Reinventing yourself out of overprotection

What does reinvention mean?

Everything is environment. Your mind, your body and your surroundings are all environment. When you are automatically interpreting the environment of yourself and your surroundings with a set of learned assumptions, you are experiencing a version of reality that appears as the only reality thanks to those learned assumptions.

Those assumptions contribute to a series of labels, designed to help us form an identity and through that identity we can identify what to belong to … and what to separate from. What to belong to is meant to keep us safe and what to separate from is meant to be a threat to our well being. Hence why race, religion, culture and gender can create division. Racism and sexism thrive when we are conditioned to subscribe unconditionally to assumption that our identity is based on a colour of skin, personality traits, where we are born or how we make sense of the unseen forces that created this existence.

Please watch this great video so you can expand your sense of self and increase the perspective on what labels are doing in our life.

Reinvention happens when you change any one of your assumptions; like you are inferior, weak or unworthy because of the colour of your skin or gender. Each time you remove an assumption based on a mistruth and replace it with one aligned with your wisdom and the truth of your mental and biological capability, you have in effect, reinvented yourself. This is profound because it changes the way you think, feel and act across virtually all areas of your life. Your reality changes and hence what you experiences changes. Changing just one assumption filters how you look at almost everything in your life.

For example, say you doubt you can handle confronting people who are disrespecting you. That filter will control your emotions, thoughts and actions. You will assume that if you confront you will be attacked. This makes you feel anxious and compels you to avoid confronting at all costs. Anxiety through this filter is justified because you are convinced you need to protect yourself from all threatening situations. So the ‘confronting is dangerous’ filter will affect how you relate to all if not most of your relationships with family, friends and colleagues and beyond.

What if that assumption was blatantly wrong and limiting your success in relationships? What if you can confront without creating conflict? Here is a video I created that shows how to confront in an empowering way.

As you can see, when you remove a filter that forces you to assume that confronting is dangerous and to be avoided at all times, you begin to act in a way that creates desirable results. This is a profound reinvention stemming from the removal of just one assumption!

Many of these assumption filters interfere with our sense of worth and capability. When we have hurtful experiences, we can tend to form assumptions that life is more threatening and dangerous than we previously anticipated and protecting ourselves becomes a higher priority. ‘People can’t be trusted’, ‘love hurts,’ ‘I am jinxed’ and hundreds of filters like this manipulate the environment we see and experience. These filters create an unbalanced and unhealthy skew towards overprotection that often creates a ‘me versus the world’ mentality.

The brain through traumatic events can cause us to draw conclusions that anything that remotely looks like the environment that existed around that trauma needs to serve as a warning that the event will repeat. So we form assumptions with intense emotion that translates into habits. As this trauma rewires our brain to protect us, we end up trapped through our perception and behaviour, caught in overprotection mode without realising the consequences. Overprotective thinking and decision making compounds into being overly defensive, distant and avoiding all risks, not matter how calculated they are. When we are in the habit of avoiding our environment, this isolation stagnates our growth. The ability to live a purposeful live filled with meaningful connections and adventure is taken away from us.

Eventually through stagnation, we experience boredom. Not consciously knowing how we got there, we feel lost and disillusioned. That means, without being conscious, we are only aware of the options that are ultra safe and the ideas that would excite us are held outside the blinkered range. This means the imagination is not being ignited so it can serve the heart because the brain is wired to believe that entertaining new ideas is a liability; hence the imagination is shut down, depriving our ability to re-imagine a world that can excite, expand and fulfil us.

In this highly stressed state, you are imagining the world as mainly jungle; an uninspiring adventure-starved playground. The focus here should be on deconstructing the ideas that formed this way of imagining your environment; yourself as unworthy and incapable and your surroundings as being scarce on resources and cruel. By deconstructing the way you are imagining, you can expose and assess the assumptions that were formed during those traumatic events. Your wisdom from there can be clarified and the contrast between the self sabotage and the empowering state becomes clear. This gives reason and motivation to move out of that stagnant state and into the one that delivers the balance that restores adventure.

This shift into a different state of mind is a reinvention that nature does constantly, known as adaptation. A caterpillar reinvents itself into a flying creature; a butterfly. Look at what nature shows we are designed and meant to do.

To dedicate yourself to a personal development journey of ongoing reinvention out of traumatic conditioning, here are things you can focus on: –

1. Read self help books

2. Surround yourself with like minded people who value personal development

3. Commit to learning and to meditating daily

4. Spend quality time in nature every week

5. List the rules you have been living your life by and compare them to a list that resonates more with your wisdom

6. Create opportunities for creative play

7. See a life or EP7 personal development coach / practitioner who is trained to help you reinvent yourself.

8. Attend personal development seminars, webinars, courses, workshops.

What have you done that has helped you on the path of learning how to reinvent yourself? What recent reinventions have empowered your purpose?

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