Hidden thoughts – Motivated Champions?
If you haven’t yet it’s worth reading some of the background to this in our other posts on thought streams
These are collections of thoughts we can begin to see as related, perhaps following a similar vein and having a similar purpose.
When we reengineer our relationship with our Monkeys, the relationship becomes better ….and we are more able to notice and react effectively to these older patterns.
These thought streams are designed to persist, to pull as back when we think or do or even believe, things that might compromise their definition of our survival.
This can often relate back to something that makes evolutionary sense like the risk of losing status or acceptance and perhaps the ‘protection’ of our group. Perhaps our new ideas for the future mean we will now choose new beliefs or behaviours that don’t fit or may alienate or enrage our group. This potential loss of social acceptance would cause a reaction from that part of you that has learnt survival means sat in the group.
Discovering and labelling the thoughts and thought streams.
The more fundamental the change we consider as an option then the better the opportunity this generates to reveal previously hidden thought streams.
Imagine I told you to sell everything you had to buy an airplane ticket and leave within one month.
Think about this for a moment and watch the thought streams kick off.
You can play with this by imagining ‘extreme’ ideas and scenarios putting them forward as an idea and watching your thoughts swirl.
We get used to what is there all the time.
Some of our thoughts are new they strike us simply because they are novel others are so constant that we forget they are there and yet they drive many of our choices and actions. Discovering what our internal programming is telling, suggesting, selling or even demanding of us helps us see more choices.
This begins to get at the question of why we do what we do.
Why would bright intelligent hardworking people spend their whole lives doing things that will never take them where they want to go?
A moments investigation lets us see that our internal screen is regularly and persistently filled with thoughts and thinking
A moments thought tells us that some of our regular or persistent thought streams are more useful to us than others.
A few more moments thoughts and we can begin to separate the thoughts that happen to us and those thoughts we think ourselves.
The language here is tricky but perhaps if we made a distinction between the thoughts we have as conscious thoughts or conscious thinking and the other stuff we might begin to make progress?
Lets give an example:
Think about a recent trip you made –
The conscious bit is the suggestion to think about a trip you made what happens next is your system responding dutifully to the request.
We have been fortunate to talk to a lot of people about what happens in their heads. With a little effort most can see this distinction and this helps us begin to differentiate the two.
One is the instruction and one the response. One is from the leader and one is the reply from the worker.
We can get lost in brain structure, in the psychologists world of debate about ego, id, superconscious, sub conscious etc or the Physiologists world of sympathetic parasympathetic or brain function by area and it is all very interesting, however most of us just need a way of working that lets us move on effectively.
So please evaluate what we are going to say here only in pragmatic terms – does it help? – does it work?
Remember that bathroom light switch?
Knowing about electricity generation is interesting but when it,s dark and you want a pee, all you need to know is how to throw the light switch.
How to think about what happens inside you
Imagine you are having a coffee with friend. they are very excited full of their latest idea and its brimming over spilling out towards anyone who will listen.
They have started doing intermittent fasting and they think it’s great a game changer and everyone should do it.
They tell you all about it as you sip your cappuccino. They make it very clear why they think it’s worth (you) doing it.
We may love our friend and this may even be the first time they have shared a new thing with us, but we know that what suits others may not suit us so well. Their ‘must do’, ‘no brainer’ may not fit with our situation or our plans.
We may also have realised that unless the one who is trying to help us knows what it is we want and where we are going, they are not qualified to make any recommendations for our life.
As we sit drinking our coffee it’s easy to see what is going on. We may be pleased for our friend or we may think we have just lost twenty minutes of our life we will never get back!
As we sit there we can gently evaluate whether what they are telling us has any value or not.
All simple stuff when it’s written on a page like this. All obvious and logical and yet it can still be hard to say no to enthusiasm or perceived pressure like this from the outside world even when it has no value for us at all.
Outside in the external world we can maintain our guard and watch out for time stealers or dream stealers. It’s more difficult inside us especially when we dont differentiate the thoughts and thinking.
If you think its your idea to try intermittent fasting, if you think you think its a great idea and a no brainer you may very quickly find yourself going along with something new that doesn’t meet your real needs.
When this happens inside our head and our friendly thought champion starts suggesting options or even insisting they know best and demanding our obedience unless we know these are ‘only suggestions from someone who may or may not know what we want it can be hard not to join in. One of the things that the Misaligned Monkey approach has shown us is that most people are not joined up inside.
Different parts of them are doing different things, pulling in different directions and the lack of clear leadership and direction is reducing the efficiency with which most of us can get things done.
In the Monkey challenge about half the exercises are about relationship building and the other half are all about defining and maintain a clear view of the desired outcome.
The more of and less of exercise along with the future pacing guided meditations have helped a number of people get more clarity on what they want or don’t want in their lives and how to get it.
Let’s start to look at how we can create a model of how these things work that will help us use what we have to best advantage.
Imagine for a moment each thought or thought stream has a motivated champion behind it.
(We will talk elsewhere about what these may be and how they form)
These motivated champions are like a well meaning friend. They may be enthusiastic about something new or determined to make you follow old rules, support old values or continue to do what they think is the right thing in the right way.
The first value of looking at it like this means we are predicated to realise and accept that this thought is not ours, this is a thought for us to consider. This is a thought provided by one of our motivated champions.
This means we already have some distance and distance gives us time and the space to evaluate and choose. As we saw in the Misaligned Monkey, the size of the gap between any stimulus and our chosen response dictates the variety of our options.
Once we start thinking about a motivated champion as the one behind different thoughts or thought streams this gap increases and it’s only a short step to begin to wonder what they are motivated about and what they are trying to do and why. This too increases the gap as we momentarily ignore any content and consider purpose.
Imagine these champions believe fervently in what they know.
Let’s keep it simple and show the size of the potential problem by considering that this includes:
- The facts as they see them
- Their interpretation of the situation
- Their ideas on if or how to react
- What to actually do
- How to feel about the whole thing
These champions and the thoughts and thought streams they sponsor are embedded in our wiring to help us be more successful.
What they do is not their fault they are just doing their job.
These champions are part of our inheritance and their to keep us safe
As we have developed we no longer need to follow the advice to the letter
We now have the capability and perhaps the responsibility to choose which of their ‘advice’ to follow.
These champions have a clear view of what success is for us
Their definition of success may be out of date
Their definition of success or what is possible may be limited by factors that no longer apply
Any conscious attempts to go for something outside their experience or their expectation fuels their insistence on our obedience
The dissent appears more quickly and more intrusively when our definition of successful is not the same as theirs.
Imagine they also believe that we need their help and advice and our not capable of surviving on our own.
We saw in The Misaligned Monkey what it looked like for someone who was trying to help us
Just suppose our motivated champions have a similar experience. They see a track record of us setting out goals or actions that we then give up on, don’t work for or simply het bored and move on to the next big thing.
Perhaps they test us to see how serious we are and send us thoughts and thought streams to do just this at moments of stress?
Just suppose they look at how we spend our time, what we think about and notice a disconnect.
Many of our delegates had the opportunity to stop and consciously consider how they spent their time and energy and the relationship of this activity to what they thought they wanted their life to be like.
It was a shock when many realised that much of what they thought they wanted was not actually accurate and even when it was, that there was no clear link between what they did and the c=achievement of these situations or things.
They were what Zig Ziglar would call ‘wandering generalities’. People who wandered about doing what ever came along with no eye on the future, with no worthwhile end in mind.
Contrast this with Zig’s opposite a ‘meaningful specific’, someone who chose what they did how they spent their time to give them more chance of having, being or doing what they really wanted.
We all do a bit of both.
Imagine what this feels like to one of these motivated champions. Something that feels responsible for us and our results. Seen like this its obvious why they may have an uncontrollable urge to get involved and sort things out.
Those with clear goals that occupy their waking hours and dictate their activities seem to suffer less from negative or confused thinking. Many delegates were dismayed to find how little time they spent in Meaningful specific mode.
Don’t fall at the first hurdle because you don’t know what to do.
Any goal will do to start with, even one that just says to ‘find a goal that makes me feel motivated’. If you want help with this take the challenge and use the relevant exercises to build your picture of what you want your future to be like. Do it our way and you get the Monkey onside, using its considerable resource to help.
Change is not easy
Most of our delegates had clear reasons to change. For some it was a question of change or lose their livelihood. Almost all were capable of making the change but some were defeated by the same battle in their heads that we are describing here.
As we think of our motivated champion helpers we can see how they might react to us choosing new goals or new directions for our lives. A little more thought and we can also see how some may even attempt to stop us being successful in an activity we consciously decide is a must do.
Having a way to look at thoughts and thought streams that gives us more choice, creates a major advantage in creating and maintaining change.
Their insistence on us following the old rules maybe and some would say is designed to stop us making new choices and taking new paths. They want us to be safe and they think, more of the same, following the old rules that got us where we are today is still the safest strategy.
When we want change and move on to set a new goal or outcome consciously, we should expect our motivated champions to kick off.
We should see this as a good sign and whilst we may be be grateful for their motivation we are clear that we are the leader, the one in charge.
Consciously you and I know that more of the same gives us more of the same and, if we want change, then we need to make some different choices. Understandably any new ideas or approaches that we adopt or even just consider can challenge our old wiring, the motivated champions get involved and the flood gates to thoughts and thought streams designed to get us back on the straight and narrow path that our history dictates.
If we are not involved in choosing the rules and beliefs that we work to we are not leading
Someone else is the leader of our life, the writer of our story and this someone (the Motivated Champions)may be using rules and beliefs that our outdated and not give us the results they once did.
Consciously, we all know, that doing the same things in the same ways or even different things in the same way, will not generate new, better results.
take a moment to
Personal Change
In popular self-help many of the improvement plans or strategies revolve around changing habits.
We believe that reengineering thought streams or how we use them is the fundamental improvement practice. It helps us reduce the internal noise that erodes our new habits, our resolutions and our ability to deliver over time. It also can work to defend and maintain old habit sin the face of our desired change.
We have learnt that this is the foundation practice in all sustainable change.
Having said that there are a number of clear and solid interventions we can make that will get us results and pave the way for the identification of and subsequent reengineering of the thought streams that are causing us most difficulty.
Pragmatic tools for change
Using these hacks will also cause the hidden streams to appear more visibly as they fire up to prevent us rocking the boat. Thinking about how you are going to change and what you are going to change allows us to see them and once outed we can spend time at view point three creating a new frame of reference or terms of engagement.
Alongside reengineering process here’s some hacks that will help if you want to change something
Let’s look at the problem
Your existing thinking (thought streams) has led us to a result your wish to change now. `Maybe something has happened (a course with Sales Academy) that has let you see that you really want things to be different now or when you look forward you realise that what you are doing now won’t give you the future you want.
You acknowledge an intention to do something about it.
Another way this crawls into our consciousness is our preoccupation with new starts. Particularly and most obviously each New Year is a time for new promises to ourselves and others. It’s a time when we briefly think about things and many of us come up with a new list of ‘nice to haves’ or ‘to dos’.
Sometimes these lists surprise us and we see how far we are living day to day is from our ideal world. Doubly sad when we accept there is currently little real effort engaged in making the change.
Most of our delegates struggled to make their new year resolutions happen.
Some of our modular courses meant we saw groups around new year and then every three months or so for a year.
We explored with them their new year’s resolutions as a way of showing how their focus was stolen by new events and how their own requirements from their own lives were side-tracked by noisy urgent stuff (that often didn’t matter 5 years on).
Almost without exception all our delegates played the New Year’s resolutions game.
Most of those who failed to keep their New Year’s resolutions or make them a reality simply forgot about them!!
When we saw them in March their resolution (s) was no longer on their radar and had often been replaced by new things that would subsequently also be forgotten. Often delegates reported they had set the same resolutions several years in a row. They also realised they had spent their time working on things that they were not serious about.
This is not us criticising or pointing a finger. It’s a horrific fact reflecting how many of us live as we let things take their ‘natural’ course. We can work long and hard doing the wrong things to get the things we don’t really want.
Why would we do this? What goes on inside us that results in us ineffectively challenging the status quo.
Most of our delegates had changes they wanted. This was in what they had what they did or what they were, the ‘be -have- do’ questions from the Misaligned Monkey.
These changes would seam important when we discussed them and yet even over a three-month window we are unable to retain focus and take action to help us have the better life we want!
If it’s something you really really want then you perhaps reasonably think you will remember. If the motivation is enough it may work but some of us need to see something working before we dare to believe we can achieve change. `even when we do we can have problems and we may even have to bolster up old habits to ensure our new focus is balanced in a sensible way to maintain the other aspects of the life we have sorted so far. Many new authors focus on the excitement of the book, the writing and forget their exercise nutrition loved ones and other important deliverables.
Many of the professional change agents we have spoken to – think physios osteos, yoga teachers personal coaches cant understand why people pay them 60 bucks an hour only to ignore their advice and not do what they ask them to do. Theres a thought stream problem that unless untangled first leaves us sabotaging our own change.
You say you want x but it is or becomes a ‘nice to have’ and time takes its toll. Very quickly we get lost in other stuff, no longer focussed on the future we said we wanted.
Let’s be gentle
It is difficult to remember stuff in the face of all the inputs from our busy world.
This is not a test and if we need a reminder and this will help us succeed then let’s build one in.
Let’s also accept that changing what we do and how we spend our time is also tricky.
We have good techniques that help us see what to do.
Taken seriously “More of and less of’ and the ‘Stop Start Continue’ exercises are game changers in aligning what you do and the achievement of the changes you want. This is why we use it as one of the challenge exercises as you develop your relationship with your Monkey. Knowing more about what you want and how you are going to get there makes a massive difference.
Our first rule of successful change is that we must keep the required change visible. Sounds so basic, so unnecessary but the evidence is clear that our dreams get overtaken. Overtaken by events and our own thought streams.
What better way to sabotage something that appears to a thought stream as dangerous change than to help us forget all about it?
Change requires us to play different roles
We play three roles Leader, Manager and Worker and overlap without conscious input can lead to disaster.
We need to keep the roles separate and not confuse roles responsibilities. As managers we need to create a situation where it is easy for the worker (also us) to do our job. The easier we make this the more likely they will deliver.
The first task is to create a system that means the worker has no choice but to remember (are constantly reminded) what they are required to do.
Something on the bathroom mirror or the fridge places they go and look at regularly within existing routines and habits work for this.
You may a manager just say lose weight! but if you do only this you are missing a trick.
A good manager knows that it works better if the reminder helps them with both the need to do something and some information that gives them the why.
What doing it will give them – do it for these reasons that mean something to you
This is an accepted part of most good personal change programmes. Motivate yourself to do what you need to do
Leave yourself clear everyday what the jobs are and what you get if you do them.
You can add in some incentives – do this and I’ll arrange for you to have this
Run now you can watch x later
Add in rewards – in the moment reinforcers of what you need to do as you do it.
You are running – well done us – well done you
Realisation in a tough moment that you are choosing to do something thats difficult because you believe in a better future is a great reinforcer.
When we talk to the cold-water guys talking to yourself as you get in:
“It’s only cold”
“We are doing it”
” Well done”
Encouragement makes sticking with the process easier and then once acclimatised –
” look at you taking and enjoying a cold shower”.
Affirmations also help here,
“I am a strong self-disciplined cold shower taker”
We all know repeating behaviours expecting new results is madness
Whatever feels right for you makes a difference.
The major cause of failure in our groups was this problem of remembering you were doing (your project here) is left unaddressed. Often in March or April the delegates would reset their New Year’s resolutions again and ‘have another go’ at the same things.
If they did it in the same way – you can guess what the outcome was:
They tried harder, beat themselves up more but we know doing the same things in the same way expecting different results is madness and our poor delegates were doomed to failure unless they stepped back and managed the situation.
Think also about the message this sends from you to you. Like modern day students to don’t do their assignment well they learn they can just have another go. Maybe its ok when you are young but some adults spend their whole lives failing at the same thing.
The work required is about setting up a reminder system that works for us. Very few people do this. In the flush of excitement of the new goal or outcome it is hard to accept or believe that you will need to be reminded of it –
The hard fact is that those who don’t set this reminder up rely on maintaining their focus mentally.
Accept now that it’s unnecessary to carry this load internally. You won’t win prizes for doing it the hard way.
Differentiate between it being critical to do something and you having to do it.
It doesn’t matter who or how we remember what matters is the work gets done. We want to make this change as easy as possible so take steps to make it easy to remember by setting up something that lets you keep it in mind. Don’t load your head or test your powers of focus unnecessarily, change your environment to make it easy and irradiate this source of failure.
We had the feeling that the delegates were gambling on the fact that they ‘should have” been able to remember. Such a shame that they didn’t see the value of managing, setting up relatively easy fixes that compelled their own worker self to carry a much higher load.
They loaded themselves with unnecessary work and responsibility. A load that would not be delivered effectively and that when they subsequently failed caused them to spiral in feelings of inadequacy and failure. Many of them decided the task itself or the change itself was too hard, not for them when in reality the only problem was, they forgot!
This probably leads us back to some of these hidden thought streams. Challenged by the change we embark on they see it as their job to guide us back to normal. One avenue is to manifest in forms that sabotage the changes we are making.
This is where you have an opportunity to ‘manage’ yourself.
It’s enough to suspect that on some of your projects (like our delegates) you simply forgot or let your dream drift away use this suspicion to decide how to manage the situation and put in a fix that works.
Logically, there is no reason why you would not do this. No reason not to take two minutes to set up a reminder that works and yet many don’t – something happens in their heads that confuses or complicates the logic and the project stalls at the first hurdle.
Try it tonight, pick one of your projects, take action and stick a picture on your fridge or bathroom mirror, watch what thought streams that either stop you from doing this or once you have done it arise whenever you look at it.
Once we see these thought streams as reactions to our new project we can explore their roots, their purpose and check if they are still valuable to us or not.
This is good work but it’s not enough
Remembering you are going to run three times a week is not enough there’s more to do:
If you remember you should be running 3 x a week, two weeks into your new adventure and you haven’t done it the thoughts streams can fire up again. Using the emotional energy to break in and stop you fixing things.
You have decided to run, you want to run three times a week and you haven’t done it.
Why?
You are not bad or lazy
This did not happen because our delegates were bad or lazy people. The sad answer was they knew they should run but somehow the time was never quite right. They didn’t know when to run.
They had existing routines and habits (even when they thought they didn’t there were patterns in what they did day by day and week by week). These routines and habits took all their time and there was none left over.
One of the biggest problems people have with our twelve-week challenge is they can’t find the time. They have no mechanism for awarding themselves some of their own time for something they want to do. Our delegates were overcome with other demands and they didn’t make their own me time.
At the end of each week no running had happened.
To generate time for themselves for their own projects management was required. Those who confused their leadership management and worker roles were unable to do this.
In the moment the worker them allocated time to everything else first only using anything that was left at the end for their stuff. For most there was never anything left.
First come first served or noisy urgent dictated how they used their Tim and whilst some could navigate their way through this for important work jobs or work required by significant others few were ‘selfish’ enough to take time out for themselves first.
It may seem mad but if someone else had instructed them to ‘run now’ many of them would have simply going running.
They had no one to do this for them and so they had not run. This shows the value of having an onside partner who applauds and supports your goals. Someone like an Aligned Monkey, a partner or a coach who has the same goals and methods in mind.
When you work out the actual changes in your Routine or habits that must be made to deliver the change you require (e.g., a New Year’s resolution) it’s not enough for most of us to rely on remembering we are doing it. We need more support to remember what we are doing and when to do it.
If this is you then you have another opportunity to watch the associated thought streams carefully. We would do well to question or investigate the purpose it is programmed to support. The negativity almost certainly tells us it’s not the one we are leading towards.
It is pointless valueless and can only erode our resolve, it makes no contribution to the outcome we have chosen.
To move on, we simply have to accept the facts of what has happened, expect the same to happen again if we repeat and don’t take steps to make a change in what we do.
This conclusion is cold logical and divorced from any critical thought stream input. This means we are operating in ‘manager mode’. We are only focussed on what needs to be done to deliver the leader’s vision.
Our best option as manager is to build in a trigger that helps our overwhelmed worker know when to get the job done.
One option is to sub contract this and buy a coach or an ap, either can be a good choice and either can and will work.
If it suits our situation, self-managed change is also a great option, this is when we manage using our own triggers.
A trigger is something that triggers the behaviour we want when we want it and the best ones build on what we have already accomplished which when we look, is actually quite a lot.
A well set up trigger tells us to ‘do it now’!
Triggers
Want to be fitter?
Want a better toned body?
Want to show myself I can make successful change?
Our chosen mechanism for this is to do 20 press-ups every day
New Year’s Resolution I will do 20 press-ups every day to ……..(be -have- do)
Suitable Triggers
To find a suitable trigger we take something we already have sorted. Something habitual, something we always do.
The classics are teeth cleaning or going to the bathroom – something most of us do at least once a day. It could be lunch, breakfast, dinner; on your commute as you go to bed or wake up. The more you look you have lots of existing routines and habits that could be used as a trigger.
Back to the example let’s say that every time you clean your teeth you do your 20 press-ups.
This encompasses everything we need to know to design a good trigger:
We simply take something we already do and we use it to ‘bolt on’ our extra.
I clean my teeth twice a day it’s something I have done for over 50 years I can be confident that this event will take place every day.
I can use this event as a trigger and link something to this confident that as I clean my teeth, I will get the instruction (memory) I need.
This helps me remember I am doing it, like the fridge or mirror note, but it goes further – I feel the trigger and don’t just remember I am going to run three times a week. the trigger tells me do it now. Something I as ‘management ‘ have set up to help me as a ‘worker’ to do it now.
Quite often the task itself is not onerous. The problem comes when we leave room for choice, for procrastination and the resultant thought streams become the problem to us getting the job done. Many running starter guide books tell new would-be runners that the biggest block to becoming a runner is your own front door.
Once you learn how to open it, walk through it and start running the job is half done.
Same with cold showers once you’re immersed in its fine.
There are endless other triggers to play with:
Leaving barbells in the toilet- it’s hard to walk past them without doing something
Parking the car and then taking 5 minutes to breathe
Your list here …..
Pick something you do and bolt your desired behaviours to it. Make it easy have the weights / the pills / the phone ready.
Most proactive sales forces do better if they have a programme of say 20 cold calls a week.
Having a list of names with the correct phone number in your pocket means whenever you stop for a coffee you find it easy to make one call. 4 cups of coffee a day one call each time gives you your 20 calls a week. Imagine having your coffee having to remember a name and a number and then find somewhere to make a call. Making it simple and easy to do the right thing is obvious, it works and the treasons we don’t do this provide insight to thought streams we may wish to investigate further.
Many of the sales people we met went for months without making any calls. Even making 5 a week – every week transformed performance against target and also improved their ability to communicate and talk about their products and services with customers.
You can imagine the thought streams that surfaced when this approach was suggested to people who had not traditionally made these calls.
Each an opportunity for the delegate in self manager mode to investigate what was really going on and see thought streams operate that were holding them back.
Your Thought Streams now
Let’s summarise change and as we do watch for your reaction to implementing a change in your routine and habits now. See if it gives you clues towards understanding more thought stream activity.
The journey to change requires three different activity streams:
Leadership – set a meaningful direction or outcome (Meaningful means of value to me)
Management – set up the work to be done in a way that makes it as easy get done as possible. These covers: the memory – we are doing this, the trigger – the instruction to do it now and everything possible to make the work part as enjoyable and rewarding as possible.
Working – do the work (going for the run)
Separating these three functions shows us what is required for a complete job.
If we are to become runners to get our toned body or our clearer heads then we must do more than run, we must ensure we run constantly or consistently and this means we need to lead and manage ourselves.
When we split out these functions and do the work, they require for success we get insights into what is going on indie us. We see thought streams that may have previously been hidden, we see other aspects or sides to them and the three approaches give us different angles from which to interact and evaluate the situation.
If we try to defeat thoughts streams with logic at a manager or worker level we will lose. The only way to differentiate what is best is to have an understanding of the purpose off or outcome required from any given method or activity. Seen in context from the level of leadership we can unearth or out our thought streams that may previously have been so internalised we still think they are us and we are them. Outing them, labelling them and seeking to understand their purpose and how or it they help us, provides the opportunity for further reengineering in the space we have uncovered though aligning our Monkey.
Check out the post on the Sedona technique for letting go of persistent feelings and how we feel it can also help us understand and let go of thought streams that are no longer of value / don’t support your chosen path
.cut outs
Not all thought streams are equal
It looks like we are born with some inherited ideas about how things work and how to survive. These are passed on in the gene pool as part of the human inheritance that has allowed us to survive and prosper as a species.
We also have a mixture of stuff that look like rules, beliefs, should, musts and so on that have been passed on by our parents, our tribe and the significant teachers and experiences we have had along the way.
Most of us have an interesting mix of all this some of which conflicts with itself and seems to vie for our support.
One thing that can help us find peace and power is to make some choices about how all this works. Many of our delegates seemed to behave as though they were strangers or visitors in their own internal space.
For many this meant they didn’t enjoy being on their own with their thoughts and they sought refuge in external stuff.
Sadly making change happen outside is tricky if the internal set up is not on side and supportive.
The value of recruiting your Monkey first as part of your success team becomes even more obvious when we begin to see our Monkey as some sort of intermediary between us and these inherited thoughts.
No one knows how all this works and so as pragmatists we just want to acquire a model that lets us work with what is to get the changes we want.
Whether that’s internal change, external change or just an override that lets us be happy now, our goal is realised more easily and less painfully if we are fully aligned and fully authentic.
Understanding how our thoughts work and what they are is a key part of managing our internal space effectively.
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