You know that voice in your head? You know, that one that tells you bad stuff and brings on thoughts and emotions you would rather not have. And if you are thinking “what voice” – that’s the one. 

Well, it’s not you! Yes that’s right it’s not you. Nor is it your ego, or your unconscious or a rogue program, a bug, a virus, a chimp or anything you need to listen to.

It’s an unconscious program that You installed at some time, yes You!

We are born with programming for survival, we then add to that, learning all about life and adding to our skill and knowledge of how things happened. Initially we do this by observation and mimicking our environment and those in it. As we get older we get more discriminative about accepting what we are told about how the world works, we want to experience it for ourselves. We want to work out the rules. And when we understand a rule and others break it we get confused and annoyed, because we have to reassess the “rule” to see if there are acceptable exceptions and what the punishment should be for breaking it. Even worse, we get told off or punished whilst following a rule and accused unfairly of breaking it, or see the law maker doing the breaking and our sense of injustice is a driver for anger, and we feel justified in it being so.

Our perception is a great filter for clouding judgement and filtering things so we only see what we expect to see, which reinforces that we see more of what we expect and even less of what we don’t. This is demonstrated by those who seem to see all the positive things and because of it apparently lead charmed lives and those who always look for the negative and always appear to be in the midst of a drama.

So who is the voice in your head? It’s everyone who ever influenced you negatively! It’s the teacher who told you that you would never amount to anything. It’s the guy at the corner shop who embarrassed you for failing to say please just once. It’s the kids at school that teased you over your weight, or name, or size, or colour! Any one of these could cause the major blip that infects all our life. Even if you think you have many “issues” there will be a common core to it. Deal with that and most of the other issues go at the same time, like hitting the middle pin when bowling.

It takes only one dramatic incident to form a program that screws up our lives. This is when we develop a lifelong program that will be badly designed and hurriedly put together as some sort of defence mechanism. Whether it is what everyone would see as “terrible” such as child abuse or being robbed, or something that others would even laugh at, something embarrassing. It is not about what others think, it is about how it affected you in that moment. Quite possibly it is the first time you ever experienced your body produce a chemical that fill you from head to toe in anger or fear or helplessness. In that instant you never want this to happen again and you develop a program that will help you avoid it. You then keep this hastily made up “shield” for life. You behave as though you are not worthy, you may become shy to avoid contact or aggressive to repel contact. Whichever mode you select will work!

It doesn’t stop there though. Whatever you now perceive becomes your reality, and as your attitude affects how others react to you it compounds what you feel. You even become a mind-reader, you just “know” other people don’t like you. When, in fact, it is just you, who doesn’t like you. It is your own mind projecting your perception of yourself into the head of the other person.

Unfortunately because you are now totally brainwashed by the perception caused by the program, you will now, misguidedly, defend the program as though your life depends on it.

This program will not go away on its own, nor will positive thinking make it disappear (even though it may calm the symptoms). In fact you will steadily get worse, this is a program built for life (literally).

You will of course be wary of losing it, because if you suffer from anxiety then being anxious of losing it is hardly difficult to predict. But lose it you must to escape its hold from every aspect of your life.

The great news is that because you “learned” it in one lesson, you can “unlearn” it in one lesson. Once your brain sees what started it and realises that the program is not doing what it should then it can release or adapt it. This is an Aha moment of clarity from which there is no going back. The brain literally re-wires to the truth of the situation, and the fact that it was in the past, so the threat no longer exists.

What would you be better for getting rid of?

Steven Blake, MBA