JuliePoland.com
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Excerpt from my new e-book,entitled
"SECRET MESSAGES: How your Inner Voice
Might Be Holding you Back"
I Know Where I Want to Be-What Should I Do Next?
In order to create different results in your life, you have to do different things. Did you
ever try to enter a store or other public establishment and push and push on the door to no avail?
No matter how hard you pushed, the door wouldn't budge. Then you looked down and saw the
word "pull" painted in bold lettering about six inches from your nose! You changed your action;
a light-handed pull on the handle opened the door, and you were in!
The same thing happens when you are working toward your goals. You are where you
are today because of the actions you took up until now. If you're not achieving what you desire,
take a look at what you're doing. Are you pushing against a door that just won't open? Unless
you stop what you're doing and try something different, you will never get inside the building.
There's a lesson to be learned here, and until you learn it, you are only wasting time and precious
energy.
So how do you start developing new, effective actions and keep going until you reach
your destination? I've been involved in many discussions about whether people get better results
in self-improvement when they:
¨ Think themselves into new ways of behaving, or when they
¨ Behave themselves into new ways of thinking.
The two concepts are actually very much interrelated. Your thoughts drive your behavior, yet
sometimes experimenting and testing the waters with your actions is what convinces you that a
new way might work after all.
Your learned habits of thought-your secret messages-influence your actions. You react in
certain ways to certain cues automatically, without consciously thinking about them, because of
the way you were conditioned. Imagine you are in a movie theater watching a suspense film. The
heroine is alone in her house, it's nighttime, and a thunderstorm is brewing. The lighting is dim,
and you can see the silhouettes of trees blowing violently outside the windows. The background
violin music transitions from smooth and mellow to jagged and screechy-and it gets faster and
louder. Then as the heroine walks down the hall toward a concealed doorway, you spontaneously
shout, "Don't go in there!"
The actress can't hear you. You know it's only a movie, and that it's not real. In the plot,
nothing has actually happened yet-but your pulse is racing, your tension is growing, and you call
out to her anyway. The effects in the film work on your emotions and your behavior, because at
some point, you learned what they are supposed to mean. You know that dark and stormy means
threat and evil in the movies. Even though the villain can't pop out of the screen and get you, you
react with jumps or shrieks of fear just the same.
To think your way into new actions, you must interfere with your automatic pattern of
stimulus and response by consciously choosing a different, more effective action to use the next
time a similar situation arises.
Continued
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