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Transcript

What is keeping you stuck?

Wisdom Tree Podcast is sponsored by the Choose Love Ministry.  CLM is a non-denominational IRS registered non-profit religious organization with the goal of teaching spiritual education, helping people live a life they love, and supporting the community with charitable giving.  You can donate to this program or to the ministry’s programs at ChooseLoveMinistry.org. 

Good afternoon friends.  The holiday season has begun.  In the US we have Thanksgiving this week.  Gratitude is at the forefront of everyone’s topics this week.  I wanted to go in a different direction.  There is only a little over a month left in the year, and I’m starting to think back on my goals and resolutions from January.  What did I achieve – what did I not achieve?  And more importantly – WHY or WHY NOT?

Let’s have a chat today about the WHY NOT and see if we can come to a conclusion about at least some of the reason we are stuck and unsuccessful in our goals.  And for most, there is one big reason…

Paradigms.  Those pesky thoughts keep you stuck.  It’s the voice in your head that tells you what you can and cannot do. 

We all have them – but we didn’t always have them. 

When we were kids we had great imaginations and fantasies and dreams.  Nothing whispered to us that we couldn’t play our favorite game of pretend or imagine what we would love to be when we grew up.

I remember summers at my grandparents house.  They had a beautiful large covered front porch – with bannisters that were wide enough to sit on.  The neighbors had a daughter my age and we knew each other our whole lives.  She and my brothers and me would spend endless days playing on that porch – we were detectives and spied on the cars going by from the porch or we were the “runaway” kids, and the porch was our ship that we sailed away on for many grand adventures.

Paradigms never popped into my head telling me the game was silly or it wasn’t realistic because we didn’t have a ship or any money.  Nothing told me to worry about what the neighbors thought of me swimming in the ocean located in the side yard of my grandparent’s house.

Something about childhood makes our minds open to any possibility we can dream up. No thought entered my mind as a child on that porch that told me to stop, or it wasn’t right to imagine a life of fun and adventure.  I was free to dream. 

And then I grew up like we all do.  We become afraid to make decisions. We doubt our worth.  We worry about the expectations of others. We use the word impossible a lot.

Our Paradigms hit us with every decision we make.  They invade our minds with negative thoughts, self-judgements, and self-imposed rules that tell us we can’t.

The thing is that creating a dream for your life actually begins like a child’s fantasy.  You dream it up. You create a world in your mind – one that doesn’t yet exist. That’s the first thing you do when you are creating goals and dreams for your life.  You imagine it – you use your imagination and create a new you or new situation for yourself in your mind.  It’s just like your childhood games of fantasy play. 

It should be as simple for you to take the steps to build your dream as it was for you to play a game as a child. But somewhere along the way we created boundaries and rules and fenced ourselves in to a space that we call “possible.”

I played that game on my porch-ship for 4 or 5 summers and I count them as some of the happiest times of my life.  But the freedom to dream stopped – probably as I entered middle school – and what others thought or how I was supposed to conduct myself became the border for my dreams.  And the rules list kept growing and my borders of freedom to dream became smaller and more constricted over time.

And I know you know exactly what I’m talking about.  I know you’ve been there.  You’ve wanted to dream something new and just as you begin to imagine a new life, a voice comes into your head; “you can’t to that – you don’t have the money – you can’t change jobs – you can’t start your own business – you can’t put yourself out there for a new relationship…”

…You might fail.

And the paradigms, your self-imposed rules, keep you stuck and unhappy and unfulfilled and playing small.  You can’t live your dreams because…

But let me ask you:

Says who?

Who says you can’t live your dreams?

Who decided you can’t change careers? 

Who decided you can’t get a new reliable car? 

Who created the rule which is preventing you from trying to reach your goal?

Who chose to put the opinion of others before your own desires?

You, you, you, you, and you.

Who’s decision is it to decide for your dreams in life?

Yours.

You are the only person stopping you and you are the only person who can build your dream.

I’m sitting here recording this lesson with no tech skills or fancy equipment. My voice cracks and I’m not a talented speaker.  But I have a message to help you live a better life and I’m not letting my fear and paradigms stop me. Because I have a goal that I will help others in a way that feels right to me.  Spiritual education is my love and spreading it is my dream.  I face my fear of failure and record these lessons or post my blogs or teach my workshops.  And maybe very few will ever listen or read what I’ve done.  And some people will see that as failure.  I know that for those who do listen, and it helps them to live the life they love, well, that is all that matters.

If I can do this, then you can challenge your paradigms too.

If you want some help understanding paradigms and some tools to face your fears  – and you may not want more help.  This lesson alone may have been an A-HA moment for you, and you understand that the voice in your head that keeps you stuck are just thoughts and they don’t have to control you.   But if you do want to dive a little deeper, I have a Vision Workshop coming up on December 1^st that gives you tools to help overcome paradigms.  I’ll put the sign-up link in this post, but you can always go to my website – geniemathews.com to find the latest sign ups. 

Who is responsible for you being stuck – it’s you – or rather, your thoughts.  You can overcome them.  You can dream what might seem impossible and move beyond the fence you have placed around yourself and your success.  They are just thoughts.

Thank you for listening in.  I hope this helps you get closer to a life you love. 

Thank you to Choose Love Ministry for sponsoring this program and for the good work they do. 

Follow me for more spiritual lessons – I am on Facebook, Instagram, and all my links are on my website: geniemathews.com

Have a great week and if you are in the US, enjoy Thanksgiving and time with family and stay safe on Black Friday sales day! 

Until next time – love and gratitude my friends.