your life's memoirs?
What would you like to add to your life's memoirs?
I have probably always been the positive type, nothing rarely stopped me. I probably let Pippi Longstocking's famous words: "I've never done this before, I'm sure I can" influence me early in life.
What I had in me of insecurity from a slightly troubled childhood and youth became something that has strengthened me tremendously later in life.
I was probably not very thin-skinned, most of it "bounced off like water off a goose"
To the people around me, who didn't know me very well, it probably seemed that I approached every challenge fearlessly, while those who were closest to me realized that I was more afraid and insecure than it appeared on the outside. But I acted and carried on regardless of the fear that was knocking at the door.
I was idealistic, had strong opinions and a huge belief in justice for all. Early engaged in animal welfare and nature. Grew up in an environment with friends from almost all walks of life.
Families with hunting interests, sporty people, where out and about was the only kind of life worth living, others had deeply religious environments, some with a criminal background, others again from the snobbish upper class and there were those who struggled on social welfare.
My environmemt was and still is enormous and varied, and my attitude and treatment of all of them was always the same: all treated equally and that respect is something to be earned based upon how they treat other people, animals and nature.
Naturally, like others, I have wondered a little why I have become who I am, most people reflect about the reasons for things in life. Early in my life, approx. when I was 9 years old, in connection with the aftermath of my parents' divorce, my grandfather's death and bullying in my childhood, I was allowed to speak to a psychologist.
He and I had some profound conversations about behavior and how it was influenced by experiences, which in turn in the long-term impacts people's self-image.
This psychologist is unfortunately not alive today, but his name was Hans Hattrem, he had his practice in Larvik. Grateful for him.
For these reasons and other happenings later in life, the human mind became interesting to me early on, I had deep experience and learned a lot about this subject early in life.
It didn't make my life flawless, on the contrary! But I became fearless and dared to make mistakes.
I understood early on that there was no point in worrying, and in most cases nothing went wrong.
And because I carried on with boldness, again and again, I met upon the golden opportunities. You increase your chances of success if you dare to try! Nothing of any significance in life happens within your comfort zone.
I believe that we should create at least one thing that is important in our life every year, something that develops you radically as a person. And once a month we should do at least one thing that we don't usually do.
To find out what this should be, you can write your life book, some call it the manuscript of their life.
Maybe you keep a diary, or you did during childhood like I did. It helped me process trauma and emotions that arose at the time, some of it a lot of fun and also things that still makes me embarrassed.
As part of a self-development program with us in Kraftrommet, you will be encouraged to write about how your life is right now. Then you will write more about how you want it to be.
You learn to fantasize again, as you could when you were a child. We work on developing our mental tools and begin to exercise them. It will begin to dawn on you how much power that actually resides within you.
Imagine that they are like muscles to be brought to life and used consciously to achieve a new understanding of yourself and what constitutes your personality. What made you who you are? Why are you where you are today?
You learn to love yourself more with all your positive and negative qualities. You uncover old belief systems that no longer seem reasonable, and you learn to accept and live with yourself in a completely new way.
You can find your contentment and gratitude for who you are, find the joy in that life again. But it might also open up a sense of adventure and your innate need for growth and expansion.
Being grateful for what we have does not mean that we must be so content that we lock ourselves into our comfort bubble.
The greatest addiction in life is not alcohol, other drugs, gambling, or laziness, it is mediocrity and comfort. The comfort zone imprisons us and numbs our brain, and the same brain does everything it can to maintain the status quo.
The chemical factory in the subconscious controls everything our body must do, we are fed stimuli in the form of hormones of all types, which our body is dependent on. Change will create abstinence and we will want to turn back into the familiar, to the safety of conformity.
People don't like change, and definitely not if someone tells us we should change. It's uncomfortable.
Our dreams always lie outside our comfort zone. Our lives are far too short to be unhappy 5 days a week in exchange for 2 days of freedom.
If you want to improve your relationship with others or get more out of life, then you must work on yourself
Toiling and struggling with a halfway life, a job you dislike is not healthy and will not lead to anything good for anyone.
When you work hard at something you don't believe in, it will lead to internal stress and increase the chances of dis-ease both mentally and physically.
When you work hard for something you truly believe in, you become full of joy, passionate, and inner drive. Passion and inner drive are not a result, but rather the beginning of a richer life.
I am a big fan of building up positive behaviours and the importance of working to ensure that these behaviours becomes a part of our personality. Then our body will come into more harmony and in line with new thoughts and feelings you will be having. We will give ourselves an opportunity to recalibrate our thought processes and can thus change our result.
Everyday life can seem quite confusing. Maybe you feel that things are happening to you and around you and that the only thing you can do is accept it, you are just hanging on?
Then remember this:
Your conscious mind (frontal cortex) processes about 2 m2 per second, while your subconscious mind processes about 150,000 m2 per second! (Yes, please read it again)
Your subconscious controls about 95% of your daily actions, reactions, decisions, and feelings, without you having a single conscious thought about what is happening.
All of this is based on a programming established when you were a child, and which continues to be established every single day based on what you think, repeat, listen to, and your self-talk.
It is critical that we understand that our subconscious does not know the difference between reality or fantasy, lie or truth.
So, it just must accept everything you give it, what you feed it and what you want it to believe.
The good thing then is, it also means that we can trick the subconscious into implement new behaviour.
But there is also another significant difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind.
The first is the so-called thinking brain, it converts what we receive via our senses into images via tree like branches in the brain.
The subconscious mind is the emotional brain, it only understands the feelings that are created based on what is let in from the conscious, thinking part.
In other words, this means: if we are to bring about lasting change, we must use emotional language to be able to access the sub-conscious. We must open up, be authentic and dare to be vulnerable if we want to reach this part of ourselves.
When that happens, you will no longer find yourself in situations you struggle to control.
You will see that life in fact happens for you, and not to you. Life mastery is something I wish for everyone to experience!
Wishing you all the best!
Greetings Merete