in her own best interest.

It's now 6 months since she made the change...

Let's just say she's much happier.

I believe that the gap between what you say about yourself and what you actually do...

Represents your level of self awareness...

The closer the gap between what you say and what you do...

The higher your level of self awareness.

Now I don't know for sure if that's true or not...

But it's a useful assumption to have and operate from...

Why?

Because it leads to self acceptance..

And self acceptance is contact with reality.

Contact with reality means....

Seeing the truth about yourself and your mess ups...

And choosing to deal with them as they are.

It means not lying to yourself about where you are in relation to where you want to go...

When you truly accept yourself...

Shame disappears...

And when shame disappears...

Let's just say...

Life gets better.

Till tomorrow...

Get out of your own way.

CTM

PS: Yes...still shamelessly reminding you that it's my birth month and I'm still open to receiving gifts and surprises thank you very much. My birthday is November 30th. Feel free to make it a big deal.