Taught to Win - Conditioned to Fail

Pressured by parents, teachers and peers to succeed from day one and god help you if you don’t.

Our conditioning is a negative suggestion from day dot.

If you want someone to think about something, tell them not to think about it.

“Hey! Don’t touch that!” The subconscious mind quickly removes the word “don’t”.

Our conditioning is one big negative suggestion. We are programmed by parents, teachers and peers not to fail, and because of it we fail.

We can’t stop thinking about what we don’t want to happen, because all they did was fill us with the consequences of what will happen if we dont.

If you fail this, that will happen, so make sure you work hard and don’t fail. The subconscious mind just hears “fail”, it zeros in on it and the hard work you are doing to not fail is so fractured by the fear of failure that often we fail, but worse than that, we fail and lose the learning in it.

It’s a no win situation, because we need to fail and be aware enough to learn from that failure.

Failure is fertiliser.

Should, shouldn’t, must, must not, do, don’t, the corridors of learning are too narrow for success.

So it sets up the fear of losing but also the fear of winning. I feel like the fear of winning is the stronger of the two.

Our fear of losing in front of others harbours the deeper fear of winning, being seen by all and sundry to come out from behind the excuses and the crutches, to be seen in total vulnerability, and try to win, while risking failure, with your childhood conditioning ringing in your ears telling you all the fearful stories of what will happen should you fail.

No wonder we fear winning so much!

What is the missing information? What did we need to learn then that we didn’t receive, what do we need to learn now?

We don’t need anything, we simply need to understand what we are, not who we are.

What are you? Feel into that before you tell me about your job, your kids, your spouse, what you have and haven’t done. All of that is experience, it has absolutely nothing to do with what you are.

What are you?

You are Awareness!

Awareness is the primary source of your definition. Don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself. Shut your mind up for a second and sit there and pay attention to “what is the source of you?”

What will you find if you pay enough attention?

Within awareness is consciousness, and within consciousness is mind.

We have been taught to put the mind first, but as we know the mind adds and subtracts whatever it likes, operates mostly in past and future horrors.

Awareness is a state of expansion, fear is a state of contraction. Why do we infect our children and each other with so much fear?

Our fear of failure brought to us courtesy of parents and education separates us from the one thing they intended us to do, “learn”! This is the unconscious power of negative suggestion.

When we talk of mental toughness, to me that means we see around the limitation and fear based contraction of a conditioned mind, and start to realise we are much more than that, and if I am more than that, and the mind is seen, then I get to choose whether I listen to all it’s bullshit or not.

Bingo, now we are talking about mental toughness.

Now we really are talking about increasing the chances of winning.

If we are going to condition ourselves to win then we need to learn how not to listen to all the negative suggestions we have picked up along the way. Otherwise we have a mind that is at war with itself. Mind will never win out against mind.

If I got you to write down just one days worth of thought based content, you would see first hand just how repetitive, unoriginal, fearful and contracted mind and thought really is.

You, the real you, however, cannot be contracted, cannot be corralled, you are far too expanded too be held in the narrow corridors of a mind, and intuitively I think most people somehow know this.

Stop kneeling at the false alter of the mind, we are not victims of the mind, we put ourselves in that place without realising we have a choice.

If you want to know what mental toughness is, go beyond it.

If life is boring and repetitive, it’s that way because we are listening to the dialogue of a monotonous dictator who is a conditioned structure. The intelligence of that structure is a lot more limited than we realise because much of it is not even ours, it’s the cautious voice of others.

Don’t go looking for your potential in your noggin, you won’t find it.

Awareness is primary, let the mind babble as it does, just don’t pay it so much attention.