2.8 How You Used Your Various Forms Of Conditioning To Create Your Current Life Path

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”

Jim Rohn
Motivational Speaker

YOUR APPROACH TO LIFE

It’s not events that shape your life or determine how you feel and act, but, rather, it’s the way you interpret and evaluate these events. That is how your conditioning has created who you currently are.

The meaning you attach to an event will determine the decisions that you make, the actions that you take, and consequently your ultimate destiny.

There are 5 definable elements that you have used (your approach that you’ve accepted after much conditioning) to create your current life path:

1. The Way You Evaluate Everything

The first element that affects the way that you now approach life is the way you evaluate everything and the mental and emotional states that you are in while you’re making an evaluation.

To make proper and superior evaluations about anything, you need to be in an extremely resourceful state of mind and emotion. Anything less will lead you to making poor evaluations.

There are four major definable modes of evaluation that we each use as part of our mental processing. These modes are:

1. evaluation through logical and rational thinking;

1. evaluation through organizing factual information through sensory input;

1. evaluation through use of your feelings and emotional states; and

1. evaluating through the use of intuitive and imaginative processes.

2. The Questions That You Ask

The second element that affects the way that you now approach life is the questions that you ask.

Questions create the initial form of your evaluation process. In response to anything that happens in your life, your mind evaluates it by asking questions: “What is happening? What does this situation mean? Does it mean pain or pleasure? What can I do to avoid, reduce, or eliminate pain or gain some pleasure?”

You end up dealing with habitual questions coming from your mind which try to evaluate each situation or circumstance to support some emotional pattern that you have become caught up in.

3. Your Chosen Hierarchy of Values

The third element that affects the way that you now approach life is your hierarchy of values.

Each of us has learned to value certain emotions more than others. We all want to feel good. But our life’s experience have allowed us to create a personal coding system that we use to determine what equals pain and what equals pleasure. These patterns grow into values and the creation of an entire value system upon which we direct our lives.

4. Your Established Beliefs

The fourth element that affects the way that you now approach life is your beliefs.

Through beliefs, we create a set of rules by which we lead our life. These rules are created through our beliefs we have about what has to happen for us to feel that our values have been met.

Our global beliefs determine our expectations and often control what we’re even willing to evaluate in the first place. The force of these beliefs determine if it is appropriate for us to experience pain or pleasure, and they are the core element of every evaluation we will ever make.

5. The Memories That Retain Your “Reference” Experiences

The fifth element that affects the way that you now approach life is the multitude of memories that retain your “reference” experiences.

In order to decide what something means to us, our mind checks our memories to find a prior experience with which to compare the new situation against. When an experience from the past is uncovered that can be utilized to compare a current situation with, a reference is made. This referencing process forms the raw material that we use to construct our beliefs and from which we make our current decisions.

How To Create Change?

Any change that you want to make in your life can be done in one of two ways:

1. You can adopt a new global belief that will help to change the way that you currently feel or the way that you are currently behaving.

2. Or, you can change your values, and through their change totally modify how you will feel or behave when faced with a particular type of circumstance or situation.

A single shift in one of the five elements listed above will powerfully affect the way that you think, feel and behave in multiple areas of your life.

If you change just one element in this list, there are certain evaluations you won’t even consider, certain questions you won’t even ask, certain beliefs you won’t even accept.

The process of creating a global change through changing your belief(s) or your value(s) can be a powerful force for shaping your destiny.

To change your destiny and to create a new life path, you need to change both your current values and beliefs.

Summary

Our values are the principles you live by. They’re the standards that you set for yourself about what is good, fair and meaningful in the world. They determine what you seek out and what you avoid, what you enjoy and what you find draining. Your values determine your actions.

Your beliefs, on the other hand, are facts that you accept to be true, often without question. They’re formed throughout your life and are influenced by the way you were raised, positive and negative events in your life, the depth and scope of your knowledge, the past results of your decisions and your imagined plan for the future.

Beliefs underlie and influence your values.

Many of us have developed limiting beliefs during childhood and over our adult lives that we’re not even aware of. Limiting beliefs are thoughts like “I’m not deserving of love” or “I’ll never be good enough,” and they don’t represent your true values. You must surface these negative thoughts and replace them with empowering ones that speak to your real values and beliefs.