From Stress to Success: 10 Steps to a Relaxed and Happy Life: a unique mind and body plan. Xandria Williams
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them. Further, these Limiting Beliefs are putting restrictions on your life and you are feeling stressed by them. If you weren’t stressed by them, they wouldn’t come in the Limiting category. A belief like women aren’t violent’ may be stressful if you are a woman and feel like hitting out but think you have to suppress this. But if it makes you feel safe rather than stressed, it is a useful belief to have and not limiting.
Your ultimate negative belief
Your Ultimate Negative Belief has already been referred to. It is the biggie. It is the major stumbling block on your road to a happy and stress-free life. We will discuss it further, but later. If you want to pursue it now, turn to the chapter on Affirmations. There you will learn both how to find your Ultimate Negative Belief and how to antidote it with a Positive Alternative Belief.
Conscious and subconscious
We have talked about conscious thoughts. We have also talked about and alluded to deeper thoughts, thoughts that you perhaps haven’t brought to consciousness for many long years. It’s now time to take a closer look at the conscious and the subconscious minds and to consider their similarities and, more importantly, their differences.
Your conscious mind is where you do all your rational thinking. You plan, you consider, you analyse. You make decisions and you assess their results. With your conscious mind you keep yourself in line with reality, you try to be objective. Most people like to think they are rational human beings who can think and reason logically and act accordingly.
Your subconscious mind is subjective rather than objective. It relates to you personally. It is creative and intuitive. You can think of your subconscious as an entity that has your best interests, as it sees them, at heart, that is responsive to your logical thoughts and that assists you in creating a reality that conforms to your expectations.
If you think you’re going to be late for an appointment you will have the thought going round and round in your mind, ‘I’m going to be late’. Your subconscious picks this up and interprets it, not as a fear but as a statement of fact. Since it has your best interests at heart it then does all it can to make sure that reality works out the way you expect it to be and it makes you late. It may encourage you to do just one more task before leaving home or allow your mind to focus elsewhere so you forget something and have to go back for it, or it may take your conscious mind off where you’re going so you take a wrong turning. All or any of these things can make you late and your subconscious has done its job in making sure that your conscious prediction came true.
If your conscious mind keeps repeating that you’re unpopular and no-one loves you and your friends don’t really want you then your subconscious will make sure that you focus on the events and situations that conform with this view, thus again supporting your conscious mind with its view of reality.
Your subconscious mind will also make you behave in such a way that the outcome conforms to your world view. If you think you are unpopular you are likely to withdraw in social situations and keep to yourself, thus encouraging other people to leave you alone and proving, to you at least, your unpopularity.
The subconscious has little sense of humour. It is also very literal. Be careful of such phases as ‘I’ll die if I don’t get that job’. You just might.
Little Johnnie had just learnt to walk when granny came to stay. He insisted on carrying a plate of cakes to her at teatime. All was going well until granny saw what he was doing and said, in an endeavour to make him more careful, ‘Watch it, Johnnie, you’ll fall.’ He did just that. He watched it and then, as instructed, he fell.
Spend a few days listening to all the messages you feed into your subconscious. Are they serving you? Are they positive? Do you tell yourself you are happy or sad, successful or a failure, liked or disliked, good-looking or a mess, wealthy or poor, healthy or sick? The first step is to become aware of these messages, then to analyse them and then to change them as appropriate.
If you have a spotty face but lovely glossy hair you can either gaze into the mirror and say ‘what a mess’ or ‘how pretty/handsome’. If your subconscious gets the ‘mess’ message you are likely to do a lot of things in the day that will contribute to making you more of a mess. You may slouch, spill things, be careless with things that make your clothes and hands dirty or do a number of other things to increase your look of dishevelment. If, on the other hand, your subconscious gets the ‘pretty/handsome’ message it is likely to encourage you to act more cleanly and do things in such a way that you are neater and more elegant and generally contribute to your overall feeling of looking good.
It is not simply a question of focusing on the more positive aspects of your appearance, although this is a powerful tool in decreasing the stress you might otherwise feel about it. It is also important to encourage the unconscious actions and decisions you make that contribute to the desired end result of looking good rather than the unconscious actions that make you look dowdy.
It is valuable to know that the power of this subconscious mind, which is enormous, is yours for the asking. You don’t have to plead with it, pray to it, or bully and cajole it into doing what you want. All you have to do is recognize its capacity and programme it correctly and you will get the desired result.
The limiting factor in all this is yourself. If you choose to you can use the power of your subconscious to your own advantage. Equally, if you choose, you can use the power of your subconscious to keep you where you are and encourage all the things you fear. Which course will have you less stressed? Obviously the former course is the one that will lead to less stress. It is sad that so few people choose to use it. I repeat, the limiting factor is yourself. It is up to you what you choose to do and how you choose to think.
Fear of failure
So many people behave as if it is easier to predict failure and make that come true than to predict success and bring that about. The very notion of ‘touching wood’ tells us that we’re afraid our successes will be taken away from us, we’re afraid we’ll fail. There is a common fear that if you predict that something good is going to happen you are jeopardizing the positive outcome by even mentioning it; ‘touching wood’ is, in some way, supposed to undo the harm that could be caused by making the prediction.
It seems that in our society it is thought better not to predict success or a good time for yourself than to predict it and then not get it. It is more acceptable to predict that you have failed an exam and then be bashfully grateful when you have passed than to predict success. Many have a fear that if they predict and expect something good to happen and it doesn’t, people will think much less of them than if they had predicted a poor outcome initially. The saying ‘Pride goes before a fall’ says it all. Why not be proud? Why not be positive and hopeful?
Betty told me that she was always afraid of doing badly in the exams at school even though she was a good scholar and usually came in the top third of the class. While some of her close friends, who were also in the top third, were saying the work was easy and that they felt they’d done enough study, she couldn’t admit to them, or to herself, that she had done enough or that she was confident. Her greatest fear was appearing confident and then finding the result was worse than she had anticipated.
Even at the times when she felt she did know her work well she still couldn’t leave her books alone, fearing she’d overlooked something. She’d get into last-minute panics and rush back to check on facts. She’d create in her mind exam questions that she couldn’t answer and she’d get very stressed and tense in the days leading up to the exams. Even afterwards she would focus on all the things she hadn’t included in her answer. She hated hanging around with people discussing the papers and hearing the things they had put in and that she had omitted or done differently, fearing that they were right and she was wrong. She’d then tell people she was sure she’d failed. The results, when they finally came out, were an anticlimax. Invariably she had done well.
Her mother had brought her in to see me because Betty’s major school exams were looming at the end of the following year and she was afraid that the stress would be too much for her. I pointed out to Betty that it was fine to study hard. It was