How to Shift Your Life

So many of us want to shift.

To shift our lives from present to future.

From our present state of thinking, feeling and behaving to a new one - one where we don't suffer from so much nervousness, dread and vain hope.

We want to think different thoughts. Thoughts that lift us up and make us feel energetic and motivated. We want those thoughts to help us feel better, so that we don't go through our day with a huge black cloud hovering over our heart. And we want those good feelings to spur us to act differently, walking with our head held high.

So we get into the self-help books and seminars. We are looking for the key that will help us achieve 'the shift'.

I spent four decades trying to shift my life, with no results. I read Tony Robbins and other self-help gurus. I even became a Master NLP Trainer. But in spite of all the great advice and inspiration, my life continued to be run by the same original programming that had been written into me as a young boy.

It's only today, closer to the end than the beginning, that I have made the shift. I'm not there yet, but today I think, feel and behave differently from how I did just ten years ago.

I do feel like a new man. And I'm happier and more at peace.

Why is there such a chasm between our intention to shift and our capability to do so?

Why do so many self-help books get read with so little effect on so few people?

Is it that we just can't get ourselves to take action? To do the things being suggested?

Or is it that when we read these books we are in reality searching for a key, one thing we can think or do that will open to doors and let us in to that new life?

And when we don't find it we go on to the next book, always on a search for the 'key'.

I've suffered from both these causes. I have made far too little effort to apply the knowledge I've learnt, and I have also harboured the idea that there is one way of thinking or acting that will enable me to solve all my problems.

Yes, these do hold back our progress in making the shift, but my own difficulty in following self-help advice has led me to another, more important impediment.

I have learnt, painfully, that it's not merely laziness or our inability to find the key to change key that is the reason we cannot shift. Instead, it's mostly due to our programming.

We can read and even try to apply all the advice we like on how to change our life, but if, underneath all the good suggestions and desperate action, our life is being run by a hidden monster, no amount of effort on the surface will get results.

This monster is the habitual, ingrained ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that we adopted as young kids in order to survive.

It defines how we are in the world: What kinds of thoughts run through our mind all day long, how we consistently feel, and the way we behave around people.

And it's stubborn.

It doesn't matter how much effort we put into changing our life, it's as if we're swimming against a current. However hard we pull our arms and kick our legs, we always stay in the same spot.

When I became qualified as an NLP practitioner, I applied many of the tools and techniques to myself.

My particular interest was 'internal representations' and how they influence (control) so many aspects of our life. Internal representations are simply our thoughts. They are the way we re-present what we see and hear in the world in our own minds on the inside.

I knew that if I wanted to shift my life, I had to think differently. I had to change the way I presented the events of my day to myself on the inside. In other words, how I made sense of the things I experienced.

But it wasn't just a question of "think different", as Steve Jobs so famously said.

I found that changing my thinking through willpower didn't do it for me. I always devolved back to my habitual thinking, which was running me ragged. I had to find a way to re-program my mind and heart.

I had to find a way to leave my old self, with it's ingrained thoughts, feelings and behaviours behind.

Don Miguel Ruiz, in his life-changing book The Four Agreements, calls our programming the "dream", and it is our purpose to leave the dream that we grew up in and enter the real world, where we are the architect of our life.

"We live in a fog that is not even real. This fog is a dream, your personal dream of life — what you believe, all the concepts you have about what you are, all the agreements you have made with others, with yourself, and even with God."

Meeting the woman who would become my wife was the catalyst that thrust me, painfully, into a world of different programming, away from my 'dream' and into the real world.

I married a woman whose beliefs and way of being in the world were almost the opposite of me. Where I was a people-pleaser who valued harmony, she was a truth-sayer, letting whatever thought entered her mind come straight out of her mouth. She was not afraid of confrontation, and practiced this with me every day when she questioned my way of thinking and behaving.

I realised that her worldview would never be exactly the same as mine, but despite the pain of having my programming questioned, I knew deep down that she had something important to teach me about running your life your way. Gradually the way I thought about people, work and relationships changed, and this meant that my habitual emotions of fear and anxiety dissipated. I'm still saying and doing things I regret (like holding back from confronting service personnel), but I also know that my old programming has only a cursory influence on me today.

Now, when I am inspired to try out a self-help tool, I am better positioned to make it work for me. I start with a clean sheet in my mind, unencumbered by my old, noisy habits and beliefs.

Of course, you don't have to get married to your opposite to change your programming.

But shifting your life in this way needs more than a few self-help tools. It needs a decision that puts you in a different environment, whether physical or psychological.

It needs you to be in an environment where you are subject to new influences, some of which will probably give you pain as you come up against your comfortable way of being.

You will say that you can't just leave your family or career or country. You don't have to. A good way to start is to make a decision that you are going to consciously behave in ways that scare you.

You can decide to speak your truth every time you open your mouth, and to hell with the niceties of society.

You can decide to make your own decision, without checking with anyone, and then take the first step.

And you can decide to mix with people who are totally different from you, holding true to yourself however tense things get.

These kinds of actions will help to put you in situations that make you fearful, nervous or angry - and these emotions that accompany your new actions will crash into your old programming, causing it to loosen its grip. Years of habitual ways of being need something powerful to run up against if they are to shift. 

My suggestions here are only a small sample of things you may be able to do in order to shake up your programming. You can look at your own life and you might discover a good way for you to create your own shift. 

In sum, if we really want to shift our life, rather than tinker with it, we need to go deep.

It's not possible to change our habits of thinking, feeling and behaving just by doing it. We will always default, after an initial high, to our deeply embedded programs.

As long as we are unaware that we are actually controlled by deep-seated programs and not by conscious will, we will never reap the benefits of the self-help world.

But when we are aware of this, we can look at our life and work out a way to re-write our programs with the help of situations that produce extreme emotion in us and force us to do things we are terrified of doing.

And once we achieve a mind and heart that are clear of the mud of our history, we can then use our self-help books to propel us forward into a happy and successful life.

With best wishes,

James