The Empowered Mind (Video)

We are all born into a moment in time. And when we're born in that moment, our brain immediately starts adapting us to be able to survive in that environment. Now, we also inherit from evolutionary psychology, a lot of genetics, a lot of traits. But parallel to that is we grew up in family systems. We're social mammalians, we're social brains. And what happens is our brain shapes us to be able to survive in those particular conditions. To do that, there's both good news and bad news.

The emotional brain is adept at organizing us, the future human being, to become a survivor in the environment. The bad news is by adapting us to circumstances, it locks us in to perceptual patterns of ways of being in the world. And they become so familiar to us, that we don't even notice they're there. We know it by the glass ceiling. All of you have experienced this, whether or not it's reaching a particular place in growth, in a company or personal and you keep hitting this glass ceiling. You can't see why you keep falling back and you can't achieve to the next level. Well, what you've done is you've run into one of these Olympic patterns that was created long ago, long before you could think. Locked in and then becomes resistant to change.

And we have this idea of success being push hard, push hard, push hard, determination, determination. You know, I'm gonna focus on this, I'm not going to... there's no 'no', I've got to go push, push through. The truth is that doesn't work. Yet, understand this. We come, stock with what evolution has given us, our brain is always going to want to control outcome. Even though it's very apparent that we can't control outcome. We try hard, we want to win, we want to force that.

At the same time, though., we also grow up in families where we start really learning about our mattering. We start learning about our deepest worth, in the eyes of our parents, our siblings, our neighborhood, all across the place, from culture. And as that happens, we develop certain basic beliefs about ourselves and certain shaping occur, that shape the way our brain and then our mind is going to engage the challenges of life. Sometimes we're more anxious about it, we don't have kind of the belief in ourselves that we can engage in certainty.

Other times we believe we're just really overconfident and we blend things. This is all developmental. And most of us, come stock, we come into this world, we grow up, and we never see those life patterns. They're all emotionally based. And it's all about the beliefs we have about our ability to manage uncertainty. You know, do we kind of coalesce and step back? Or do we move forward? Are we curious? All that stuff. The good news though is this. Despite what you inherited from history, and from your family of origin in the development of the self that you are, understand this. In quantum mechanics, you learn very quickly, that there is no reality out there. What there is, is potential. It's the observer that you are about that potential, that brings forth the form of that potential.

Now, the way evolution works is we get locked into a particular potential that allows us to survive, not thrive. And that's what we're constantly pushing up against when we try to produce self-mastery, or self-development. We keep hitting these barriers. And what we're taught, you know, the affirmations, the visualizations, the training subconscious, all that stuff, the problem is it doesn't take into account the emotional brain. What we have to do is we have to go into the emotional brain and find the emotional programs and the meaning at the very core of the brain, organizing the potential into itself, about your ability to manage the challenges of uncertainty. The good news is yeah, we come in here and we come by it honestly. We have a brain that is not necessarily built to be able to work in probability world. But that's what we live in.

And in the same way, that fear and aggression tend to be the ways that we go organizing, about how we deal with uncertainty, and particularly the meanings, the beliefs that we develop our ability to manage uncertainty. The key, though, is to understand the fear and aggression, or ease that's been with us for ever, okay? However, because of us human beings, we also have something else, we actually as human beings, what we are, is conscious creation. That conscious creation comes with the keys to the kingdom, what we're able to do as human beings. We're not locked into a perceptual map, like my dog. He's gonna dog, he's gonna buddy around and be that. However, we can go in and explore the very depth of the beliefs we have about our ability to manage uncertainty. And we can go in and reshape them, no longer the product of natural selection, we become designers of the self.

And what I want to do is talk to you about what are the emotional programs that you need to be able to activate and to work with in order to produce the empowered mind? Because ultimately, the mind you bring, you are going to engage with uncertainty. And the mind that we want to bring is an empowered mind, not the one that allowed you to survive, but the one that can seize the moment, the one that can bring that moment up in moments of challenge. And my promise to you is this. All of us, on our genome, not only do we have the potential of being built around fear and anger as responses to the challenges of living, but we also have the discipline of ruler.

Now that discipline, I define as the ability to manage. The way I define discipline is the capacity to manage whatever comes forward to be able to maintain order under challenging conditions. That's discipline. That stock, it's not the one that possibly has been shaped by experience into the mind that engages the challenges of living, but that's potentially there. The second, we also come equipped with the courage of a warrior. That warrior part of us, that courage part of us does not mean that we don't experience fear. It means that we don't fear fear. It means that we can turn toward our fear and not flinch.

And to be able to recognize that by turning toward that fear, and taking it out of the darkness where it hides, we can master it. The next one and powerfully important is the self-compassion of a caregiver. The nurturance, the self-soothing of a caregiver.

A lot of people beat themselves up when they don't achieve something. And I've never met the person yet that beating up actually helped them improve. No, it dug the grave deeper. What's been proven in neuroscience is that it is compassion, self-directed compassion at the self when you make a mistake, when you don't live up to a standard that allows you to start teasing apart the neural circuitry of belief that produced that performance, and to reorganize it into higher functioning. That's powerful. That's what compassion can do. It's absolutely necessary.

You know, you're going to be taking losses for the rest of your life. Beating yourself up about them does not allow you to learn. It's the compassion that allows you to learn and to grow and to reorganize the potential you are at a higher functioning. And the last one is the impartiality, the capacity to think clearly, under challenging conditions. That's also known as sage. When you're able to take fear offline, that would be that orphan nature that we've talked about. What you're able to do is you're able to say, you know something? I want to lead from the discipline of ruler, rather than my fear. And out of that, that discipline of ruler is going to start organizing the self very differently. It's going to organize it for effectiveness, and being able to take action and to bring forth a different reality. That's powerful stuff.

But what I want you to see is it becomes intentional. You develop an intentional mind; you know what history gave you. Okay? It gave you a mind that is working for short term survival. And once it achieves that, it locks it into a pattern. And that's how you start inventing your life and creating your destiny. Know what we want to do is go beyond our animal origins. We want to actually become homo sapiens. We want to be able to say, you know something? When I engage the challenges of living, and you will, there's no way out, the challenges are there as part of living. The key though is what mind are you going to bring into that moment. You can train yourself to develop the beliefs of discipline, maintaining order, under really trying circumstances. You can develop the belief that you can face your fears and master them.

You can develop the belief about self compassion, and rebuilding the self into higher functioning. And out of that, what you do is you realize, I can come to believe that I can operate quite successfully. Under challenging circumstances, I can think clearly. Yeah, this is what's there. You know, you leave the brain to its own conditions, it's going to organize you for survival. And that was good for most of the lifetime. But the thing is that locks in during childhood, and it starts creating your experience. Okay? That's the shrinking of possibility that you become as a human being.

The question is, when you start seeing the limitations, you bump against that glass ceiling, you go, I understand that this is time to look at the deep-seated beliefs that I have about engaging uncertainty in my ability to manage it, and start developing these particular emotional programs, to bring them forth as a cocktail, from which your mind arises to engage the challenges. Friends, it's teachable. It changes your life. And you begin to really say, you know, something? I get it, we live as potential. And what happens is, here you learn how to reshape that potential into a higher expression of the self. That's conscious creation, friends. Come and learn. Learn how to take who you are currently, that got organized a long time ago for survival, and learn to take it and build it into a mind that engages life from a much more empowering way. This is the empowered mind. Come and learn, friends. Come and learn.