How to Make Better Decisions - Life Maxims Inner Guidance System (part 1)

Hello, my name is Ricardo Pereira. I am the creator of the Dark Night Monthly oxygen tank where we assist your healing and more powerfully learning your lessons, and also gradually create more comfort during the dark night of the soul.

And today I'll be sharing with you a simple system that was crucial for me to navigate more centered through my own dark night of the soul and completely get out of it. Again, this system I learned it back in 2010 and was essential for me to feel safer and have more clarity about the decisions that I made during my own dark night of the soul. So let's get down to it.

I will be giving you a very simple strategy for you to trust more of yourself. Because one of the questions I see around in people who are going through a dark night of the soul is, how can I trust more of myself? Or how can I trust more of my own intuition? Which basically goes down to also making decisions which is pretty relevant and important for someone going through a dark night. You probably know if you're going through one that part of what is happening is you dissolving, getting rid of the old conditioning, of the older programming that doesn't really serve you anymore, that doesn't serve your dreams, your purpose, your heart's desire, and more of your authentic expression. Because if you are stripping down, if you are somehow dissolving the older conditioning, the older and original programming, you want to be very clear about what you put in it. Because one of the things I learned through one of the most inspiring people I learned I learned from Dr. Richard Bandler, the co-creator of Neuro Linguistic Programming and actually considered one of the best hypnotists in the whole world. One of the things he often shares and teaches is that if you want to make a faster and faster transformation, you create a void and you put something new in it. And I oftentimes hear people that are going through a dark night of the soul say something like this, "Oh, I'm going through this void feeling either this disconnection or this aloneness, and there seems to be another level and another level of this emptiness and void, and I'll just surrender to it, and hopefully the healing will come. And that is okay. Yet there are moments for hope, and there are moments for motivation or determination and strategy. Remember, we have already started covering the topic around the limiting belief that the ego is bad or that you must get rid of your ego during your dark night of the soul. And if you haven't seen how I share and help bust that limiting belief, that myth, just go into the other video that I have freely available to you on my Patreon page or on my YouTube channel. But let's get back to the topic of today, a simple structure that helps you more easily make decisions and also trust yourself during the dark night of the soul. And I'm going to right away address a trap because there will be a trap to this, and the trap is that structure is bad. Again, another limiting belief. And I can totally relate to that trap because when I started accessing my own creativity when I was back in Canada with my mentor Dov Baron, and I started accessing more of what I felt was my authentic self, and a lot of creativity started bubbling up. And what I realized was that I was feeling resistant to some or most shapes of discipline or structure. And that makes a lot of sense because I, like very probably you and the most of us, grew up in a system that shares a form of discipline or structure that do not really serve our best purpose for most of the time. And we have our school system for most of us. So, think about it this way: imagine that you are a hose and that that hose is channeling water. A regular hose, the ones that we use to water the plants or the garden. And imagine that the water flowing through it is your creativity or your creative force, whatever you want to call it. And imagine that the direction that you spread that water is totally related to a structure or no structure. So if you have no structure at all, The hose will be like doing this and spreading the water for all the directions. And when you notice, you haven't really watered what is most important to you. So here is why structure is important. Now the distinction is that the structure is the structure that you learn to create to best serve your purpose. Your dreams, what you really want to bring more into your life and also into others' lives as well. Either in life in general, in relationships, in business. And when you have that structure, when you learn and you identify this is good for me, this direction, this is good for me and this is also good for me, But this one doesn't really serve my purpose. That one also doesn't serve my purpose. You start watering more of these directions and less of that. And when you notice, you will have the field that you actually want to water. And we're talking about your gifts. We're talking about your dreams. We're talking about bringing more comfort, healthy relationships, and the quality of the experiences that you really want to experience in life. So again, remember, if you think or feel structure is bad or discipline is bad, please keep in mind that may as well be a limiting belief, just very similarly to ego is bad, and that there are ways for you to create good kind of structure, just the same way as I addressed on the other video a healthy ego or a functional ego. So let's get down to the simple structure of today, and that would be called life values or life maxims. A very simple strategy that I learned with my mentor back then in Canada in 2010 was to identify what my life maxims are. I also got his assistance to identify my relational maxims, but today we will keep it simpler to the life maxims. And there is another trap here. This may sound deceptively simple, but then again, when I ask people, are you aware of your life maxims or your life values. Most people do not have clarity around their own maxims. So again, common sense is oftentimes not common practice, sadly. And this deceptively simple strategy will basically help you get your GPS. Because if we're thinking about the ego or the conscious mind as the GPS for the directions that you want to grow and progress to, what we're talking about here is getting as clear as possible about those coordinates. So this simple exercise goes down to this, and again, there's a difference in you doing this here or if you were together with me in a group setting or an individual setting, but this is very important for you to start getting it right away. These are the kind of strategies that make the distinction between you knowing where to head, where to walk, where to dance, or you not having a clue about where you want to go. And if you're in the middle of a dark night of the soul, that will be kind of a keen As in a boat in the middle of the ocean and you have this sail, is it? I think it's called the, you know, the thing that the air blows to. And if you don't have a direction that you can insert in your rudder, wherever the wind blows, you will go on those directions. And sometimes you keep in circles. So again, these simple strategies make the difference between you being more and more in circles, years after years in a dark night of the soul, or you being able to start realizing what your direction is and start going on that direction. So get a piece of paper or a journal or a pen or pencil because This is really simple. And stop for a few minutes or a few seconds. You can pause the video whenever you want to. And the first question is this: What is really important for you in life? [No speech]And what we want here is starting to write down some labels and write as much as 10 to 15 labels top. So, words. You can write down several different things like love, or you can write down romantic relationship, growth, creativity, financial autonomy, whatever that is for you. So I'm not here to judge what your life maxims or values are. I'm just giving you a few examples. Contributing to other people's betterment of lives or improvement of other people's lives. So again, it's up to you. Playfulness, whatever that is. So stop for a few minutes and just pause the video and then write down those 10 to 15 labels. And when you finish those 10 to 15 labels, notice which 5 are more important to you. And the game is kind of like this. If I could only choose 5 for them to be kind of the GPS coordinates of the 5 most important areas in my life or priorities in my life, what would those 5 be? So jolt down all of the others and keep just 5. And now these are just labels. So that's another important part of this exercise. Because once you start connecting more and more and getting clarity around your life maxims, what you will notice is that the labels will probably not change. What will change will be the inside of them, the meaning of them. So for instance, for me, my number 1 life maxim is my own personal growth. Now, if you ask me around 12 years, no, even a little bit more, perhaps 14 years ago, what did personal growth mean to me, I would have probably answered personal growth means meditating a lot, means learning how to access altered states of consciousness through meditation. It means learning how to use my mind to bend a spoon or influence physical matter. During my dark night of the soul, that changed. Now it is different, but it is still my number one maxim: my own personal growth. So when you get only 5 of those, your top ones, you then do this for each one of them. Them, you ask yourself, so what does this mean? So for instance, for me, if I ask myself personal growth, my own personal growth, what does that mean to me? I would probably include on my own definition be in integrity with my soul's path, being as as congruent as I possibly can with my thoughts, feelings, and actions. That means also thinking what is important to think so I can feel how I want to feel and I do what I want to do, or else I wouldn't be out of my integrity. That also means if I say to someone, "I will do this," I do my best to to actually make it happen unless I change my mind. But if I change my mind, it's important that I know why I'm doing it. I usually only change my mind if I feel perhaps that I'm out of integrity or if there's a better strategy to do so. So after you write down a few lines about what that label means to you, and you will go a few layers deeper and deeper. So when you get the first layer, you look at it and you ask yourself, "What does this mean to me?" And you go again a layer deeper, and then you get a second one and you ask yourself, "What does this mean?" And then you have a second important question, and that is when when you get down to the nitty-gritty of what that actually means for you now at this stage in your life, you ask yourself, "What is in this most important to me?" Or in other words, "Why is this really important to me?" And you allow yourself to connect to your emotions because Oftentimes when we get clarity about what's important to us in our lives, we realize that we get down to very basic or essential core needs of the human being. And it is really important that you go again layer as deeper as possible. And remember, we're not looking for perfection here. That is one of the traps that many of us fall into or have fallen to far away in the past. What we're looking for here is progress. So when you have the 5 maxims, the 5 labels, the last step. So number 1, first step is you get clarity around the meaning. Number 2, you get clarity around what is it about that that is most important to you. And number 3, number 3, you prioritize these 5 labels. So You number them from number 5, the least priority one, to number 1. And the way you do it basically is again like a game. There's a reason why children play a lot. Just think about it. When you look at children and if you ask the question, how is it that children really learn? You may Observe that they do it through playing. So again, the game here that we're doing is you ask yourself, if at this stage in my life I could only have 4 main priorities to guide me through my own growing and healing process in life, or what is most important to me, what would the main 4 B, and you drop the 5th one, and you do that until you reach number 1. And I really hope that you do this. Now is the time for hoping because I'm not with you in a live seminar or in a mentoring one-on-one call where I could really hold the space for you to do it. But until you start using some of these strategies that actually work, it'll be indeed a matter of hopefully. And we all know on some shape or form where that hopefully leads us, and sometimes that is perpetuating some of the suffering. And I know that a lot of people going through a dark night say and repeat that you cannot really do something about getting out of it. Or to kind of increase the speed of your own healing or learning the lessons. And I'm here to remind you or give you a different perspective that I don't believe that. That's not my experience. So when I started reaching a certain point in my own journey, I realized that after I started learning new ways of thinking or some new strategies and I started putting them in place, I started seeing me moving more and more gradually. And what we want to do here is assist you in learning your lessons more powerfully because the dark night of the soul serves as a catalyst for you to also transform at a deeper level. But for that to happen, it's important that you learn your main lessons, also to enhance your healing and bring you some more comfort. So if you have enjoyed or found value on this video, please like or love and write down, share any thoughts or comments or questions that you may have. And remember to check out my Patreon page or my YouTube video where you will find the full resources, my exclusive monthly content where I have one recorded video, 30 to 45 minutes, with exclusive nuggets and strategies like this or other tips. And then I have also a monthly live call where you can ask me any question and I'll guide you through some transformational processes using NLP, hypnosis, healthy relationships strategies, shadow work, and also other tips like biohacking, helping you understand what is happening at the neurochemical and biochemical level and the relationship with psychological states. So please check it out as well, and remember, you are not alone. I am here to support you on not only leveling up your healing game, but also for you to be able to have more and more fun in your life. Because if not, what's the point? Take care!