What State Are You Creating From?
Act from the state you want to create not the state you want to escape.
- Luke Manson
As a practitioner who offers services such as Holistic Body & Lifestyle Coaching, Massage Therapy, Movement Therapy and Personal Training, people often come to me for support as it relates to their body. Some want the tension headaches to stop, the foot pain when they run to subside or to lose weight. Others are trying to make movement a regular part of their life or are working to take on the identity and lifestyle of an outdoor adventure enthusiast. Each of these people are motivated to act by a desire to experience their lives differently - perhaps with less restriction, or with greater freedom and ease.
In the intake and assessment process, my intention, in part, is to uncover the deeper underlying motivation behind a client’s desire to engage in a coaching program with me. What I regularly find is that each of my clients wants to experience a different internal state of being. They come to me feeling stuck, overwhelmed, frustrated, hopeless and dissatisfied, and what they want to experience is freedom, peace, joy, appreciation and vibrancy. They want to live more on the upside of life. They want to be more ALIVE!
Most often the work between practitioner and patient or client is focused solely on the technical, mechanical, and tactical strategies to fix the “problem”. What I’ve learned in my experience both personally and professionally is that while these components are important, they alone do not lead to the sustainable creation of freedom, peace, joy, appreciation, and vibrancy. The reason is that just like training and conditioning, or reconditioning, the body to perform in the way that we intend biomechanically, we also have to train and condition, or recondition the mind intentionally to cultivate the mental/emotional outcome we want.
Let’s explore this further!
There’s a neurological and biochemical pattern for every thought/emotion pattern. What that means is that when we’re having the thought “I can’t do all of this work” and feeling the emotion of overwhelm, there’s a specific neurological pathway that has been stimulated and a specific chemical concoction released in our body by the body associated with that thought and emotion. The lay term muscle memory is used to describe the concept whereby motor pathways of the nervous system are conditioned to support the execution of a specific physical action or physical skill. When we start crawling as a baby, we are building and conditioning the motor pathways of that particular action. The same happens when we practice riding a bicycle. The more we practice, the more those motor pathways get refined and the better we become at those skills. This is also true, for example, when we repeatedly experience, practice, or rehearse the thoughts associated with the belief that I’m not good enough and feel the associated emotions of inadequacy. We create a neurological and chemical pattern or pathway that gets so finely conditioned that it becomes easily triggered and seems to happen automatically. Eventually the body becomes so familiar and conditioned for that experience that it will soon develop a preference for that experience. The internal states of being we practice over and over in time become a part of our personality. They make up who we are.
How can we move past a conditioned internal state?
The first step is to become aware of the pattern and along with that recognition, decide that it doesn't serve us or support the results we want to create in your life. Without awareness, we cannot consciously change anything. So awareness is a big first step. The steps to recondition a pattern beyond the first step, are often left untaken and the simple reason is that most of us aren’t familiar with those steps, don’t have someone to guide us through them, and don’t have someone to hold us accountable to the difficulty of repeatedly following through. The second step is to establish a vision for the state of being we want to experience. We have to define your destination both externally, by objective results as well as internally. The third step is the effort to intentionally connect to that internal state of being along the journey to fulfilling on the external outcomes. This third step is where the shift happens. It’s where the rubber hits the road. It’s where the consistent conscious conditioning takes place bit by bit. It’s all too common when we set out on a journey of creation to bring the old internal state of being on that journey. We’ve been conditioned to believe that we’ll experience the new internal state of being we desire once we reach the destination and achieve the goal. The reality is that the internal change in state we feel when we accomplish our objective is temporary and the old state eventually comes back. This leaves us disappointed and frustrated. When we have repeated experiences of this type, we often come to one or two conclusions. We become hopeless of getting to and sustaining that desired state and/or we come to believe that the only way we can feel the internal state we desire is by achieving something else. We can find ourselves going through life trying to achieve things along the way so we can feel the momentary pleasure we experienced with the previous achievement.
Take Action!
Do you want to overcome the conditioning that holds you back and cultivate the internal states you want to experience in your life? Check out the Personal Training and Lifestyle Coaching services to read more or click here now to schedule a complimentary consultation to learn more about how I can guide and support you.