Grow and Don’t Die
In personal development, feelings of uncertainty and frustration arise when our primary impulses to GROW and NOT DIE act in opposition, manifested as friction between our desire to improve ourselves and the limiting stories that tether us to outdated beliefs and behaviours.
The dissonance we experience is due, in part, to the two disparate parts of our brain that govern the competing motivations to thrive and survive - the conscious and the unconscious mind, respectively.
We conceive all the fabulous things we want to do with our life, set goals, and plan the actions required to achieve them in the conscious mind. Our unconscious mind, on the other hand, is responsible for keeping us alive. It's what makes us run away when faced with danger, keeps us breathing while we sleep, and through digestion, provides life-giving nutrients. It's also the part of our mind that protects the story of who we are - our ego.
Take a moment to try this experiment. First, take a deep breath and hold it for as long as you can. That's a conscious action. You'll soon feel the urge to breathe driven by the need to exhale excess carbon dioxide, not, as you might assume, to inhale more oxygen. The breath response is an automatic reaction by the brain's respiratory centre to prioritise the unconscious need to breathe - ensuring we don't die - over the conscious decision to hold our breath. This pattern of prioritising survival above desire repeats itself in many facets of life where the unconscious motivation to protect oneself is at odds with conscious aspirations for development.
As I touched upon in a previous post, the ego is the voice of our unconscious mind, narrating a story authored during our formative years in response to the environments and people around us. It automatically governs more than 95% of our behaviour and, as a result, determines our life experience. Often, the foundational assumptions, beliefs, values, and opinions based upon which the ego determines our behaviour don't align with modernity or the vision we hold for our lives—making optimal performance and personal development challenging to achieve.
Having an unconscious mind at odds with your development goal is a recipe for frustration and, ultimately, failure. It's the reason why only 8% of New Year's resolutions survive beyond the second week in February. For a short time, grit and brute force determination will help you go to the gym, drink less, love more, eat less, delegate more or argue less. However, suppose the narrative of your unconscious mind isn't in harmony with your conscious aspiration. In that case, you will quickly revert to old behaviour patterns, especially when your conscious thoughts become distracted by the business of life. No amount of deliberate repetition will make a difference.
The unconscious mind will fight with every available means to ensure the ego remains intact, resisting and, in some cases, actively sabotaging conscious behaviour that threatens its survival. For this reason, technical behaviour change isn't adequate, and we must rethink personal development to include psychological adaptation.
The rudimentary approach of forcefully introducing new habits to replace the behaviours we want to change doesn't work. Instead, we must examine our unconscious mind to identify the stories that created those behaviours in the first place and rewire them to support the changes we want to make in the future.
Thankfully it's more straightforward and faster than it sounds and provides incredible results by comparison.