The 3 components of transformation

Have you ever stumbled on something that changed your life for the better? I did recently and I want to share about it because I hope everyone I know can find something like this.

Despite the poor quality video, the technical problems and unplanned interruptions this course introduced me to a dozen or more really simple techniques and ideas that have been like the missing pieces to the puzzle of my life.

I found the course while looking for something on courage up popped Mel Robins Ted X video – How to stop screwing yourself over. This is one of the most popular Ted X talks ever! This led me to do some more digging, who was Mel Robins? It turns out she is a best selling author and has a ton of free YouTube videos including a series called Mindset Reset.

After watching Mindset Reset one of the biggest revelations for me was the idea of the subconscious mind running most of our lives. How we often live on autopilot but that we also have the power to program that autopilot to work for us not against us. If we never reprogram our autopilot it will just keep running the programming it was set with from biology and from our early life experiences. This program is often very sub-optimal and can include things like being constantly guilty about something we do like buying nice stuff or constantly scared to do something like making friends. In fact when we dig deeper we find nearly everyone has this negative self talk where we repeat criticisms endlessly all day until they become part of who we think we are.

But the big revelation for me was when she introduced the final component to the framework of transformation I’d been missing – visualization. I mean I’d heard of visualization before and had some affirmations already but without understanding why they work it is hard to do it right. I certainly wasn’t. If we don’t do visualization right it either doesn’t work or only works a bit.

So now I have these three key components to self transformation and becoming who I want to become. To learning the ability to change how my mind works to letting me live the kind of life I always dreamed of.

The first component is mindfulness or meditation, this gives us a key skill in becoming aware and learning how to disengage from our thoughts so they are no longer who we are. This also gives us our first glimmer of recognition as to who we really are. This one is also becoming more and more recognized by psychologist as a key technique to helping with depression and other disorders. If you need some tips on where to start you can try the Headspace app.

The second is unlearning or resetting our default programming both biological and that we picked up at an early age before we had any processes in place to filter out unwanted instruction sets. This is likely to be the hardest of the components as we can have layers of bad programming and generally we can’t see it ourselves because we are used to living in it. This is were your mindfulness helps, you can use it to connect pain or tightness in your body with feelings and the thoughts that trigger them.

Some other strategies include drawing up a life score where you split your life up into major areas like finance, relationships, friendships, health and well-being and score each area to get an idea where to look deeper. What really helped me make some major breakthroughs into the unknown areas of my mind was The Landmark Forum, I’m sure there are other courses for this as well and would love to hear what courses others have done for this.

Lastly a good hypo-therapist or psychologist can help you go deeper and find the causes of many patterns. I’ve used these as well as Landmark and mindfulness and feel so very blessed that they all exist!

The third component to transformation is visualization. This one is still fairly new to me but makes perfect sense with my current understanding and with my practice so far. The idea is you can create new programs because your brain doesn’t know the difference between something you visualize (correctly) and something you remember doing. The key is to visualize the image and the feelings together to create a new destination “memory” then visualize overcoming all the challenges you are likely to meet on the way again with images and positive feelings. This creates a new program or pathway to where you want to be and your brain will now automatically help you get there instead of following older fear patterns that stand in your way. I know Mel Robins outlines how to do the practice of visualization in some of her you tube videos which is where I first learned the detailed steps so that might be a good place to get started – Mel Robins YouTube channel.

All these components I’ve outlined above are areas that require continual learning and practice and it’s vital to have some kind of daily habit to do so consistently to fully realize the benefits. There is a lot more depth than I’ve touched on in each of these components. I’ve found doing this habit every day has unlocked all the potential and finally broken me out of the loser (fear based) mindset. I’ve been low energy for years and unable to follow my dreams until the last month or so when I solidified my habits of daily practice and learning and added the visualization techniques in. Then bam it has been truly energizing, I have purpose to my life and feel I can overcome any obstacles.