“There is nothing anyone can say that is going to make you do the things that you know you should be doing,” Bishoi Khella.  We need to determine what that “should” is.  I watched a fascinating live the other day where one of the coaches asked the question about what we think the problem is with ourselves.  She didn’t want the circumstance, she wanted the participants to actively say what was wrong.  So she didn’t want to hear, “I tell myself x,y,z,” she wanted to hear, “I’m too afraid to move forward on this because I don’t think I can.”  Her responses were totally unorthodox and not something I’ve experienced with a coach.  When she heard the perceived issue she would reply with, “Then you can’t do it.  You’re a loser who can’t do it.”  I bristled for the first 5 minutes of this thing because it sounded horrific and I knew that if I were paying for something like that I’d be pissed.  I think there were several people thinking along the same way because she wasn’t getting the questions as she wanted them, and she eventually clarified: “This is what you’re telling yourself.  I’m just mirroring what you say to yourself.”  And then the concept of the mirror shifted for me.

We can’t sit there telling ourselves that we can’t figure it out and expect the universe to deliver the answers wrapped in a neat little package for us.  Mind work is tough and requires focus and patience and clarity and dedication.  It means cutting out all of the extraneous junk and really getting down to the core of it and keeping disciplined enough to stay on track.  No one outside of ourselves is going to be able to tell us what to do and how to do it.  We have to decide what to do, we have to decide to change the stories, we have to decide we want to feel differently and actually do something about it.  If we tell ourselves we can’t do it, the universe is going to show us that we can’t do it in spite of what anyone else says—in fact it will probably put people who tell us we can’t do it in our paths.  We can’t rely on people to tell us what we should be doing if there is something that calls to us alone. We have to want it enough to actually follow through.  We have to want to redefine who we are and where we are going and then actually do it.  Even a pep talk from someone else won’t help because it is only fulfilling a temporary need.  We must be able to carry the torch ourselves and do what we need to do to change that story.  We have the answers, we just need to sit long enough to hear them and then be brave enough to follow through on them.