When Your Mind Sabotages Your Dreams: Mediate Your Life: A Guide to Removing Barriers to Communication, #3

Introduction

In each moment, you are creating your experience of your life.

This may seem like a bold statement. Most people go through their lives as if they are entirely at the mercy of what happens around them. If they don’t have what they desire in their lives, they may blame outside circumstances, their past, or other people, saying things like, Well, I just haven’t met the right person yet, that’s why I’m not married or I didn’t grow up in an entrepreneurial family, so I don’t have it in my genes to get a business going. They may also internalize the blame and find themselves at fault: I’d love to make more money, but I’m not smart enough. Frequently, people feel hopeless and helpless, as if they play no part in getting what they want.

All of this is understandable, since most people were never taught how to create their lives. When you grow up in a family and culture where people tend to look outward for responsibility, and blame and shame are the predominant responses to what happens, being willing to look at your part in creating your life takes courage and openness to a whole new way of seeing the world.

Why?

Because taking responsibility for the part you play in creating your life starts within. Of course, there are many circumstances out of your control that influence your life, but you do have significant control over how you relate to your circumstances. Thus, it’s what you do within you, how you relate to yourself, others, and the world—that is where creating your life begins.

Ask yourself:

✦ Am I satisfied with my life?

✦ Is there anything I can do to make it better?

People often find some areas of life that work in their favor, but others that simply don’t, whether they understand why or not. For example, perhaps business is the arena where you are effective at reaching your goals, and yet you can’t seem to create a relationship that works, or vice versa. Maybe you feel comfortable taking responsibility for your health, but your financial situation is out of control.

It’s probable that you would like to change some aspect of your life, or create something entirely new and different, but what? Perhaps you:

✦ long to start a business

✦ already have a business and aspire to greater success

✦ wish for a lifestyle that has greater balance between taking care of yourself and your responsibilities to family and career

✦ yearn for financial stability

✦ desire a healthier body and mind

✦ would like to be a better parent, partner, or friend

Shelves of books already exist that give strategies for the nuts and bolts of creating these and myriad other dreams. While those resources are all helpful, many do not touch on how to get through the internal barriers that can often arise. In other words, before these nuts and bolts can be put into place, you have to learn how to get out of your own way.

In contrast to other books on this topic, When Your Mind Sabotages Your Dreams addresses the internal responses to whatever you choose to do. We give you the maps—specific steps to take—to navigate this territory, showing you where to focus your mind and what actions to take, so that you can remove those barriers that might be stopping you, and in doing so, move toward the life you wish to create.

In the pages that follow, you will not be creating vision boards for your life or crafting visions and missions for your business. While useful, these subjects are covered in other great resources. We are also not focusing on task management; plenty of people have written excellent resources to help you with time management and productivity, such as David Allen in his book Getting Things Done. It’s also not a book that’s going to tell you to simply try harder, be more focused, beat or force yourself, or power through.

Instead, this is a book about collaborating with yourself. As such, we will guide you to identify the conversations you would like to have with yourself to create what you desire in life. While this may sound strange at first, this practice will enable you to be clear about what you would like to do, plan the conversations to have, know what outcome you desire from those conversations, and develop the tools to prepare for and act mindfully in each moment. Further, this book is about how to have compassion for yourself wherever you are in the creation of your dream, along with resilience to face what comes up at each stage of the journey. Ultimately, we teach you how to meet yourself with awareness, presence, and choice—and when you can meet yourself this way, you can meet the world in the same way.

In the first volume of the Mediate Your Life series, Choosing Peace, we set the foundation by exploring the basic components of Nonviolent Communication—Observations, Feelings, Needs, and Requests—that the rest of our work builds upon. In the second volume, From Conflict to Connection, we explored the maps and skills that are necessary when you are in a difficult conversation with someone else.

While this book is about the conversations you have with yourself, in particular those that tend to get in the way of living the life you desire, it is a close companion to From Conflict to Connection in that as you go about creating your dream, you’ll likely be talking with other people. We refer you to that book for the maps and skills that will help you be more effective in those conversations.

How This Book Is Organized

While creating your dream is not a linear process, there is generally a flow or order to it. Before you can plan, you have to dream, and before you can take concerted action, you need a plan. Thus, reaching any dream follows the basic structure of dream, plan, implement. The chapters follow this flow of what takes place so that you can work through the process while reading the book. Chapter 1 will teach you to embrace your thinking mind, Chapter 2 will help you clarify your dream, Chapter 3 will aid in creating a plan, and Chapters 4–10 will cover various aspects of implementing your plan to achieve your dream.

Chapter 1

begins by exploring awareness of thinking and how you create your life one conversation at a time, which are the foundation for everything to follow. We’ll see how parts of you can sometimes be in conflict, how your own thoughts become barriers to achieving your dream, and how to embrace the concept of mediator mind to learn to change your internal conversations from contentious to harmonious.

Chapter 2

starts where creating your life starts—with a dream. Sometimes it’s difficult to be clear about your dream, and creating clarity requires becoming aware of the internal barriers that may be blocking your dream from emerging. When you can empathize with all the internal parts of you that come up in thinking about your dream, you can become clear about who you are, and your dreams and goals suddenly emerge from the confusion.

Chapter 3

moves to the next stage, which is planning. Creating your dream will involve planning conversations (and the outcome from each) with yourself and others. Because you may feel overwhelmed, want to know every step along the way, or even resist the process of creating a plan, you may find your progress is halted. The key to moving ahead is knowing where to focus your attention, so that in the next moment you can have awareness, presence, and choice. We teach you a simple activity to do just that.

Chapter 4

begins the process of implementing your plan, with a discussion of taking action. One of the primary barriers to moving forward is when you have two internal voices, each advocating something different. Since all voices are speaking to meet some need, learning to mediate between them helps you make better choices, as you take into account each aspect of yourself that is showing up.

Chapter 5

focuses on making agreements with yourself. Since many people find it difficult to be accountable to themselves, we teach you three types of agreements to make it easier. We will also touch on what to do if you don’t keep the agreement.

Chapter 6

recognizes that as you implement your plan and take action, you are likely to judge yourself afterwards for what you did or didn’t do. In this type of internal conflict, a part of you speaks up that is upset about what you did (the Educator), and another part of you responds with the good reasons for choosing that option (the Chooser). Mediating between these two parts of you transforms your judgments, helping you to find the needs behind your judgments as well as your actions.

Chapter 7

introduces the important role habits play in achieving your dream. Habits, whether they are behavioral or mental, can either be a significant barrier or profoundly supportive. We’ll show you a process by which you’ll learn to identify what habits you’d like to create to help you achieve your dream, along with what habits you already have that are a form of self-sabotage you’d like to change.

Chapter 8

acknowledges that as you implement your plan, you will encounter obstacles and experience setbacks. How you deal with them can lead you further along the road or stop you in your tracks. Bringing compassion to yourself in difficult times, escaping from self-judgments about what you might have done differently, making new decisions about how to move forward next, and re-motivating yourself are essential elements of dealing with setbacks.

Chapter 9

suggests that when conflict arises with other people as you work toward your dream, there is an internal component to that external conflict. When you resolve the internal driver, the outer conflict is more likely to shift. As such, you may find a smoother path toward achieving your dream.

Chapter 10

expands the view to encompass how all the maps and tools in this book can apply across different aspects of reaching for your dreams, anytime you find voices sabotaging your efforts or feel blocked in moving forward. We teach you to recognize what is coming up for you so that you know which tool to use.

Early chapters each introduce a map or tool to support you on the journey to living your dream, and you will see in later chapters how these maps interrelate and how to choose which process to use as you go through different stages. For many processes we include a link to a video demonstration so that you can see in action a concrete example of how that process unfolds.

As in the previous books in our Mediate Your Life series, we will be following our fictional family as they face the internal conflicts that keep them from creating the lives they desire. We’ll see how Sally works through the internal conversations about starting her own business while still being a mom and taking care of her family, how James faces his own uncertainty about what his dream is, and how teenaged Corey takes steps toward what he’d like to create.

In addition to the family, we will also follow three people in short snippets throughout each chapter to highlight the different ways people can get into internal conflicts that sabotage their efforts, and how they work through their internal conversations. Let’s meet these three companions.

Chris

In his recent physical exam and lab tests, Chris’s doctor told him he was pre-diabetic and that his blood pressure was too high, and the doctor wanted to put him on medication. Chris knew that he’d been under a little stress lately; he was working long hours and was unable to spend as much time with his family and do the things he enjoyed. He also knew he was a little overweight; in fact, he has struggled with weight since graduating from college ten years ago. During those ten years, he sometimes went on a diet and did quite well, but then he always slowly gained the weight back, usually adding on a few pounds more. Because he hadn’t been paying much attention to it lately, he was a little shocked when he stepped on the scale at the office and was heavier than ever. The doctor told him losing fifty pounds was likely to help him lower his blood pressure and avoid developing diabetes.

Dawn

Dawn is in her fifties, happily married to her husband of thirty years. She mostly stayed at home to raise their two children, the youngest of whom is now away at college. She did some part-time work and volunteering now and then while the kids were growing up, as well as being involved in all of their activities. Now that the kids are gone, she is feeling a little out of sorts, spending a lot of time puttering around the house and yard, unsure of what to do with herself.

Kevin

Kevin and his wife got married and started a family in their early twenties. Kevin threw himself into work, striving to get ahead and live the American dream, and has been climbing the corporate ladder. He’s read lots of self-help books about self-actualization and has attended multiple events with one of the leading personal development gurus. Though initially he got a rush from putting in long hours to get everything done and move ahead, he’s finding it exhausting and draining now that he’s in his forties. Aware of feeling a bit empty inside, Kevin has been reflecting more on how it seems harder to keep going, and how there’s not much time or energy for him to be able to enjoy the things he’s working so hard for: his family and his nice lifestyle.

How to Use This Book

If you see ways you are not progressing in creating your life and you’d like to change that, then take this book on as an experiment in living. We recommend reading each chapter, both so that you have all of the maps available to you and understand the entire process, and also so that you can address the internal barriers that may arise at each step. You will then more readily recognize your own sabotaging thoughts, and when they emerge you can return to specific chapters in the book as a resource to shift the internal conversation.

The Practice Pauses in each chapter are designed to give you a chance to apply what you’re reading to your situation right now. Besides the full version of each map, which we recommend you practice often until it becomes embodied, we also outline ways to use each map more quickly once you are familiar with it. In this way you can more easily integrate the maps into your daily life.

Here are some possible ways you can make this book benefit you:

✦ Do you already know your big hairy dream? Would you like to create world peace, start a social movement, or increase compassion and consciousness on the planet? If you’re clear about your dream but feel stuck in some aspect of moving forward, use this book as your barriers and challenges arise.

✦ Don’t have a clue what we mean by a dream? That’s okay, we’ll help you get there with Chapter 2, and then you can use the rest of the book to start taking action.

✦ Prefer to test some of these tools? Pick a smaller project, such as having a dinner party, going on vacation, or completing a project for work. Barriers come up with small dreams too, and they provide an excellent training ground for using the skills and tools.

✦ Feel stuck but aren’t sure where to begin? Read through the book and learn to identify the different voices in you that are vying for attention. As you become more adept at hearing them, you’ll gain clarity about what will help unstick you.

However you decide to use the book, try out the exercises and maps we lay out in these pages. Identify the thoughts that come up, capture them, and use the processes in this book to work with them. If you find that you get better outcomes, enjoy the process more, or simply discover that your life flows more easily than with your habitual way of being in conversation with yourself, keep going! Do small test experiments, integrating one map into an internal dialogue to see if it improves your outcomes, both in the way you feel and in your ability to take action in the world. Embrace the ongoing process of being more skillful at recognizing self-sabotaging thoughts when they flit through your mind, and of using strategies to make them work to your advantage.

What we’re talking about can seem overwhelming, as in some ways it is about changing the way you habitually interact with yourself and the world. Yet, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming if you approach it through small changes. Yes, it does take some focus. But as you remind yourself to notice your feelings and thoughts and to use processes to have better internal conversations, you will indeed reap the benefits.

Aren’t you and your life worth the effort?

We are what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we make our world.

—Buddha

Sally glances at her phone and notices the time. Oh no, three o’clock? I’m already late! She throws her bag in the car and sits behind the wheel. I didn’t think the meeting would run that long. Maggie’s going to be so upset with me for being late.

Sally calculates how long it will take to drive to Maggie’s school. Clearly marked in her calendar is the three p.m. meeting with Maggie and her teacher. Sally remembers how excited Mags had been when she gave Sally the request from her teacher for the conference. Bouncing up and down, she had tried to explain what it was about, but all Sally understood was that it had something to do with a special science program the teacher wanted Maggie to participate in. Sally had felt unsure about adding another activity to Maggie’s schedule, but seeing her excitement, Sally knew she at least needed to consider it.

Thinking about Maggie’s schedule prompts Sally to reflect on her own busy day: getting the kids up and to school, meeting with her website developer, finishing a proposal, and the meeting that had just run over, in which she presented the proposal to a potential client. Then again, every day is a busy day, Sally thinks, impatiently tapping her foot as she waits for the light to turn green. Between running the kids around to school and various activities, managing her fledgling consulting business, and taking care of the household, Sally feels like she is on the go from the moment she wakes up to when she finally goes to bed at night. It’s even worse when her husband James is gone, like he is now, even if it’s only an overnight work trip. Wondering how long she can keep it up, she pulls into the school parking lot as a wave of exhaustion flows through her body and settles in her stomach.

Whatever you would like to create, this book can help you achieve it. But in order to understand how you can change anything in your life from within, we must first explore how human beings think.

How aware are you of the thoughts that run through your mind each day? Imagine waking up in the morning and the string of thoughts that may follow:

Oh, warm covers . . . it feels cold out . . . maybe I can hit the snooze button for another few minutes. No no, I need to get up because I’ve got that early call at work . . . I can’t be late today. I wonder what Bill will say when he hears I’ve landed that sale! Oh wait, I haven’t landed it yet, but I know I will . . . we had a great conversation last week . . .

And it continues on through breakfast and into your commute to work:

Oh god, I really hate this traffic. It should only take fifteen minutes to get to work but no, add another hour to that . . . if they’d just change the way these lanes merge, it would be so much easier for traffic to flow. Maybe I should start going in earlier, but I don’t want to miss time with my family in the morning. At least I can listen to some good podcasts while I’m sitting here, so it’s not a complete waste of time . . .

A popular online meme suggests that we have thousands of thoughts a day, though no one seems to be able to cite actual research on which to base specific numbers. Still, there’s no denying that thoughts—however you define them—accompany you as more or less a continuous background stream of commentary throughout the day. These thoughts run your life, unless you become aware of them.

While this may seem overwhelming, it’s important to note that you are not the sum total of your internal commentary. When you can become aware of your thoughts, you realize that just because you think them, they are not necessarily true. Many meditation and spiritual traditions include practices that allow you, over time, to notice your thoughts, realize their impact on you, and be able to witness them instead of being run by them. But paying attention to and noticing thoughts, rather than allowing the constant stream to buffet you one way or the other, requires practice.

So how can you become more aware of your thoughts?

While thoughts may be ubiquitous, they often take place underneath conscious awareness, hence it may only be when you notice you’re ruminating on distressful thoughts about something that happened that you become aware of the stream and its impact on you. Alternatively, you may notice feelings, and since thinking and feeling are connected, thoughts will produce feelings that affect you. If you notice you are feeling upset, for example, you can backtrack to uncover the thoughts associated with it. Here it’s helpful to ask yourself, When did I start feeling this way?

Of course, for many people, being aware of either thoughts or feelings may be difficult. If you are focused outward all the time, being in touch with your internal state—whether feeling or thinking—may take some practice. This is when creating a system to regularly check in and pay attention to what is going on internally is extremely beneficial. For example, you can set a timer on your phone or computer that prompts you regularly to check in with yourself. Each time it goes off, ask yourself, What am I thinking? You could also choose a behavioral trigger, such as walking through a door, using the bathroom, or eating or drinking to cue you to focus on what you are feeling and thinking in the moment.

Parts in Conflict

As you become more aware of this constant stream of thoughts, you might notice you are having an internal conversation, as if there are different parts of you speaking to each other. To take a simple, and somewhat silly, example, let’s say you’re in the middle of writing an email and your stomach growls. You have an internal conversation about getting up for a snack or waiting a few minutes until you finish. When you go to the refrigerator, you see there’s not much in there, and another internal conversation ensues about when to go to the store.

In the earlier example of the commute, at least two voices are speaking to each other—one frustrated about the traffic and wondering about going in earlier to avoid it, and the other desiring to spend more time with family in the morning. Once you start to pay attention, you’ll begin to notice how often your internal conversation is actually a conflict. Part of you wants one thing (avoid frustration of commute) and part wants something else (family time). In a sense, you have an internal split where these two parts of yourself are in conflict with each other, pulling you in different directions.

Being in conflict internally implies that there are (at least) two parts of you that have different strategies or ideas about what you have done or what you ought to do. For many people, the idea that they have different parts of themselves vying for attention may seem disturbing; however, take comfort in knowing that this is a well-established concept in psychology and quite normal. For example, Hal and Sidra Stone’s well-known Voice Dialogue work is based on the concept that you have many internal voices that determine your worldview and behavior; Jonathan Haidt’s analogy of the Elephant and the Rider introduced in The Happiness Hypothesis describes how the mind has different parts that can be in conflict; and Chip and Dan Heath further developed this idea in their book Switch to elucidate how people change (or don’t). In addition, the idea of there being many parts within the psyche is the basis of a model of psychotherapy called Internal Family Systems developed by Richard Schwartz.

Thus, a growing consensus recognizes that there is not one unified voice within the mind; instead, there are competing modules in the brain vying for control of consciousness, with the prefrontal cortex acting as a kind of traffic cop, deciding which module will have control of conscious thought from moment to moment. This all goes on behind the scenes, without your being consciously aware that it is happening. Yet, despite how overwhelming it may seem, with practice you can learn to become consciously aware when these shifts between various components take place. This is the beginning of true self-awareness.

Creating Your Life

When you think about creating your life, what do you think of first? If you’re like most people, you might focus on what you are or are not doing. What you do is, of course, a crucial aspect of creating your life. Yet in our view, there’s actually a step before the doing.

You create your life one conversation at a time.

Think about this for a moment. If you and your colleagues are working on a project together, you get on the same page by having conversations—who will do which tasks, what outcomes you’re looking for, etc. To create anything in the world with other people, you have conversations with them.

Often overlooked is the fact that the same process happens within. Unlike with other people, however, you may not even realize you are having a conversation, and maybe even a conflict, with yourself, or how you can change the relationship between your internal voices so that it serves what you’d like to create. Because you live one moment after the next, as each moment arises and you are living in that moment, you are in an internal conversation about what is happening now and what to do next. You create your life moment by moment in a whole series of conversations.

Now, people are not typically aware of every single internal conversation occurring from one moment to the next, and that’s fine. In fact, it might hinder your day-to-day activities to a degree if you did. After all, many of these conversations flow easily and effortlessly, and life proceeds smoothly from one action to another.

Except when the conversation isn’t so easy.

Well that sounds like an exciting program, doesn’t it? Sally puts her arm around Maggie’s shoulders as they walk through the school doors and out into the sunshine.

Maggie pulls away. You’re not gonna let me do it, are you? she says, throwing an accusatory glance toward her mom.

Sally sighs. Maggie had made it clear through the meeting that she was angry. As her teacher explained to Sally that