Three Skills to Get the Life You Yearn For

Part Two

Skill number one: Ask specific questions. When it was time to focus on getting a perfect for me feeling life I asked myself, “What do I need to change in my life that will make me feel better, satisfied, elated.” I kept this question in the front of my mind to ponder, while trying not to stress over it, and then I waited. Our subconscious minds are like “robo-librarians” that must go after the information asked of them in a machine-like way. The interesting part about this process is that you never know when the information will surface or in what form it will be. This may sound painful to you out there that have to know now but trusting that your subconscious mind will come through and provide information you need when it is ready is worth this temporary waiting investment. When I got my answers back I decided to start rebuilding my life by getting my health back and calming my mind. My mind, body, and emotions got a lot of relief by working to fix my gut and anxiety issues and I started to feel better about my life.

Fortunately, there are a couple of bridges, if you will, that connect our subconscious minds to our conscious minds. First is our intuition, that both saves us by sensing danger and leads us to our own personal bliss. When you see, hear, or feel something that feels really pleasant to you, stop and look at how you might include it in your life. If you experience something that feels like it took a few minutes but it actually took a lot longer, that’s something you may need to include as well. If you linger over an activity in passing, that’s a really good sign that you would like to have it in your future.

These attractions are your subtle intuitions telling you about your true nature, so pay attention to them… you’re getting to know yourself better. Try a few things, keep the ones that really please you, until you get a balance that feels right. As you introduce good things into your life, do yourself a favor and get rid of the stuff that is not serving you well… just because it was once good, that doesn’t mean it will always enhance your life. Please remember, to heal a struggling life and experience a much better feeling one choosing healthful everything is most advantageous.

The rub in this process comes when your subconscious mind sends up doubt or fear messages to dissuade you from these uplifting possibilities. Most of us have experienced second-guessing ourselves, this is a habit that keeps too many stuck with the misery of not moving forward. Maybe you can’t make progress toward a better feeling life because you beat yourself up mentally and/or verbally. So how do you get past these tendencies that are keeping you in a less than life? In my book, GET WHAT YOU NEED, Skills To Build Your Destiny, I write about how I got past talking down to myself.

Skill number two: I created a trigger recognition response, where I did my best to catch myself falling into this beating myself up bad habit. Once I realized I’d been triggered and was entering that bad feeling place I’d say to myself, “This is that thing you do that makes you miserable and hurts your health.” The sad truth is that talking bad to you about you damages your health because the anxiety it causes hurts your parasympathetic nervous system’s ability to rest, digest, and repair your body. And, because everything about us is connected to every other thing about us this damage will badly affect your physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

Your habits are on subconscious autopilot and the only effective way to change its reactive programming is by repeating a conscious response. This trigger recognition response gives me a few seconds to consciously redirect my mental energy to my gratitude chant, “I am thankful, I am grateful, I am appreciative.” It’s an easy way for me to come back to my calm self with just a couple of minutes of repetition. After a month of this conscious practice I no longer had the problem, and if I experience stress that makes me want to beat myself up again, it still works well.

Skill number three: Address your anxiety, repeat skill one. Ask yourself what fear triggered it to appear, “What am I really afraid of?” It tends not to be the obvious thing. Keep this question in the front of your conscious mind, but don’t let it stress you out. Also, examine if you have a similar feeling in your body when you are hungry, tired, or ill as feeling any of these things can make you think you are anxious when you are really feeling something similar. I used to think that I had anxiety right after waking up every day because I felt it in my body, but it turned out to be hunger because I eat dinner so early. When I asked myself if I could be hungry my thoughts of being anxious went away.

One of the best things I got out of this practice was a realization that I had a tendency, AKA habit, to slip into fear easily. As I wrote in the beginning of this article, that was my subconscious mind maintaining those particular neural connections to save my brain energy. This knowledge saved me a lot of self-loathing… just by learning that conscious me was not to blame because it’s natural for my subconscious mind to act this way. My only real problem before that was that I didn’t know about this strong subconscious function or how to overcome it. Learning it took a huge burden of self-blame off of my shoulders, which was one of the best reliefs I’ve ever experienced.

The second bridge between our conscious mind and our subconscious mind is our imagination. I couldn’t say it any better than Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination is the language of the soul. Pay attention to your imagination and you will discover all you need to be fulfilled.” Paying attention to my imagination and intuition and applying conscious effort and focused attention to these three skills helped me to have a perfect for me feeling life… and they can do the same for you.