Why it’s So Hard to Change “Safe” Into Success
Last week, I talked about becoming an expert at change to get what you want. And part of that change involves the ecological support you’ve been conditioned with. It seems to be a thing that gets in the way of change. So why do we have it? What purpose does it serve?
source: thedailyrecord.com
Ecology Keeps Us Safe
Ecology is our life prolonging safety mechanism. Pretty important. It starts when we first attach consciousness to physical form. When that happens, this thing comes online called ‘Let’s start recording what is safe and not safe so we can keep this physical life thing going as long as possible because this is cool.’
We have to figure out what’s safe and what’s not because if we don’t do that and we’ve never seen a samurai sword, we won’t know that that thing could cut our head off.
We’ll just say, “Object coming close to me. Let me experience this,” and then determine whether that was safe and that doesn’t work because with safety it’s a one and done kind of deal. A very, very high cost of failure, so very, very low tolerance for risk.
Carl Buchheit, our NLP teacher, talks about the approved list of survival experiences.
It’s literally a recording of the kinds of things that are OK for you to experience. Anything that’s not on that list is a question mark. It could be lethal.
Where are we going to get this list of survival experiences? How are we going to assemble this list?
Ecology Begins with Our Parents
The first thing we’ll do is download our parents’ list because if they survived it, then it’s probably survivable.
The first social function that a baby has is to be able to feel the experience of their mom and dad.
Watch closely the next time you see a child that’s less than two years old hurt himself. He looks up at mom and goes, “Wow. This is a lot of sensation. What does it mean?” Mom goes, “Ahhh,” and then baby goes, “Wahhhh.”
I practiced with my son Spencer when he would hurt himself. If we freaked out, we’d direct that at the thing that he hit. “Oh my God. Is he okay?” I’m having that intensity feeling and if he ran into a chair I’d be like, “Oh my God you chair. Why did you do that? Stop that. You hurt Spencer,” and he would laugh.
Now being hurt isn’t a big deal. He fell from the monkey bars and broke his arm when he was eight. He broke the radius and the ulna clean through. His bones didn’t come out of the skin, but he had a full on extra joint.
He reset it and it fell apart. He reset it again and he’s like, “This isn’t good.” He went to the office and he said, “I broke my arm, so do whatever you need to do when that happens.” Then he fell asleep. That’s what happens when he hurts himself. Sometimes he cries. He broke his arm once before and he cried then, but he was in a lot of pain.
It’s not like crying is bad or you shouldn’t freak out when you’re in pain. That’s fine, but together Spencer and I created ecological support for the idea that sensation is okay.
source: physicalculture.com.au
How Too Much “Safe” Starts to Limit Us
Ecology is how we evolve as a species. We develop new things that are safe for us that were not safe for our parents and then we have children and they start with our list and then they do the same thing and so forth and so forth. We will progressively live in a safer and safer world, at least according to us.
You’re literally making yourself safe. And sometimes, you’re keeping yourself safe from what you want, particularly because the things we want most are the experiences that aren’t on that list.
There are experiences that are safe, and then there are those not on the list—like a good one called financial freedom, liberation, power, whatever it is…
The neocortex says, “I want to have that happen. I want to have that experience. That’s not on my list.” Then the Critter Brain checks it against the list and says, “Nope. Not safe,” and starts to create all the physiological reactions in your body associated with fight or flight.
Are you identifying a path for yourself that your Critter Brain is going to let you walk down, or is it going to pull the plug because it’s not safe? Next week we’re going to personify our Critter Brain, so we can better understand it. In the meantime, what’s on your list, and what’s not? Feel free to leave a comment!
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