Self-consistency is powerful.
People resist betterment in a service of maintaining their own self-concept.
There's got to be a way to get around that.
Sometimes I talk about self-consistency in a joking way, but it's kind of true that there's
like the self-consistency police, and they come out in force if you violate the self-consistency
norm.
Well, it's true.
We do resist changes to our self-concept, but there is a way around it.
Here's how you get past the self-consistency police.
You find a new path entirely that is like adding something new, a new piece of information,
a new experience.
We don't say a new experience didn't happen if we go somewhere and learn something new.
And if we even discover from a teacher or a mentor that we have qualities that we didn't
know about before, as long as it's additive and doesn't erase anything that we know for
sure is true about us, and it's just that, oh, and I can do this also, that's the way
around.
That's like, sure.
Throughout your life, you know you went from not knowing how to ride a bicycle to riding
a bicycle.
It was new.
It's okay for you to change in that way.
But the fact that you have a quick temper, or you're not good at dancing, or--those are
the things that we have a hard time absolutely switching.
So if you're going to learn to dance, you have to think of it as not changing the I
can't dance thing.
You have to think of it and treat it as if it's a special, separate thing, like a different
ante room to that I can't dance place.
Like you might learn to do something where you move your feet, but it's called exercise.
Well, there are ways around you not staying locked up in past perceptions of yourself,
and they do have to do with extending out into new territory, going out in a part of
the brain which doesn't have something active that's already in place that wants to resist
you.
You can have those kinds of experiences all the time, especially if you learn something
that you didn't even have a store of information about yourself.
So, for example, I had never learned to ride a horse.
The only time I'd ever ridden a horse, I was like, 12 years old.
I got on the back of an unbroken horse.
It bucked me off, and I never went on a horse again.
But when I was in graduate school, wanting a break from writing my dissertation, and
still writing my dissertation, I took horseback riding lessons.
Here's what's wild.
Somehow I decided that I would simply listen to what the instructor did.
I would have no existing preconceptions about riding from that one horse that bucked me
off when I was 12.
And I would just listen, and I would simply do what they said instead of resisting.
It worked!
It was crazy.
I was riding so well that pretty soon, the instructor was saying, hey, I can--you know,
I was driving--I was riding western, which means with a saddle, you know, like cowboys
and that kind of thing.
It wasn't a dressage kind of thing that I was getting ready for, but it wasn't English
riding.
But here's what I did.
She's taken me out when the other people are having trouble, and she's showing me how to
do like a running start, where the horse is moving and I leap behind, you know, put my
leg over.
I was having a blast, and it was all because I didn't tell me--tell myself I couldn't,
and this was new behavior.
So, I was not going up against hard stuff inside my brain that was like hard wired in.
I was going in a new area.
That's how you can get around things.
Label them creatively.
Go in a new direction.
Don't go head on with existing habits, and open yourself, and act open yourself, and
act as if in this sense of having faith in the instructions you receive.
That will take you far, and that is the way to work around the self-consistency theory.
The actual--the wiring you have in your brain that says no, I know what's it.
This is the way it is.
You have to re-conceptualize that concept of yourself so it creates open spaces for
you.
That's how you can do it.
Since you're a high achiever you may know about this.
High achievers often hit a wall.
They're going along, they're having one success after another and then suddenly, something
happens and they grind to a halt.
And it's confusing because they're not sure what it is they've done wrong if anything.
They just know that they're not moving anymore the way they're used to moving.
The way they have moved in the past.
If you've run into like what seems like a ceiling over you and you're kind of in a fog
and you're mystified by what's getting in your way, you can even kind of slide into
a swirl of doubts and wonder if you ever really achieved anything significant at all and whether
any of your amazing achievements you have done were anything but kind of fronting or
a little bit of a fraud.
That is really negative and pernicious and it doesn't have to be that way.
I want you to go get a free report from me.
Go to DrKenChristian.com/Breakthrough and receive from me this free report with action
steps that are going to tell you exactly what to do now to get you going.