The 3 biggest mistakes that people make when they’re trying to change their life.
We’ve all been there.
We’ve gone on holiday and felt inspired to completely change our lives when we get home.
Or we’ve listened to a motivational speaker, and immediately resolved to change our job, our home or our partner, as we set out to build an amazingly abundant and inspirational life.
And we’ve probably all made New Year’s Resolutions that lasted somewhere between five minutes and a week.
So how come these changes never last? Are we not dreaming hard enough or long enough?
What does it take to make concrete, long-lasting changes?
And is permanent change even possible?
Well, yes, change is possible, and I’ll give you some tips as to how you can do that successfully, but let’s look at some mind psychology, as all change starts there first:
Change your mind and you change your life.
The mind loves what is familiar, and it will always try to draw you back to what is known because it feels safe there. This is largely written in our DNA and stems back to tribal times when feeling safe was directly connected to survival. Eating strange berries could kill you; leaving the tribe to walk a different path could see you alone, with no protection from the proverbial sabre-tooth tiger; being different from the tribe could see you excluded and alone, unsafe and unprotected.
In order to create a new life for ourselves we have to break out of the pattern of what is familiar in order to step into unknown and unfamiliar territory. This can make us feel really uncomfortable and this, ironically, pushes us back into the known, into the safe – often right back where we started. And then that familiar feeling of having failed, or missed our big chance, creates a sense of despondency. Surprisingly, this holds true even if the familiar is destructive! We go back to what is known, even it doesn’t serve us.
And then there are the neural pathways to contend with… When we repeat certain thoughts or actions over and over again, not only do these thoughts or actions become entrenched, but our mind actually builds neural pathways so that familiar or expected outcomes are the ones naturally chosen, lessening even more so our chances of permanent change. This safe path quickly becomes our routine and very soon it begins to dictate our whole personality.
We may become known as the girl or guy who’s grumpy until after the first coffee of the day; or the person who wants a loving relationship but dumps the prospective partner as soon as they get too close; or the complainer; or the one who never-sits-still; the one who’s always late and makes ridiculous excuses for it, and so on.
Behind all of these behaviours and personality traits are repeating patterns of belief, limiting thoughts and energy blocks, most of which we are completely unconscious of because they are so familiar. Some of them have been with us for 20+ years and some of them are learned behaviours we picked up from our parents or society when we were 5 years old and just didn’t know any better!
Somehow though, perhaps due to an inspirational idea, a chance meeting, a role model worth admiring, we decide that we want to change. We want to change our life, ourselves or our circumstances, in order to live the life of happiness and abundance that we’ve dreamt of but has so far, been out of reach.
We say to ourselves that tomorrow will be the first day of the rest of our lives! Everything’s going to change and it’s going to be fantastic! But what we don’t realise is that we may have already set ourselves up to fail.
Here are the three biggest mistakes that people tend to make, even as early as on Day 1 of their Transformation and you might have done these yourself too:
1. You try to change everything at once. You end up running around all over the place trying to get everything to happen all at the same time but without a plan, with no real direction or goal and no focus.
You’ve created a shopping list of immediate changes: lose weight, get fit, eat healthy, stop smoking, start a journal, make lots of money, find a great relationship, get new friends, dump old ones, tell certain family members what you really think of them so that you can start afresh, write a book, become an influencer or a blogger, start a business and sell loads of things, learn to meditate, make a difference in the world, get really spiritual and get followers on FB or Instagram so that you can become well known.
People often try to make these changes in their life and try to become a different person – they want to reinvent themselves but all without their family really knowing because they are afraid they might not be accepted by the family if they do change. But nothing less than complete and radical change will work for them however they don’t want anyone to notice their changes as they fear judgement.
The mistake is that whilst one or two of these changes will definitely make a difference, trying to do them all at once is simply unsustainable over the long term. Approached in a different way though they are all completely achievable.
2. Focusing on the wrong things first – things that don’t automatically lead to lasting change. Signing up for more courses, buying more books, having more healings, buying more crystals and generally just getting more stuff might be interesting but without a plan of action, it won’t take you far. The question to ask yourself is: Do I genuinely need these things or is this just a diversion or stalling tactic?
Here are two examples of things we want to change but don’t go about it in the right way: If you’re wanting new friends (perhaps the type of friend that you aspire to be) it’s important to realise that the friends you have now resonated with who you were when you first met. So, in order to have new friends, you have to meet these new friends energetically first. That means making inner changes – changing thoughts and beliefs and shifting your energy. If you don’t do this first, you’ll just attract the same type of friends you already have (and this holds true for romantic relationships too). Once you change on the inside then quite naturally your old friends will drop away, and you’ll meet wonderful new ones that are a perfect match for you at your new vibration.
Your new life doesn’t have to all be in place exactly, but your mindset needs to have changed sufficiently that the vibration that you are sending out into the field is the perfect match for the new types of friends that you want. The key here is to have changed your vibration or changed your frequency. Dumping old friends and expecting to get new friends without a change occurring within you, just won’t happen.
Another example: If you want to lose weight, get fit and eat healthy – three things that definitely go together well – the results will come in the doing though, not in the researching of which diet to follow, shopping for skinny or get-fit clothes and buying a stationary bike that you never even sit on! To get results you need to be in motion. Put your imagination to work, start moving your body more, start walking perhaps – you don’t need fancy clothes for that! Stop eating processed foods – you’re intelligent enough to know that chips, lollies, soft drinks and pies are not healthy choices. However the most important thing of all is being willing to look at the real reasons behind why you’re carrying this extra weight and why you got so unfit in the first place.
Many of the issues around weight loss (and the types of people we attract as friends or partners too, for that matter) are actually to do with what we feel about ourselves on the inside, and this leads me to biggest mistake number 3, and that is:
3. Thinking that we’ve done the work of letting go of limiting beliefs or energy blocks and changing on the inside – when we actually haven’t.
We can be masters of denial and unconscious limiting beliefs or energy blocks are by their very nature, hidden beneath our conscious awareness. They are the key factors that inhibit our ability to make the changes in our life that we want to or know we need to in order to create a happy and abundant life.
This is our inner work and only we can do this. No amount of eating healthy food will give you a happy and abundant life when you are unhappy on the inside. No amount of dating websites will find your Mr or Ms Right when you have unconsciously written a program in your mind that says you “will never trust another man or woman again”. These are the emotional blocks that we have put in place unconsciously because we think they will keep us safe.
Perhaps they did once but they have expired now and have become a burden to us – it’s time to uncover them and let them go. You might be surprised to find that they are not at all what you think they are.
If you don’t have what you want in your life yet, it’s either because you are giving your mind the wrong messages, or you are blocking the right things from coming in.
With awareness and self-evaluation all of this can be overcome. You can change your life but in order to do that successfully you must change your mind first.
So, until next time, stay happy,
From my heart to yours,
Karen
Karen Turpin is an expert at helping women – and men – to find the energy blocks and limiting beliefs that hold them back from living the life of happiness and abundance that they really want. She is available for private sessions in person or via Zoom around the world. Find her at her website www.karenturpin.com or join her FB group – Consciously Abundant Community.