The Story You Keep Repeating Is Shaping Your Life

(Transcript edited for clarity.)

Hi, I'm Wes. Welcome to Your Life Systems. This is The Story You Keep Repeating Is Shaping Your Life.

This is really a discussion about intentionally feeding your mind the right things and avoiding feeding your mind the wrong things.

The stories you tell yourself tend to become true; they tend to shape your life.

Often, when I think about these things, and as I was putting together some notes for this episode, it made me think of one of the most famous success books, Think and Grow Rich, which is an interesting book and it's got some really good things in it.

But anyway, this is not a review of that book. I've read it several times. I've used some stuff in it.

I'm not a firm believer in everything in it. If you haven't read it, it might be worth your time to read it. If you like it, great.

If you don't like it, that's fine too. I'm not here to try to convince you to like it.

But if you just look at the title of the book, it says Think and Grow Rich.

Well, it's obvious you can't just think and grow rich, but it reminded me of that because often what we think, or like I was talking about, the stories that we tell ourselves repeatedly or what we feed our minds, can have a great effect on our lives, what we do, our success, etc.

So, one of the main things about that book is that the main message is thoughts can become things. Everything starts as a thought, and then that can become something in your life.

And that's what we're talking about here when I say the story or the things you keep repeating are shaping your life.

So, if you intentionally keep feeding the right things into your mind, it can have positive effects.

And if you continuously and intentionally avoid putting the wrong things in your mind, it can also have positive effects.

And of course, this works the other way too. The more negative things you put in your mind, the harder it is going to be to overcome those and reach the success that you want.

So, that's probably the first big point here. I challenge you to do an inventory of everything you're putting into your mind right now.

This is everything throughout every day, every week, etc. This goes from what you read, what you listen to, what you watch.

Is everything that's going into your mind helping you achieve the goals that you want to achieve? Or is it hurting you with the goals you're trying to achieve or the things you're trying to do in your life?

And this even goes as far as who you're talking to on a regular basis.

Are the people you're talking to on a regular basis helping you through building up what's in your mind, or are they tearing you down, whether they're purposely trying to tear you down or not?

You need to be closely guarded about what you put in your mind or allow in your mind because it does affect you.

And here's the question I want you to ask yourself: What story am I repeating about myself, my options, or my future?

And again, you get to choose, intentionally choose, what stories you're telling yourself. And you get to intentionally change the stories that you're telling yourself.

So again, ask yourself this question: What story or stories am I repeating about myself, my options, or my future?

I've talked about this a few times on other episodes, but so often when we're up against a challenge and we're in business or in life and we look at it, the first thing we're thinking is, okay, I've got two options. It's either this or this.

Well, every time I find myself doing that, every time I find myself thinking I've only got two options, I've trained myself to stop and take a mental step backwards and make sure that that's true.

Because often you don't have just two options. Sometimes you can find a third or fourth option, and they can be even better than the first two that you consider.

So that's why I included in the question, what story or stories am I repeating about myself, my options, or my future?

Because if you train yourself that you only have two options in most situations, then that's all you're going to see is two options.

You need to intentionally train yourself to look for the third option or more options every time it looks like you only have two options.

So, repeated interpretations can and often do become beliefs, even when they started as temporary reactions or just quick thoughts.

Now, I often think about, you know, when my kids were growing up, my wife and I were always very careful about how we communicated with them about certain things.

Now, we weren't perfect, but for one thing, we never once, not a single time, ever made one of our children think they were stupid or tell them they were stupid.

Now, if they did something stupid, like we all do, we would explain or talk to them about why the decision or the action might not have been the smartest thing.

But we were very careful not to train them that they were stupid.

They might have done something stupid, but we never wanted them to think they were stupid.

Because here's the difference. This is simple, and believe me, I still make stupid mistakes every once in a while.

Now, I've learned I don't make stupid mistakes because I'm stupid.

I make stupid mistakes because I either don't gather enough information before I make a decision, or I don't think through all of the information or all of my options before I make these decisions that end up being stupid decisions.

But here's the difference, especially talking about children. If you continuously tell them one thing, then they start believing it, and then they start reinforcing it through their actions and their thinking.

So my goal was to basically train my children that you're smart.

Constantly telling them you're smart, and then helping them figure things out and helping them build the knowledge and the information that they needed to continue learning, and that became self-reinforcing.

They finally started believing they were smart. They believed they could figure things out, and they could learn.

And, you know, children are easier to indoctrinate or train by reinforcement over and over and over again, but as adults even, we're susceptible to that, and we're often more susceptible to it when we're the ones training ourselves.

So if you're thinking over and over again that if you make a mistake, if your first thought is, I made that mistake because I'm stupid, you've got to stop that right now.

Stop telling yourself things that are going to hurt you.

Now, it's important to be accurate and it's important to be truthful, but it's more important about what you train yourself to believe.

If you believe that you made a dumb mistake, but it's not because you're dumb, then your mind lets you figure out how to fix the mistake.

But if you convince yourself you made the mistake because you're dumb, then that's reinforcing: Well, I made that mistake because I'm dumb, and since I'm so dumb, I can't figure out how to fix it.

You've got to stop that right now.

And that's a big one. We're talking about how smart you think you are.

And there's also danger in thinking you're smarter than you actually are, so there are some limits to this.

But my point is that that's an easy one to think about because I think most of us, if not all of us, have made stupid mistakes.

And often, if you're like me, I usually beat myself up every time I make a stupid mistake. But I get angry at myself.

I'm like, I knew better than that, or that information was out there. Why didn't I find that information before making that decision that didn't work out?

So I don't beat myself up in that, oh, you're dumb. I beat myself up in that I'm smart enough to avoid these things.

And I get angry at myself, so that pushes me to try to avoid the same mistakes in the future.

Now, I said that's a big thing when you're talking about smart, dumb, whatever. But this works even on medium and even small-level things.

And sometimes, depending on what you've had ingrained in you over your life, and even more what you've been teaching yourself in your life, you need to start small.

Sometimes it's hard to reverse something immediately. It takes a lot of effort and work.

It takes being intentional.

So, find something. Do an inventory of what you're training yourself to think, believe, do. Challenge those thoughts and those beliefs.

And then pick a small one and start intentionally training yourself to overcome that.

Maybe it's a limiting belief. Maybe it's like, well, I'm always going to live here because everybody I know lives here.

My parents have lived here. And this is it. And that's fine if that's what you want to do.

But you've got to realize that there's plenty of people that don't live where they grew up. And I'm not even talking about the same house. Maybe it's the same community, whatever.

There's plenty of people that have decided that that's not where they want to live. And they've figured out ways to live somewhere else.

Income ceilings, especially if you're entrepreneurial.

You know, as you reach certain levels in life, and depending on how successful you've been with money, everyone's at different levels.

But, you know, I remember when my first job, I made $245 a week. And this was a long time ago.

$245 a week. And I thought I had it made.

At that time, I thought, well, if I could ever even make only $500 a week, I'd just be rich.

And then, you know, later I made more and more and more. That's just an example.

Now I've made, you know, it's not consistent, but I think my best week ever was probably over $10,000 or $11,000 in a week.

So I didn't allow my limited thinking to hold me down.

Because you'll never make $10,000 in a week if you don't believe you can do it.

Now, if you're making $500 a week right now, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that.

But you're probably training your mind into thinking in small increments. Well, if I could just make $600 a week, or $550.

And you might not even be able to envision making $1,000 a week right now.

Sometimes you've got to take steps. But the first step you have to take is you have to believe you can.

And you can intentionally do that by training yourself.

So that's really what I'm talking about here when I'm saying the story, or stories, you keep repeating are shaping your life.

So if that's true, and I firmly believe it is, it's 100% true.

If that's true, then you need to start telling yourself different stories and improving your thought process and intentionally changing your beliefs.

This is Wes, Your Life Systems. Please subscribe to this channel.

I hope this helps. I'll see you soon.

What's Next?

·        Inventory the messages you repeatedly feed your mind through media, conversations, and self-talk.

·        Write down one story you repeatedly tell yourself about who you are, what options you have, or what your future can look like.

·        Separate a mistake or bad result from an identity statement about yourself.

·        Challenge an either-or story by deliberately looking for a third or fourth option.

·        Choose one limiting belief small enough to work on intentionally this week.

·        Replace the old story with a more accurate belief that leaves room for learning, options, and action.

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