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Mike Bundrant: Overcome the Hidden Cause of Self-Sabotage
69 Plays8 years ago
Welcome to this week’s episode of the Art of Authenticity. I’m Laura Coe, your host, and thanks for joining me. Today, I’ve got Mike Bundrant joining us. He is the founder of iNLP Center. He is a Master NLP Practitioner. NLP is Neuro Linguistic Programming. It is a specific type of coaching that I love. It’s really effective, and if you’re a coach it is something you should definitely check out.
He’s also a retired psychotherapist. He no longer focuses on the psychotherapy approach, he mainly focuses on NLP. I understand why, it’s Tony Robbins, a lot of people have popularized it, it’s a really, incredibly powerful tool to get change in your life.
Mike and I had a chat before the podcast, and we agreed to a very different format for the show. You’re in for a real treat, hopefully you like it. I read his book, Your Achille’s Eel: Discover and Overcome the Hidden cause of Negative Emotions, Bad Decisions and Self-Sabotage. It’s a really short 30-page document. I felt like we could really get through this thing in the hour, and every single page that I read, I felt like he had outlined perfectly the process that happens when we move from our truth to an inauthentic life.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to this week's episode of The Art of Authenticity. I'm Laura Coe, your host, and thanks for joining me. Today I've got Mike Brundrand joining us. He is the founder of INLP Center. He's a master NLP practitioner. NLP is neuro-linguistic programming. It is a specific type of coaching that I love. It's really effective.
Effectiveness of NLP and Episode Format
00:00:40
Speaker
And if you're a coach, it is something you should definitely check out. He's also a retired psychotherapist. He no longer focuses on the psychotherapy approach. He mainly focuses on NLP. And I understand why it's Tony Robbins. A lot of people have popularized it. It's really, really incredibly powerful tool to get change in your life.
00:00:59
Speaker
Mike and I had a chat before the podcast, and we agreed to a very different format for the show. So you're in for a real treat.
Authenticity to Inauthenticity in Childhood
00:01:07
Speaker
Hopefully you like it. I read his book, Discover and Overcome, A Hidden Cause of Negative Emotions, Bad Decisions, and Self-Sabotage, your Achilles heel. And it's a really short 30-page document. I wanted, I felt like we could really get through this thing in the hour. And at every single page that I read,
00:01:27
Speaker
I felt like he had outlined perfectly the process that happens when we move from our truth to an inauthentic life. When we're younger and we're susceptible to losing ourselves because of the various influences around us and in order to survive, we split away.
Negative Emotions and 'Aha Moment' Concept
00:01:49
Speaker
As Dr. Shafale and many other people have talked about, it happens early in our childhood. We don't realize it.
00:01:56
Speaker
We've attached to a self that isn't really us and we now identify with this idea of ourself, but in fact it's really just negative emotions and it causes bad decisions and ultimately causes self-sabotage. This is Mike's
Insights from Mike's Book on Resolving Emotions
00:02:16
Speaker
theory on how this all happens and what you can do about it. He has something called the aha moment to overcome and take action to remove this negative looping process from your life. We had an insanely deep conversation. So this is definitely not the 101 chat, keeping it light. This was us moving through really
00:02:40
Speaker
If you're ready for change, if you want to hear some detailed conversations with Mike and I about what you can do today to make those changes, this episode is for you. Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you enjoy today's show. Welcome to this week's episode of the Art of Authenticity. Today we have Mike Bundrand joining us. Hey Mike, how are you today? Good. How are you doing Laura? I'm great. I'm great.
00:03:05
Speaker
really
Introduction to NLP and Its Focus
00:03:06
Speaker
excited for this interview. We were talking beforehand that we're going to do something a little different here. For those of you who have been listening to this podcast for a long time, we've had authors and coaches and Mike just brings this incredible combination of years and years and years of NLP, which had one guest who had a background in NLP. And Mike, if you could, you could probably give us a little intro into NLP, that would be great. And then he also has this
00:03:33
Speaker
book that I read and I was like, I just want to walk through this. It has so many insightful, incredible ideas that I feel like anybody out there could get value from right away. So Mike, yeah, if you could start off explaining a little bit about your background, give us a little sense of the things you've been up to. You brought us into the INLP center, but for many people, they're not even sure what NLP is.
00:03:58
Speaker
Right, okay. Well, NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It's a communication skills, interpersonal skills, and sort of...
00:04:09
Speaker
inner self-management set of tools that was developed in the early 1970s, and it's a very unique approach that focuses on nonverbal and non-conscious elements of communication. I learned it because my background is mental health counseling. I went to college and became licensed as a mental health counselor, so I sort of learned it as
NLP Styles: Tony Robbins vs. Mike Bundrand
00:04:35
Speaker
one of the tools of the trade and before long I ended up teaching it and doing NLP certifications in the United States and Japan and sort of NLP training kind of took over my life and then in 2011 we decided to offer NLP training for lots of life coaches and
00:05:02
Speaker
business professionals, mental health professionals. So we decided to offer the training online. And so that's how INLP center.org came into being. So we're running the INLP center trainings. I have, I'm no longer doing sort of clinical mental health counseling. I do, I have a small life coaching practice on the side and I try to write about interesting things like the book you and I are going to talk about today as well.
00:05:32
Speaker
In a nutshell, for somebody who's not heard it, Tony Robbins has popularized NLP, but can you give like a two second description of how NLP, what a tool might look like and how it's different from say, classic therapy that I think more people are used to of learning about people's backgrounds and trying to find a root cause and looking at your internal life?
00:05:56
Speaker
Sure, I think I can do that in a nutshell. There's different kinds, different styles of NLP. Tony Robbins is
Restructuring Emotions Through NLP
00:06:05
Speaker
more the motivational kind of pump you up style. He's really great at that stuff. There's other people who use NLP for a variety of reasons, but then there's
00:06:17
Speaker
Sort of our style is more for coaching and therapist and so forth and it's not so much. Pump you up motivational but really understand the structure. Of your sort of inner self so that you can make changes to it so an example might be if somebody's coming. And they're discussing a problem maybe they're stuck in some.
00:06:43
Speaker
Negative emotion or what have you what we're gonna do with nop rather than. Talk about it although we might do some of that but we're gonna find out the inner structure so as you're in that state what specifically are you picturing in your mind and how are you picturing it that internal image has a structure that.
00:07:05
Speaker
Has qualities that really determine its impact upon you what are you saying to yourself what are you feeling and what are the specific qualities of your feeling where in your body and what's the feeling specifically doing in terms of the sensation and then we can begin to sort of restructure.
00:07:27
Speaker
how you're having this experience so that it doesn't have the same impact on you. And sort of the metaphor I use is, you know, imagine being on a roller coaster and you're sitting in the front seat of the front car, looking down the track, going down a big hill and the wind's rushing past your face. There's one way of doing a roller coaster. The other way would be imagine you're, you know, a thousand yards away
00:07:54
Speaker
From the roller coaster watching people on the roller coaster what have you you're looking at it from a great distance. Both ways you're still picturing a roller coaster but those two ways are going to give you dramatically different experiences of the roller coaster so how we're structuring our inner experience has a lot to do.
Creative Approach to Negative Emotions
00:08:17
Speaker
with the outcome, how we feel, what we do, that inner state. So that's one small example of how NLP might approach change work with people. Yeah. So that in our mind's eye, when things are up close and really intense and vibrant and filled with colors, we feel certain ways and when they're distanced and further away, just like the roller coaster. Awesome. Yeah, I've played with it and it's not trained, but it's so powerful.
00:08:43
Speaker
All right, so today I really wanted to focus, Mike, on this book you sent me. I mean, I just was laughing out loud even though this is such a serious topic because I just have never seen anybody approach what I think is the source of so much pain and discomfort for so many of us with such an incredibly creative and truthfully funny style. So you wrote a book, Discover and Overcome,
00:09:10
Speaker
the hidden cause of negative emotions, bad decisions, and self-sabotage, your Achilles eel. Thank you, by the way. I really appreciate hearing that feedback from you. It means a lot. I really appreciate that. Absolutely. No, I really mean it. What I was struck with is literally, you guys will make the link available on our site, but I think everybody should grab a copy. You start right away with hello.
00:09:36
Speaker
We've been together for a long time now, although you wish I was dead. Even so, I'm very much alive. And so this is coming from the first person of what you call attachment. Can you explain to the audience who is this person? What is this image that you're starting off with? Okay,
Psychological Attachments and Childhood
00:09:57
Speaker
so the book deals with self-sabotage and why we do it, what's the unconscious
00:10:05
Speaker
motivation and this idea of psychological attachments, which is different than attachment theory, but it goes back to the days of Sabin Freud and this sort of hidden thread in psychology really since then. But when writing the book, I decided it would be interesting if
00:10:27
Speaker
I assumed the role of the self-sabotaging part of the psyche. And I spoke directly with people as that part, even though that doesn't necessarily happen to anyone. But I thought, you know, what if it did? What if I became the inner demon? And I said, you know what?
00:10:53
Speaker
I'm going to introduce myself to you. And I'm going to tell you all my secrets. I'm going to tell you how and why I mess up your life. And I just thought that would be a creative approach. It is because first of all, it creates separation between the crazy thoughts in our head that bring us down and make us feel out of control and anxious and hurt and hopeless and ourself, right? Because right away, you're saying, Hey, I'm this this entity, I exist.
00:11:20
Speaker
and I'm separate, which I think was just really clever right off the bat. And so he goes on, you guys, to say that your negative, frustrated, hurt, anxious, hopeless, out of control feelings feed me. In fact, such despair is highly nutritious for my type. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah, so we're going with the book being called Your Achilles' Eel, and I mean by that, specifically, you know, an eel.
00:11:49
Speaker
swimming in the ocean and I had in mind the lamprey eel which is a parasitic eel that what this eel does is it attaches itself onto unsuspecting fish and it feeds itself on the fish until the fish become ultimately weaker and weaker and until they die.
00:12:15
Speaker
And so this this concept of a psychological attachment, it ends up being an unresolved part of you, unresolved emotions, negativity that you got attached to long before you really were conscious. And the negativity, this attachment, it feeds on more negativity and is actually driven toward it.
Chronic Negativity: Control, Rejection, Deprivation
00:12:43
Speaker
So I sort of merged the
00:12:45
Speaker
sort of the metaphor of a parasite with this idea of self-sabotage and negative psychological attachments. Yeah, I mean, again, the idea that something attached onto me and it's not me, really just resonated with me. The thing I work with with my clients the most is these thoughts, the things that are going on in your head all day long, they're not really you and to really start to separate that is such a
00:13:15
Speaker
a difficult process. And so, do any of these sound familiar? Criticism, pessimism, rejection, control, loneliness, frustration, anger, and you go on self-sabotage, emptiness, you can thank me for all of these, right? And even though we experience all of these things, we don't know where they're coming from, right? But we want to be free of them, but yet we've attached to them. Is that the point?
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, we want to be free of them, but we're attached to them. And in a really strange and bizarre way, we are unwittingly setting ourselves up to experience more of the same. And I would agree with you that that's not who we really are. It's not our authentic self. It's not what we deserve.
00:14:11
Speaker
It's just what we have become attached to what we've become accustomed to and i can give examples of how we might set ourselves up to experience more of the same i think at some point in the book i do so i'm sure we'll get to that but that that's the idea.
00:14:30
Speaker
We're attached to it. It's not our authentic self, but we're driven in some strange way to continue to remain attached and experience more of the
Tolerance for Negativity
00:14:40
Speaker
same. Well, I think you make the point that I think so many people don't say, but they fear you may not even know who you are without me, right? And I think that ultimately when people think about making a change away from even the things that are the most negative in their life, the relationship that's not working, the job that they hate,
00:15:00
Speaker
Right? Like the financial decisions that are causing so much misery, they don't know who they are without these negative situations. So you go into to say chronic negativity falls into three categories. And this really got me because I feel like it was so so succinct, the feeling of being controlled, the feeling of being deprived, and the feeling of being rejected.
00:15:22
Speaker
How did you decide on these three categories? Why those three? Why those three? Well, they really come from classic child development, where from infancy up through five, six years old, there's some classic child development theorists that
00:15:45
Speaker
Suggest that we go through certain stages where control rejection and deprivation are are at issue and so they came from that but even more so. I thought they fit another words they tend they those three categories really do encompass.
00:16:07
Speaker
A lot of the ways that we end up seeking trouble where we end up getting ourselves into really tough emotional situations and being in a in a rut and.
00:16:20
Speaker
In some of our work at the INLP Center, we take each of those three categories, control, rejection, and deprivation. We talk about the various different styles or types of control, rejection, or deprivation that we practice. But that's where it came from. It does seem to fit a lot of our experience. Yeah. When I read the description, I couldn't think of much more, right? That feeling at mercy of outside forces that you can't control.
00:16:48
Speaker
Feeling deprived like something feels empty inside of you or feeling rejected right like worthless unwanted hurt humiliated Yeah outcast you bet and and then this is the part that I think Right we so if this is coming from childhood and the experiences we had with our parents this is where you say that the attachment the
Influence of Chronic Negativity on Choices
00:17:12
Speaker
as you put it, comes in to save you. Why save you? Yeah, I like that concept and save you because one of the things that happens when we're kids, especially young infants and babies, I mean, we're having a psychological experience. We're having an emotional experience. The problem is
00:17:36
Speaker
We're set up for pain in a lot of ways because when we're young, we don't have any patience. We don't understand that there's a world beyond our own needs. We don't understand that mom, while she may love me, if I'm hungry, and I don't get something immediately as a baby, I become enraged because I don't have a sense of time. I don't have any boundaries.
00:18:03
Speaker
I don't see mother as a separate person with her own needs, and she's in the middle of something, and so she's got to take a few minutes. In a way, we are set up to have these experiences where we feel controlled, deprived, and rejected on a pretty continual basis. I mean, a two-year-old who wants to stick a car key in the light socket
00:18:28
Speaker
and isn't allowed to, it's going to feel controlled. Even parents with really great intentions who are doing the right thing are going to cause their small children to feel negatively. Then of course, bad parents, inattentive, neglectful, abusive parents, only exacerbate the problem.
00:18:56
Speaker
We end up as children having this consistent experience of negative emotions. Of course, we have positive emotions as well, but we experience a chronic negativity.
Awareness of Self-Sabotage and AHA Process
00:19:08
Speaker
And again, the worse your parents are at parenting, the more negativity that you're going to have. And so how does the eel save us? Really, the only option that we have, according to this theory, is to build up a tolerance for the negativity, to learn how to deal with it.
00:19:27
Speaker
we can't make it go away we can't change the circumstances and so we build up a tolerance for it we familiarize it we learn to handle it and in a strange way it's not uncommon that we learn to take some form of pleasure in it so for example you have the little boy
00:19:51
Speaker
who when he does something wrong, his mother or father or somebody overreacts and punishes him. And he does something wrong again and he gets punished. And again and again and again, parents overreacting. Then at some point in his life, it occurs to him that he could push mom's buttons. All he has to do is this or that or the other thing and mom flips out. And so pretty soon this kid
00:20:20
Speaker
is pushing mom's buttons and kind of giggling about it, right? Or, you know, it's those kinds of scenarios where suddenly there is introduced kind of a forbidden fruit mentality in it. We know it's wrong, but somehow we want to do it, right? And so this is, according to this theory, a way the psyche learns to handle
00:20:48
Speaker
Negativity is we sort of develop an appetite for it resilience to it it sounds like you're saying as well and almost then i don't know like i would think that little kid is getting a little control back if they're in a situation right like that could be so the motivations can become interesting if mom's doing this over and over here now i can do it too right and it becomes maybe exactly and now the the kid is seeking more of what.
00:21:19
Speaker
has always caused him pain. And so that's sort of when that transition from, oh my gosh, this is overwhelming and I can't survive this way, into finding a way to pleasureize it, make it into a forbidden fruit, or familiarize it, or building up this huge tolerance for it.
00:21:45
Speaker
That's sort of the eel coming along and attaching and saying, I am the one who has an appetite for this stuff. I eat negativity for lunch and I'm going to take care of it for you.
00:21:59
Speaker
Yeah, and you go on to say, are you still with me? Here are a few questions for you to consider. And what I thought was so fascinating in these questions, right? Have you ever wondered why people choose to do things that cause them unhappiness? Have you ever tried to give up behaviors that cause you guilt, shame, personal angst?
00:22:16
Speaker
What I could point out in each one of your questions is you've taken the victim and the blame out of the question. I don't know if that was intentional. Most people would say, what do you mean? I don't choose to do things that are causing unhappiness. This is happening to me, right? Like, I don't give up behaviors that cause guilt. I feel guilt and shame and personal angst all the time because of this person, that person, this situation. And so in this narrative, you're restructuring
00:22:44
Speaker
that there's all these ways in which we choose unhappiness, negativity, guilt, giving up an achievable goal, inviting, controlling, rejecting emotionally unavailable people. I mean, it's flipping this whole paradigm on its head and saying, you know, why are you making those choices and not wanting to let it go? So that was intentional on your part.
Breaking Free from Self-Sabotaging Behaviors
00:23:10
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. What I really think happens, I do think we make choices, but they are that invite further pain into our lives. I think those choices are unconscious or semi-conscious choices that we don't recognize. It's just we find ourselves in this situation again. And when you're working with someone one-on-one, you can usually trace it back to
00:23:39
Speaker
when the self-sabotaging choice occurred. So for example, a woman has a history of being in a relationship with controlling men and she's miserable. And so she finally gets out of the relationship and she goes and finds another relationship with what? A controlling man or rejecting or depriving. And so her conscious experience is, oh gosh, this is happening again. Why do I end up with these jerks?
00:24:09
Speaker
But if you sort of dig into it and trace it back, you can usually find something like, what were the red flags that you overlooked, that you talked yourself out of confronting? What were the things about this guy that you told yourself would probably be okay when they were really red flags? And so at some unconscious or semi-conscious level,
00:24:37
Speaker
The choice point is identifiable and so we so often set ourselves up. We're on a diet and
00:24:47
Speaker
and things are going well, then we're at a party and we go, well, you know, this is one side of the piece of cake or whatever. And we just talk ourselves right into the very thing that causes us to fail. Right. The third piece and the fourth piece. And you say the bottom line is I'm an ugly truth that you've always tried to avoid me. And when you've had to confront me, you've attempted to annihilate me.
00:25:14
Speaker
You see, I'm a survivor and I can outmaneuver the best of them. And that's such a great sentence too because the hooks that this has on you after years and years and years of living this way is very difficult to break those hooks. Is that what you meant by outmaneuvering?
00:25:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm gonna say it can be very difficult and most of the time it's either extremely difficult or impossible because we take the approach that. I just want to kill this part of me right or we deny it we you know pretend we just wish that it would magically.
00:25:55
Speaker
Vanish or we even try to use willpower and override it do everything but take a square look at it and say This is what's going on with me. This is what I'm doing. This is what I
00:26:11
Speaker
At some level i'm seeking we do everything but confront the truth of the matter and we can't out maneuver it that way.
00:26:26
Speaker
Where hold act and yeah, I'll add the acronym aha Super cute and easy to remember so right so I mean hundred percent this was my experience I was just this is what we're taught right shove it down get over and get past it go You know, come on like man up like all this stuff. Yeah, I deny it Slap us some one client said slap us a smile on it, right? like these families say all this stuff and mainly it's cuz we
00:26:54
Speaker
We feel like it's sort of weak to deal with any emotional state. But in fact, the real work and the real strength comes from from what you're going to describe here by first becoming aware. So can you explain your process of aha aware halt act? Sure, sure. And by far, the first step
00:27:16
Speaker
Is the most important because again our tendency and for the reasons you. Mentioned our tendency is to deny it in fact it's really absurd what we're really saying here is we're unwittingly seeking what we hate. We're unwittingly setting ourselves up to get the very results that we complain most about. And.
00:27:41
Speaker
That's absurd who wants to admit that right who wants to know that about themselves however so that's why becoming aware of what's really going on. Is the key.
00:27:54
Speaker
Well, Mike, too, it flies in the face of everything your family taught you, which is why I believe you can be in this position in the first place. If the answer to all of it is get over it, you would never want to be aware of it. That's not what you were taught, and that's what this feeds off of, is that you're never going to be aware. I mean, its existence depends on it. Right. It also flies in the face of, say, positive thinking culture.
00:28:22
Speaker
where you're supposed to think positively and look at the bright side and all these things which are really valuable in and of themselves, but thinking positively does not stop self-sabotage necessarily. It doesn't stop these patterns because the negativity, the difficult spots that we get in over and over and over again are so familiar to us, the rut that
00:28:53
Speaker
And that sort of safety and familiarity of the devil that we know is so much more powerful and primal than positive
Transformation Through Personal Truths
00:29:05
Speaker
thinking. Right, and positive thinking in my experience, right? It's like, be grateful. So, okay, you're in a big negative space in your life and you see, you know, people saying gratitude is a solution. I mean,
00:29:20
Speaker
So what do you do? You sit there and say, I'm grateful, I'm grateful, I'm grateful. And then you recognize this isn't working. And you're like, I suck. And it just goes back into the negative thinking, right? Because I don't think you can force your will on yourself to be grateful. Right. Yeah.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yeah, and so there's in the awareness piece, there's a shift that occurs because if you just let the negative thoughts and the say overlooking the red flags, the excuses you make that enable you to go and eat the cake. If you just sort of let that negativity run on autopilot, then it's just negative negativity running your life. But if you confront it,
00:30:00
Speaker
By honestly acknowledging what you're doing, then I don't consider that negativity. I consider that being truthful. And so my clients and students of the AHA solution learn to recognize their attachments and be truthful about them. And I'll often teach people how to write what calling a personal truth statement for now.
00:30:29
Speaker
or maybe it's more of an absurd truth affirmation. But it's really confronting yourself by saying, let's say that my attachment is to rejection and I tend to hang around people who reject me a lot and then enable them by not expressing how I feel or giving them any feedback at all and so forth. And the people who are nice and decent to me, I'm not attracted to them at all, they're boring or what have you.
00:30:58
Speaker
And so I'm just gravitating toward this. My life is this rejection machine and that's the reality of what's happening. So a true statement would be something like, today I'm going to seek as much rejection as I can. Today I'm going to interpret the world in a way that leads me to feel rejected at every opportunity.
00:31:25
Speaker
And it's not meant to be an affirmation. It's meant to be a reflection of what I'm actually doing. And so I walk into a social gathering, and the first thing I'm scanning for is people who are looking funny at me, people who are better than I am, people who are dressed nicer than I am, people who are wealthier than I am. I'm comparing myself to them going, I'm scum.
00:31:52
Speaker
And so what I'm literally doing, and this may all just be happening on autopilot, but what's actually happening is I'm walking into the social gathering looking for opportunities to feel rejected less than. That's so powerful like because affirmation statements are so popular and like Instagram and everywhere, right? It's just
00:32:14
Speaker
Be inspired, be yourself, like your truth and step into your light and all that stuff. But I mean, God, the truth is, right? Our affirmations are truthfully these.
00:32:25
Speaker
They are. There are these death sentences walking into rooms, but nobody deals with that part first. They're trying to slap the positive affirmation on top of it. Interesting. Yeah, it is. Then usually when people really become aware of what they're really doing at a deeper level, what their autopilot is doing,
00:32:48
Speaker
They're blown away because it is absurd i mean if you look at my day and i'm going through the day you know sort of constantly feeling less than low self esteem and anxious.
00:33:00
Speaker
when what I'm actually doing is looking for every opportunity to feel rejected, that's absurd because I hate rejection, right? This is me consciously going, I hate it, I'm mystical. But at the same time, I'm not going into the room going, oh, who's here that I can connect with? I mean, I'm not doing that. Yeah, but you're talking about personal agency and giving that back to people. Yeah, that this is your choice to walk in a room and say, let me see how many times I can be rejected, or
00:33:29
Speaker
You know what? I just want to be victimized today a hundred times. That's my personal goal. Like, whew, great day, you know? And I mean, if we started with that much truth, then we might make a more rational decision, but we bury it. We just, you know, deny it and blame. Yeah. And as long as it's buried, we can't make any choice about it. As long as it's outside of our awareness, it's also outside of the reach of our choice. We don't really acknowledge or recognize that it's going on. So we can't do anything about it.
00:34:00
Speaker
But what happens as you start to become aware is that something happens really naturally, which is at some point when it really dawns on you what you're doing and it makes sense why you would be doing it given your early life training, then you start to go, hmm, do I really want to keep, do I need to do this? If I had something else that I could do,
00:34:29
Speaker
What would it be and so now you're in the realm of making a conscious choice as opposed to just having this thing on autopilot that you're a victim of. And so then you can start thinking of what else could i do what else should i do and so forth and that's the sort of halt.
00:34:50
Speaker
part where when you're aware, the more you become aware, the more control you have over the process. And at some point you'll be able to stop and say,
00:35:01
Speaker
what are my other options and that would be the act on new information part of the aha, get a different idea and suddenly now I have something else I can do. And when you go through the process deeply and there may be other tools and other work that may need to be done along the way to do some letting go and so forth. But when you kind of get through the process, you have this inner transformation where now when you walk into the room,
00:35:29
Speaker
Those thoughts those rejecting thoughts don't occur to you anymore you feel that attachment and that's the point. Yeah i love
Mike's Journey of Self-Awareness
00:35:41
Speaker
it and you say. To do the work of releasing what i'm up to yes me your attachment you have to consciously realize.
00:35:49
Speaker
what you're doing that makes your life a prison, right? And then you can make the choice if you want to be free. So I love it, Mike. This is so powerful. And I think anybody out there listening, if you like this, if you are interested in checking it out, again, I'll have the links on my site and Mike can share his thoughts with it. He's written blogs and all sorts of different
00:36:15
Speaker
articles can find them online as well. We'll have all that. So Mike, everybody who comes on the show talks to me about what it means to have an authentic life as well. Given you spent so much time thinking about it, what then does an authentic life mean to you? I think being authentic means being self aware and honest. And for me,
00:36:38
Speaker
To me, an important part of that honesty is honesty about your limitations. In other words, I mean, this goes back, I think authenticity develops or can develop along sort of the life cycle. We go through different stages. I'm 49 years old now, but when I was 29, I was in a really different place developmentally where
00:37:05
Speaker
I really wasn't aware of or honest about my limitations. I was sort of charging ahead trying to make it in the world kind of thing, a really different place developmentally. So as we mature and learn about who we are, we learn about our limitations as well and our shortcomings and
00:37:31
Speaker
And then we developed much more compassion for other people and their limitations and really learned to see other people just as people like me. And when you get to that point, I think you are now sort of swimming safely in the waters of authenticity. It's a long process, though, to get there, I believe. And do you practice, I'm sure you practice the systems that you've developed?
00:38:01
Speaker
having put the time and energy in, I ask people what their daily practices and habits are to stay in an authentic space, but has this become now something that you do just as a habit or unconscious pattern that you don't have to work that hard at or how is it for you now? It just gets easier and easier when part of me being authentic when we first developed the AHA solution, one of the attachments under
00:38:28
Speaker
under control one of the ways we go about seeking to be controlled it we call the rebel and if there were ever an emotional rebel on this earth it was me right.
00:38:43
Speaker
Rebels seek to be controlled. Consciously, they are so anti-authority. Nobody tells me what to do. Don't even expect anything of me. In fact, whatever you're expecting of me, even if I expect that of me, but if you're expecting it of me, I'm going to do something else just because you're expecting it. That was me.
00:39:07
Speaker
the rebels really seeking to be controlled because if you line up say 10 people and nine of them are basically cooperative and do you know what they say and what's expected of them and the 10th person is a rebel who's the one that gets intervened on right the rebels are constantly attracting monitoring and intervention without really knowing it right so that was me yeah and so when I realized that it's like
00:39:38
Speaker
There's just things in my relationship with Hope, my wife.
00:39:43
Speaker
And so part of the of my authenticity was saying my gosh i am such a rebel and what that does it just screams at you to come and intervene and try to get me to fly right and so i began to acknowledge every single day what i was doing to rebel and seek that sort of negative attention from her.
00:40:09
Speaker
And it took several months to work out and that was sort of my project for that period of time. And now I don't feel that within myself anymore. And then I'm sort of onto the next attachment that is going on with me.
00:40:26
Speaker
And trying to be honest and figure that out. So that's one way that I, you know, and over the years, the attachments have really softened or disappeared and so on and so forth. And so
Conclusion and Resources
00:40:39
Speaker
one of the things that I do every morning is as I just sit down and notice how I'm feeling for five or 10 minutes.
00:40:46
Speaker
is kind of do a body scan and and notice what's there is there my basically feeling okay then i'll just sit there and breathe there's some old familiar feeling that i have and what's that about ten. And so on and so forth and you know i try to express what i'm learning through my writing and so forth so you know their times when i really discover something that sort of emerged i need to work on.
00:41:13
Speaker
And other times I go through sort of long periods of inner peace. So it just depends. But for me, it is all about a personal growth oriented lifestyle. And it's all about the process and sort of being honest about where you are in your own process. I love that. I love that. Mike, thank you so much for coming on.
00:41:38
Speaker
the art of authenticity sharing your thoughts and your work. This is the first time I've walked through somebody's work like this and I really enjoyed it. I hope you did as well. Yeah, that was fun. I really appreciate you sort of putting that level of thought into it. That was really interesting. And if people are looking to find out more about you, where can they find you?
00:41:56
Speaker
The best place to go would be inlpcenter.org. That's our main website. A lot of that website is centered around NLP and life coach training certification for practitioners. But there's an articles tab there too that has a lot of personal development articles on it and so forth.
00:42:23
Speaker
There's a video on it as well that is sort of a 30 minute or 20 to 30 minute walkthrough of self-sabotage and how psychological attachments work. And it sort of explained with examples without the eel metaphor. Awesome. Thanks, Mike. We appreciate you sharing your wisdom. You bet. Thank you, Laura.