Schedule your day so you can be a free spirit: Huh? Reading that might sound counter-intuitive. Many people feel that either you are a planner or you are a free spirit, and they feel that having a schedule takes away their fun. Actually, nothing can be further from the truth!

When you have a schedule, you get all of your things done so you have more time for play. An example of this is scheduling your Saturday morning to clean the house because your in-laws are coming Sunday morning to stay for a week while their floors are getting replaced. You didn’t do what you had planned, it is now Saturday afternoon and your friend who you haven’t seen in 10 years has an 8-hour unexpected layover in your city and wants to meet you. Ugh! You want to see her so badly, but you didn’t clean your house and your persnickety mother-in-law is going to arrive the next morning. Are the bed sheets even washed? Yikes!

Since you didn’t do what you planned to do, you no longer have as much freedom as you would like. More than likely you are going to meet your friend (as you should), but you will need to stay up very late cleaning the house because, at a minimum, you must have clean sheets on the bed for your guests! Now you will be tired, grumpy, and behind schedule when your in-laws arrive to stay with you for a week.

When you have an efficient and productive morning routine you can knock out all the things you desire to do for yourself. By doing it before your day officially starts, you always ensure that you get it done and that you are filling up your soul before your day even begins. It is Murphy’s Law that when you decide to push off to your lunch hour to get these things done, that is when something unexpected and fun comes up and you are torn with what to do. You want to go and have fun, yet now you feel guilty that you didn’t get done the things you like to do for you. And…you better not miss two days in a row for this or you will have a hard time getting back on track.

Can you see the connection with having a strict and solid daily routine actually allows you more freedom? Also, presumably you will be working on parts of you or a goal you have set during this scheduled time, which will be leading to something better in your life. That alone sounds like a step in the freedom direction to me!

Bringing this all together

Since this is the last of the 4-part blogs on aligning your mind, and we have covered a lot of healthy new initiatives, let’s make sure it sticks! As a brief recap, we:

  1. Set the stage for where we want our life to be with our lifetime achievement award script and how to solidify that with creating a vision board to match. We incorporated the importance of believing it can be true by the words we say and the habits we instill in our daily lives.
  2. Shared an understanding of our conscious mind and subconscious mind to help us conquer our goals. We choose one dream from our vision board that would be the best goal to work on in our life right now.
  3. Discovered how to develop the muscle in our brain to make it impenetrable and able to accomplish anything we set our mind to with several exercises to help make it stick, including developing a positive mental attitude and incorporating gratitude into our lives.

For the sake of this last campaign about the mind, I want to sum it up by calling it a growth mindset. Everything that we have done so far has been to enhance our lives. For most people this is with setting a goal, accomplishing it, and then moving on to the next one. These goals lead us to our larger dream and vision of our life.

 

 

Understanding neuro pathways

Do you know that less than 10% of people reach their goals? Less than 10%! We can change that by having an understanding of our neuro pathways. I am certain you have heard that it takes 21 days to create a habit. You have probably also heard that it takes 28 days. Which is it? Actually, for most habits it is 66 days. The “easier” the new habit, it could take closer to the 20-something days. For the “harder” habits, it could take as much as 66 days if not even more!

Here are some highlights:

  1. Dominant neural pathway is the belief that you have over and over again or the thing that you do the same way over and over again. You tell everyone you are not good at math. You are now terrible at math. When you brush your teeth every morning, you start at the same place every single time you brush.
  2. Neural pathway, learning, and your memory are similar to meeting someone new and forgetting their name. The tricks you have read or been told to remember a person’s name work because they immediately use the neural pathway. The more something is used the more likely it will become dominant. Another example is when you learn something new, it is advised to rewrite it and tell it to someone else. Just like a muscle, use it to build it. Do not use it, and you lose it.
  3. Neural pathways when they are connected with thoughts, emotions, and habits are more difficult. But…this is where the magic can happen! If a child was attacked by a dog when they were little, since heavy emotion, pain and hurt, and overall trauma occurred, a neural pathway formed. Another example, and this one is mine, is once I got lost driving to a specific destination in a neighboring town. After that, I got lost nearly every time I visited this town because my neural pathway told me “it was a town that I always get lost in.” And I did! And, since I got lost the next several times I visited this town, I was creating an even deeper neural pathway because of my repetition. So, just the same as you can create a positive habit (with repetition) you can also create a negative belief with repeated negative thoughts and stories you tell yourself.

Creating a new neural pathway

Is this possible? Of course it is! A good example is to think of how you drive to work every day. Although there are probably several different ways to drive to your office, you take the same path every single day. You are creating a dominant neural pathway. How to create a new one is by flipping the switch and taking a different route to work. Will it be awkward at the start? Yes! Will you need to be very conscientious and deliberate for quite some time before it becomes a new habit? Yes! Will it eventually feel as natural as the old route? Yes! The point is to do it every single day. Don’t miss a day because it will be too easy to go back to old habits.

Wrapping it all up with a bow

When desiring to enhance a certain aspect of your life, take these 5 easy steps:

  1. Get a very clear vision in your head of what you want and why.
  2. Believe it so you can receive it. You must deeply know, believe and trust that you can have the dream that you desire…or something better!
  3. Think about it every day. Write about it and look at it (your written goals and vision board) every day.
  4. Put action behind your desires. Write out your goal, all the things that need to occur, and do something towards it every single day.
  5. Create a schedule in your day – and stick to it by creating a new neural pathway – so that you can commit time to all the small but powerful details that will make you successful at reaching your dreams one goal at a time.

Don’t forget to watch the video, and grab your download!

Connie Holmes
Connie Holmes