Do You Set Yourself Up to Succeed?

We recently brought a wild horse into our family and my mate has been applying a training method called Natural Horsemanship.

This method encourages the trainer to observe where the horse is at in their understanding and begin the teachings from there. For example, our new charge had never been touched by a human so the first step was to attach a stuffed work glove to a long stick and gingerly touch Cricket with the surrogate “hand” as she walked by. It startled her at first but she gradually got used to it and the lessons increased from there.

The process was slow at the beginning, there were days the “hand” was no big deal and other days where she responded like she’d never seen such a scary thing before in her life. But my mate’s patience and consistency created an amazing trust between the two, so future learning came at increasing speeds.

I’ve been giving myself a hard time lately about learning something new. I’ve expected myself to just “get it” even though it’s a pretty foreign concept to me considering how I was raised (how most of us were raised). Instead of applying the gentler approach of natural horsemanship I’ve just made my lessons harder and harder and then wondered why I became flustered and confused.

The concept I’ve been incorporating into my life is this idea of how we create our own experience or reality. I have no quarrel with the concept; I’ve seen way too much evidence of its effects on my life and in lives of others around me to turn back now, but there are still some areas in my life where I have enough resistance to this new philosophy that nothing (in that area) really shifts for me and my task has been to go back and find out “where I’m at” on these topics so that I can start to change things at an internal level.

The process is about uncovering hidden beliefs. Now this is not about doing huge excavating in your life and tearing apart old memories and dissecting conversations, it’s just about taking the time to become aware of what you believe about certain things. Whether you know it or not you have been influenced by your family, religion, culture, the media and society-at-large. This is the stuff that plays in the background and contributes to you sabotaging certain aspects of our life.

For example if we were taught that “money is the root of all evil” then acquiring money can encourage feelings of guilt or it can even prevent us from ever having any money in the first place so that we can continue to be “good” people. Many of us have underlying beliefs that play out in love, in our careers, in our family dynamics, in our health and in our Sense of Self. And we can choose to alter those beliefs at any time!

I’ve been reading a book called the Brain That Changes Itself by Dr. Norman Doidge, MD. It speaks to a new science called NeuroPlacticity and it’s all about how we can change how our brain functions by setting up new expectations for it. But the conclusions of the book speak to our need to UNlearn behavior before we can apply NEW learning.

UNlearning is a process that one needs to allow time for. You simply can’t make a new connection when the old connection is still in place.

So, I’ve been encouraged to explore more areas of my life where ineffective beliefs are still playing out (and holding me back). I can actually “set myself up to succeed” by understanding that I’ve got some programming running in the background and being aware of it is the first step in letting it go. Replacing that belief with what I’d prefer to believe is the next step and practicing the new thought is step three. Step three can take some time or it can just be a “click” and everything falls into place. However it unfolds, its worth the effort!

I’ve learned a lot in the last few years – I’ve changed some of the BIG beliefs about Money, Love and my Sense of Self and now it’s time for the next layer, the subtler beliefs, it’s time to understand where I’m really at and begin building the learning from there.

At this very moment - I’m encouraged by the effectiveness of this method as I witness my mate riding Cricket passed the window as I write. Her head is high, she is completely comfortable and her rider has a grin from ear to ear.

I’ve simplified this process (above) for the space allowed in a short article, it’s important to note that this is often the biggest challenge for most people and I’ve designated much of the www.RubyShuze.com curriculum to give you tools and resources to UNlearn the unconscious beliefs that are standing in your way.

If you are aware of areas in your life where you keep getting the same (undesired) results? Ie: Different jobs but the same tensions, different relationships but the same problems, new friends but the same expectations? I would encourage you to begin there and pick up some helpful tools that you can make use of in your exploration.