Ep.23: Why you're Stuck in the same Cycle - How to stop holding yourself back
Are there parts of your life where you feel totally empowered, making real progress… yet in one area, you’re completely stuck? No matter how much you try, how conscious you are, or how many changes yo...
Episode Transcript
The Loop You Can't Seem to Break
Welcome back to the Wisdom Practice Podcast. If you feel like there are a lot of areas in your life where you're doing really great - it doesn't have to be a 10 out of 10, or even an 8 out of 10, but you're conscious, you're making strides, you feel more empowered about that area of your life - but there's one, or maybe two areas where no matter what you do, you feel, for lack of a better word, hopeless.
No matter how conscious you try to stay, no matter what actions you try to take, you feel like you're in this never-ending loop, and you may have been in that loop for a month, a year, multiple decades. If you resonate with that, this episode is about why that is - and it's not your fault, because it's partly to do with the way we've been brought up in a world where we're always taught to look outside of ourselves.
By the end of this episode you'll have a new perspective on how to look at that part of your life and that pattern, and maybe not feel as guilty, ashamed, or frustrated as you normally do - and through that, finally be able to make some change.
Taught to Look Outside Ourselves
We've been taught, day in and day out, to put more attention on the outside world than on ourselves, on what's going on inside us. We've been taught that what's out there is real, and what's going on inside us is just airy, intangible stuff, so it's not as important. Everything around you, you can see, touch, feel - it must be real, it must be important, and I completely understand that.
But what happens when you've grown up in that kind of environment is you define your sense of self from everything around you, because the outside is the only real, tangible thing. It's completely normal, and that's the issue - it's just completely normal. It's what everyone experiences, and because of that, we all think it's normal. Yes, the outside world can teach us a hell of a lot about ourselves, but when we start looking for a part of ourselves in the world, that's when the issues start to come up. If that sounds like you, it's completely okay - we all do it, and chances are you've been experiencing it so long you don't even know what the opposite would be.
When we experience these patterns for so long and keep getting the same results from our actions, we just think that's how the world works.
Looking for Love Outside Yourself
Let's say you're looking for a relationship to make you feel loved, subconsciously of course, and you find someone and everything's amazing, and they completely fulfill you. Then one day they do something that, in your perception, makes you feel not loved - maybe they had a bad day, maybe something happened - and because your entire sense of self-love is defined by something outside you, when that outside starts to crumble a little, you react, you panic. We all do. And then we act and make it worse, because we're acting from a place of fear rather than understanding what they're going through. Long story short, that relationship breaks up, you find someone else, and you exhibit the same pattern, on and on and on.
By the time you're 30 or 40 you just think that's how relationships are. And it's not your fault, because our brains are only designed to understand what we've experienced.
The Brain Is a Brilliant Record Player
Our brains are a brilliant record player. Anything you've experienced, it can compute and analyze - it can do all this stuff. But as soon as you try to understand something it hasn't experienced, it can't help you. That's what I mean when we start to look for ourselves outside of ourselves, having grown up in an environment that has taught us that for decades.
You get to a point where that's your view of the world, and it's been happening for so long we don't even have the awareness to know if that's our view of it or just actual fact. You may be in a position where, even if you're aware of it, you know there's something you're doing that isn't serving you, isn't creating the result or behavior you want - but you've been doing it so long that any chance of changing it feels hopeless.