This is a guest post from my good friend Donna Merrill who is a personal development expert and works with her psychic abilities with her clients.
So, over to her now…
These are always excuses that can keep you in fear. These excuses drip-feed into your subconscious through a little inner voice that seems to always be around, especially when you are on the verge of making a breakthrough in your progress. If you allow this little inner voice to take over in this negative way, it will always divert you from success, and usually just at the point that you thought “things will be different this time.”
So why does this Little Voice have such influence over the way things play out in our lives?
Case Study
Let me tell you a story to show you how this works.
I had a client that came to me, distraught that her long dreamed of fashion ecommerce site was just not happening. She had followed the blueprint to the “t”. She made all the right connections with people in her industry, set up a Facebook page to announce her undertaking, started blogging about it, got a lot of people interested, built a list of followers who were awaiting the announcement of her site going live. She did much more, and I won’t digress with the details.
The point to the story is that she kept getting stuck in neutral with the actual release of the site. She had technical problems. Her husband thought the project was a waste of time. She was spending more money on it that she intended, so she shelved it for a while. She was losing the interest of her followers because it was taking so long. Then she got depressed about it. Then she got angry. Then she blamed others. She went through all the emotional upheavals that come with perpetual disappointment in oneself.
The Breakdown
I told her she had learned her business, and had done all the right things. But she had not learned how to deal with that pesky “Little Voice.” In fact, her initial reaction to my suggestion of the Little Voice’s influence over her spoke volumes. “That’s crazy,” she protested. “I have no such little voice, I just couldn’t get the work done in time, and so now it’s all falling apart… as usual.”
Her argument pointed to all the reasons why she was a serial failure in trying to achieve her goal. Over time, I had gotten to know that this client never really thought that she could succeed in this venture, as well as any of the others she had undertaken.
She had a Little Voice that constantly told her, “sure, you can make some progress… but actually see it all the way through to success? Never.” She had great ideas, would be very excited to get things started, but always somewhere along the line, she was derailed by that little voice whispering “Who do you think you are? You can’t succeed.” Her denial of the very existence of the Little Voice told me why she couldn’t overcome it. If she didn’t recognize that it was there, how could she fight it?
You see, that’s the power of the Little Voice. It hides deep in your subconscious and influences you at the deepest level, with the most important things in your life. Meanwhile, you don’t even know it’s there. Yet, you carry it around throughout your life, and you just assume it is always telling you the truth.
“You can’t make it.”
“You’ll never succeed.”
“You’re not smart enough.”
The Fix
So, the fix in this case was pretty straightforward. I eventually got my client to take two critical steps in her thinking. These are the same steps that we all need to take if we’ve allowed the Little Voice to take control of our lives in a negative way.
1. Acknowledge that the subconscious mind plays a pivotal role in your thoughts and actions.
2. Know that you can change it.
It’s not usually too difficult to help someone go through their past experiences and realize that this Little Voice has, indeed, been around a long time. The greater a person’s resistance to exploring themselves from an interior perspective, the more difficult this is. This particular client was pretty quick to come to terms with her Little Voice, and was quite determined to deal with it.
So, we come to the trickier part of this business. How do we stop this Little Voice. The answer, really, is that we don’t. It has always been there, and always will. That’s because it has an important function in our psyche. It’s there to protect us from harm.
What?
That’s right, the Little Voice is there to make sure we don’t hurt ourselves. In this case, it always stopped my client from going too far into a success mode because it was convinced that it would end in failure, and therefore hurt her. Why? Because it had been trained through a lifetime of experiences and external influences that she truly could not succeed, so therefore, it was telling her to not even try. It was useless and ultimately harmful.
So there’s the naked truth about the Little Voice. It’s there and it’s not going away.
The good news is, once you know that, all you have to do is retrain to stop being negative, weak and self-defeating. There are many modalities to retrain the little voice that keeps you from achieving your goals, or feeling good about yourself, or having the self-confidence that would serve you so much better than perpetual self-doubt.
Self Actualization
Here’s a quick little exercise I used to help this particular client move forward in her quest to retrain the Little Voice. You can try it, too. It’s called systematic desensitization.
First, I want you to go into a relaxed state of mind in order to switch things around, and redirect what you Little Voice is telling you.
To do this, sit in a quiet, comfortable place with no disturbances. Unplug EVERYTHING. Take a deep breath and while you do that, breathe into your stomach to expand it. Hold that breath for a moment and exhale.
Take note of your body. Start from your head and feel the physical sensations of deeply relaxing. Feel its effect on your facial muscles, then your neck, shoulders, arms, stomach, thighs calves… all the way down to your feet and toes.
This will take a while, but believe me it will put you in a relaxed state. As you concentrate on your body’s physical reaction to the sensations of relaxing, try not to let any extraneous thoughts come into your mind.
Breathing
Take a deep breath that fills your belly. Hold it for 3 seconds and while you are holding it, say a positive message to yourself, then exhale.
Here are some messages you may want to say:
- I am good enough
- I deserve
- I am successful
- I am a perfect human being
- I am confident
- I am strong
- I am prosperous
- I am beautiful
- I am fearless
- I am social
These are just a few examples. My client, chose to tell herself: “I am capable.”
The point is, that once you acknowledge the negative power that Little Voice is having over you, you can choose to do this one exercise to confront it. It will begin the process of reprogramming your subconscious Little Voice from its habitual negative talk to positive affirmation of who you desire and are determined to be.
Self Talk
Yes, you must talk to yourself! If you have a thought that says “I’m not good enough for … (fill in the blank),”simply reverse that thought by saying to yourself – aloud if you wish – “I am good enough for …” Of course, your life won’t change overnight.
I instructed my client to repeat this exercise over and over again, twice a day for 30 days. She had a pretty fascinating breakthrough as a result. In fact, she tells me that she still does this exercise daily, going on two years, now!
I challenge you to start taking control of the Little Voice in your mind, not by passively wishing it would go away, but by adding this, or a similar, reprogramming exercise to your daily routine. Try it for 30 days and let me know how you make out with it.
Have you tried to take control of the Little Voice in your head? Did you even know it was there? Do you think it might have a grip on your life that you can’t fight? I’d love to hear what your experiences have been with your own Little Voice.
Please let me know in the comments below. And make sure to share this article on your social media sites!
Your turn now. Let me know your thoughts on that…
~ Donna Merrill
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