Lee’s Insights

Have you ever noticed how you can be so motivated to achieve a certain thing and then for some reason it just doesn’t happen? That some goals, no matter how sincere you are in setting them, never seem to get accomplished? Why is it that you can make a COMMITMENT to yourself and sometimes even to others with the best of intentions, and yet not follow through? Some examples I have seen over and over again are the promise to lose those pesky 10 pounds in a New Year resolution and then not only not lose them, but also gain another 2 by the end of the year, the commitment to get rid of debt while at the same time applying for more credit cards, the tearful resolution to just say no and then minutes later saying yes… again! You’re probably shaking your head right now, you know what I’m saying.

The problem isn’t the sincerity of the commitment, or our ability to set and achieve goals, it’s our underlying automatic commitment -and it is simply that -it’s underlying, we aren’t even aware of it, it’s automatic - it’s right there, it beats us to the thought process and, it’s a commitment -just as sincere as the one you made. It’s a belief about ourselves that got ingrained into our psyche sometime in our lifetime, usually in childhood, and yes, usually by our parents, but that’s really not that important - what is important is to realize it’s there, acknowledge it as part of who we are, and then move on! UACs can be our friends once we find out what they are.

They key is to find them -so we need to take a look at the behaviors or the outcomes in our lives that we are not happy with and ask some questions. What belief about myself does this outcome or behavior reinforce? What do I say to myself about myself when I am feeling down about these outcomes? “I’m fat and ugly?” “I’m lazy and never follow through” “I’m not a successful person” “I’ll never have money?” “Only shallow people worry about their looks and weight?” “Money doesn’t bring happiness only misery?” “I’m only good enough when I do for others?”. When we take a listen to our self talk, we can hear the UAC. For some people it is helpful to get clarity and closure on where the UAC comes from originally - therapy is recommended in this situation - for others, it is very powerful to simply identify the UAC and acknowledge it and then decide to replace the old sabotaging UAC with it’s opposite, a new and empowering UAC. For example, replace “I am fat and ugly” with “I am a beautiful person inside and I deserve to feel and look as good as I can -I am worth being a priority in my own life” - replace “I’m a loser and I will never be financially secure” with ” there is abundance in my life and I am in charge of my financial destiny”.

It takes some practice, some mindfulness and a real desire to take charge and change our lives. In my own journey, the most exciting thing I have discovered is that I truly hold the key to my own happiness -and when I am aware of my UACs, I am in charge!

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I heard this analogy the other day and I thinks it’s one of those “life changers” kind of like when I read Jonathon Livingston Seagull or Deepak Chopra’s the 7 Spiritual Laws of Success -so the analogy went something like this: when you think you have come up against a wall and cannot push past it, it is almost always a “paper wall” -most of us assume it is made of bricks and mortar with sheet rock and a good coat of paint, making it impossible to push through, when in fact with even the gentlest shove it will cave in and before you know it, no longer be there.

OK, so some examples of this that I have personally witnessed? -that’s what everyone asks when I excitedly tell them my new insight. How about when that difficult person in your life has made it impossible to … say what’s on your mind? tell them you want a raise? ask for some space? break up? set some (God forbid) limits?? If you’re anything like me, you have tolerated whatever it is for months -maybe even years before you got up the nerve (or maybe the pain of not saying it was worse than the fear of saying it) and then what happened? After a few minutes in some cases, days in others and in the worst of situations, weeks -they gave in or went away, and now that wall is no longer there. I love the example of the perennial brick wall of our childhood -the bully - in spite of the sheer thickness of that wall, there was always someone who decided the bully was simply made of paper (or did the pain just become worse than the risk?) and fought back -in my school, much to all of our shock, it only took minutes for that wall to crumble!

I live in an area where we are lucky to have farmhouses and other structures that have been around since before the civil war and I spent my high school years in Rome, Italy, where there are structures that have been around since the times of gladiators -those walls were made of bricks, mortar and rock and they still stand as proof - the walls others impose on us (or we allow to be imposed upon us) and the walls we impose on ourselves are just paper… if we push, they will crumble. They will!

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