Avoidance Behavior

A couple of weeks ago my wife went on a trip to Hawaii with her parents for a week.  During that time I made plans to work on my Blog Business course that I’m planning on releasing this year.

I was thinking that the time I normally set aside to spending with her in the evenings I could set aside to work on the course instead to give me a nice boost to get started on it.

It may not seem like much, but even just 3-4 hours/day extra that I would normally spend having dinner with my wife and hanging out with her can add up quickly if I were to focus myself.  Multiply those 3-4 hours by the 10 days or so that she was gone and it adds up to 30-40 hours.  Putting 30-40hours of extra work into a project, especially when you’re just getting going can be a big boost.

However, to my surprise something really interesting happened.

Avoidance Behavior

Instead of working on my project, I found myself engaging in all kinds of avoidance behavior.

I watched movies, TV shows, spent time talking on the phone with friends I normally don’t call during those hours, cleaned my room, spent time training my dogs, and I even gave Zoe two baths and spent 2 hours one evening brushing Kobe’s coat.

If I didn’t know myself better I would just chalk it up to catching up on stuff that needed to get done, but I’ve been in this situation enough times before to recognize that I was engaging in avoidance behavior.

I still did spend about 10 hours extra on the Blog course during that week, but that’s only 25% of what I could have spent if I really wanted to.

Since my wife got back I’ve found myself doing the same thing.  It’s like there is a mental block for me to try to finish this thing.  It’s really frustrating because I already have all the content for the course in my head and in my journals, and I have some of it already typed out.  It’s just a matter of putting the time and effort into putting it all together.

Sometimes when you only work on a project for a few hours a week it’s hard to realize that you’re avoiding the work and creating mental roadblocks, but when you set aside some focused time to work on something it’s a lot easier to see if you don’t do it.

So, for the last few days I’ve been really thinking about what the challenge is.  Why am I avoiding and delaying taking the action steps I need to take in order to complete this course.  I have no problem working with one-on-one mentoring students to teach them the same content over the phone, so what’s the challenge?

After a lot of introspection I realized that it’s not just this course.  It’s more related to making money in general and not just finishing this course.  I meditated on this for a while and I realized that it was my subconscious vision of the future that was stopping me.  Let me explain.

About ten years ago I went through Tony Robbin’s Personal Power II program and as part of that program I created a very detailed goal list of what I want to accomplish in my life in the next 10+ years.  I created a vision of my future house, what it will look like, how many rooms it will have, what my office will look like, what kinds of books it will have, what kind of kitchen it will have, and other details like who I’m going to invite over for a BBQ etc.

I also visualized what kind of car I’m going to drive, who my friends will be, what kind of person I’ll be, what I’ll do for a living, how I will spend my days etc.  I put in a LOT of work to get very clear on that vision and every detail within it.  Then I did a bunch of exercises to visualize and cement that vision in my subconscious mind.

All that is great, and it has helped me a lot in the last 10 years with a lot of the vision already manifesting itself in my life, BUT there are a lot of parts in the vision right now that I no longer want.  In fact with just a few exceptions I would say that the majority of what I wanted 10 years ago I already have, and anything from that vision that I don’t yet have is only because I no longer want it.

So, the challenge I’ve realized is that the vision I’ve still got in my subconscious mind is outdated and no longer what I want or who I am.  In fact, I would say that my current life is better than that vision from 10 years ago.  So, subconsciously every time I try to do something to change my life, such as for example creating products or services to create more value for people and to make more money, my subconscious mind sabotages those efforts because it thinks that any change will result in that vision that I no longer want.

For example, lets say that in my original vision I wanted to own a BMW once I had the cash to buy one outright.  Well, I’ve already owned several BMW’s and I’m not so sure I would want one now that I’ve owned them.  Let’s say that I would much rather own an Audi or a Honda, but my subconscious vision is still that of the BMW I so vividly visualized 10 years ago.

Well, if that is the case it creates a conflict between your conscious mind which may be thinking “When I make enough money, I’ll buy an Audi” and the subconscious mind which may be thinking “When we make enough money we’ll buy that BMW we visualized, which we don’t really want anymore”.  In such a situation when your conscious mind and your subconscious mind are at odds with each other, the subconscious mind always wins in the end.  And if the subconscious mind is in conflict with itself, then you normally go around in circles and nothing gets done.

You can’t fight the subconscious mind.  The only thing you can do is re-program it to be in alignment with your conscious mind, and that is what I’ve failed to do up until now.

Outgrowing Your Vision

This is not the first time I’ve outgrown my subconscious programming.

In 2002 I was running a multi-million dollar business, but for some really strange reason after all my expenses and payroll was paid I could never pay myself more than $3,000/m even though I was the co-owner of the business.  Every time we would get some good contracts in and I would look forward to paying myself a bigger income for that month, some weird thing would happen and our expenses would jump or a check would bounce or something would happen and all I could pay myself was $3,000/m.

At first this didn’t seem like a big deal, I just figured I had to work harder as we were growing the business, but after months and months of the same thing happening I was getting really frustrated.   I was working 6-7 days / week and I was working 12-16hour days on my business.  Somehow I could pay all my employees their payroll, commissions, and even bonuses from time to time but for me personally we just never had enough money in the bank at the end of the month to pay me more than $3,000.

It was like a curse.  It almost became funny after a while.  Money would come in and I would joke about how by the end of the month there would be something that would pop up and prevent me from paying myself more money.  I joked about it but a part of me was really frustrated because I couldn’t figure out what was going on.  Was I somehow unable to make more than $3,000/m?  Was there some kind of spiritual limit or something on the amount of money I could make?  Who set this limit?  What was going on?  Was there some kind of universal conspiracy at work here?

Talking about the experience doesn’t do it justice.  Living it and experiencing it was a huge learning lesson for me.  Weird things would just happen right at the last moment and I couldn’t pay myself any more than $3k/m.  It was like being in some kind of comedy where the main character is cursed to never win.

Then, one day while cleaning out my closets I came across a box and in that box I found one of my old journals from 1998.  I totally forgot about that journal and was excited to flip through it to see what kind of stuff I wrote about 4 years earlier.

While flipping through the journal I came across a set of pages and my jaw almost hit the floor.  I couldn’t believe it.

There was a section in that journal where I had written out an affirmation after attending a seminar which talked about affirmations and subconscious programming.  Back in 1998 I had just started a new business and my income was $0/m basically so when I went to this seminar they talked about setting a monthly goal for yourself and creating affirmations to reinforce that goal.

Well, guess what goal/affirmation I set back then?  Yup, you guessed it…$3,000/m.

The affirmation was “I make $3,000 net income per month.”  The crazy thing is that I didn’t just say it once.  I said it 468 times!

Each time I said the affirmation to myself I put a little check-mark in my journal and then I counted the check-marks and they added up to 468 times.

Of course in 1998 the $3k/m goal was a good goal for me because my business wasn’t making any money so I was just starting out, but I didn’t realize that I was inadvertently setting myself up with a limiting subconscious belief in the process!

What’s worse is that I moved shortly after setting that goal and the journal I had went into a box and into storage so I totally forgot about it until that day I found it in 2002.

Once I found that journal and realized just how powerful affirmations can be (to help us grow and to limit us), I created a new affirmation with a much higher income goal and my income in my business was no longer limited to the $3k/m I was previously making.  In fact I went on to have the highest income earning year of my life up to that point.

It was such an amazing lesson though, seeing how powerful affirmations are in our lives and how the subconscious runs our lives.  That is why I’m such a believer in visualization, affirmations, Law of Attraction etc.

Creating a New Vision

Anyway, after realizing that my old vision of what I want my life to be like is outdated I am now working on creating a new 10 year vision for 2010.  I have already started the process but I’m going to take my time and really get clear and specific in what I want because I know there is so much power in doing this exercise.

The crazy thing is that last night I was working on one section of the vision, unrelated to money or business and did a bit of visualizing of what I want.  Today something came up related to that area of life and tomorrow I’ll be announcing something on the site related to it.  It’s crazy how quickly things can change and happen “out there” once we get “in here” figured out.

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