Conscious change

Change can be challenging.  Often times, people feel like they’re not changing, they can’t change, or they’re changing too slowly.  In the midst of change, they also tend to feel like they are fighting themselves, and trying to control themselves into being different. As human beings, change is a major part of our lives. As life coaches, helping clients deal with and navigate change is a major part of our work. In this article, we draw on our experience helping our clients achieve positive, constructive, and enjoyable change in their lives by pointing out 5 helpful realizations that will empower you to manifest conscious change in your life. So, whether you’re trying to enhance your relationship, be more mindful, let go of negative thoughts and emotions, feel good more often, or manifest more success in your life, following these realizations can help you more swiftly and enjoyably achieve the change you seek inside and out. 

5 helpful realizations that will empower you to manifest conscious change in your life

The 5 helpful realizations that will empower you to manifest conscious change in your life are:

1. Affirmations and positive beliefs don’t resolve the negative thoughts, emotions, and attitudes that create resistance in our lives.
2. Becoming conscious of our subconscious mind is key to releasing the parts of us that are stuck in fear and negativity and resisting change.
3. The process of conscious change is not as much a process of building ourselves up as it is a process of deconstructing what’s been bringing us down.
4. Just because you feel something, doesn’t mean it’s true and doesn’t mean it’s you!
5. You can achieve a lot more change in a lot less time than you may feel.

In this article, we’ll discuss each of these in greater detail.  It’s important to note that getting to a place in yourself where you consciously and subconsciously resonate with these realizations takes time and practice.  As always, we encourage being patient, loving, and understanding with yourself on your journey.  If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please kindly comment below or contact us – we’d love to hear from you.

The first key realization that will empower you to manifest conscious change in your life is:

Conscious change realization 1:

Affirmations and positive beliefs don’t resolve the negative thoughts, emotions, and attitudes that create resistance in our lives.

Affirmations and positive beliefs are wonderful tools.  That said, many times we find people using them when something else could be helping them more.  Affirmations are excellent for creating change as long as the foundation where you lay them is pure.

Consider this: whenever we want to achieve something, there’s usually several parts of us that have disempowering negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives about our capacity and likelihood to achieve what we want.  For example, we might feel that we can’t do it, it will take too long, it won’t work, we don’t deserve it, or some other (usually several other) disempowering negative thoughts, emotions, and attitudes.

In this situation, many people will try to use affirmations to get rid of the negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives.  In their free time, and often on a schedule, they will repeat these affirmations and positive beliefs to themselves.  In addition to this schedule, whenever a negative thought, emotion, or attitude comes up, they will redirect their focus from their negativity to whatever affirmations or positive beliefs they’ve chosen for their process.

People we speak to who are using this strategy describe several different negative emotional side effects (speaking energetically, not medically).  These side effects help demonstrate how optimism and being positive are not enough.  The 3 major side effects we see are:

1. A feeling of being in a tug of war within themselves, where they feel like they are fighting their own energy from frequently trying to switch from negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives, to positive thoughts, emotions, and perspectives. Because this process of ‘switching’ is often used with affirmations and optimism, people tend to get exhausted doing this, experience burn out, take long breaks from their affirmations, and experience long periods where they feel that they regress, or even that they’re a failure.
2. A feeling of fighting an uphill battle.  They may be making progress, that said, they also feel like a lot of their energy is being wasted and not being channeled towards achieving their goals nearly as efficiently as they intuit is possible.
3. Feeling highs and sometimes severe lows coupled with anxiety.  They describe times when they feel elated, strong, capable, confident, and powerful when the affirmations are working, and other times where they feel overwhelmed and debilitated by negative thoughts, emotions, and attitudes that surface.  In these times, they feel like they can’t even muster the energy to use their affirmations because it feels like such a leap from their current emotional state.

You may have heard the expression, “the right tool for the right job”.  In our experience, the reason these symptoms exist is because people tend to misuse affirmations and optimism.  They try to layer this positivity over negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives without clearing those negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives first (or at least simultaneously).  Here’s a useful metaphor.

Let’s say you have a plot of soil with some old weeds where you’ve decided to plant a garden.  If you don’t carefully remove the weeds and, instead, just throw some new dirt over them and plant your new seeds, the weeds will likely prevent the seeds from growing (and maybe even consume them completely).  Naturally, you take the weeds out first.

The weeds are the old negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives that are limiting you.  The seeds are your affirmations and positive thinking that will hopefully yield great life and relationship results – beautiful, fruitful plants.

Do you see the issue?  When using affirmations, people are often “putting the cart before the horse”. By using affirmations without clearing negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives first, they end up covering them up with and, thus, suppressing them under their affirmations and optimism.  The issue with this is that their limiting perspectives and negativity, like weeds, always find a way back to the surface if not dealt with ‘at the root’.

When this garden represents your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual body, how important is it that it’s built upon a clean, weed-free foundation?  You see, affirmations, positive beliefs, and optimism are excellent and useful.  We just tend to skip a very important part of the process – the part where we consciously, carefully, and patiently search for and clear any negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives that will tend to hold us back no matter what positive thought or belief we try to hold on to!

When we skip this step, the parts of us that are holding onto these negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives end up fighting our own positive energy.  That’s when we get symptoms like the ones above.  That said, when we do acknowledge, identify, and consciously go about clearing our negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives in a disciplined manner, our affirmations are able to take root, and we are able to manifest our intentions far faster, more effortlessly, and enjoyably.

A key reason why people sometimes have difficulty clearing their negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives is also the next key realization that will empower you to manifest conscious change in your life:

Conscious change realization 2:

Becoming conscious of our subconscious mind is key to releasing the parts of us that are stuck in fear and negativity and resisting change

The process of using affirmations actually contributes to this because it can lead people to ignoring, avoiding, or suppressing their subconscious negative thoughts, emotions, and perspectives.  People often don’t realize that, in so doing, they’re actually burying these internal limitations in their subconscious mind.  Just because these internal limitations – or subconscious negative perspectives – become invisible and inaudible to our conscious minds, doesn’t mean this negativity isn’t still running in our system affecting how we feel and the decisions we make!

Sigmund Freud said, “the mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water”.  That means that parts of our mind that we are conscious of – the thoughts we hear, see, and feel – are only a glimpse of the full picture.  It also means that a lot of the conscious thoughts and emotions we feel might simply be the final ripple effects of subconscious mental processes that were already set in motion.  If this is the case (and in our work, we have found it to be), and you want to achieve conscious positive change in your life, how important is it to become aware of limiting negative perspectives that are hidden in your subconscious mind and release them?

Very important!  The good news is that there are many ways to do this.  More good news is that you can do so gradually, gently, and enjoyably while prioritizing the goals that matter most to you.  Even more good news is that with some information, tools, techniques, and guidance, you can do it on your own (if you want to).

Once you start becoming aware of subconscious parts that have been limiting you and releasing them, you’ll find yourself snapping through large positive shifts in your life that you may have been struggling to make for a long time.  Sometimes, you can achieve these shifts in an instant, like an “aha!” moment.  Other times, with just 10 minutes or less of using some techniques we offer, you can permanently transcend aspects of past limitations.  That’s because, instead of suppressing it, once you lift a subconscious misinterpretation to the light of your conscious mind, it can clear and release permanently and quickly.

Most people don’t do this or ever get to enjoy this experience because they are busy trying to ‘become’ someone new in order to achieve their goals.  In a way, when we use affirmations to shift our belief system, we are reconfiguring ourselves and trying to become someone new (whether we realize it or not).  In our work, what we’ve found is that the trick to enjoyable and conscious change and manifestation is not becoming someone or something new, it’s simply ‘unbecoming’ any old parts of ourselves that are preventing us from achieving our goals.

This brings us to next key realization that will empower you to manifest conscious change in your life:

Conscious change realization 3:

The process of conscious change is not as much a process of building ourselves up as it is a process of deconstructing what’s been bringing us down.

A majority of self-help advice and coaching today is advising people to contradict their negative beliefs about themselves with new positive beliefs that they perceive are more aligned with their goals.  At a glance, this might appear to make sense.  That said, what we’ve found is that all of these different beliefs (sometimes even the seemingly positive ones) can actually weigh you down, lead to inner conflict, create tension, create more negative thoughts and emotions, and limit spiritual progress.  That’s not to say you shouldn’t be optimistic, positive, bold, and empowered about the intentions you’ve carefully thought through.  What we are saying is that there’s often times a more enjoyable and faster approach to conscious change than just creating new positive beliefs.  To explain this, we’ll use a few metaphors.

First, consider a sailboat that’s under sail with several anchors on the right side (that’s starboard for you sailors).   These anchors represent the limiting conscious and subconscious negative thoughts, emotions, and beliefs a person might have about themselves and their goals.  Of course, these anchors will slow the boat down, make it unpleasant to be on it because of the tilt, and also make it less maneuverable.

The ‘going’ method to deal with these negative beliefs that’s being taught widely today is to identify positive beliefs that will support the goals you want to achieve and then use affirmations to integrate those beliefs into your conscious and subconscious mind.  Some people call this consciousness hacking.  What people don’t realize is that this is actually like taking some other anchors (the positive beliefs) and throwing them over the other side of the boat.  Now, you have anchors on both sides of a moving boat that are holding you back.

The reason the positive beliefs can actually hold you back instead of propel you forward is that the positive beliefs don’t make the negative beliefs go away.  Thus, the positive beliefs can actually also create tension and act like anchors if we don’t clear the negative beliefs first.  When this happens we then have multiple anchors on both sides of our boat which slow us down, create tension, make us heavier, make us less agile, and (here’s the real kicker) remain hidden in the depths of our subconscious mind where we forget or don’t realize they’re there.

Here’s another metaphor.  You can look at your ego as a tower that stands over a river and your beliefs as one of the components that make up this tower.  The river represents your true self, your soul, God, joy, presence, unconditional love, immediate manifestation, and abundance.  Because this tower is made up of your ego and this river stands at the bottom, every part of your ego takes you farther away from the capacity to feel and be aligned with your true self, your soul, God, joy, presence, unconditional love, immediate manifestation, and abundance.  When you deconstruct the ego, you can access this river and, thus, resonate fully with your soul and God.

When we don’t deconstruct the ego, and instead, try to ‘fight’ our negative beliefs with positive beliefs, we are essentially building the ego structure taller.  It can get tall enough so that when we look over the edge, we can’t even see the river anymore (the ego creates separation from others, our soul, and God).  In addition to that, as our ego gets bigger (or in this case taller) it also becomes less stable, sways in the wind, and undergoes greater strain and tension.  This instability, stress, and lower capacity to remain resonant with our spiritual nature ultimately diminishes our capacity to achieve our goals.  Believe it or not, even positive beliefs can add to the ego structure and have this effect (as an example, consider an over confident person who ‘learns the hard way’).

To be absolutely clear: we absolutely want you to feel great about yourself and your capacity to achieve.  Simultaneously, we are making a very subtle distinction that can save you lots of unnecessary hardship hitting your head against the wall trying to do the ‘right’ thing.

The distinction is this:  instead of creating positive beliefs about yourself, building up your ego, and experiencing the inherent obscuration, emotional volatility, and inconsistent life and relationship results that comes with that, you can choose a distinctly different path towards positivity, optimism, and empowerment that is faster and more enjoyable.

You can instead practice resonating with the fact that you are an extraordinary child of God just like all other beings on this planet and thus you definitely are and must be great, capable, worthy, forgiven, and deserving of anything and everything your heart desires.  This faith and understanding can be much more powerful, motivating, and empowering than any positive belief.  Faith is far more powerful than belief.  It’s a clean, divine fuel that you can run on forever.

With that understanding, instead of piling new positive beliefs on top of old negative ones, you can simply release the negative beliefs that are taking you out of resonance with the simple truth that you are an extraordinary child of God just like all other beings on this planet and thus you definitely are great, capable, worthy, forgiven, and deserving of anything and everything your heart desires.  As you deconstruct the most prominent negative beliefs, or ego parts, that are limiting you today, pieces of the tower will fall away, return to and be healed by God, and you will get closer and closer to and feel more and more of that divine river of love that flows to and through you and all beings and things.

To deconstruct the ego, humbly, honestly, and courageously beginning to acknowledge and become aware of your ego and it’s parts is recommended.  People often get stuck in this process because becoming aware of ego components can be a vulnerable process.

For example, we speak to many people who have certain unwanted negative thoughts and emotions that they don’t fully understand.  Often times, they are also afraid of the implications of having these thoughts and emotions and simultaneously in judgment of themselves for having them.  Of course, this fear and self-judgment only makes it harder to understand these unwanted negative thoughts and emotions and to clear and release them completely.  Frequently, this fear and self-judgment also leads to suppression and denial instead of acknowledgment and resolution.

Most people have at least a few negative thoughts and emotions that they feel this way about – if not consciously, then subconsciously.  This is normal and good because these supposedly negative thoughts and emotions often hold misinterpretations that, once we unravel, will reveal key understandings that unlock wonderful new potential and experiences in our lives.

The reason people have such a hard time with achieving conscious change on some of these more vulnerable thoughts, beliefs, and emotions is also the 4th key realization that will empower you to manifest conscious change in your life is:

Conscious change realization 4:

Just because you feel something, doesn’t mean it’s true and doesn’t mean it’s you!

Let’s look at the assumption that, “if I feel it, it must be me” first.  This process of identifying with what we feel often makes it really hard to acknowledge what we feel for fear of judgment and abandonment by ourselves and others.   Of course, if we can’t acknowledge something, we can’t work with it.  If we can’t work with it, we can’t release it!

Now let’s look at “if I feel it, it must be true”.  If we assume that all of our feelings represent truth or reality, then we can become slaves to our own emotional process and making all decisions based on how we feel.  Consider what happens when your feelings don’t represent reality…

Have you ever gotten really upset or angry about ‘spilled milk’ and later realized it really was no big deal?  They say hindsight is 20/20.  When we get caught up in a triggered emotional state, our feelings are often not useful guides for decision making and we often only realize that later, once we’ve calmed down.  Nonetheless, in those times we often assume that “if I feel it, it must be true” and react from our inner-pain or fear and end up regretting the decisions we make.

One of the core teachings of this experience is that our feelings don’t represent reality.  They actually represent our fear, pain, and ego.  Unfortunately, we often can’t tell the difference between the strong emotions we feel and what really is.  When we operate from this skewed vantage point, we often end up making decisions that keep us stuck in the same painful patterns, instead of seeing all the options available to us that are offering the potential for the conscious change we seek in our lives.  If you feel stuck, unable to make as much progress as you’d like, or if you feel concerned about thoughts or emotions you’re having about yourself or someone you’re in a relationship with, understanding what we’ve discussed here might bring you a sense of relief and help you acknowledge anything and everything you feel so that you can be empowered to work on it and resolve it.

The final item (for now) on our list of key realizations that will empower you to manifest conscious change in your life is:

Conscious change realization 5:

You can achieve a lot more change in a lot less time than you may feel.

Whether they are looking to resolve negative thoughts and emotions, become more spiritual, enhance their relationship, lose weight, be healthier, happier, or more successful, people typically underestimate how quickly and how positively they can actually change.

When it comes to change, we often project all sorts of scenarios about how change will unfold, how change won’t unfold, and how long it will take.  By projecting these limitations, we actually end up limiting ourselves to these projections and even playing them out while resisting many bigger and better versions of change (that were totally possible) from unfolding in our lives.  Through this process, we often revalidate our fear and belief projections and further entrench ourselves and our life results in our limited states of mind.

Often times, these limitation projections about how things can change are also contributing to us remaining in the state that we are trying to change.  This creates a sort of catch-22 and a feeling of being stuck or unable to change as rapidly as we want in our lives.

You can use your God given freewill to unlimit yourself

You are a child of God.  You are made of the same star dust that exploded into this miraculous and creative universe.  You have God given free will and the capacity to resonate with, reflect, and embody God’s creativity, joy, presence, unconditional love, immediate manifestation, abundance, and witness miracles every day.  Use that free will not to limit yourself – to unlimit yourself.  What may feel all too real, total, permanent, and inescapable can completely transform in a split second if you maintain an internal space that allows it to.  We’ve experienced it in ourselves, we’ve experienced it with clients, and we know you can experience it too.

You can start transcending your limitations and feeling better and better today

If you’re feeling badly about something, if you’re trying to achieve something, if you’re having negative thoughts and emotions holding you back, if you’re struggling to feel God, if you’re conflicted or confused about what you should do in your life – we can be your sounding board, help you gain clarity, feel better, permanently release internal limitations and negative thoughts and emotions, cultivate your spirituality, find more fulfillment and meaning in life, explore mindfulness and meditation, achieve your goals faster and more enjoyably, and get into alignment with what’s in your highest and best good.  We offer life coaching over the phone to individuals worldwide who work with us from as often as twice a week to every once in a while.  You can find more details about ways in which we work with clients here: Coaching with Us