Like many people my age I went through a mid-life crisis (MLC), where what could go wrong, did go wrong. Looking back, I see it as a pivotal time in my life leading me to where I am now. After getting through the worst of it, I was left with two things I wanted to focus on. First was to quiet the negative voice inside my head so, and second was to put energy into positive goals so I could start shaping my life in a way that I wanted. It wasn’t till later did I realise that those two goals were intrinsically linked. It was just one of the many lessons I would learn on my journey.
Before my MLC I was the guy with a near permanent scowl on my face, and I thought the negative self-talk I experienced daily was just a normal part of life. It turns out none of this was a true representation of who I am, those feelings were the downstream effect of an unsupportive self-concept, the idea that we’re unworthy in some way.
There was a time when I thought we ‘are as we’re made’, which meant, once our personality was formed, we’re pretty much going to experience life like that for the rest of our days. I now know better.
Change is but an insight away, and I’ve been fortunate, as the result of coaching and ongoing self-enquiry, to have had a few significant insights that have changed the way I see myself and my place in the world. As the negative self-beliefs have fallen away, I experience more peace within myself which is reflected in the world around me.
As soon as I learned I could change I wanted to learn everything I could. I trained in various rapid change modalities including NLP and Hypnosis, but it wasn’t until I came across the work of Sydney Banks that things really shifted. For background, Sydney Banks was normal guy who had what would be considered an enlightenment experience. It changed his whole perception of himself and gave him a deep understanding of how we all create our experience. At some point he codified this as principles and went on to share that knowledge as the 3 Principles (3P’s), of Mind Thought and Consciousness.
The foundation of 3P’s coaching is to understand how we create experience, and then objectively look at our own patterns of thought and behaviour. When you are able to detach from your conditioned thinking it’s like becoming our own friend, the one that keeps on pointing out to us the error of our own ways, but we’re too close to it to see what they’re trying to tell us. But as we step back, we see the obvious, the innocent patterns of thought that lead to the behaviours that don’t serve or support us. Insight dissolves these patterns, improving the quality of thinking and the quality of life. And the bonus, dropping constraining beliefs expands possibilities, and allows us the confidence to chase those possibilities, which seems like a good result to me.
