Everybody struggles. Everybody has problems that they’re trying to overcome. You can look at the richest, wealthiest, most successful looking person in the world, and you can bet for sure that they are struggling. People only ever present their best self to others and they hide their worst self. That person that you see on Instagram and Facebook, that’s who they want to be, but who they are is somebody much more complicated.
That’s because big problems don’t come from life. They come from yourself. That’s really hard for people to believe at first, but you can often see it in others. You probably know somebody who is struggling, and you know exactly how they could fix it but they never do. You’re probably one of those people. In fact, I’ll bet that if you could talk to yourself, you would have a ton of really great advice that you never follow.
People get caught in this cycle all the time. They know exactly what they need to do, but they never seem to actually do it. It’s not because they are bad, or lazy, or that they don’t care. It’s because sometime in their life they decided subconsciously that that’s who they are. That they can’t ever do, or be, any better.
You can’t understand human behavior without understanding the subconscious.
Your subconscious mind is built for survival first. What’s the point of objective truth if you don’t live to see tomorrow? So when a trauma happens, your subconscious mind searches for any solution to prevent it in the future. Your subconscious doesn’t worry about whether it’s the perfect solution or whether it’s healthy later on down the line. Your subconscious is worried about surviving right now, and if it causes problems later, then at least you made it to later.
My mom is a powerful woman. She is strong, tenacious, and driven. But she also struggles with anger. When I was in trouble as a kid, there wasn’t a point in trying to defend myself or explain my side of things because anything I said would just make things worse. When you’re 4 years old and somebody six times your size is mad at you, that’s pretty scary. And since anything I said would just make my mom even more mad and would put me in even more trouble, I decided internally that it was stupid to even try to do anything. That it was pointless to try.
That decision made sense at the time, and it makes sense in that context, but in other contexts it’s really harmful. And that’s kind of the problem. Your subconscious often over-generalizes the decisions you make, and it rarely re-evaluates them later. So later, when effort is the difference between success and failure, a belief like “there’s no point in trying” totally derailed my entire life.
And I never even knew why.
I just thought I was lazy. There must be something wrong with me. I must just be a bad person. It never even occurred to me that those two things could be connected. That’s because the connection isn’t logical, it’s emotional.
If you don’t understand that, you will suffer your entire life.
Look around at the most wealthy people in the world. Many of them are completely miserable. No matter how much they make, no matter how successful they get, they are always living in the shadow of themselves. Money can buy a lot of things, but the things that matter most can’t be bought. They have to be learned.
Knowing deep down at a subconscious level that you are loved, that you matter, that you are good enough, that you are capable, that you are good, that you are right as a person. You can be one of the poorest people on the planet, and still be more content and alive than anybody you will ever meet.
But poverty doesn’t last long in people who have a clear sense of who they are.
In the same way that “there’s no point in trying” absolutely devastated my life, a healthy belief will also affect every part of your life. More energy, more willingness to try new things, more excitement to succeed. And when you think of a dynamic, energetic and powerful person, it’s hard to imagine them not succeeding.
But it can’t just be a conscious, surface-level decision. It has to be one that you change at a deep level, at the core of your being. That’s the part of mental health that many therapies often fall short on, and it’s one of the secrets of hypnotherapy. Change at a deep level is what hypnosis is all about.
For me, the healthy belief was “You are brave”. The knowledge that success and failure are both a point of pride in myself makes all the difference in the world. Nothing I ever do will ever feel pointless again.