Tanya Long – 2016/11/03

There’s a saying that when I first heard it years ago, I struggled to get my head around – ‘Whatever we fear we attract’.

At the time I wondered what would make it so?  What powerful forces in the universe would work against my favour to bring that which I feared into reality?  (a bit far fetched don’t you agree?).  To be honest, at the time I didn’t quite see or understand the logic behind this.fearattract

A few months later I was coaching a client, lets call her Sarah  on some relationship objectives she had.  She had started in a new relationship in which she was having such fun.  However Sarah was wracked with worry and was feeling completely overwhelmed at the speed that the relationship was moving in and how quickly she was falling for the guy. Previous traumatic experiences were flavouring her thoughts.  She was asking herself – ‘What does he see in me?’ ‘Will this last?’ ‘What if he changes his mind?’ ‘What if he is not feeling the same way about me that I feel about him?’

‘My heart will break if he ends this’, she told me.  ‘Why would he end it?’ I asked.

‘Maybe I’m too intense? Maybe he’ll realise that I’m not what he thought I was?’.

In that moment ‘What we fear we attract’ popped out of my mouth. Immediately I thought about the much celebrated quote from Ghandi.

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”

As human beings we have a natural tendency on needing to be right about stuff.  It’s sort of how we are subconsciously wired.  I’ve spoken a lot about how powerful our minds are and how we are not always aware of how much our subconscious plays a part in our thoughts.  When we raise fears or doubts into our subconscious, without realising it we start to look for signs to prove ourselves right. We hear and see things with a different lense, constantly testing to see if we are right.   At times causing obsessive and irrational thinking. More often than not, they end up in shaping our future.

In Sarah’s case, I highlighted to her that if she continued to think along the current lines, she would start coming across as intense and behaving in ways which would prove to herself that this relationship would not last. Fast forward to possible scenarios – Sarah constantly seeking reassurance from her new man, scrutinizing his other female friends to see if he preferred being with them, holding back, having emotional outbursts, driving herself crazy with the thoughts in her head and ultimately chasing her new man away with her intensity and outbursts.

She would be holding herself back from just enjoying the moments, and letting the natural flow of the relationship evolve.  Her greatest challenge, she complained, was to reign in her thinking.

We discussed a strategy that she would start using :

  1. Pay attention to the thoughts and Stop. Decide to let them go when they come up.  Sarah decided to wear an elastic band around her wrist and snap it when a thought came up – sort of like snapping her back into reality
  2. Choose a new context. Instead of ‘This is going to go pear shaped’, Sarah decided on ‘This is fun, it will be what its meant to be’, and she made a commitment to herself to use this every time she snapped her wrist band.
  3. Surrender and take action. She made a commitment to do 1 and 2 above, every time a sabotaging thought came up.
  4. Check-ins – Sarah decided to check in with herself once a week to see how she was doing on this and make sure that this strategy was working for her.

My invitation to you is to think about where in your life this statement rings true:   “What do I fear at the moment?“.  And to use the four steps above.

Let me know how it unfolds, ok?

T xxx

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