Spiral

Life is always moving. You might have heard “Either you’re growing or you’re dying”. It can be depicted by a spiral. Either you’re on your way up, letting positive actions, feelings, results lift you higher and higher or you’re in a downward spiral. When you’re going down everything is hard. Taking action becomes difficult, your self-esteem dwindle, your feelings get darker and your results are unsatisfactory.

Keeping an eye on the small steps that matter

Changing direction in the spiral can occasionally be initiated by a single event that instantaneously and fundamentally change how you perceive your life. Usually however, there are a number of seemingly insignificant changes that add up to a new impression of life quality. You don’t wake up one day in a happy life and say “Today I’m going to ruin my life”. Nor do you wake up from a depression and skip into a happy future due to some single event. The steps in the spiral are usually slow when you’re changing direction, but pick up speed when you manage to take several steps in the same direction in a row. You get momentum.

When judging life quality it’s important to remember that everyday matters. Life is made up of the years, weeks and days you live. Your personal assessment, of the quality of your life, is usually based on how you feel about your life today. Even if you’ve had a splendid year so far, if you’re miserable today due to an illness or painful failure, you’ll still feel negative towards your life. Luckily it’s the same the other way around. If you’ve been really low for the last two weeks and your best friend comes by and you spend a couple of hours laughing, all of sudden your life feels so much lighter. Humans tend to give the temporary feeling they’re in disproportionate influence when judging their quality of life.

So keeping an eye on the small steps in the spiral that will change your direction in the spiral is important, and the best way to assess your direction is to do a daily check in. Am I moving in the direction I want to?

The momentum is boosted from another circular theory

The Circle of Belief is part of the concept of the spiral. The Circle of Belief describes how your actions impact your results that in turn impact the belief about yourself and your abilities that in turn influence how you feel and so on. If you imagine tipping the Circle down horizontally you can stretch it out into an eternal spiral. The entry point is not important. The wonderful fact is that no matter where you enter the spiral you can impact the direction depending on how you manage that entry point. There are many possible entry points but if you find one that works the other steps will come more automatically 🙂

Hacking the Circle of belief is something I’ve been researching for a long time. Three years ago I was a firm believer that the primary entry point was through Belief. I relished the idea of planting strong Beliefs and I took pride in removing the weed. I still believe that understanding your limiting beliefs so you can work out strategies that counter them is important. But I’ve come to appreciate how strong the entry point of Action can be.

One way to change the wiring in your brain is to replace it. Instead of spending time on dismantling a disempowering belief you can repeat a new empowering one. If you change your behavior and stubbornly repeat it your brain will start to shift and soon the new actions will give you new feelings that eventually will impact your beliefs. Your brain will create a new wiring in your brain by your actions alone.

How can you use action as entry point to turn the direction of your spiral?

• Use your ability to fantasize.
  Humans are believed to be the only animal that can use its’ imagination to actually fool one’s own brain. Practice creating the feeling of joy and you will actually get better and better at feeling it. Create the feeling to teach your body and brain how to feel it.
  A word of caution here – I’m not recommending you to fake joy in terms of saying your happy even though you feel depressed. Faking a smile can be really powerful but pretending to be happy while hiding hurt inside is in-congruent and dangerous.What I’m referring to here is using your memory and ability to fantasize to get to your actual feelings. How would feeling happy look and sound like?
• Change your posture
  If you’re sitting in a meeting and you want to feel intrigued instead of bored. Try sitting up straight, lean forward and intentionally put a look of interest on your face. The person talking will notice your attention and get a new feeling towards you and you will most likely get another feeling as well.Other forms of using your body is to dance or do power poses.
• Use the ”action” of meditation
  This summer after reading You are the Placebo and Becoming Supernatural by Dr Joe Dispenza I decided to try meditation. I’ve tried a few different strategies to become more mindful but this time I found something that I feel really helps.
  Meditation requires action. You need to take back control over your minds habit of wandering, constantly bring your awareness back from wherever it slips off to. Every time you manage to bring yourself back to the now you’ve succeeded in building that habit. Mediation is teaching your brain to let go of old thought patterns.

Entry points doesn’t matter as much as direction does

David J. Schwartz said “You have to act yourself into a right way of thinking and feeling, rather than try to think and feel yourself into a right way of acting”.

I’ve come to appreciate the potential of Action as a tool for getting better results. The distinction of better results are the ones that give me a feeling of pride and daily progress. Moving upwards in the spiral is infinitely more fun than going down.

What actions do you take when you need to change the direction of your spiral?