I’m in the midst of changing my business model, which necessitates lots of internal work. Identifying, facing, and releasing the demons and self-limiting beliefs that we all manage to accrue is hard but necessary work in order to muster the courage to show up authentically. There’s also the work involved in identifying what is authentic for you, after decades of being socialised to fit in.
Along the way, I started noticing some of my self-sabotaging behaviours and digging down to find their roots. We all have these, of course; they’re there to keep us safe. Whenever we try to play bigger, dare to grow, work to be different than we’ve ever been before, self-sabotaging behaviours are what we end up doing automatically without thought as our mind’s way of keeping us small and unchanged, which keeps us safe.
Today I was pondering a particular set of dysfunctional behaviours that I witnessed and absorbed during childhood (like all the best dysfunction), which was reinforced during my young adulthood. I’m incredibly lucky and grateful to no longer have this particular knife dangling above my head, but I’ve still worried about it, quite viscerally at times, regardless. Sometimes I feel a bit like “Life’s good now, but just wait until something happens and the other shoe drops. It will happen. It’s only a matter of time.”
It hit me today: The root of some of my self-sabotaging behaviour is my reptilian brain’s idea that by doing these things, that other shoe will drop, the pain and suffering will come, and I can go back to the world I know so well instead of this kinder, gentler world I find myself in now, which seems so alien. It’s a nice world, to be clear, but still strange and unsettling.
I’m grateful to have had this realisation the easy way and not the hard way. Now the quest shifts to working this kinder, gentler world into my reptilian brain’s model of reality, so that I can accept it and just enjoy it.
