On Friday I like to work from the sofa. It’s the one day of the week in my business where I don’t have client calls. I love sitting on the sofa and working as it’s comfortable 🙂
It got me thinking about my comfort zone, and not just my comfort zone, but yours too!
OK, so I used the sofa as a bit of an analogy for how our brains operate from the comfort zone. You see, our brain doesn’t like change, the unfamiliar or the unknown. In fact, it is constantly seeking out certainty and will do whatever it can to keep you safe. It normally does that in three ways; focus, physiology and language.
So, when we start thinking about doing something new, such as building a Virtual Assistant business your brain goes into overdrive!
The red alert sign goes off in the control room in your brain that signifies ‘danger’. It pulls out all the stops and has you focus on what could go wrong creating pictures in your head, it shifts your physiology so you feel tension in your muscles and stress and anxiety in your body.
Finally, it starts feeding you language and shouting thoughts in your head like ‘what if I fail?’, ‘I’ve only ever been an employee, I can’t do this’ and ‘I’m not confident enough’. Your brain will literally come up with all the excuses.
Well, you can tell your brain to do one!
I like to use the NLP technique of giving your internal critique a name and a persona. I was working with a client on this recently and she named hers ‘Horis’ after her miserable Uncle.
She really brought this character to life and gave him a personality. As I said to her, your internal critique is part of you, but it’s NOT you.
We can detach ourselves from the negative thoughts in our head and a great way to do that is to use a pattern interrupt. It can be as simple as having a rubber band on your wrist and when you notice you’re getting into a particularly negative cycle of thoughts you just ping that band. It’s not hard enough to hurt but it’s enough to break your attention away from your thoughts.
It literally interrupts your pattern of thought. It brings you into awareness and you can then change the negative thought to a more positive and empowering thought.
Another way of doing this is to create a mantra. So, if you find yourself saying, ‘I don’t have the confidence to start a Virtual Assistant business’ you then get to flip the switch. Instead, you can repeat your positive mantra, and say something like ‘I have more than enough confidence to build my VA business’. By repeating your mantra daily you’re reprogramming your brain with a new belief and I really encourage you to connect with the feeling that comes with this too.
It takes somewhere between 21 and 28 days to form a new habit so get going with that mantra until you’ve annihilated the old belief. After all, it is just a belief and your mind keeping you safe.
As Brendon Burchard says in his book The Motivation Manifesto ‘Unless we are being chased by a deadly animal or deranged human, or face imminent physical harm like falling to our death, fear is just bad management of our mind’.
Let me know which of these techniques you’re going to implement into your life and when you’re going to start (I’m secretly hoping you’re going to say today). Looking forward to reading some positive and empowering mantras dropping into my inbox.
To connect with me you can find me at [email protected], https://suzieflynn.com and at https://linkedin.com/in/suzieflynn.
