if you stopped actively sabotaging your own work."
- Seth Godin
Most of us want changes in our lives, but it seems like only a few of us are able to accomplish the changes that we know that we need to make.
Most of us want to be happier, healthier, wealthier and more more successful.....but unfortunately most of us are having a difficult time making the changes to make this happen.
We want and we expect change, but we are not doing the most important and effective things to make lasting change happen. A lot of us keep on doing the same thing over and over again and for some strange reason, we expect a different result.
So why is this happening to a lot of us?
Think of a thermostat. You have it set for 75 degrees. On a warm sunny day, if the temperature reaches over 75 degrees in your house, your AC kicks in and runs for a while until the temperature is back down to 75 degrees. Same thing with heat. If it gets too cold in your house, your heater will kick in and bring the temperature up to the desired heat that you have set your thermostat for.
Now, think of yourself as having a automatic thermostat built into you. This is a thermostat that will keep you within your comfort zone. This thermostat will tell you what you can or cannot succeed at. How much money that you feel comfortable making, how much weight that you feel comfortable carrying, what kind of love that you will allow into your life..... just to give you a few examples.
Unfortunately our family, teachers, friends told us who we were, and since we were only children at the time this programming was going on, we didn't know any better. We believed them and unfortunately this set our programming and our thermostat.
In other words.....your ability to succeed at something later in life is largely determined by what you were told as a child.
You might consciously want the changes in your life right now, but your thermostat, which is mostly unconscious (you are not aware of your programming as a child), won't allow you to change for a longer period of time. It doesn't matter how hard you are trying to change on a conscious level, the thermostat might keep on bringing you down to a level where you are feeling more comfortable at being.
If you find yourself to be unhappy right now, your thermostat will bring you to do things that you enjoy and it will try to find a solution to your unhappiness. That is a good thing.
But here is the catch, if you find yourself to be too happy, the thermostat will make you sabotage yourself and bring down your happiness level to a point that feels more within your comfort zone.
Same thing with weight loss. You lose the weight and feel great for a while but then you thermostat kicks in and starts to sabotage you. You start to gain some weight in order to return to a level where you feel more comfortable. Your own comfort zone.
Your thermostat might bring you up for a while, but eventually it will just stop and not let you go any higher.
This is why the majority of lottery winners end up losing all their money and even end up bankrupt. They were too far out of their comfort zone.
Most of us are not aware of our own thermostat. And since it is mostly unconscious it will end up limiting us from taking the right kind of action to be able to accomplish what we desire.
In a way it knocks us off the path that we started to walk on. It knocks us back onto a path that feels more familiar to us, even though we don't really want to walk that path.
We consciously want the new path but since our thermostat is mostly unconscious and 95% of our lives are controlled by the unconscious, well..... you can guess where most of us will end up....back on the old path.
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