In January 1995 is when I opened up my first martial-arts studio.
Teaching people how to kick and punch certainly sounded like a fun way of making a living but I knew that marital-arts gave me something deeper, and I wanted to share that, a sense of finding myself.
It didn’t take too long for me to learn that what I was helping people do was overcoming fears, overcoming their own limitations and I was totally hooked, I realized I wasn’t so much training their bodies as I was coaching their minds. I had really become a mind coach!
For the next 25 years I have devoted much of my time trying to understand the human mind in order to help students/clients make lasting changes to their lives whether it be working out better, eating better or thinking better, and 2 things became really clear to me:
Number one… if a client/student doesn’t make the deep personal decision and commitment to make changes to their life, there is nothing whatsoever that I can do to make the changes for them.
And number two… even when people really want to make changes to their lives, they mostly don’t!
This has always bothered me… good people with really good intent who really want to change and live better, healthier lives but almost never do.
Did they just lack discipline? Were they just lazy?
I wasn’t sure because often it seemed as though people really were trying very hard, but it almost seemed that they were being controlled by something they had very little say over. So I kept learning, I kept reading and listening, wanting to understand!
Slowly a clearer picture of how to help was forming in my mind, and the answer was almost… duh!
Of course people are being controlled by something they have very little say over, we all are! And it’s obvious… it is our subconscious mind!
What I have learned from 25 years of coaching humans, is that if you don’t find a way to make the necessary changes to your subconscious mind and to your nervous system, then nothing changes.
In fact you are more likely to set yourself up for failure by disappointing yourself with wasted efforts, ending up back where you started or worse, because now you also have an extra helping of self-judgement. Does this sound familiar?
Think of it this way – if I read a self-help book and I agree with every point the book makes and “decide” that from this moment onwards I will make these changes to my life – what are the chances that I’d actually make changes that stick?
Here’s what happens when I read a book… I engage the “conscious” thinking part of my brain in order to see and understand the words on every page. But in my subconscious mind I have very old programmes running which in fact are controlling my life. So even if I love what the book teaches me, what stops the old patterns from still running my day-to-day life?
You guessed it, nothing! Nothing changes unless I change the patterns in my subconscious mind, and the automatic reactions of my nervous system.
During the next week we kick off Jedi MIND and I still have a few spaces left. Join us for really fun weekly sessions in which you learn how much influence you have over the state your nervous system is in:
1) Learn how to de-escalate your activated nervous system and
2) Build resilience in your nervous system, remarkably improving its sensitivity.
Click on the link button below to see what it’s about or message me directly to ask any questions you might have. You CAN completely re-train your nervous system!
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