The Glass Ceiling – A Bedtime Story
We all throw that term around a lot, “The Glass Ceiling” That invisible force we think is holding us back. We usually use it in reference to our career and income, but the glass ceiling applies to our finances, friendships, abilities, even our love lives. (We all know the woe is me “I’m always alone why does everyone suck?!” type… maybe that’s you. That’s a glass ceiling too.)
Here’s the bad news: your glass ceilings are all in your mind.
Here’s the good news: your glass ceilings are all in your mind!
And you control your mind. Or at least you can, when you learn to.
It’s not your fault they’re there. They were put there when you were growing up.
When each of us arrived on the earthly scene we were blank slates, full of potential and such courage it was actually dangerous. And we were mental sponges: our subconscious was absorbing every piece of information around us. These inputs are a survival tool. We learned to walk and talk, what to swallow or not swallow. We learned not to jump out of windows or run into traffic. At first, we were encouraged to take risks: we learned to walk because we had that kid bravery and our parents were rooting for us to get back up when we fell.
But then the messages shifted. Almost without exception, we began to receive direction to “play it safe” and to avoid risk or take only supposedly “calculated” ones. These messages reprogrammed our minds and replaced courage with fear.
Your subconscious mind is an incredibly powerful thing. Here are some facts about it:
- It’s twice as powerful as your “conscious mind.”
- It never rests.
- It’s constantly absorbing information.
- It knows no difference between right and wrong, fact or fiction; it believes everything it’s told.
- It completely controls your habitual tendencies.
- It is your glass ceiling.
Your subconscious mind is like your iPhone’s Operating System. You can try to make your phone do something all you want, but if the OS isn’t programmed to allow it, its not gonna happen. There is a way around it, of course: hack in and re-program the OS.
Need some obvious proof this little list is true?
Ever tried to walk to the very edge of a skyscraper? As you try to inch forward, moving seems nearly impossible. Your legs are like lead weights sitting in globs of wet concrete. Your entire body seems to ignore your demand to move to the edge. Your subconscious has overtaken you. When you were a kid you might have rolled right off that edge, but your conscious mind – by taking in information that falling off buildings is bad – fed your subconscious that info and, of course, your subconscious took it as truth because it believes everything.
More proof?
Ever see someone get hypnotized? Hypnotism removes the filter of the conscious mind and puts your sub-conscious directly in the driver’s seat. Remember, it has no ability to discern fact from fiction. It was designed to have a filter and when you turn that filter off, wild stuff happens.
A good hypnotist can make someone truly believe they’re a dog, that they’re freezing when it’s 100 degrees out, that they’ve been mortally injured, or make them recount, in detail, memories their conscious mind doesn’t even know about.
Your conscious mind could never truly make you believe you were a dog. Sure, you could pretend you're a dog, but actually believe it? Nope. Your conscious mind just doesn’t have that level of power and, of course, it has the ability to reason and knows damn well that you are not a dog. The subconscious is a massive storehouse of information and has no ability to discern true from false. It also fully controls the limits of your potential, because that’s what it’s there to do.
It’s your glass ceiling. It was designed to be your safety net. Your subconscious will stop you from drastic upward motion in your life the same way it stops you from walking to the edge of a building. You were taught that building edges and going for big goals are risky. One is true, the other is false. But your subconscious knows no difference. It’s just following orders, just like when it loses its reasoning partner and hears “you are a dog” and makes you to get down on all fours, bark, and maybe poop on the floor.
It’s also why diets don’t usually work long-term. People make resolutions and then, at some point, back to their old habits they go. It doesn’t work because the subconscious is also what causes your habitual (i.e. uncontrollable) actions. You can know better and still do the very thing you know you shouldn’t do because it’s habitual. It lies in the subconscious and making a decision to diet isn’t enough to reprogram the paradigm / habitual actions.
If you want to get un-stuck, you need to reprogram your paradigms and destroy the glass ceilings. The wonderful news is that you control your thoughts, and it’s your thoughts that feed the information your subconscious will always accept. There is an infinite treasure of potential inside you. From this storehouse, you can extract everything you need to live life joyously and abundantly. But, just like learning them took input from others, un-learning does too. This is why most of those great self-help books we spend billions of dollars a year on also recommend we hire a coach.
What is required to destroy those glass ceilings is a time-tested method and a knowledgeable and inspiring coach to give you the momentum you’ll need. Picture it as your own real-life Willy Wonka, sending you fearlessly up towards the glass ceiling while you secretly pee your pants a little. Without Mr. Wonka, Charlie stays in the crooked little house eating cabbage forever (not to mention poor old Aunt Josephine). The proof is in the sales volume of self-help books versus the actual number of people living joyous and abundant lives.
I’m so excited to be working alongside Brian Dalmaso and the Matrix Success Network doing just that, using a program based on over 100 years of research and with over 40 years of results.
I will continue to post about this, because I’m excited to be sharing this little gift I’ve discovered within me: the gift of knowing precisely how to help people dismantle the glass ceilings in their lives.
There’s still time to tune in, level up, and start living your one and only life. Today is the best day to make that decision. Click the link below to schedule an intro coaching/strategy call. Just click it, like, right now.