Yesterday, on one of our calls in our community, a member made a profound remark when the question was asked, what does it take to actually achieve the goals people in the community had placed for themselves?

"We need to become a new self."

One of the piece of the work we do is to create a distinction between You and the thoughts that are normally running you.

And when I say running you, I mean they run you!

You have patterns of thoughts that are controlling almost all of what you do.

You make a plan, have a goal, want to change your eating habits, and boom... You go and eat what you know you shouldn't eat, go and get busy with the things you know will not move the ball forward, and say the stuff you know isn't empowering to you.

One could argue, "That's because I chose not to do it." yet that is rarely the case. What is way more likely is that the patterns in your brain are firing, and you are run by the automatic responses that have been trained and practiced.

In 2005, the National Science Foundation published an article summarizing research on human thoughts per day.

It was found that the average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% were negative, and 95% were exactly the same repetitive thoughts as the day before.

We can see that one of the tendencies of the mind is to focus on the negative and 'play the same songs' over and over again.

"There was another interesting study (Leahy, 2005, Study of Cornell University), in which scientists found that, firstly, 85% of what we worry about never happens. Secondly, with the 15% of the worries that did happen, 79% of the subjects discovered that either they could handle the difficulty better than expected or that the difficulty taught them a lesson worth learning."

"The conclusion is that 97% of our worries are baseless and result from an unfounded pessimistic perception."

And yet that perception is running you.

Back to the distinction we focus on in the work.

The distinction is between You and what you mostly relate to as you.

All that repetitive thinking that is automatically there which keeps you in the same loop over and over and over again.

To break open that pattern, you have to distinguish yourself from that pattern.

We have to embrace the possibility that what we normally relate to as "us" is a pattern of neurons firing.

So when our member said "you have to become a new you." He got it. Because almost all you refer to as you isn't you, but an automatic pattern response trained by experience, so far from what is possible.

"The human brain consists of 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion synaptic connections. There are more neurons in a single human brain than stars in the Milky Way!"

And you fell on a fraction of the possibility of that organism claiming that the same repetitive thoughts you think every day, and your patterns of behavior are you.

To create life is to fall in love with the possibility you are and stop being addicted to having a fixed sense of self.

Your self as you relate to is a pattern, your real self is every possibility you can imagine and more.