I am....?

Learning to tell a new story takes time and awareness - first you have to recognise that your story has certain themes and even though nobody likes to be thought of as negative, many of us have become negative storytellers. Not only do we focus on what is wrong in our lives, but we come to believe the terrible things we say about ourselves.

I kept repeating the story of what I believed about myself - that I was bad - for many years. How would things have turned out differently if I believed in my goodness?

Let me challenge you with a thought: the story you’ve been telling all your life about yourself, your abilities, your potential, your goals and your shortcomings is a verbal expression of your creative command. Your creative command is the phrase, “I am.”

“Nothing is more powerful than “I am.” 

(I fully intend the double entendre of that quote!). Really take the time to contemplate this statement. Anytime you declare, “I am...” you are stating a command. 

Most of us don’t even know how powerful we are as creators, and so we unintentionally and unconsciously use “I am” to create negative circumstances. Think about how often you say things like, “I am bad at...”; “I am sick and tired of...”; “I hate...”; “I am sad...” You become bad. Sick and tired. You embody hate and sadness. You take on those energies and they become part of your experience because you have commanded it to be so! 

I encourage you to stop saying, “I am” with regard to something negative. Replace those statements with, “I FEEL (bad, sad, angry, upset, jealous, etc.)”. If you feel something, it’s temporary. Just an experience. You can let it go. But can you let go of something that you have become? Yes - but it’s much harder, isn’t it?

It will take time, awareness and a lot of discipline to start telling a new story based on “I am (something positive - happy, powerful, a creator, good, worthy, etc.).” These are the emotions and energies you want to embody so say them often. Let them become what you identify with.

You may be wondering just how a simple command like that can have such far-reaching consequences. If you come to believe these statements, they become ingrained in your subconscious mind. They become automatic thought processes. They automatically create certain emotional states, and those emotions dictate what you say and do. Of course what you say and do - the choices you make - all have results. If you’re not getting the results you want, it’s because you have been telling yourself a self-defeating story!

This is not always easy to accept, but I encourage you to think back to all of the major decisions you have made in the past, and what their consequences were both short-term and long-term. For example, if you decided on a particular university education and went down a certain career path, your life would be vastly different than if you had made a choice to study something entirely different. 

Your dominant thought patterns (your self-story) drive your life experience. You can start telling a new story anytime you want, and you will gradually start believing and embodying that new story. Be patient - it takes time. Be persistent - it takes consistency.

I encourage you to realise that you are the only one who has created the experience you are having. You could argue that you were forced to feel a certain way by the things people did to you... but that is giving up your personal power. Read on!

What is an experience? An experience is raw data (the thing that happens) plus your interpretation of it and your emotional response to it. You can’t always change the raw data but you have full control over your emotional response. This has been proven, in Auschwitz survivors who somehow maintained a positive and cheerful demeanor even in the face of brutality and indescribable atrocities. They were not in denial - their accounts portray every detail with horrible accuracy - but they chose their emotional response. They chose to see the good in people; to see the miracle that is life; to believe and to hope. These were ordinary people cast into extraordinary circumstances... just like you, navigating life as best they can. Think about your life. Your choices. Your decisions on how to feel.

I could have argued that I could have been made to feel ‘bad’ by my father’s actions to me - and I would be right - only because I agreed to feel that way. I agreed with what he and other family members did and said, and on some level came to believe in myself as ‘bad’.

But that was a choice.