Our Self-Imposed Prison Sentence

By Tabitha Wellman, CEO, Innova Business

I often come across business owners who desperately want to change their personal life, their business and their financial situation.  But when they’re presented with the options to change, they come up with a multitude of reasons why they can’t.  So, why is that?

Jalal ad-Din Rumi, a Persian Poet in the 1200’s once said “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open”.   Choosing not to change, when we want to change our life, is akin to choosing to stay in prison.  But our choices are governed by something much bigger than we are consciously aware of.  Our belief systems and how it causes resistance to change.

Our resistance to change is one of the biggest hurdles for any business owner to overcome.  We can easily justify ourselves to stay in the prison for just a little while longer.  But the truth is that there never is the right time, the right place, or the right circumstances.

Yet the health of a business is the direct reflection of the health of the business owner.  Often business owners don’t realise that to change their business, they need to change themselves first.  And that’s why we choose to stay in prison, because we’re institutionalised.  We think it’s easier to stay where we are, than to venture into finding ourselves.

So, what do you think about change?
I remember when I first met my spiritual counsellor 8 years ago.  The first thing she asked me was what I thought about change.  I told her that change was fantastic.  I loved change.  I worked in a change industry after all - Information Technology!  I would be bored senseless without change.  She responded with an “interesting!”

She then asked me what change meant to me when I was younger.  Instantly my mind reverted back to when I was five years old.  My parents were getting divorced.  My mother cried constantly.  I was always frightened – of what, I was never really sure.  But one night we moved from the only home that I had ever known to a grungy one bedroom flat with my mother and 2 of my younger brothers.  For the next 3 years we lived in about 4 different houses.  I didn’t see my father for another 25 years (but that’s another story!) and every friend that I made at the different schools I went to, I had to leave behind when we moved again.

Viewing change from the perspective of a 5 year old
It was then that I realised that my beliefs about change weren’t as fabulous as I thought they were.  For me, my fear of change was formulated in the mind of a frightened five year old who was resisting change with all her might.  My perspective of change was that it was frightening, disruptive and painful.  From an intellectual perspective I knew this was wrong, but my belief system still had to catch up!  I had beliefs from being a five year old that no longer worked for me as an adult.

So what are belief systems?
Our belief systems are generally formed between the ages of 18 months to 3 years.  This is when a baby starts the separation process from its mother.  So what happens is a sense of ‘self’ is developed and their sense of ‘other’.  That is, how they need to behave to ensure that the ‘other’ will provide them with the basic human needs – to be feed, clothed and loved.

How we are a prisoner to our belief systems
Beliefs come out in everything we say and do.  Just listen to the way that people talk and the language that they use.  Anything that we say after the words ‘I am’ or ‘you should’ or ‘I can’ are beliefs.  Beliefs that were formed sometime between the ages of 18 months and 3 years and then reinforced forever after.  As humans, we are very clever beings.  If we believe something at that age, we will then search high and low for evidence to support that throughout our whole life. 

Now the scary news for parents!  Guess where a child learns their belief systems from?  Their parents of course!  They learn from you how to be a mother or father, a husband or a wife, a sister or a brother, how to do relationships and many millions of other things.  Just as you did from your parents!  That’s why it’s often said that we married our mothers or our fathers.  Because our first ever true love is actually our parents.  But I digress!

Changing your beliefs about Change
Our beliefs about change are ultimately what rule our world.  As Marcus Aurelius once said, “our world is what our minds make of it”.  Therefore, without changing our beliefs about change, we will always struggle to have any change in our life and our businesses. 

So where do we start?  We first need to work out what our beliefs are.

Identifying your beliefs

1. Sit down with a blank piece of paper and write down what your current thoughts are about change.  Write intuitively and without judgement.  You aren’t going to be showing this to anyone, so write freely.  The more honest you are with yourself, the better your results will be.
2. Once finished, rule a line across the page and write down what your thoughts were about change when you were a child.
3. Look at the difference between the two.  Are there significant differences?
4. On a clean sheet of paper, write out what your old beliefs are leaving a gap between each one down the page.  For example – ‘Change destroys my family”, “Change is Scary”, etc. 
5. Underneath the old belief, write out what you want the new belief to be using the same context.  For example “Change brings together my family”, “Change is Enriching”, etc.  Note that each new belief is written using the same context as the old belief, but you change the key words.

Changing your beliefs

1. Now that you have a list of your old beliefs and your new beliefs, you need to now change your beliefs using a meditation technique.
2. Sit somewhere quiet, where you will not be interrupted.
3. Close your eyes and focus on relaxing the tension from your body.  Focus on your counting your breathing.  Let your belly fill up with air, then release.
4. Once you feel relatively relaxed, imagine yourself in a safe place.  Feel the environment around you.  Hear the sounds as if you were there, and see the different colours surrounding you.  Feel yourself at peace within your safe place.
5. When you are ready, imagine yourself walking to a cave that you had never noticed before.  As you walk towards it, you realise that there is a hidden door.  As you open the door, you realise that it is light and warm inside.  You walk down some steps, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. 
6. You walk along the corridor, until you reach a fork in the path.  Take the left turnoff.  Continue along until you reach an enormous cavern with a ceiling hundreds of feet above you.  The cavern is covered with thousands of shelfs with thousands of volumes of books marked in a strange language that you do not know.
7. You notice a white room at the other side of the cavern. Knowing that you are safe, cross through the cavern.  Open the door to the white room and enter.  You will notice that there is a lovely warm fire burning is a huge fireplace.  To the side, you see a desk and a chair.  On the desk is a large book with a white cover.  You notice that it has writing on the top.  You look more closely and notice that it has your name written on the top of it – along with the words ‘my beliefs’.
8. To the side of the book are two pens.  A big black marker pen and a beautiful golden ink pen.
9. Sitting in the chair, you open the book and see that it has your first belief written in it (insert your belief here).  You read the belief and then pick up the black marker pen and put two thick black lines across the belief and write the word VOID across it.  You then rip the belief out of the book and rip it into pieces.  You put the pieces in the fire and watch it burn.  Once the flame has died down, you turn back to your chair and open a new page in your book of beliefs.  Picking up the gold pen, you write down your new belief.  As you write it, it glows.
10. You look at the wording and imagine your life with this new belief.  See yourself living a life with this new belief.  Feel how good you would feel with this new belief.
11. Repeat the process with each old and new belief until you have finished your list.
12. Once you have finished, close the book, stand up from your chair and slowly turn to return back to your safe place.  Move out of the white room, walk through the cavern and follow the path back to the entrance.  Walk back up the steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.  Walk back to your safe place and then relax.  When you are ready, open your eyes.
13. Read your new beliefs to yourself and feel how your life will be now that you have changed them.
14. Write your new beliefs down on pieces of coloured paper and put them where you can view them daily.

Changing your perspective
Business is all about personal growth.  And personal growth is all about choice.

We need to realise that what we focus on grows.  Therefore, rather than getting caught on the old beliefs and old patterns of behaviour, we can acknowledge that we now have a choice.  We can either keep going on the old belief, or update them!  Either way, its all our choice.

So next time you are about to make an excuse about why you can’t change something in your world, stop and observe what triggered that reaction.  Write it down and look at the belief that came up for you.  Decide in that moment, whether you’re happy with that or not.  If not, then you now have the formula to change it!

-ends-

For more information on changing belief systems, contact Innova Business on phone 1300 864 769 or email info@innovabusiness.com  We can provide you with contact details for professional counsellors who specialise in this process.