Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One
By Joe Dispenza
It was while listening to Joe Dispenza recently in an interview say that over 90% of the thoughts we think are the same thoughts as the day before that I sat up and paid attention in a new way. It hit me between the eyes. How outrageous is that? Over 90%. That means if we’re trying to change habits, have a more positive experience at work, improve our relationships or health, have more financial freedom or do a full-blown life overhaul, we are trying to do so from the same thinking that got us to this point, and has us still there.
Ummm… that’s just not gonna work, right?
“If you want a new outcome, you will have to break the habit of being yourself, and reinvent a new self.”
“Your life’s not going to change very much because the same thought leads to the same choice, the same choice leads to the same behaviour, the same behaviour creates the same experience, and the same experience produces the same emotion” he said. For me personally this was the wake-up call I was due for, because although I have many skills and tools as a coach that I do my best to apply to my own life, I was still feeling very stuck in some areas and especially with my circular thinking. Because our thinking and feeling is so ingrained and automatic, our already-always-ways-of-being are like the water in a fish bowl – it’s there, you don’t notice it, it’s part of your totally familiar environment. In order to see it for what it is we need to be able to step out of it and look as an observer. We need to go ‘meta’ to the thought or feeling or pattern to truly become aware of them, and thus develop the skill of ‘metacognition’.
But once you spot a thought or feeling that’s not helpful, what do you do with it? This brilliant, very readable and practical book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, lays out the ‘how to’ of building this awareness and then breaking the patterns so that you are no longer thinking and feeling the same as yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. You are becoming a new self, and thus creating a new life.
“The quantum field responds not to what we want; it responds to who we are being.”
There are a myriad of tools and strategies I’ve utilised and still teach people to achieve this, but this book lays out one of the most thorough and smart approaches I’ve come across. Joe Dispenza has very much done this life-transforming personal work himself and then captured it in easily understandable steps that can be done every day or as often as you like. He prefaces these guidelines in the early chapters with explanations of what stops us changing and what we must overcome (environment, time and our body) – and with one of the best explanations I’ve seen of the quantum field and how to manifest the life and self you want. It’s worth reading just for Part 1: The Science of You.
If there is one personal growth book you read this summer, make it this one.
Karen x
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