Tip six for people with hectic lifestyles who want to make positive life or career changes

Do you have a hectic lifestyle and want to make positive life changes but precious little time to make them?

Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing with you the mindfulness, self help and personal development techniques and tips that helped me to:

• escape the corporate cage, that is, my well-paid secure job and hectic lifestyle in London
•  move from  London to live in the idyllic countryside and do my dream job as a successful Psychotherapist, Coach and Mindfulness Teacher helping 1000s of clients at my Liverpool Street and Harley Street Practices and  nowadays at my online, Bristol and Somerset Practices sometimes advising film Directors, such as Mike Leigh, on the authenticity of film narratives.

Though I am now doing my dream job, living in a delightful Somerset village and have many tools at my disposal, life is occasionally still tough so I’ll also send  you some tips to help you remain motivated, and focused when you are feeling stuck, overwhelmed, lost or you are falling victim to ”l’m too busy and don’t have enough time” and procrastination trap.

For those of you who didn’t get the opportunity to read tips one, two, three, four and five of my blog for people with hectic lifestyles who want to make positive life or career changes see:

http://www.karendeeming.com/index.php/2015/07/02/tip-five-for-people-with-hectic-lifestyles-wanting-to-make-positive-life-or-career-changes/

Tip for week Six, visualisations and positive affirmations:

During the career change transition from my secure well paid Corporate job to become a self employed Psychotherapist, I would often felt overwhelmed and crippled by an underlying sense of fear and panic often posing myself questions such as:

• Why are you doing this?
• Why not play it safe and continue working for someone else, at least you will receive a generous, regular income each month?
• Are you crazy leaving this job, many people would be delighted be in your financial position right now so why risk leaving and becoming a free lancer?
• Dreams are for other people not you etc etc ……

Following years of coaching, personal development and reading self help books though, I suddenly remembered a few helpful techniques. Instead of focusing on deprivation and starving myself of my dream and of allowing myself to experience positive and pleasure thoughts, ie scarcity, I woke up each morning by developing a positive mindset of abundance.

Here’s how:

• Firstly, I adopted a positive affirmation statement in the present tense such as “I’m happy and grateful that I am a highly successful Psychotherapist with lots of clients at my Harley Street Practice,” repeated this at least 40 times each morning and then just before I went to sleep, for at least a two week period.
• Then, I took a photo of Harley Street and of myself smiling and looked at this during each affirmation.
• I was mindful, becoming physically, emotionally and mentally aware of my inner state as each external event happened in my life, moment by moment, rather than living in the past or future.
• Last but not least, I frequently reflected on this statement: “if you never give up you never fail.”

In other words, I adopted a small steps approach by setting byte size, realistic goals such as aiming to be seeing 15 daytime clients by the end of February not something vague like to gain new clients.

 

Sounds simple and perhaps mumbo jumbo doesn’t it? However, I have also used this technique with several clients and friends to help them tackle issues such as:

• overcoming procrastination
• overcoming addictions
• overcoming shyness, low self esteem and social phobia
• overcoming anxiety and exhaustion
• overcoming loneliness

The results have often been astounding. Having said that though, most of these clients have undertaken a few counselling or mindfulness sessions with me, before adopting the above exercise in order to achieve their goals.

What’s the primary principle behind this techique?

The subconscious mind operates 95% of your life and only 5% of what you are thinking or perceiving is your conscious mind. The subconscious mind works most effectively with pictures and imagery so you want to take advantage of that, ie the photos. Once you train your subconscious mind to focus on the things that you want then your performance starts to follow because your performance is always aligned with your subconscious mind.

Also as children we picked up messages from parents, peers, teachers and society, not always positive, that literally form the 95% that we are not conscious of and this 95% is really running the show often resulting in fears and doubts that cause us to procrastinate or to feel stuck and demotivated.

For example:

• don’t dream like this
• you can never have this kind of house
• don’t set yourself up for failure
• you can never run your own business it’s too risky

We then blame our doubts and fears on the external world and we play the victim but the reality is it is our own selfs we are our own saboteurs.

The positive affirmation exercise is an ideal tool to reprogramme your subconscious and of course your unhealthy, scarcity mindset.

Does any of this sound familiar?            What can you do about it?

Be honest with yourself and acknowledge that you’ve probably fallen victim to the scarcity trap and mind set. Naturally, the reason will be different for each person and remember you’re not alone in this very common dilemma…

Take control of your negative internal chatter box alias “inner critic” that I mentioned in my last blog.

I’ll end with a few insights that have helped me, Karen Deeming, along the way:

• whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting
• happy feelings will attract more happy circumstances
• visualize and rehearse your own future
• shift your awareness
• counselling, psychotherapy, mindfulness and coaching are about personal growth and development and encouraging people to discover their potential for living as well as for people with anxiety, depression, stress, bereavement, low self esteem, and relationship difficulties.