🔑🌈 How to Stop Your Mind from Negotiating Away Your Dreams and Start Achieving Them! 💡✨

You can't out-negotiate your mind when it wants to keep you where you are in life. This edition is written with that haunting premise in mind and with an understanding that you don't have to force forward action. Your mental, physical, emotional, financial, professional and overall life well-being is dependent on your ability to grow and evolve.

I believe that experiencing life will naturally lead to evolution, but learning and acting on lessons that contribute to your growth in any area of your life can be difficult when you feel lost in thoughts of unworthiness and change. These thoughts manifest themselves in your mind, either commanding action or preventing it, and providing compelling reasons for doing so.

If this sounds like you, and you want to make changes in this area, keep reading and pick up some valuable tools to begin your journey to stop negotiating and start doing.

I intentionally use my mind to mindfully decide before it unintentionally negotiates. This leads to taking more action that gets me closer to my goals and aligns with my well-being.

The key is that the results don't stop my mind from having those thoughts, but the response and subsequent action are very different from what it used to be.

When you read advice on this, the most common tip is "Just stop negotiating." Thinking back to when I started working on this skill, "just stop" meant very little in terms of what that meant from an execution standpoint.

If you are just starting out, how do you build the skill so that you can stop negotiating?

Here are some first building blocks and lessons I have learned to move from struggle to empowerment.

Before we get to the skills, let's take a step back and look at the why. The why here is important to gain awareness when you are doing the how and the what.

Negotiating with your mind can come in many forms.

It can look like procrastination, justification, self-care, acting on feeling, etc. When you wake up and want to hit the snooze button, that small conversation when you are half awake is your mind negotiating.

When you want to go to the gym, get out of the house to do X, or even finish a personal or professional project, that voice that begins to speak to you about why you should put it off or not do it at that moment because of X, Y, Z is what I'm referring to.

The why is simple. Your mind likes the comfort of the familiar. Change is uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and requires you to take different action than what you are doing at that moment. If your mind perceives that this moment is good, then it will attempt to save you from a fate worse than death (aka do its duty) by telling you all the reasons or just commanding that you continue doing X and not do Y. Sometimes you are half awake, other times you may be hungry, and other times you may just be. Whatever the environment, the biggest challenge is that fight between that negotiation and your desire to do the action, especially if it is for a longer-term goal or vision.

So what is the first step? First let’s begin with the foundation:

Change your conditioned response.

But how do you do that?

I anticipate the pattern before I'm in the pattern and create a pre-emptive solution.

• Think about something that you need to do.

• Think about actions that you take around that time you need to do X.

• Integrate that action you already do and use that to set up your environment to accomplish Y.

For example, I wanted to have a better skincare routine before I went to bed and floss my teeth more at night. I struggled for months, always failing. I knew that as I watched TV before bed, the voices started, and generally, they would lead to no action. But I also knew that I went to the bathroom before I went to bed. It was a habit. So, when I went to the bathroom, I would take out everything I needed and put it on the countertop, then I would go to the bathroom. All the stuff on the counter would compel action because it was right in front of my face.

My mind can negotiate all it wants with me, but I set myself up to accomplish a different routine by blending it into an existing one. It's done, and then I can move on.

Next,

I intentionally use my mind to create a trigger and a stronger affirmation when I'm in control of my thoughts and activate this when my mind wants to negotiate.

Now this might take practice (as all good things do) but like any skill, once learned can become extremely powerful.

The trigger is a switch that prompts new thoughts. The trigger can be as simple as counting down from 5 to 1 (thanks to Mel Robbins and the 5-second rule). It can also look like an affirmation or even a “What if” statement. The key is that you will come up with this BEFORE and not during the time you need it.

This happened to me just yesterday. I'm learning a new skill with my writing and journaling for my mental health. Deep down I was looking for some type of outward recognition to show that it was well received. When I didn't get it, my brain began to negotiate taking a break from the writing. That it wasn't working.

So I asked myself two questions. Why does outward recognition matter now? What if it didn't need to matter for me to get stronger in the skill?

Those two questions then resulted in more "what if" and "why" questions with the final conclusion that at this time, the goal is to build. Building requires consistent action to gain the power from the skill. None of that requires a single "like" from anyone else (unless it's from the mentor who taught me the skill). So there is no need to stop.

Negotiation ended.

Your mental well-being allows you to find peace in so many other areas of your life. The negotiation of your mind to take you further from your long-term visions of your authentic well-being in whatever area of your life is a disservice to you. Start small and use one or both of these tips to begin or use this as inspiration to create tools that work for you.

Whatever decision you choose.

Just start… NOW.