MINDSET
COACHING:
MOBILITY FOR THE MIND
Challenging what you think you know to be true can be pretty uncomfortable,
but it’s essential if you are to become a better version of yourself.
WORDS: GREG SELLAR
n fitness, we talk about having mobility – being able to
move our joints and body through different ranges of
motion to suit everyday activity. If you concentrate too
much on one aspect of fitness, like developing strength or endurance,
typically you’ll limit the mobility you have around a joint, meaning
you’ll be able to move less freely and the muscles become less
responsive. It’s the same in your mind – if you repeatedly reinforce
unhelpful thinking, you strengthen the brain’s neural pathways,
making it harder to change.
We tell ourselves the same inaccurate stories over and over
again because they’re easier to digest and keep us comfortable
in the status quo. After about 66 days on average of forming new
habits, you begin to entrench behaviours, limiting beliefs and
mental roadblocks that fester to the point where we grind to a halt.
Sound familiar?
The stories act as excuses to not do anything differently than we
have in the past. Common phrases such as ‘oh yeah, that doesn’t
work for me’, or ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ are examples of being
in denial that change needs to take place. It’s hard to clear out old
thinking to gain mobility because most of those thoughts have been
entrenched since around age six, when the neural pathways in the
brain reach full development.
Nobody wants to hear the truth: we’re scared we’ll find out we were
wrong all along, so we hold onto our unhelpful thoughts for dear life.
Do you ever reach that point during an argument with someone where
you realise that you’re wrong – you’ve lost, yet you’ll keep fighting just
to save face? That’s what happens when we lose mind mobility; it
stops us from being better versions of ourselves because challenging
what we think we know to be true can be pretty uncomfortable. We
have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
We have thoughts running through our heads all the time
in a subterranean insanity that gets out of control when the
things we’re saying aren’t helpful. Every one of us will process
approximately 60,000 thoughts by the end of the day, and of those,
45,000 are negative. That means, 45,000 times a day, we’re
telling ourselves ‘no’, ‘can’t’ or ‘won’t’. It’s subconscious,
unintentional, and an incredible amount of time we spend
listening to that little Devil with Tourette’s that sits on our
shoulder.
One of the biggest problems is that we spend a huge
amount of time beating ourselves up and saying the most
I
54 | NETWORK SUMMER 2016