What Are Relationships?
WHAT ARE RELATIONSHIPS?
Humans are often very confused about how relationships work. We’re under the impression that we have to control the world (and everyone in it) to feel good. I have never met a human who didn’t want to control other humans. We have so many rules for our relationships that we’ve stopped experiencing them and are locked into our expectations of how these relationships should be.
Relationships are thoughts.
You are never in a relationship with a person or a thing, you are only ever in a relationship with your thoughts about a person or a thing.
Your relationship with anyone, including the one that they have with yourself, and the relationship they have with other people, your past, and your money are dependent on the thoughts you choose to think.
YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOURSELF
Having an amazing relationship with yourself is simply a commitment to thinking awesome thoughts about yourself. I am fully aware and acknowledge that it sounds easy and is very hard for most people. The reason is because our brains are designed to look for the bad and to judge. The brain is a problem-solving machine. When we turn our brains on ourselves, our brain find problems that don’t exist! We spend so much brain energy judging ourselves that we often have very little energy left to love ourselves on purpose.
I want you to start thinking about yourself as two people, or ‘roles’. There is your true self, the fullest version of you, the best version of you, your Alpha State – this is “the boss”. Then, there is the brain, the thoughts and beliefs systems, the programs, the conditioning, the Beta Condition – this is “the employee, or technician”. As the boss, you are responsible for the vision of your ‘business’ (life) and the overall success or failure of the ‘company’ long term. You also know that the value and success of your business depends solely on your employees, or technicians.
As the boss, you employ the technician. As the technician, you are responsible for the technical side of their business (which is operating the thoughts that create the desired result for the boss, or company). This is what your brain does; it thinks thoughts.
When you don’t have a relationships with yourself, it’s like the employees are all running around the company screaming, “WHAT DO WE DO, WHAT DO WE DO?!” and there is no boss to give them direction. Technicians don’t have vision, they just operate the last program they were given – which for most of us came from childhood and all the lessons we learned from our parents and teachers and adults around us. Without a boss running the company, we are all child employees running around being unproductive and, sometime, sabotaging the company unintentionally.
I want you to step into the roll of the boss – your Alpha State. What expectations do you have for your technician (“the employee”)?
ASK YOURSELF:
? What are some thoughts you think about yourself as the boss?
? What kind of relationship are these thoughts creating?
? What is the impact of these thoughts on your relationship with others and with your past?
? What are the expectations and job description of the boss in your ‘business’ from the perspective of the technician?
? What are the roles, expectations, and job description of the technician in your ‘business’ from the perspective of the boss?
INHERENT & IMMUTABLE VALUE
I want to do a thought experiment with you.
Imagine a $100 note. What gives this note value? What makes it worth $100? I mean, it’s just a piece of paper with ink on it, right? What makes it valuable? YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT IT!
A $20 note has the same volume and mass, perhaps even the same amount of ink. The difference is the way we think about them compared to the $100 notes. True, the $20 note has a 20 on it and the $100 note has 100 on it, as well as the faces of different presidents. But the truth is, the only real difference between the $20 note and the $100 note IS THE WAY YOU (AND WE AS A SOCIETY) THINK ABOUT THEM!
What about the difference between $100 note and a nugget of gold or a small diamond? Based on the ‘exchange rate’ (which are also just agreed upon thoughts), let’s assume that the gold nugget is ‘worth’ $100 and the small diamond is ‘worth’ $100. Which one is more valuable? Do they all have equal value? One is a piece of paper, one is a metal, one is a rock. What’s the difference? THEY WAY YOU THINK ABOUT THEM!
We are still on the thought experiment – stay with me.
Let’s say you have two $100 notes. Which one do you want? Does it matter? Ok, what if I took one of them and crumpled it up in my hand so it got all wrinkled and maybe a little torn. Does this diminish it’s value? Would you not take it if I offered it to you? Could you not use it to exchange for an item that costs $100? Ok, what if I rubbed it in mud, buried it in the ground, froze it in a brick of ice, ran over it with a car, and left it out in the rain? Does this diminish it’s value? Would you not take it if I offered it to you? Could you not use it to exchange for an item that costs $100? Of course not! Why? Because it doesn’t change THE WAY YOU (AND WE AS A SOCIETY) THINK ABOUT THEM!
Here’s the deal, you get to think about yourself ANY WAY YOU WANT and nothing that happens to you can EVER CHANGE THOSE THOUGHTS.
You have have inherent value (which means you have a permanent and inseparable value as a human) and this value is immutable (which means it’s unchangeable). No matter what happens during the course of your life, there is nothing that can change your inherent value. Just like the $100 note that gets rubbed in the mud and driven over by the car. The inherent value of the note is unchangeable, no matter what happens during the course of it’s existence.
YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR PAST
The relationship you have with your past is just like any other relationship you have in life. It is the relationship you have with your thoughts about your past. Nothing that happened in the past is affecting you RIGHT NOW. What is affecting you RIGHT NOW is the way you’re thinking about your past RIGHT NOW.
There are no old thoughts. What you choose to think about in the moment is what creates the feelings in the moment. It is not your past that is creating how you feel RIGHT NOW, or what you were thinking at that time in the past that is creating how you feel RIGHT NOW. It is what your thinking RIGHT NOW that is creating how you feel RIGHT NOW.
Have I said ‘RIGHT NOW’ enough yet?
Look, your past no longer exists. It is as extinct as the dinosaurs. In some ways, it never existed, like the unicorn. The only place your past remains is in your memory – in YOUR brain for YOU TO CHOOSE how you want to think about it.
Do you want to choose thought that build you strong or break you down?
Imagine your past as a person.
How do you speak about your past? What do you expect your past to have been like? What is your manual for your past?
Love grows as you accept your past as it is, allow it to have a balance of highs and lows, and believe in its perfection for bringing you to this moment – the present. This is what we want to do for ourselves, for other people, and for our future. Love unconditionally just because it feels good to love. The more you love your past and yourself, the more you will succeed.
ASK YOURSELF:
? How do you think your past should be different?
? What are the conditions you have placed on loving your past?
? What would be different if you loved your past unconditionally?
? What would you be thinking, feeling, and doing differently?
? What is your past trying to tell you?
? What is the thought that you currently have about your past that is most holding you back?
? What new thought are you going to practice about your past from now on?
WORKSHEETS
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