Sunday’s Focus

Reflect on your exploration of energy expenditure and the Too much and Not enough explorations from the last two weeks content. Do you feel supremely confident in your ability to discern where your energy goes and how you habitually fuel your subconscious mind? If not, jump back into those weeks.

Sunday’s Concepts

The last two week’s concepts have given you the tools to find your energy outlets and how your subconscious mind co-opts your energy for fuel.

This week, you will explore how your subconscious mind uses your successes to stop your momentum, progress, and growth.

First, a quick review.

Step 1: Figure out where most of your energy goes. Something takes up the biggest slice of your energetic pie in each of your bodies. It is rarely the most productive and effective use of your vitality. Bringing presence to your energy expenditures will help you isolate your imbalances and inefficiencies. Which body do you bias? Which component is your preference? In which bodies and components do you under-invest?

Are you hyper-focused on your thoughts or what is going on around you? What do you give the most value to? Is the value you assign worth the amount of energy you are using? Is the value you give in line with your foundation beliefs?

Where do you over-emotionalize the situation to control, limit, or incite? Do you spin-up your emotions as distractions? Do you energize your emotions as an excuse to distance? 

Step 2: Does your subconscious mind whisper or scream that you are Too Much or Not Enough? If you are hearing the Too Much or Not Enough signals from your subconscious mind, it is a sign that you are moving beyond your typical configurations. Your subconscious mind exists as an illusion and projection. Not Enough and Too Much are fiction. Your personality, beliefs, patterns, intolerances, judgments, and habits exist to fuel your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind evolved to allow you to co-opt the biological necessity of homeostasis toward your fears.

Your subconscious mind is reductive. It is constantly looking to shrink your options, to simplify opportunities into familiar (safe) and unfamiliar (unsafe). For example, if your subconscious mind is keeping you from digesting your trauma, then your trauma doesn’t have any value on its own. It is a fuel source. Held energy like trauma is just the gas tank for your subconscious mind.

A great analogy for how your subconscious mind works would be the feeling of driving a car with one foot stomping on the brake pedal and the other jamming the accelerator.

Quiet your subconscious mind and you will exist without feelings of insufficiency or excess. 

Monday’s Focus

Reflect on the last few days. Look for examples of Version One and Version Two. Contemplate alternate trajectories and outcome

Monday’s Concepts

Step 3: How are your successes leading to insecurities? Success creates energy and momentum. Success creates a logical trajectory that enhances growth, fulfillment, and happiness. Your conscious mind embraces success and momentum.

Your subconscious mind feeds on energy and judges momentum as life-threatening. So, the battle begins. If you empower your conscious mind and disempower your subconscious, you continue to succeed. If you allow your subconscious any sway, you will question your successes. The Not enough and Too much signals will begin and try to wrestle energy and momentum away from your thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Binney Smith spent the last fifteen years as the primary caregiver to her children. She focused on keeping them engaged, healthy, and self-sufficient. It was an 80-hour-a-week job. Now that they are older, Binney Smith finds herself with an abundance of free time. She decides she will finish her master’s degree.

Two years go by. She is excelling. She completed her thesis, and she is ready to defend it. Binney Smith starts looking for what’s next. The kids are doing great in school and are socially well-adjusted.

Version One: As she weighs her options, doubts form. She questions whether the time spent was worth it. She questions her motives and goals. She doubts her ability to defend her thesis. She worries about failing. Anxiety shows up in every decision she makes. She judges herself a horrible mother. She projects her anxiety onto her kids. She creates stress and drama in every interaction.

She sees a psychiatrist who prescribes anti-anxiety meds. The meds start a self-judgment cycle that leaves her frozen in indecision. She abandons her thesis defense. She stops caring for her kids. Eventually, she self-commits to a psychiatric hospital where she spends her days sorting crayons by length and color.

Version Two: As she weighs her options, doubts form. She questions whether the time spent was worth it. She questions her motives and goals. She takes some time to reaffirm her foundational beliefs and intentions. She confirms her desire to finish her masters. She congratulates herself on her parenting triumphs. She aces the thesis defense and has a giant graduation party. One of her advisors recommends her for a job. She takes the offer and uses the argument in her thesis to help the start-up create vegan, non-toxic pigments for crafts, make-up, and baking. The company went public three years later. Binney’s stake in the company is now worth $64,320,011.

Tuesday’s Focus

Take one of your Version One experiences and see if you can track the downward spirals. What was the sequence that allowed your subconscious mind to usurp control?

Tuesday’s Concepts

In Version One above, Binney allowed her successes to feed her subconscious mind. It created a downward spiral. In Version Two, she used her conscious mind to maintain her trajectory and momentum. Let’s look at the energetics of both.

Downward spirals happen when the subconscious mind co-opts your body’s desire to maintain a healthy balance. Homeostasis keeps your tissues and systems at a rate and rhythm that ensures optimal health. Those ranges don’t change very much or very quickly. But when you allow your subconscious mind to appropriate that concept, it creates ever-narrowing limits of acceptability. Sometimes instantly, sometimes over a longer period of time.

John Deere is afraid of caterpillars. It started when he was a boy working on his family farm. While carrying a box of ripe tomatoes, John felt something crawling on his arm. Startled, he dropped the box, stumbled forward, and slipped on a baseball-sized Early Girl or possibly a Big Boy. He hit the dirt hard, landing on and fracturing his coccyx. He healed in time for the three-legged race at the county fair, but his relationship with caterpillars was never the same.

Pretty soon, he felt safe checking things before reaching in or picking up. His system adapted to that level of vigilance. Checking for caterpillars became a normal thing to do and it no longer seemed as traumatic.

But his subconscious mind had learned how much energy caterpillar hyper-vigilance could generate. So, his subconscious mind started generating fear stories about his Lepidopterophobia. His subconscious wanted more energy, so it reduced the limits on what felt safe. John started double-checking and then triple-checking. And then that became his new normal, his system adapted, and hyper-vigilance became unnecessary. He adapted but his subconscious mind still wanted more.

The next step was to uplevel his fear into anxiety. He had anxiety if headed into any environment that might typically have caterpillars. His fear grew until it affected his every decision. Hyper-vigilance became his new normal, not because caterpillars presented an actual threat, but because his subconscious mind became addicted to the energy his fear generates. His subconscious mind convinced his systems that high levels of anxiety are required for him to feel safe.

Wednesday’s Focus

Look back on something you no longer fear and ask yourself why. What changed? How did the value you place on the fear cease?

Wednesday’s Concepts

Success and growth require discomfort. Your subconscious mind is constantly trying to label discomfort as distress. Any time you are succeeding, your subconscious mind is trying to steal that energy and momentum to fuel your fears. Every. Single. Time.

It starts in the creation phase. You have an inspiration to try something new, to push yourself into a new, different or unknown direction and WHAMMY! your subconscious mind triggers you into reaction. It wants to keep you in its fictitious homeostatic range. As soon as it feels your energy growing beyond what is familiar, it knows it can elevate your fear and steal some of your energy and momentum.

Once you overcome the initial fear reaction, your subconscious mind continues to try to commandeer any energy or momentum you generate. It is what it does. It is how it continues to exist. Recall some fear or anxiety you no longer have. What happened? You and your subconscious mind probably moved past the time-window of the fear and/or stopped giving it energy.

Fears are like harmful algae blooms in freshwater lakes. Something, usually phosphates from fertilizers wash into the lakes and overfeed the resident algae. The algae grow out of balance to its environment and starve the other lake species of oxygen. The health of the lake’s plants, animals, fish, and insects suffer… and sometimes die. Fear does the same thing with your actions, intentions, growth, and progress. Fear feeds on success.

Once you have achieved your goal, fear still tries to feed. How many times have you finished a project, exercise, or event and started second-guessing yourself? That is your subconscious mind trying to harvest energy.

Thursday’s Focus

Search your history for examples of how fight, flight, and freeze fears have robbed you of success and momentum.

Thursday’s Concepts

Let’s go through each of the five fears and see how they collude with your subconscious mind to rob your successes of vitality and drive.

Fight – The fight fear always opposes. It creates a conflicting energy configuration. But there is a catch. Your subconscious mind creates a reactive potential that has a fraction of the energy it is seeking to gain. It projects an idea, image, emotion, or sensation expecting that you will react with substantially more energy than it used to craft the projection.

Chuck fights for what he believes in. He is an environmental lawyer helping the Navajo Nation repel attempts by the current administration to open up tribal land to fracking. It is a noble cause. He is good at what he does until he allows it to get personal.

Chuck tends to create enemies. He reads the legal responses from the government and allows his subconscious mind to create stories about how he is being targeted unfairly. He gets oppositional. He shifts most of his energy to his emotional body and prepares to attack.

Eventually, his adrenals fatigue, his endocrine system weakens, and he has increasingly severe health issues. A healthy and balanced Chuck would not allow it to get personal. He would know that allowing it to be about him takes his focus off his clients, cause, and case.

Every distraction is a fear reaction generated to shuttle energy away from your goals and toward your subconscious mind. Every fear is generated to fuel your subconscious mind.

Flight – The flight fear seeks to create distance. Binney Smith in version two above uses the flight fear to distance herself from not only her successes but also her intentions and foundational beliefs.

Freeze – The freeze fear looks to stop, limit, or compress. Freeze fears look to contain the energy held by your subconscious mind.

Jed disgusts his neighbor Jonathon. Jed is a racist, misogynist, and lover of Fox News. Jed parks junk cars in his front lawn, lets his dogs run loose, and does no maintenance to his house or property. Jonathon tells Jed that he has plans to plant a rainbow garden to support the LGBTQ community in addition to buying a life-size statue of Barrack and Michelle Obama for his front yard.

Jonathon created a scenario. It only took a minute and required no additional energy on his part. Jed reacted to the fictitious scenario by building a solid eight-foot fence between their properties… which is what Jonathon was hoping for. Jonathon triggered Jed’s fear and subsequent over-reaction. Jonathon played on Jed’s freeze fear reaction. He guessed that Jed would try to wall himself off from his intolerances.

Friday’s Focus

Search your history for examples of how fix and familiar fears have robbed you of success and momentum.

Friday’s Concepts

Fix – Fix fears will always involve managing with the intent to control outcomes and possibilities. Fix fears will seek to reduce discomfort and change. Fix fears will seek the middle ground, some sort of compromise.

Chelsea is a sculptress. She starts with clay and eventually recreates the piece in Carrera Marble. Unfortunately, Chelsea spends most of her time remodeling the clay. Her subconscious mind tells her how hard it will be to recreate the piece in marble, so she reworks the clay into shapes she believes will be easier to chisel. The simplified shapes don’t align with her creative intention, so she reshapes them back into hard edges and bold angles. And the cycle repeats.

Eventually, her compromises deflate her enthusiasm. Her subconscious mind contorts her compromises into uncertainty and then fear. Those fears fuel future fears and the cycle repeats.

Fear is the vacuum your subconscious mind uses to suck the life out of your dreams.

Familiar – The familiar fear will shift your successes toward something recognizable, something habitual, and something that feels safe. Familiar fears are all about maintaining acceptable ranges, limits, and digestibility. Familiar fears moderate success and decelerate momentum.

Quinn is a YouTube influencer. He posts videos of his climbing and skateboarding adventures. He has thousands of people waiting to be notified about his latest upload. He doesn’t allow himself to post anything longer than two minutes. He posts nothing controversial. All his videos have the same content, feel, and emotional range. He makes a decent living off his channel. He skates and climbs, uses drones and GoPros and keeps repeating the same formula.

Quinn doesn’t upload videos of what he truly loves, pine needle weaving. He is afraid to jump out of the box, or ehhh Tube, he has created for himself. He is afraid to show the enthusiasm and love he feels when he weaves. He is fearful he is going to be rejected. The skate and climb video production takes up most of his time, leaving him little to weave. The yearning to weave isn’t quite enough to overpower the need to maintain the predictable. His subconscious mind has effectively caged him into repeating his past and not exploring a more fulfilling future.

Saturday’s Focus

Play with being more tenacious. Push yourself a little farther than is comfortable. Soften and move. Track your resistance and results.

Saturday’s Concepts

Let’s review.

You figure out where you are spending your energy and shift toward things more in line with your intentions, trajectories, and foundational beliefs. You question every Not enough or Too much signal you receive from your subconscious mind and get back on track. Then you find the places where distraction (fear) saps your momentum and alters your focus.

When you do, you will get more productive. You will have bigger successes. You will spend less time on things that don’t have actual value.

Sometimes, it will take tenacity. It may feel like you are pulling a wagonload of rocks. There will be discomfort. Your desire to succeed must be greater than the power you allot to your subconscious mind.

Here is a trick. Push yourself in short intervals. When you are pushing up against your current boundaries, you will feel resistance. Your mind will try to create future scenarios intended to overwhelm your resolve. Don’t go there. Stay in the moment. Ask yourself what you should do for the next 5, 10, or 15 minutes. Soften and move without further thought. Take the first step, allow the second step to follow the first. Persevere. Be steadfast.

Next week, you will explore Step 4, the nature of your ingrained resistance.