No, it was not Tony Robbins, nor T Harv Eker, who said this... but James Redfield. However, the premise is simple... wherever we put our focus is where we will create our most likely outcome.
I'll put my positive Personal Development hat on for a bit in this post, as I promised in my last one that I'd talk more about expectation and manifesting outcomes. Well here it is... but first my summary of the week.
The last 7 days have been quite interesting for me. I'm still on the inner-shift pathway, but also the start of my Rehab/Prehab phase. Not a great deal to shout about in training as it has been a few walking sessions (to not trigger too much inflammation in my heel), a couple of VO2 sessions on the bike which all feels quite easy compared to 4 hour long runs i was doing a few months ago. I had a big reaction in my hamstring in my injured leg which was sore for days afer quite mild strength work. Highly unusual but also a sign it has got kitten weak through the time away from constructive training.
So I'm right back to the beginning in many ways. Weak, injured and out of shape. But that's OK. We all have to start somewhere, right? The fact is, I trained, I was that bit stronger than the week before, and no serious repercussions from the load I put on myself.
... we shall call this a win. So onto the 'meat' of this post... Attention | Energy | Creation
We live in a causal universe. That means to say for every action there is a reaction. A cause and an effect. We also live in a universe that is constantly in motion, from the galaxies to the quantum movements around every atom in existence. Everything is in motion. This means that inaction is also causal. We stand still, everything else moves anyway... except it can move in either our benefit or detriment. It's just more of a coin toss, depending on what you are doing or not doing.
A simple example... we adjust our diet, improve our activity levels and we tend to lose body fat (Action/Cause leading to Reaction/Effect)... we sit still and make no changes to eating etc, then the high probability is that we get fat (inaction/Cause still leading to Reaction/Effect). It's life. So the more positive strategy is to keep moving. I am oversimplifying this, as actions (or too much action) can have negative outcomes (though outcomes, nonetheless) too, but we need to move. The trick is to take positive actions (cause) that will lead us to positive outcomes (effect)... and sometimes that can also be to also take positive inaction...(yes, we can be positively inactive such as rest & recovery which leads to healing, etc)
It's all about energy and attention (i.e. what we focus upon and when, with our actions/inactions) and the outcomes. Last week I wrote about the outcomes, I seek. Many are different and others the same as they were for this year. To have a different experience overall (i.e. pain/injury free training, healed body, etc) I need to have a different set of actions to previously, and that requires my focus and attention to be different.
As I said at the start, 'where attention goes, energy flows'. Where I focus most is where the energy will be applied most (actions taken). Breaking my training into the phases I outlined last post, sets the intention for where I focus my attention. This brings me back to 'my story'...
The Story I've adopted as 'my life' has been conquering adversity, battling the odds, overcoming challenge, pushing beyond pain and setbacks, with the struggle as the focal point of my life story. 'Boy did good, when all the cards were stacked against him'.
Much of this may be regarded as noble by many, but when you become your story, your identity, focus and energy becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. You treat yourself in so many aspects of your life, by what you see through your lens of the world and how you see yourself. This thinking and behaviour is deeply mired in testing yourself to answer the question 'Am I good enough?', or to fight against an innate sense of 'I'm not good enough'. 'If I achieve this I will be 'better''.
Well no. Not when it becomes our defining self-view. When that happens it becomes self perpetuating. We inadvertently base our 'Cause' behaviour led by our unconscious self-view. Our self-view is centred around our 'story'. If our story is we are always the victim, then guess what happens. We shift our attention and thus our energy in making choices to do/not do things that result in negative outcomes where shit goes wrong for us and we are forever a victim... And we NOTICE it more.
And that's the main thing here... because a person may, for example, see the world through a 'victim of circumstance' lens of the world and story they define themselves by. They see more and more instances of where things go wrong for them. That, in turn, reinforces the Story, and thus reinforces the belief, which then reinforces the choices (often very negative) that lead us to more shit f*cking up in our lives. It's a vicious cycle that can be VERY hard to break. Pretty shitty, right? A trap that operates to keep you stuck firmly in the groove you are in, that you cut deeper and deeper with each reinforcement and step that you take on that trajectory. A bit like Conan The Barbarian's 'Wheel of Pain'... stuck endlessly in a loop of suffering until broken free. Only then seeing so much more possibility that his current existence allowed him to.
This is a great metaphor in many respects.
How doers this happen?
Our RAS - Reticular Activating System (the part of the brain that controls what we notice and focus upon at any point in time) is being forever programmed to help reinforce what we value and believe to be true about ourselves in the world around us. If our Stories focus upon those negative beliefs and values (e.g. defined by struggle, we value conquering adversity, etc) then that our RAS gets to work and operates as the lens through which we interact with the world and ourselves... and thus limit our ability to make effective choices to take actions to break the cycle! In simple terms, the RAS controls our focus areas and is influenced heavily by how we feel about ourselves and the world around us. This means it filters what we see based on what we feel/believe internally. It operates what we focus our attention upon and what we notice in the world. Our minds process everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) we ever see, hear, touch, feel, sense, etc at an unconscious level. That is a VAST amount of information.
If we were to consciously notice every single detail we ever experience, we would go crazy. Imagine me writing this piece. While I'm concentrating on what I'm saying and typing, I would have the same level of focus and concentration on the other screen I have on my PC, applying the same concentrated attention on my investment portfolio, while noticing the dust on the keyboard with the same level of focus, while noticing my breathing/finger movements/background noise/click of the keys/ information in the letters on my desk/feel of the chair support/my shoes on my feet/the colour of my wall/the texture of my wall/the letters and numbers on the monitor/the shape of those letters/the colour of those letters/the height of those letters/etc/etc (you get the picture). With all being processed at the same level of focus in my mind simultaneously rather than simply concentrating on my imparting my weekly epic wisdom and learning (LOL)... You'd go mad (and this wouldn't get written).
We can only process consciously 3-4 things at once (or if you are a guy watching Game of Thrones, only 1 thing.... or so my wife says). Our conscious mind can process about 40-50 bits of information per second. Our unconscious mind can process an astonishing 11 Million bits per second. That is processing 1 million things simultaneously! (that is every thing we see, hear, smell, touch, sense within our environment at every moment we exist) This is why the unconscious mind does all of the processing such as remembering to pump our heart, breathe, etc. Without that we'd forget and we'd be dead. Can you imagine having to remember to beat your heart, take a breath, and tring to get anything done?? The difference between the conscious and unconscious in the ability to process the world and ourselves is staggering! And this is where the RAS comes in to filter what is important for us to focus our (very limited) conscious attention on.
The RAS allows us to filter what is important to us in an ever endless onslaught of sensory information at any given moment of time. It is also set up to notice the things that have become unconsciously important to us. Through this, it helps shape our decision and choice-making faculties. If all you see is doom and gloom, and that is your unconscious belief... then that is going to form a large part of what you see and notice and thus act upon which, in turn, reinforces that belief. If you believe a particular negative story you have about yourself, the huge chances are that you will base your focus, and so your decision making and actions (at a unconscious level), on that. It reminds me of the saying 'If you believe you can't, then you are right'. You literally programme yourself to fail.
Where attention goes, energy flows. And this makes sense to me (and even more sense in light of this journey). If my attention is overwhelmingly on mileage increasing, and recovering from injury, then that's where my energy and decision making goes. The big problem I've been having is not adjusting my expectations of my key goals this year (50k 100k, 300k). This meant I focused mostly on trying to reduce pain while getting the really big distances in, and NOT focusing on being a bit kinder to myself, shifting my big goal expectations, which resulted in injuries taking so much longer to recover from.
Running injured, when heavy and middle aged, is ultimately dumb. But makes sense on some level when my unconscious is firmly focused on my Story of adversity and overcoming struggle. It's like it's driving me to push on regardless to execute the storyline further. This means my RAS is busy filtering for hardship rather than ease and flow. I've been making choices that REINFORCE my Story (albeit inadvertently) and not really understanding that my year was only ever likely to turn out this way because of my filters. That's pretty f*cking wild!
The secret? Change where the attention goes, and thus change where the energy (and ultimately the outcome) flows. To get a different outcome we need a different input. To produce a different input we need to ensure our decision making engine and filtering system operates differently in order to make different choices (our RAS).
This means that, given our identity, beliefs and story has such a grip over what we focus on and give attention to, we need to change this first.
This is harder than it sounds. It requires a lot of consistent effort. One thing I'm finding is questioning WHY am I about to decide to do one thing and not another. Being more conscious and steering me from constantly making unconscious choices that are wedded to my old story (and sabotaging my efforts, as well as making shit harder than it needs to be). It also means setting a clear (and repeated) mental intention based on the goal (see last week's post) and then allowing my unconscious 'system 1' 1 thinking to zero in on the new way and take care of the rest.
The goal I set to complete the 300k with excitement and passion infers that I will feel positive. That means a positrive experience which means that it's injury free. Free from pain, free from worry, etc. I'm attempting to programme my RAS and unconscious to make this a positive experience for me rather than a pain-ridden siege (which is how my year has felt up until now)
To break a habit of a lifetime takes effort and a lot of constant conscious thoughts to continually check ourselves. I've already been at trying to reprogram my internal operating system for the last couple of months. It's not easy, but it is slowly working. I can feel myself valuing myself higher, and starting to shape better choices I'm making. Do this enough and eventually our unconscious starts to catch up, and then puts its immense processing power (200,000 times more than our conscious mind) to working for us, and enabling our RAS to support us better in where we place our attention, intention and energy.
I'll keep you posted on how that starts to turn out.
Thanks for reading...
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