Did you know you may have an undiagnosed condition?
It’s one that tens of millions of other people the world over suffer from too. It’s not diabetes. Nor is it high blood pressure. Or any stress related maladies. It’s repetitive self-sabotage syndrome.
You’ve not heard of it before? Well before you go checking out symptoms on Google there’s a reason you’ve not have come across it previously. I made it up! The name that is, not the actual ‘condition’.
Self-sabotage shows up when we reach a point of attempting to be better or happier, richer or re-visiting a scenario that we failed at or upset us before. Rather than soar and excel, we unconsciously (i.e. we’re not fully aware that we do it) trip ourselves up. This can be through poor self talk telling us not to bother. It can be through reminding ourselves how badly it went before. Or the classic sign of self-sabotage -procrastination. Ah, got it now??
Yep, we’ve all put the blocks on ourselves at one time of other. Even Tom Cruise has. Well kinda.
A trickle to a flood.
Cole Trickle is an up and fast coming young NASCAR driver. His career is on the up until one day at Daytona he is involved in a serious racing crash. When his racing adversary and now friend Rowdy Burns is then also found to need brain surgery Cole re-evaluates his racing.
He is given a chance to get in a car again but he’s a shadow of the old fearless kid who won races such a short time before. After one race where he retired the car, his chief car builder Harry sees that Trickle deliberately blew the engine. His accident and his pal’s health worry got in his head. He self-sabotaged himself.
But you see, as in this film, life often makes us face ourselves again. In his final chance race at the Daytona 500, Cole is trailing last. His short career seems over. Then there is a big smash on a turn, exactly like the time he was hospitalised in the same such incident. Cole slows down, the self-sabotage begins. But Harry breaks into his head space and tells him he can do it, he can get through this.
Cole listens and trusts, and powers up and through the wreckage, and defeats his demons. He goes on to take victory. I know it was only acting from Tom Cruise, but the manner in how he played that character, I’m sure he has suffered from self-sabotage himself in the past. Yes, really!!!
Maybe you are beginning to recognise it in yourself now?
In your mind how the past keeps coming back to haunt you in certain situations? Or that your business ideas or big plans never seem to get off the drawing board again and again?
It feels like a mountain to climb to get anywhere. But YOU are that mountain!!
The Mountain is you.
The art of self-sabotage is one many of us have perfected.
So adept are we at it that we put ourselves in situations that look like mountains to get out of. We end up stuck, blocked, isolated, alone, or trapped and blame it on these very mountains holding us where and how we are. But, WE are the mountains. We are the very thing in our way.
In her ground breaking book about this, ‘The Mountain is You’, Brianna Wiest reveals all the schemes and thoughts we construct to then pretend we would move forwards, upwards, into money, into love, and into freedom if we didn’t have too much to climb to get there.
She magnificently wrote, ‘ The mountain is often less a challenge in front of us as a problem within us’, and that, ‘There is nothing holding you back in life more than yourself’.
Where Cole Trickle destroyed the engine to avoid facing an old fear, we do the same through inner beliefs and insecurities that rise up like Everest.
- We start a business idea but leave it sitting there because we think we are not good enough to make it work. Or that being successful means things can only go downhill from there.
2. We don’t have any true committed relationships because once we get close to a partner they will see we are flawed and not worth loving.
3. We don’t allow ourselves to ever explore having more money because we have the warped idea that wealthy people are hated and users.
Recognise some of these echoed in your repeat struggles? Now you can perhaps start to see that the only thing keeping you from you desire is your self-sabotage hijacking it.
No rock, no hard place.
In each occasion of our own just like those above (read Brianna’s book to discover yours!!), we open up our inner mountain and stick it slap bang in our face. We can no longer walk our path, or win our race be that to be an artist or to win Daytona. I’m asking you now to face your self-sabotage skills and finally see when and where you have always used it. Your missing career, life partner, financial success etc will be where to find it. Where you always put it when a shining life can be won. Your mountain instead of your mojo!
Just make sure you don’t end up like Cole with a glittering future ahead of him but so held back by what’s in his head he says, ‘You got me here, now what?’ Don’t be someone who blames everything and everyone else any more. Don’t look up at mountains that are not there.
It’s time to no longer be stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Photo attribution – Pixabay.com – https://pixabay.com/illustrations/ai-generated-man-stress-mistake-8993806/ by Graphixmade under free use content license.
References – Days of Thunder – Paramount Pictures 1990.
The Mountain is You – Brianna Wiest – Thought Catalog Books.
Five thoughts, ideas, insights, or quotes to power up your mind to think differently and creatively about life and who we are. Put all previous thinking away and open up a brand new world of the Supermind. OUR SuperMinds.
This week – Corporal Punishment.
Corporal punishment was the means of harsh physical punishment for those guilty of serious crimes. A kind of repayment for their actions. In our modern society it has become viewed as rather barbaric. Yet without it all types of crimes are on the rise in all parts of the world. But, it’s a delicate subject. SuperMind Saturday asks whether it could have a part to play in the future to help dissuade would-be offenders or has its time come and gone.
- Corporal punishment has existed from Early man. It was the way to control tribe members and citizens behaviours and from breaking group laws or for serious crimes. Today it is frowned on as inhuman. But it was an integral part of the civilised world for centuries. With the world an increasingly violent place, could it make a comeback to deter the out of control criminals/attackers? And in what form?
- Corporal punishment typically was a public event. This was to show the people what the price to pay for bad deeds would be. It also acted as a form of justice that all could witness. In the USA offenders have to work in public in special coloured overalls that signal who they are. Could this be expanded so that that had to wear such clothing for a set time when released?
- I’ve saved the controversial question for the middle. Common views are that CP is NOT the answer to discipline dangerous law breakers. But with every type of serious, violent, and sexual crime on the rise…what is?
- Very few realise that a form of corporal punishment has been spanking children at home by parents and in school giving naughty pupils the cane. Such practices have been outlawed now. Therefore pretty much most forms of CP have been legally abolished. Are we therefore ‘civilised’ if we eradicate any form of physical CP even in the lightest form?
- On 21st Century Earth everyone’s feelings are a key component. Society, TV, laws etc focus on people not being offended or upset by something they see, hear, or read. Corporal punishment would be a traumatic experience for the modern offender. Are we moving TOWARDS justice in this way for the future or AWAY from it and why?
That’s another SuperMind Saturday for your mind powers to work on. Thank you for being here for the SuperMind time. Keep asking yourself these through the week to open up more of your mind to evolve its potential. Consider more, generate ideas more, think on bigger possibilities more, activate your connection to your personal higher mind more and more. Employ your SuperMInd and Super Think!
See you next time for more super thinking.
Picture attribution under free content license – https://pixabay.com/photos/woman-dark-lonely-freedom-iran-9145401/ by shimabdinzde.
If you were to think of exercise, like most people you would probably imagine some physical activity.
And with that perhaps a sport or definitely some exertion on the body.
Very few would ever first link to exercise with the mind. Nor would they ever believe that the best exercise we could do for ourselves isn’t physical, it’s mental. And yet, developing the mind is the prime way to begin powering up almost every area of your life. One day it could serve you very well indeed.
Hugh Glass needed an incredibly fit mind. Why? Because his body was almost totally out of action.
Glass was a frontiersman and trapper working on a trail up the Missouri River in 1823. One day when scouting for game near where the Grand River forked he surprised a mother grizzly bear with her cubs. Protecting her brood the bear attacked and mutilated Glass so badly internal body parts and bone were visible. His fellow trappers eventually left him for dead believing it was impossible for him to survive even for a short time.
But what the body is incapable of, the mind can be alive as ever and incredibly capable. Waking from unconsciousness with no weapons or equipment he realised he was abandoned in the freezing wilderness. Plus he could hardly move.
Death seemed inevitable.
The mind can go far.
Glass knew his only hope was to crawl and keep crawling. For all the extreme pain that flooded his body, he set his mind at making it back to civilisation and life. And that he did. He famously crawled inch by aching inch some 200 miles and even crafted a makeshift raft so he could float downstream to Fort Kiowa.
Six weeks after his seemingly fatal attack, Hugh Glass reached the fort and a place in the history books. It’s also the story behind the Hollywood Oscar winning movie, The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
This story typifies that physical effort was not enough. Pure mental fortitude and willpower was required to have any chance at all. Luckily that is what he possessed in bucket loads. How many people today could honestly be able to achieve the same feat with their minds???
One type of person in modern life can experience such mental toughness. The ultramarathon runner. They can typically run hundreds of miles in events on all types of terrain and face every type of weather. The Moab 240, for example, is a 240 mile (386km) ultra event with over 31,000 ft of elevation through the baking heat of Utah where daytime temperatures can hit over 100 degrees and with night time drops to below freezing and even snow.
How do runners cope with such punishment?
Champion ultra runner Courtney Dauwalter has developed a mental exercise called her ‘pain cave’ to push through immense exhaustion and various bodily ailments in her 100+ mile runs. When she can’t physically take another step she goes to a space in her head and makes that space bigger in her vision. This space is where she has the determination to keep going.
It works because this one time biology teacher when she started ultra running has won pretty much every prestigious ultra race there is and set course records everywhere in doing so.
Which leads me to this question.
Do you exercise your mind….at all?
I would wager two truths now.
- That virtually everyone will say, ‘No’.
- That virtually everyone will say, ‘I don’t know how’!
It’s common as I’ve already noted that exercise = physical movement in some form to the majority of us. Trouble is that some of the best and highest achievers of all time haven’t been Olympian athletes except in their mental work. And you can join them starting NOW! Here’s how with a mini starter list on how to exercise your mind –
a) Read more. Not social media posts but plain old books. This will cause your mind to start whirring into action imagining the scenes, the characters, the plot and what can happen etc. It’s the first great place to start mental movement.
b) Read more mental books. Follow on from that by reading books on the mind by the best writers. Not meditation books but ones on better thinking, greater focus, developing ideas etc. Check on that genre on Amazon or in your local bookstore. There’s plenty their to feed your mind.
c) And rather than include a slew of other suggestions I’ll simply add the following – practice imagining better for yourself, push yourself to learn a new skill, make your future plans and create ways to develop them, try crosswords in the paper, commit to one hour in the morning and one in the evening dedicated to progressive thinking and positive expectation as but a few.
The world has gotten very comfortable with making physical exercise an integral part of its daily lives. But it plainly fails in the mental department when that very effort to develop the mind shifts life in major style.
That’s not the bear on the trail, it’s the elephant in the room. We need to be fit and strong in the head not purely for good mental health, but for the sheer power it injects into our life to improve ourselves, believe better and higher, and to generate new possibilities. The mind is the seed and our life is was it feeds.
So start your mental exercise regime today.
Then you will lose the weight off your mind and be dripping in mental muscle that will wow everyone.
References – www.brittanica.com – Hugh Glass.
Wikipedia – Hugh Glass.
www.bbc.com – Courtney Dauwalter – Step inside the pain cave.
www.destinationtrailrun.com – Moab 240.
Photo attribution under free use content license – https://pixabay.com/illustrations/ai-generated-man-strong-gym-8706770/ by Hansuan_Fabregas.
Are you aware of the amazing power of questions?
Yep, a question itself to start with. Well, that’s deliberate. Most people only ask questions when they’re incredibly stuck. Usually it’s for directions or someone’s phone number or what a particular shop’s opening times are. But, we generally don’t ask enough of them because we (incorrectly) believe that, if we do, it suggests we are stupid or people will think less of us.
So let me dispel this myth. Those that ask questions are usually numbered in the most shrewd, progressive, sharp, and versatile people on the plant. Questions build knowledge, perspective, understanding, and awareness among others. Without them we own one viewpoint and limited judgement and can be easily influenced or refuse to budge from our fixed position.
The real key to questions is what they lead to. And certainly what they solve.
In certain situations they might seem like they could ever make any difference. But, a good question put the right way can turn things 180 degrees round.
Questions can be life savers.
Chris Voss is a life saver because he uses questions. He uses them calmly and skillfully. And very, very deliberately.
He’s no in depth political interviewer. He’s not an elite level recruiter. Nor is he some Ivy League professor or a veteran counsellor. He was perhaps the world’s no.1 hostage negotiator. The FBI’s finest. And if you were ever unlucky enough to find yourself in such a situation, Chris’s art of questioning probably will have kept you alive and escape unharmed.
Now a best selling author Voss was an experienced police officer in the New York joint terrorism task force who worked his away up to be the FBI’s chief international hostage and kidnapping negotiator. After three decades of high level crime and terrorist situations, dealing with 150 international cases alone, he shared his insights in his worldwide hit book, ‘Never Split the Difference’.
The book featured using a style of questioning that focused on understanding the criminals perspective in their mind, build rapport and elements of respect with them, and ultimately to calm the situation towards a mutually beneficial end point. Effectively he got the terrorists/gangsters/kidnappers to open up and feel heard and validated. His questions led them to reveal their priorities and desired outcomes from the highly charged scenario, but also their personal worries and concerns. Now who had ever done that in such depth before?
All with the power of a) questioning them and b) questioning them in the right way. He moved them from blame and threat upon their life, to collaboration and a kind of alliance. It was brilliant and he alone saved hundreds of people’s lives as a result.
Now do you believe questions aren’t that important?
A life changing question.
I want to share a story with you from my life about how a question changed someone’s life.
About 15 years ago I was working with a large private school specifically with their older pupils on a life enrichment programme. The teacher who was head of year often sat in on our sessions as he was curious and intrigued about my course content. In fact he seemed to turn up for most classes for a good while every week.
Weeks later after the school had wrapped up for the Summer break he called me with a dilemma. He had worked solidly for nearly two decades to reach his position at this high quality establishment. Then, out of the blue, he was offered a role in a more remote part of Africa. This really appealed to him but so did furthering his career aspirations and he was torn on what to do. So, he asked if I could help him at all.
I told him I’d give it some thought (always a good thing) and call him back the next day. That’s exactly what I did and I simply asked him ONE question. Which was,
‘Have you been waiting for this opportunity all your life’?
I told him not to answer me then and there but to give it time to sink in and come back to me. Six days later I heard from him and he was going to Africa. The question had got to the heart of what mattered to him. He went and made a massive success out of it. And even more special – some years later he was able to hand his work over to someone else and he returned to develop his career from where he took off.
One question = one life changing answer.
Start with one.
Maybe you are in the same quandary as well?
Multiple choices or too many woods for the trees to know clearly what decision you should make.
Bring in the power and truth of a question. One question. Practice asking yourself one question at a time and then sit on it and see what stirs in your mind. In no time one particular question will stand out and hit home. One self enquiry will touch base with the absolute answer that will shift the whole darn shebang.
You don’t need to be a skilled negotiator with your own conflict. You just have to ask questions to self understand and unlock the best route forwards based on who you are. That’s how they work. They draw truth out in the form of answers.
The best minds use their minds to ask questions that unlock major doors.
Doors to freedom like Chris Voss’s captives or my teacher friend’s next big move.
Which leaves only one important question to ask,
‘Why aren’t you using questions more to create the freedom you badly need?’.
Reference – Chris Voss, ‘Never Split The Difference’, published by Random House Business.
Photo attribution under Pixabay free content license – https://pixabay.com/photos/man-thinking-doubt-question-mark-5723449/ by Tumisu
Five thoughts, ideas, insights, or quotes to power up your mind to think differently and creatively about life and who we are. Put all previous thinking away and open up a brand new world of the Supermind. OUR SuperMinds.
This week – Suicide.
Suicide has reached epidemic proportions. More and more people succumb to it every single day. It’s a worrying trend. And that means we have to have a good SuperMind think about what can be done. Let’s do that.
- Every year more than 720, 000 die due to suicide. That is the equivalent of the complete population of the city of Okayama in Japan not existing year after year. But that is just an estimate as some countries are poor at collecting data. Therefore the figures will be far more. While the reasons are various one fact remains – minds feel there is no way out of the current life situation. How can we begin to improve the resilience and strength of minds as a whole everywhere?
- The facts show that men make up some 80% of suicide cases. Men are known for not been talkers, not opening up, not doing ‘touch feely’ stuff as they call it. What would help men open up up more about their problems? How can we encourage and support that?
- The most alarming statistic of all is that suicide is now the 3rd leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds. In 2021 alone it was the No.1 cause. Young people are increasingly feeling their life is not worth living. Most are impulsive decisions. Are young people being too exposed to the wrong things that are affecting their minds? Or is social media making their life look dull and themselves as losers? What is the root cause?
- Thought/question – Why suicide? In this modern world where there’s a multitude of ways to better yourself and your life, do people chose just this one?
- Suicide is personal. An individual has lost all hope or all self-belief. Is this then how life has become in this day and age? Is self-esteem and self-belief at the heart of why suicide claims so many lives?
That’s another SuperMind Saturday for your mind powers to work on. Thank you for being here for the SuperMind time. Keep asking yourself these through the week to open up more of your mind to evolve its potential. Consider more, generate ideas more, think on bigger possibilities more, activate your connection to your personal higher mind more and more. Employ your SuperMInd and Super Think!
See you next time for more super thinking.
