I raced rally cars for many years. I can’t claim to be good at it but I learnt many lessons from it. The biggest one was never look at the tree.
what does that mean in real language. Well, as you’re drifting sideways through a corner on a dirt road at about 120 km/h, there is no greater guarantee of sliding into the embankment or a tree then to be looking at it.
I now ride a road bike and the same phenomena applies. As you are riding down a steep hill taking a very sharp corner we are taught and practice over and over again the art of looking out of the corner rather than at the corner. It’s a strange phenomena but we go in the direction of our dominant thought and if in these high speed sports our dominant thought is on where we don’t want to be we end up going there.
but I wonder how many people apply this to life. I meet many grandparents who are worried about where their grandchildren or even children are going to end up. They are worried about ageing and they are worried about the world. I wonder if they realise that their focus on what they worry about is actually part of the caurse of it.
There is a fascinating study done on the concept of placebo. This is still a shock to me. If you give somebody a pill and tell them it is a sugar pill, in other words a placebo pill, instead of a Panadol, the headache still gets better. So even when we know a placebo is it placebo it doesn’t matter. We go in the direction of our dominant thought and if somebody says this pill will relieve your headache it does, even if we know it doesn’t.
I coach many people. Sometimes a person will declare that they are thinking of changing jobs and ask my opinion. I am in many cases nothing more than a placebo to validate their intuition or their feelings that they are going to change jobs. It can become a battle if I feel that the best advice I can give is not to change jobs but they go in the direction of the dominant thought and quite often that dominant thought is not just their own. Sometimes the dominant thought of a person is advice given to them by their parents, family, and in particular spouse.
for me and argument with a spouse is a battle I can never win and quite frankly prefer not to have. A spouse has an advantage. They have the threat of an unfortunate home environment, emotional disappointment, and many other tools such as sex to make their dominant thought, the dominant thought.
I don’t think the debate as to whether we go in the direction of our dominant thought is up for question. This fact is proven in all sport and in the awareness of environment. Our environment impacts our dominant thought. Change the environment a new change that dominant thought. But it is nearly impossible to change a dominant thought keeping the environment constant. It is one of the reasons we do a declutter process during the 30 day challenge. It is another reason why we change the clothing we wear as part of rebranding ourselves. We go in the direction of our dominant thought and that dominant thought is highly impacted by our environment, including the clothes we wear.
So there are two critical factors so far we’ve discussed in determining the dominant thought that will determine the direction in which we travel. The first we discussed was Placebo, which is another word for self talk. What goes on in our brain is a placebo and that placebo is there 24 hours a day seven days a week. If we think we are stupid we become it. If we think we are a genius we become it. Nobody on earth defied their own self talk/placebo. And therefore self talk is a critical part of self development.
the second critical factor we have discussed in determining the dominant thought that provides our mind is our environment. That environment includes the company we work for, the clutter that surrounds us in our domestic environment, the uncertainty of our financial and emotional future but most importantly, far more important than all of the above put together, is the voice of a spouse. The voice of a spouse has tentacles that reach deep into our heart and mind and therefore competes with our own self talk.
there is a phenomena called codependency. Codependency is considered and in healthy state of emotional and psychological dependency on the opinion of another person. When the self talk of an individual is so bad that they continually beat themselves up and put themselves down they typically try to find a spouse or partner or parent or friend who puts them up or even collaborates on putting them down. In this situation the individual loses control of their dominant thought.
maybe a great shock for you the reader to witness this but, the single greatest challenge to and individuals success is codependency. When we are children there is a natural codependency on parents. As we grow up that codependency is meant to morph into self talk and self reliance. But sometimes that morphing is interrupted by and incident that breaks down the development of a healthy self talk within. This breakdown is less common in private school environments where the aspiration for success is much more in the hands of the school board and therefore hand-picked when it comes to staff. However in the public school system, where this morphing from parent to self talk is taking place, the quality of the transition can be, pathetic, if circumstances are not controlled.
given this backdrop I can now talk about the fact that we go in the direction of our dominant thought but the source of that dominant thought can be from self talk, or, in an extremely unhealthy circumstance, the opinion and feelings and thoughts of a spouse. In this case I am talking about a spouse who could be a friend, a parent who hasn’t let go, a sibling or in the classic language, a significant other. Either way, self talk is subordinated to somebody else.
at the root of self talk is a philosophy. That philosophy can be a religion, I set of beliefs passed from parent to child, experience, but ultimately it’s the way we interpret how the world works. This all moves in the direction of our dominant thought. If we think the world is built on the phenomena of the pursuit of happiness, and we don’t achieve it, then our self talk will be of failure and disappointment continually and then there is a need for codependency to compensate. But nobody beats up more than we beat ourselves up. So codependency usually ends up abusive, the motive for codependency being bad self talk, we attract self talk in the form of codependency that actually mirrors our own self talk eventually.
all of this conversation about going in the direction of our dominant thought demonstrates that there is only one solution if we are not going in the direction that we wish. And that solution is our own self talk. There is no use blaming the environment, blaming others, blaming a spouse or blaming the world around us that is reflecting our own self talk. The solution is to change that self talk and in particular change the modelling on which we interpret the world around us. This is called, in psychological language, and identity crisis.
Our identity is built on how we interpret the world around us. If we think we are good people it’s because we interpret our own behaviour as good and the behaviour of others as not good or as good. As I work in the field of human development and personal growth it is critical that I’m able to understand the challenges of an identity crisis.
the first and most significant is pushback by a spouse. The spouse is quite often the person who has the strongest influence on the self talk, the dominant thought of the individual I am coaching. As this identity or self talk phenomena starts to move away from that influence, there is a secondary identity crisis on the spouse who has up until the coaching, being the dominant influence on the person I am coaching. That’s a tough transition for a spouse but one of the big benefits of coaching. All boats rise with a rising tide.
the second and probably most difficult aspect of helping people through gross and human development is that they will have Memes that have been registered in their subconscious brain for a lifetime and they have no idea that they exist until they, the Memes, are confronted. Therefore there are moments in time during a coaching process when people will say I don’t understand or I don’t like or or I don’t agree with what I’m hearing from you Chris. The key here is for me to have enough experience to know that this is not personal but it is a conflict between the existing Memes and, not my personal opinions, but the universal laws of nature.
30 years ago now I came to realise that there is an argument in the world between all the philosophies that people advocate to live our lives by. Buddhist, Hindu, Doust, Christian, Islamic, Jewish and a host of other new-age idealisms present themselves as alternative philosophies that change self talk and they all work for a period of time. They all have something positive to offer. But as a person evolves so to must this philosophy evolve. There is no use using the same philosophy that helped at 20-year-old person understand what was going on in their life, at the age of 41 that individual is leading thousands of people with millions of dollars at stake in business, with children and family obligations. But people try.
when I speak to people about their life stories, the story somebody tells about an event that took place when they were 15 or 20 or even 30 years old has not changed, ever. My clients know that I hate stories. That’s sort of me saying that I don’t want to listen to somebody repeating a story that they’ve told the same way for the last 20 years, which, if they keep repeating it over and over means they hold onto the same philosophy they had when they experienced the story. Personal growth means to change those philosophies and repeating the story is just a way of holding onto the identity that built them. If we hold onto the identity that built the story we also hold on to the self talk that is a consequence of the philosophy we had. Personal growth means new philosophy.
the philosophy that I share is the universal laws of nature. Why?
I’m a person from the Australian outback teaching people about personal growth and I feel too insignificant in the world of philosophy to come up with and make up my own. I spent many years chasing rainbows running around looking for a philosophy that explained what I knew about life, help me improve my disastrous self talk, and gave me a sense of collaboration with a partner/spouse, that was not codependent as I had experienced for the first 13 years of my adult life. I chased rainbows from one end of the world to the other from the darkest traditional ceremonies to the brightest and I didn’t find it. So I decided not to invent a philosophy, and add another complication to the world of self development but instead to micro the universal laws which have been here forever, and will be here forever and explain everything. My job simply became to translate them into daily life and what to expect and what not to expect.
when my dad was teaching me to drive a car he said, and I remember it so clearly, be careful where you point your face because you’ll follow your nose. He was teaching me that every time I looked away from the road I would drive in the direction I looked. He repeated that over and over, you follow your nose, and when it came time to talk about my soon to be dominant thought of sex as a teenager, he repeated the same advice, but in a different language; a stiff cock has no conscience.
my dad did teach me that I go in the direction of my dominant thought, because when I did start dating, my stiff cock had no conscience and I remembered what he said. I guess it took me another 30 years to make sense of his advice in a broader context. But if I had remembered his advice I could have saved myself a lot of heartache and pain. Especially after a few beers. I know this sounds really gross, sorry about that if you’re listening and it’s and it’s offensive, but I think it’s really earthy. Sometimes when we talk about human development we get up in our heads and it’s hard to remember everything that’s going on in our lives in context. So sometimes I think a very down to earth, deep dark and dirty, reality helps cut through the fog and anchor something very important.
we go in the direction of our dominant thought. Our dominant thought is our self talk which we can control and determine just like when we are going around the corner on a bike we can focus our eyes on the out of the corner, when we are going through life we can focus our eyes, mind, on our vision and purpose. The self talk, needs as an underpinning foundation a philosophy and that philosophy, from my opinion, is wise to be one that grows with you for the entirety of the grandeur of your life. And that’s why I share the universal laws of nature. They bypass the commercially constructed religion and self-help, and cut straight to the big picture and then just leave us the duty of application.
we go in the direction of our dominant thought but that dominant thought can be the dominant thoughts of others. When we become people pleasers, and accidentally include the opinions of others in the impact of environment on our self talk, in other words our spouse, we lose control of that self talk, we lose control of living our own lives, we become robotic and mechanical. You have heard the expression “he or she doesn’t walk there talk” well this is talking about a person who is walking someone else’s talk. The day that we can know our own voice, when our inner voice speaks louder than the outer voices of our own emotion, and the opinions of others, we can honestly say we have become inspired. For this to happen we need a philosophy that stands the test of time, that we can defend in the face of assault by those who would prefer that we lived to their beating drum, and we need to practice on a daily basis, what is often called meditation, but it isn’t. The daily practice of self talk is the reinforcement of a language that we speak to ourselves, irrespective of circumstances.
For 40 years I have practised affirmations, denials and visualisations. I’ve written 30 books on the universal laws of nature applied to every aspect of life. I still struggle with self talk from time to time when things are not as I expected and therefore it is a lifelong process, not for me to get it right, but for me to continually recognise where I have an opportunity to grow my thinking to realign with the universal laws, to evolve past some blockage that has been revealed to me through a real day every day circumstance, and become a more complete and inspired, a more enlightened and conscious version of myself. And for this I need to get used to the idea that my identity is not fixed in stone.
Every single day of my life I hear echoes of old self talk ruminating down the back of my brain trying to re-tell stories as they were 60 years ago. Sometimes this is complicated by the fact that my job is to tell stories to enable others to relate to a growth pass in their own life. I therefore have to tell stories from their origin to their reality. From the fantasy to the reality. From the emotion to the truth. And sometimes I might get buried in the fantasy. But this gets revealed to me in my state of mind. The instant I feel myself experience emotion that is not helpful to the circumstances of my self talk and life, my vision, my inspiration, and my purpose, I stop, I process, I evolve, and I get back on track within minutes if not hours.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is the journey never ends. It’s a magnificent journey not one to be disappointed in yourself if things don’t go every single day perfectly. I’m not teaching a philosophy of happiness but rather a philosophy of self talk responsibility, living a state of inspiration so that others around us become also inspired because when the tide comes in all boats rise, and making a difference. My personal ups and downs are just the process of evolving and learning and growth. I find it in my heart my job and my purpose to help others do the same. It’s the never-ending story of growth and joy and opportunity to love.
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