The Weekly Reframe: How The Brain Works
Supporting you to free your mind so you can live from your heart!
“The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”
– Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
How the Brain Works – A Love Story
I work with many amazing entrepreneurs, artists, healers and service providers with incredible gifts to offer the world. Yet so often, at the beginning of our work together, they feel frustrated, stuck, overwhelmed and sometimes even ready to give up.
Have you felt this way too? I know I have.
It wasn’t until I finally understood why this happens that I was able to move past it myself and help my clients do the same.
It has to do with how our brains work.
A masterful coach, Gary Mahler, explains it succinctly: “Creating is not convenient. Reactions are easy and require zero energy. Creation is a function of the will and requires power and energy, yet it also generates energy.”
Our brains are not designed to expend energy. They’re designed for efficiency, to conserve it. So when we attempt to bring something new into being: a piece of art, a new offering, a new way of being, a new career or job, our brain tries to talk us out of it.
And as Steven Pressfield reminds us, the more important the creation is to us, the greater the discomfort we will feel. Most of us label this resistance. That discomfort is not a sign to stop, it’s actually a signal to keep going.
You may recognize the thoughts:
I’ll make time to do that tomorrow.
Someone already did something like this.
I don’t have enough time, money, brains, etc.
I’m not smart enough, young enough, old enough, rich enough…
I tried once and failed - maybe it’s just not meant to be.
This is your brain doing its job. Keeping you safe in the familiar zone. The trouble comes when you believe those thoughts that keep you immobilized and then wonder why you feel unfulfilled, like a hamster spinning on a wheel.
Creation is inconvenient. It’s laborious, uncomfortable, vulnerable. It feels like effort because it is effort and the brain would rather avoid it.
But the effort is worth it. When you learn not to take those limiting thoughts personally, to notice them with compassion but not entertain them, the “fantasy” life your brain says isn’t possible becomes not only possible, but probable, through small, sweet steps in the direction of your dreams.
So what’s one small step you can take today toward the life you want to create? Mine was finally writing about this very thing that’s been sitting on my heart. After many failed attempts to write to you this week!
Step By Step,
Jessie