I was once directed to a podcast of a very successful person. I wish I could say it was because of something lofty and cerebral but it was because that person was beefing with someone we knew and there was a bit of fascination!
The podcast was very engaging and pretty informative too - but there was something I noticed.
This person had done really well financially. Had a supportive community around her. A loving husband. A decent work/life balance. Yet she was stuck in the narrative of an underdog. Of course successful people have challenges and bad things that happen. Even taking that into account, it felt as if everything was filtered through the lens of being a victim... like she was wearing victim-tinted spectacles. And it didn't quite ring true.
It reminded me of an important finding in my PhD - no matter how much your external circumstances change, if your inner story doesn't change too then you might as well stay in the same place. The tint of our spectacles will travel with us wherever we go!
In a way, spectacles are a bad analogy because that implies we can take them off. We can't. We all wear some kind of spectacles - the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of things, the meaning we give to the world, and our habits of thought, feeling, and belief. We can't just leave our heads behind. We HAVE to make decisions about what to expect from the world and how to interpret it.
However, we are at our best when we refine and change our understanding and even our sense of self as we learn and grow. We take in new information. We try on different coloured lenses. We explore new ways of relating to ourselves and other people. And if we have a dud pair of glasses, we get new lenses.
Reaching goals means nothing if we are experiencing the world through eyes that are lying. That are telling us stories that drag us down - and may even mean that we end up hurting others (ESPECIALLY with victim tinted glasses, which is a whole other story about the Drama Triangle!).
Change isn't just about the external. It's about rewriting our own stories and renegotiating how we see ourselves and the world. Then it's about believing it. Then it's about living it. So, yes we've all heard that mindset is important and that we have to law of attraction ourselves into abundance, blah blah blah. But beyond that, we need to deal with the internal so that we don't accidentally wander around wearing spectacles with crappy lenses. This is especially true if you want to make meaningful change in your life instead of just changing your circumstances.
If you are going through change and want support through this - in fact, if you want to make it a whole lot easier! - then DM me and ask about my navigating change mastermind.
If you want to learn coaching skills that help you to support people to make both internal and external change, then DM me for details of our Diploma in Skilled Coaching.
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