On making a change
Had this little fellow in my pocket all day today. I’ve been meaning to for days, but just forgot and forgot and forgot. It’s an assignment from my brain coach, Susanna Davidsson, who’s helping me disentangle my thoughts and way of thinking.
I meet up with Susanna every other week for about two hours, and we’re doing it for six months. Over these 24 hours we’ll be working through a bunch of stuff. We’re just beginning to enter interesting areas like habits and beliefs. My last assignment was identifying habits, good and bad (so hard - it’s difficult to self scan!). I have many habits I judge to be bad, and few I think are good. But maybe it’s harder to identify the good ones, since that’s just the way things should be? Things you feel bad about in some ways are so much easier to identify. They come at you and say hello even when you’re not trying to identify them and write them down.
Anyways, this latest lesson was about beliefs, which are deeply rooted in your mind. I already know I have some issues in the belief department, such as “I don’t know enough”, “I should be better”, “I should do more” and also classic money beliefs that doesn’t really serve me. I WANT to do so many things and so much, so I’m pretty much reinforcing my not-so-great beliefs when I go after my projects... I have a hard time just chilling out and relax, even for short periods. And when it comes to the money thing, I am not good at asking for my for my services. I sometimes let other people’s opinions color my value of something, and that is not a good belief to have.
Back to today. The rock was to be carried with me all day, and it would symbolize my beliefs for this full day. Whenever I did something, conscious or by habit, I would pause and reflect over if that was me talking/deciding or if it was my set of beliefs.
I think I have experienced some sort of placebo effect today, as talking about money and financial decisions didn’t feel at all that difficult or impossible or scary. So perhaps I should carry this rock around more often! I also finished work in good time today and didn’t work at all after dinner (which is rare for me).
Perhaps this was just the type of mind trick I needed to be able to reflect and achieve change?
In many ways I love science, but when it comes to good effects from fluffy stuff, I don’t mind them at all if they work on me. The brain is fascinating in the way that it’s rarely predictable - depending on our past experience, beliefs and expectations, we will all get different results from different challenges. Like this rock. It could work for 2% of people, or 67%. Don’t know, don’t care. For me it felt quite symbolic and I was a lot more aware of my way of thinking and my decisions during the day.
All in all - interesting experiment. It will be interesting to see deep we get into this brain during tomorrow’s session!