Step 2 – Creating a mindset that doesn’t sabotage your self-hypnotizing suggestions

Do you know that you share your brain space with a secret saboteur? Ever notice how when you want to make changes in the way you do things or run your life, it seems a thief in the night comes to stop you.

Part of you wants to believe that you have a mind of your own, fully capable of making decisions and even being able to change your mind. Yet, at the same time you know that sometimes despite your best efforts, the old ways have a way of sneaking back in. 

You see as your brain matures it gets programmed with all kinds of messages about the way things are in life. The messages come from family, school, friends, media advertising and personal experiences (just about anywhere), and they all come together to form your mindset of beliefs, feelings, attitudes and behavior.

As you get older your critical thinking skills modify a lot of these messages. Yet some messages seem to remain stuck and long forgotten but still part of your mental programming.

If you have every caught yourself saying “It makes no sense, I know that I should be doing this, but somehow every time I try, it doesn’t work.” This is when your secret saboteur is at work. Its job is to run the mental program that connects your beliefs, feelings, attitudes with a resulting behavior.

Going back to our favorite topic of pizza, the secrete saboteur job is to make sure you eat pizza because your brain’s pizza program is supported by all kinds of previous programmed messages. These messages exist in a variety of forms and are stored in your memory banks as parts of conversations, related feelings, names or connections.

You could have pizza messages like these –

1.  “No pizza for you tonight, unless you behave and apologize for hitting your brother.”
2. “When you were young you ate all the pizza you wanted and you never got fat.
3. “Hey, I know you’re upset, but I’ll take you for pizza and you’ll feel better.”
4. Dominos.  We deliver!
5. “When I was in college me and my roommate lived on pizza.”
6. “Hungry? Let’s stop for a quick pizza.”
7. New local pizzeria menu in your mailbox

Now, you are trying to reprogram your brain with new messages that are in opposition to the old ones. If you think “will power” will work, it does, but only for the short-term.  Your saboteur will let you think it’s working, but at the first chance it gets it will back to running the old behavior patterns.

However, when you are using self-hypnosis suggestions, your saboteur will have a harder time getting through.  Because, your new programming is taking place not where critical thinking is occurring but on the deeper, more receptive brain states of alpha and theta.

Oh, it doesn’t mean, however, that your saboteur is going to give up that easily.  Its still trying to sneak back in and revert to the old behavior.

But, the more you use your self-hypnosis suggestions, not only does your new programming becomes stronger and stronger, but your mindset of beliefs, feelings and attitudes is replaced by a new more successful mindset.  As the old ones have lost their value and importance, your new beliefs, feelings and attitudes are now aligned in achieving your goal.

Think of it as letting go of old friends that no longer have your best interests at heart and replacing them with new friends who actively support your success!