Connor Beaton argues that people trying to change are often blocked by incessant questioning and analysis paralysis. He explains (with a neuroscience reference) that the brain resists change because it predicts from past patterns, and recommends "counter-striking" the questioning by trusting intuition and taking at least one action per day (a "no zero day").
Chapters
I think a lot of people, I've noticed, are feeling a lot of pressure around 2020. There seems to be something different about entering into a new decade. And so there's a lot of people that seem to have a lot of pressure on them to create change.
So I wanted to just talk briefly around what allows change to be possible and a little bit around what gets in the way. The first thing that I've noticed that gets in the way is questioning. All right, most of us have some form of paralysis on taking action in our life because we are crippled by the constant and incessant questioning that we have about how things will work out, how things will unfold, what people will think of us, what the experience is going to be like, what the outcome is going to be. And we become absolutely obsessed, obsessed with trying to predict what's going to happen based on the actions that we take. And this does not allow change to really flow freely. What this does is it corners us into a space. Usually this is coming from a place of fear, right? I did an interview with a guy named Bolotto years ago who talked about the neuroscience of change. And the biggest thing that his research pulled out was that our brains are hardwired not to change legitimately. They for our minds, because they are pattern recognition machines. What they are built to do is gather data and evidence through our senses and then try and predict, based on the past and based on our past experiences, what's going to happen in the future. But it's an impossible feat, right? It's like it's almost an impossible thing to do, especially when we're trying to break free from unhealthy habits, especially when we're trying to break free from relationships that haven't served us or how we've shown up in relationships in the past. It's very challenging to predict what the future will look like when it's different from how we have acted or the actions that we have produced in the past. Very, very challenging. Now, the reason why this is so important is because our brains are trying to predict the future to keep us safe, right? That's our brain's main goal. And if the brain can't predict what's going to happen on the other side of a conversation, on the other side of a choice or a decision or an action, it will create an immense amount of resistance that will. Essentially, its main goal is to try and keep us from taking that action or having that conversation, because it can't predict how someone's going to respond, because it can't predict how things are going to work out. So simply because the brain doesn't know, it will create resistance. Now, this is the rational mind, okay? And many of the men that I've worked with over the years, it's not that they're broken. It's not that they have something terribly wrong with them. It's that. And this goes for women as well. It's simply that their past has created an addiction to questioning. It's created an addiction to questioning so that anytime that their intuition pops up and says, hey, I feel very aligned with taking this action. I feel very called congruent, whatever verb or word you want to use. I feel very aligned with taking this action, with being in this relationship, with having this conversation, with taking this action. The addiction of questioning will pop up and kind of talk us out of it. So how do we deal with this? How do we start to really create change in our life? Well, the first thing is we have to let go of the attempt to end the questioning, okay? The questioning is always going to be there. Regardless of how enlightened you are, regardless of how successful you are, the questioning will be there. So we need to let go of trying to push the questioning out. The questioning is a part of the shadow. What we do need to do is we need to create, we need to counter strike the questioning, okay? We need to counter strike the questioning. So what this means is that if the intuition pops up and says, hey, I want to move in this direction, I want to take this action, I want to have this conversation, I want to make this decision. We let go of how, how the outcome might look, what people might think, and we allow the questioning to happen. We allow the inner critic to chirp. We allow the victim to be present and we notice it and we're aware of it, and we take action anyways. And in this way, we are counterstriking the question. We are rewiring our brain to trust the intuition more than the rational questioning. As we do this more and more and more, what will eventually happen is it will produce a result where we start to trust our intuition more than we trust our rational mind. The majority of us as men have been conditioned and programmed to trust our rational mind above our intuition over and over and over again. And this leads to mental masturbation. This leads to. This leads to the constant questioning, the ruminating, the analysis, paralysis. Because we have been told the rational mind is the be all, end all. I think I said this quote before, but Einstein said the rational mind is a faithful servant. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. We have created a culture that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. That's what he's talking about. Einstein was literally talking about, if you follow the rational mind, it will lead you astray because we can rationalize the craziest crap. If you think about the really detrimental situations that you've gotten yourself in in your life, whether it was infidelity in a relationship or a job that you absolutely hated, a friendship that wasn't working out, a choice that hurt your business, your rational mind has probably justified it in some way. Your rational mind has said, this is a great idea, right? Even if you think about if you've ever stolen anything, your rational mind has probably rationalized why that was a good idea. So we can rationalize the worst behavior. We can rationalize immoral behavior. We can rationalize treating our partner like garbage and yelling at them and cursing. But our intuition knows the direction that we need to move in. Our intuition knows that that is immoral behavior or not going to produce the results that we actually want. So we need to counter strike the questioning. We need to start to build this relationship to intuition. And we need to take the actions in our lives knowing that the questioning is going to happen anyway. It's not going to stop, right? Even the most successful people, financially, spiritually, relationally, sexually, they have the incessant questioning happening within them. It's always there, right? It's still there. It's just that it has less power. It's just that we are not as addicted to listening to that questioning and allowing that questioning to weigh us down and allowing that questioning to make us play small. So what I challenge you to do today, tomorrow, for the rest of the year, because we don't have long in 2020 to make every day a no zero day, a no zero day. And what that's going to mean is that you're going to take one action every single day to counter strike your questioning, okay? And some of it's going to be uncomfortable because you might not know the outcomes to some of the actions, you might not know some of the outcomes to the conversations that you have, or the behavioral change or the habit or whatever it is, but do it anyway. Trust the process and see how it unfolds.
