Examine your External Environment

Have you ever noticed how there are some places you go to or people that you visit that seem to leave you uptight and full of stress after you go away?

Certain people and workplaces seem to exude a thick, heavy feeling of dread and weariness. If you buy into it you come out of there feeling wrung out and stressed.

I have a few places that are like that and when I leave I have to shake it off or I will fall into the negative self-talk and “woe is me” mentality that I have been exposed to.

Let me give you an example.

One of the workplaces I attend is a public service institution.

The people there are generally well paid have tenure and guaranteed, protected superannuation payouts. Wow, I hear you say what a great place to work. Well, yes and no.

The clientele are at times difficult and rude and can even be violent. The bosses live in ivory towers and are often well out of touch with the workforce and the day to day challenges they face. They make decisions without a great deal of consultation and often repeat the same mistakes from the past. However, anyone who has been in the system for a while learns what really counts and what is just a fad for the moment and can be ignored.

Two Responses to the Stress

Now when I go to work here I meet two types of people. The first group love their job and give it 110% and have a great time. The second group do what they have to complain a lot about this and that and the other and tell me I am lucky to be out of it and doing only one day a week. I tell them they should leave and start their own business. They would leave but they need the money and they have 5 years until they retire etc etc.

The environment that theses two groups are working in is the same, physically anyway. Yet we have two responses to the situation!

So now you can see that my heading “Examine your external environment” was not on the money.

Is It Really the External Environment We have to Watch

Here we have the same external environment and yet two totally different responses.

What is going on here?

I tell you it’s the internal environment that is the big concern here. It’s the internal talk and what you allow to stay with you after talking or working with someone that really impacts your mental state. When you walk away from a place - you don’t take it with you - so why does it still have an impact on you?

Easy you have allowed it or the situation there to change you internally and now you have fallen into the old grooves of negative talk or feeling from the past.

The only way to stop this happening is to change those internal pathways so that no matter what happens outside, your mind will follow new paths that reject the external proposition.

In Dean’s book he puts it like this,

…your conscious mind has a job. Its job is to tell the subconscious mind what to do. Your subconscious mind also has a job, and its job is to do what the conscious mind instructs it to do, regardless of whether the instruction comes from the conscious responses to external stimulus, or to thought processed by the imagination.

Your subconscious stores all your associations such as memories, beliefs and habits (which are 10000 times more powerful than desire). It uses these to match information from the outside world. It ignores any information that does not match.

It Ignores Any Information that Does Not Match

So to stop those stressful places having an impact on you requires changing your mind inside. It’s clear you won’t always be able to change the environment you find yourself in but you are responsible for the internal one!

This has been my experience now for the last few years. Since taking up Yoga and meditation techniques especially, I have found that I can leave the filtering out of the negative talk to my subconscious. It knows that most of the things I am hearing or experiencing in these places are wrong and not matched by my own experiences.

This training of the sub-conscious requires a conscious decision on your part and a commitment to change. It is not hard to do it just requires action. Just start small by getting good information and learn how your mind works so you can work with it and not against it.

Remember your subconscious believes it is protecting you from harm by filtering the hundreds of bits of information you are exposed to every second. Let it do its job but teach it what you want filtered out and allowed in!

Reprogramming The Mind For Success is a great starting point. The name says it all!

After 5 years of Yoga training and meditation instruction I highly recommend Deans book.

Until Next time

This is the Greenfalcon

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