Tag: #feelthefeardoitanyway

Who Changes You?

Who changes You? Well, You do, nobody else, others or circumstances may influence, but You do the changing, consciously or sometimes, unconsciously.

How does that happen? Well for the conscious led change it is through insight, (an AHA moment). This entry is about that.

Insight Definition

The aha moment

No one solves complex problems at will. The answers always suddenly arrive, either as you fall asleep; in the middle of the night; as you wake up; as you exercise, shower, or drive; or while you do something pleasant and repetitive such as knitting, gardening, or cooking.
For insights to be useful, they need to be generated from within, not given to individuals as conclusions. This is true for several reasons. First, people will experience the adrenaline-like rush of insight, only if they go through the process of making connections themselves. The moment of insight is well known to be a positive and energising experience’ (Schwartz)
1. Awareness
2. Reflection
3. Insight
4. Action

Let us look in more detail into this model, discussed in

(David Rock Your Brain at Work)

The ARIA Model
In his book, David Rock walks you through the ARIA model (Awareness, Reflection, Insight, Action). This is exactly how it feels when you come up with a creative idea. Here are the brief phases (read the book for more details)
Awareness
This is the phase where you state the problem and activate the prefrontal cortex of your brain. Simplify the problem with a short statement:- I want to explain variables, conditions and triggers in a simple way.
And here comes the hard part. Do NOT try to solve this problem. That would not result in a new, creative approach. Let it “sink”.
Reflection
This phase is about reflecting on your thoughts. Again, it’s not about resolving the issue or getting down to the details. Think high level. Way above the details to activate an unfocused state of mind with the power of regions in the right hemisphere. Ideas can emerge freely here. Do not discard anything. There is a time for constructive criticism, but not now.
Insight
This phase is fascinating. A burst of gamma band waves hit the brain with the fastest brain waves you can get. Neurons are firing in union back and forth. It’s a brief moment with an energetic punch. This is the “AHA” moment. You can see from the diagram below, there is a scale on this moment from 1 – 5 and you will recognise not all Aha’s are life changing. It may just be an Ah, as in, “Ah, I can just do this” or “Wow I never thought of that, how amazing is this.” A full-blown epiphany that causes a complete paradigm shift in thinking

The AHA (Eureka) Scale

Action
This is your chance to harness the energy and creative burst from the Insight phase. It is powerful but short-lived. You must grab the moment and make it happen!

How to

As Action says above, grab the moment, then you look inside your brain for a ‘How to’, how do I do this new thing? Since the thinking is new, You have no previous experience of how to e.g. approach this situation differently. That means You will be learning the ‘new way’ and that will feel uncomfortable, see my previous entry Learning Re-Frame.

So:- Feel the fear and do it anyway
(Definition of FEAR:- False Evidence Appearing Real)

– How many insights do think you might have had in the last six months?
– How many led to change?
– How might you become more open to insight?

 

Beliefs we may learn early in Life

In the journey to becoming you, a major influence is the beliefs we form early in life.

For example, a belief held by many people that holds them back in life is “I’m not good enough”. Think about beliefs you learned as a child. See the information below

When did you learn these  / beliefs / lenses?

How old were you?

The following is a synopsis from Transactional Analysis (TA) on childhood scripts known as injunctions and drivers

Figure 1 The Drowning Man

See detail http://www.activatetherapy.co.uk/single-post/2017/05/01/On-being-a-lifeguard

TA identifies twelve key injunctions which people commonly build into their scripts. These are injunctions in the sense of being powerful “I can’t/mustn’t …” messages that embed into a child’s belief and life-script:
• Don’t be (don’t exist)
• Don’t be who you are (Don’t Be You)
• Don’t be a child
• Don’t grow up
• Don’t make it in your life (Don’t Succeed)
• Don’t do anything!
• Don’t be important
• Don’t belong
• Don’t be close
• Don’t be well (don’t be sane!)
• Don’t think
• Don’t feel.

In addition, there is the so-called episcript:
“You should (or deserve to) have this happen in your life, so it doesn’t have to happen to me.” (Magical thinking on the part of the parent(s).)

Against these, a child is often told other things he or she must do. There is debate as to whether there are five or six of these ‘drivers‘:
• Please me/others!
• Be perfect!
• Be Strong!
• Try Hard!
• Hurry Up!
• Be Careful! (is in dispute)
Thus in creating his script, a child will often attempt to juggle these, example: “It’s okay for me to go on living (ignore don’t exist) so long as I try hard”.
This explains why some change is inordinately difficult. To continue the above example: When a person stops trying hard and relaxes to be with his family, the injunction You don’t have the right to exist which was being suppressed by their script now becomes exposed and a vivid threat. Such an individual may feel a massive psychological pressure which he himself doesn’t understand, to return to trying hard, in order to feel safe and justified (in a childlike way) in existing.
Driver behaviour is also detectable at a very small scale, for instance in instinctive responses to certain situations where driver behaviour is played out over five to twenty seconds.
Broadly speaking, scripts can fall into Tragic, Heroic or Banal (or Non-Winner) varieties, depending on their rules.

Now think about this:-

What might you have ‘Learned’ as a child, that maybe holding you back today?

What if you could change the belief? Create a new lens to look at reality, what would that belief be?

What do you now have to learn?

Remember when you hold a belief about something, you are right! And you have evidence to back it up.

The beliefs talked about above are not easy to change, just begin by noticing when they ‘Kick in’.

Perhaps practice  changing a less deeply seated belief and notice what thinking comes up when you do

E.g. I can’t walk into a room of  ‘friendly’ strangers and talk to someone

Change the belief and you will be right about the new way! and build evidence to back that up.

#feelthefearanddoitanyway.  I will come back to this Hashtag