Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius? I have worked with Jay for many years assisting organizations and individuals achieve a higher level of performance.

“Create the self you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny spark of possibility into flames of achievement”
~ Foster McClellan

Congratulations, you are almost done! In truth, you’re only getting started because being authentic is a never-ending process of maintaining your authenticity by being ever vigilant and adapting to new duties, new goals and new direction in which life constantly takes you. For now, though, you have evolved from being blind to any inauthenticity in your life, and subject to a legacy of dependence, to the realization that you must be authentic, that you must become your own SEO, and that you can’t fear making mistakes on your journey to creating the you that you want to be. You have evolved in your self-awareness to gain greater understanding for your true genius, and you have evolved your self-concept to create an image of that authentic self you want to become.

Now here’s a riddle for you. If there are three frogs sitting on a log and one decides to jump into the water, how many frogs are left on the log? The answer is three, because deciding to jump and actually jumping are two very different things. So far you have been working in your mind. You have been considering attitudes, beliefs and gaining new knowledge. And hopefully by now you have decided to jump, but your final evolution is to leave the world of your mind and move into your reality, to actually make the changes in your life that you now believe are needed and possible. To achieve this final evolution, and finish your journey (or start it perhaps) you must actually create your authentic self – you must jump!

Comfort Zones

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.”
~ Alan Alda

One of the biggest things that prevent my clients from leaving the world of dreams and actually becoming more authentic in real life is that they fail to get out of their comfort zones. The comfort zone includes all the things we do often enough to feel comfortable doing. It is much like the querencia - a term in bullfighting that refers to the spot in the ring where the bull always returns for comfort. Former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, describes it this way, “Each bull has a different querencia, but as the bullfight continues, and the animal becomes more threatened, it returns more and more often to his spot. As he returns to his querencia, he becomes more predictable. And so, in the end, the matador is able to kill the bull because instead of trying something new, the bull returns to what is familiar - his comfort zone.”

It is the comfort zone's job to keep us in our place - doing what we've always done, the way we've always done it. And if we try to stretch out and entertain thoughts of doing something differently, like moving forward on that life dream we have, or doing anything that involves taking a step into the unknown, the comfort zone immediately spins into overdrive and begins looking for the consequences - mostly the negative ones.

The bottom-line results of these negative consequences are fear, guilt, anger, hurt feelings or unworthiness - the primary tools of the comfort zone. Early in life, these tools begin to shape our sense of right and wrong and form themselves into limiting beliefs that keep us in our own private querencia. If we dare to step outside the bounds of the comfort zone, these tools are used swiftly and with precision.

The weird thing is that you may have become comfortable being inauthentic, when being authentic should be more comfortable. In other words, you have become comfortable with being uncomfortable. To be authentic, this must change. You will have to get uncomfortable before you get really comfortable, and this takes courage.

“Comfort zones are plush lined coffins” Stan Dale

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius? I have worked with Jay for many years assisting organizations and individuals achieve a higher level of performance.

Cognitive scripts: the subconscious “self-talk” that we generate the themes or schemata we habitually apply to ourselves.

A cognitive script is the psychological term given to any messages we tell ourselves, about ourselves, all day long. These scripts can be described as tapes that we play repeatedly in our heads – those things we tell ourselves over and over again, often without conscious awareness. These scripts can influence our emotions and our behavior. They can also be positive or negative, and support our beliefs about ourselves, or create self-limiting beliefs and self-doubt. Some examples of cognitive scripts might include:
“I am a failure”, “I can’t do anything right”, “I will overcome any obstacle and I always do well on tests”. These messages are built from our experiences in life and eventually, through repeating these messages (scripts) enough times, they can become embedded in our subconscious and habitual enough that they develop their own power and are repeated even without justification from our environment anymore. People who suffer from a lack of self-belief often suffer, in actuality, from the problem of negative cognitive scripts. Regardless of why the scripts were developed, they have become habitual and now repeat frequently enough that they influence our reality and outcomes.

The good news is that cognitive scripts can be changed. Though you cannot stop the habit of playing any scripts in your head, you can replace the script that is played. One of the best ways to do this is simply through repetition or positive affirmation statements. Regardless of the fun that is poked at such “therapy” it actually does work. There are lots of examples throughout history of things once thought ineffective eventually turning out to actually work. In most cases it has had less to do with the thing in question not being effective, and more to do with our understanding not being advanced enough to actually understand why it is effective. The medical world offers up two of the easiest examples of things long practiced but only recently understood and approved.

Positive affirmations are another example of something practiced throughout the history of mankind, but because science has not formerly understood the science behind it, it has been much maligned in popular culture. Such work has been the fodder of many a comedian, and the majority of scientists have tended to view affirmations as a fanciful but ineffective way to pacify someone’s need to feel like they have some control over something they really don’t. Recent scientific advances, however, say that we actually do have more control than perhaps they once thought.

Modern day treatments like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) provide a means to replace irrational or negative scripts with rational or positive ones. CBT is practiced all over the world by the majority of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, and it has been proven to be an effective tool in helping to change habitual opinions or beliefs. This serves as a good example that repetitive thinking activities are an effective way to replace old scripts with new ones.

Habits are either the best of servants or the worst of masters. ~ N. Emmons

When we talk about your level of self-belief, we’re talking about how you see yourself (i.e., what do you say in your mind about yourself). It is unlikely that you give it much thought, but a significant influence over how you feel about yourself is due to the cognitive scripts you play in your mind. To develop your self-belief you have to change these scripts. As so many of us have heard, you can’t get rid of a habit, you can only replace with it with another one. Practice replacing any negative scripts you have with positive ones. This exercise will be an ongoing part of your personal development in maintaining a positive self-belief.