Are you ready to go to the dark side?
Because here’s the thing: it’s totally okay to go to the dark side.
Not to move in, just pop in for a visit.
The dark side holds all that stuff you’ve pushed aside because you couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with it at the time it happened.
But it’s just information. Information you need to clear.
And it’s perfectly okay to acknowledge that some things in your life aren’t working as well as you’d hoped.
Because life isn’t perfect.
Whenever there’s a really big goal you want to achieve – a new house, a new job, a new business, more money, or whatever it is you want – there’s one thing you should do before you start.
Declutter your mindset around it.
If you skip this step in favour of just powering through, you’re going to miss out on the power of deep transformation, which is the key to change.
And if you think positive affirmations are going to get you through – without the deep transformation – you’re just sabotaging yourself.
Because no matter how many times you recite, “I’m a wealthy woman, I’m a millionaire, I’m rich. I’m rich, dammit! I am rich!” you aren’t just magically gonna start believing that it’s true.
I mean, c’mon, give yourself more credit than that.
You’re smart. You have a fully working brain.
Reciting affirmations that you don’t believe in is like trying to convince yourself that grass is purple or that whales can fly.
Whenever a part of you is sitting in the back going, “Nah, no, you’re not rich, you’re piss poor, just look at you! You’re shite with money, so don’t even try to tell yourself otherwise” you’re going nowhere fast.
You have to get your subconscious mind to believe it.
Or it’s going to fight you the whole time – and eventually make sure that you fail at achieving whatever goal you set yourself.
Decluttering your mindset means admitting the truth to yourself.
It means writing down all the reasons why you don’t want to achieve your goal.
All the reasons why it’s just easier to stay where you are right now.
And trust me, it’ll be a relief, to be honest with yourself.
Let me give you an example. When I was starting out as an independent artist, I had a lot of resistance around having a one-woman business – even though it was something I’d desperately wanted for a really long time.
I found it difficult at first to even start because I was trying to do things the old way.
To begin with, I felt like I needed to deserve it before I could do it.
I kept thinking that I should first lose a bunch of weight and become skinny again so that people would take me seriously.
Because my past experience was telling me that when you’re fat, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, all anyone ever sees is that you’re fat. (Then again, I’ve never felt truly recognised for my intelligence and razor-sharp wit because, fat or thin, I’m still a woman.)
I kept thinking that if I start a business, I’ll have to step out of the wings and onto the stage.
And that felt terrifying.
Because it means I’ll have to allow myself to be seen by other people, I’ll have to put my work out into the world and feel exposed and vulnerable.
It means I might fail at it, and I kept thinking that if I stay small, if I don’t really ever get it off the ground, I can’t ever really fail because it never really even got started. Right?
WRONG!
I realised, working on a business for a few years without it ever seeing any kind of growth, is as much a failure as if it becomes a big success and then fails.
So, go to the dark side and plumb it for all those things you don’t even realise are there.
And you have to go deep, even if you’re not quite sure that you really believe those things on a surface level.
Take me, for example. I was so keen on having my own business and just looking at my surface beliefs, all I knew was that I wanted to succeed.
But when I looked underneath and dug out the truth, it turned out that I was really sabotaging myself and holding back because I was afraid of actually succeeding.
So, step one, when you’re setting a new goal, is to declutter.
Write a list of reasons why you don’t want to do it. Just write down everything you can think of – it can ever veer off into other and seemingly unrelated topics.
Just go with it.
For example, if you want a bigger house, what are some of the downsides of that?
Maybe you’ll write down, “Moving is such a hassle and I hate moving. I’ll have more house to vacuum and keep clean”.
Or maybe you’re worried about paying the mortgage; scared that you won’t be able to make the bigger payments.
Or maybe you want to move from an apartment to a house but have no idea what kind of property maintenance is required of a house and so you’re scared to do it.
Or you worry that your friends and family might become jealous if you have a gorgeous house.
You really need to be honest with yourself about all of your fears. Why wouldn’t you want this goal to come true? What fears do you have around it, big and small? What are some of the negative beliefs you may have about actually achieving this goal? You might feel reluctant to go find your fears.
Because we’ve all been told that we have to be super-duper positive in order to succeed in life.
We’ve been taught that it’s best to have the bad stuff out of sight, out of mind.
But don’t worry, you won’t start manifesting the bad stuff just by focusing on it.
You can talk about it and you can say it out loud. Write it out in black and white.
You’re simply acknowledging that it’s there, and you’re bringing it to the surface so that you can acknowledge its existence, declutter it and release it.
You’re bringing up your true feelings and real worries and giving them the space they need to be expressed.
If you don’t bring the truth out into the open, it’ll just stay hidden in the rafters and keep affecting you from there.
And even if you’ve done a lot of personal development work, there’s always more to uncover.
Because at every new level of success, you’ll repeat every old pattern in an effort to protect yourself from change.
But what’s the alternative?
Not doing the work and staying exactly where you are now for the rest of your life?
Damn, that’s a boring life!
You can do better.
TODAY’S HOMEWORK:
Make a list of reasons why achieving your financial goals would be a bad thing:
- What would be bad for you about making more money?
- What beliefs do you need to declutter, that are in the way of you getting what you want?
- If you had a really successful business, life or whatever, what would be some of the downsides about that?
