What’re you focusing on, circle 1 or 2?

What is getting all of your attention right now? Is it the stuff in your life that you don’t want, you don’t like and you’re fed up living with?

And how is that working out for you? Are you fixing things? Are they starting to get better?

Have you the feeling of a life half-lived? Never getting anything accomplished? Never achieving those goals of yours?

It costs us so much in confidence, faith and power to keep going the same way we’ve been going without ever seeing any progress.

You continue on in the same way, and as you do, you lose trust in yourself, always feeling less than you should be, losing self respect as you fail to keep your promises to yourself.

The solution is to reset your mind so you can be clear on the action to take, on the things that matter, the things that will make a real, lasting difference in your life.

I was listening to David Breslow’s interview with Kristin Howe on Manifest Everything NOW teleseminar and he did this quick exercise that made me see the futility of working on our faults, focusing on what’s wrong with us and what’s not working for us.

So here it is for you to try too:

On a black sheet of paper, draw a line horizontally across the middle, dividing the paper into two halves.

In the top half of the paper draw a large circle to fill up the space, and do the same in the bottom half, so you now have two circles, one in the top half of the page and one in the bottom half.

Into the top circle, let’s label it ‘CIRCLE 1’, I want you to write the 1-3 things that are your current biggest limitations, obstacles or fears. For example; it could be not enough money, lack of confidence, not meeting the right people, or fear of looking stupid. List in CIRCLE 1 the 1-3 things in your life that you feel are preventing you from getting what you want.

In the bottom circle, CIRCLE 2, list 3 things that you want, and be really specific. Don’t just say ‘I want more money’, say ‘I want to have £10,000 in my bank account’, or ‘I want to make £250,000 a year’, ‘I want to follow through on my fitness goals and run every other day.’

Don’t just say ‘I want more confidence’, say ‘I want more confidence in social situations and interacting with men I’d like to get to know better.’

Now, you have two circles on your page, one on top of the other. Notice that at no point do they touch, there’s no bridge between them, in fact they don’t relate to each other whatsoever. They are two separate entities.

Here’s where our logical human brains make the biggest mistake of our lives; we look at the stuff in CIRCLE 1 and we say, ‘Oh, since I lack xyz then I should try to fix that.’

And we’re off, reading books about why we lack this thing and how to find it, fix it, give ourselves whatever it is, we go to seminars, we buy online courses and training programmes, we’ll try anything to repair this missing piece.

We try to strengthen this lack and this does seem to make logical sense.

But, when we try to fix the stuff in CIRCLE 1, all we’re doing, if we achieve anything at all, is to move closer to the edge of CIRCLE 1.

Things might change a little bit, you get sporadic improvements but then you go back to the way you always were and you go off again, looking for more support, more training, different answers, and new theories to fix our stuff.

We jump from new theory and practice to newer theory and practice.

But the truth of it is, your truth stays untouched. The junk in CIRCLE 1 will never get you into CIRCLE 2.

You can spend all the time, money and energy you want in CIRCLE 1, and CIRCLE 2 will still be sitting there, still separate, waiting for you to jump into it.

Are you a prisoner of CIRCLE 1? Have you spent years on self improvement, trying to fix the junk in CIRCLE 1?

That’s never going to get you where you want, which is in CIRCLE 2.

As Albert Einstein said, “You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.”

CIRCLE 1 is your old mind, all your beliefs, perceptions, programmed attitudes, experiences, fears and doubts. This is the junk that fills up CIRCLE 1.

If you want to have something new in your life, there’s nothing in CIRCLE 1 that will help you achieve that. CIRCLE 1 doesn’t have room for new possibilities, they simply don’t exist there.

CIRCLE 2 is nothing but new opportunities and new possibilities. All the limiting junk of CIRCLE 1 doesn’t exist in CIRCLE 2; it’s just not there, so you don’t have to wade through it all.

It’s only in CIRCLE 2 that you can create new possibilities in your life.

You don’t need your old story to move forward. Stop repeating it, let it go. Stop forcing yourself to experience it over and over again. It’s gone, it’s over, release it.

Stop punishing yourself, stop suffering. How long have you been telling your sad story? How long have you been suffering?

It’s time to stop dooming yourself to repeating the experience. Pay attention to the cost of not fulfilling your dream.

Why spend your time trying to fix stuff that doesn’t work for you? As long as you’re holding onto this perceived lack, your life will never change. Stop letting it hurt you, leave it alone and jump into CIRCLE 2.

Stop it, shut up. Tell a different story. Start working on the good stuff in CIRCLE 2.

With love,

Cynthia xx

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