Rewire your patterns

The most empowering thing I’ve heard is that there is a gap between stimulus and response, and that the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use and expand that space.

Our responses typically come from patterns and scripts handed down from our parents and our pasts. We are not hostage to those patterns, we can update them. A pattern that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. Vision is bigger than baggage.

Sometimes those patterns are deeply rooted. A pattern like anxiety may have been helpful in a previous unsafe environment but is maladaptive for our current safe environment.

My friend Kanjun calls this “trauma as overfitting”, since we don’t generalize well from childhood to adulthood. Cognitive behavior therapy or Byron Katie’s work helps us get new training data by asking questions like: “are you absolutely sure that’s true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without that thought?“ This is great for updating limiting beliefs, of which we have many that are often mostly incorrect and holding us back.

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