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I launched The Unstuck Yourself Podcast yesterday.
The Unstuck Yourself Podcast is intended to help you understand where, why, and how you’re stuck while also empowering you with the awareness, tools, and strategies to get unstuck so you can unlock your full potential.
Whether you’re trying to unstuck yourself from negative health, money, career, or relationship patterns, the Unstuck Yourself Podcast is for you.
There existed a phase in my entrepreneurial journey where, for five consecutive years, I consistently earned nearly the exact same amount of money - plus or minus $10,000.
This happened despite my earnest attempts to boost my income each year through varied actions and the creation of new online products and coaching packages.
During one specific year, I set a clear income goal and committed to writing it down twice per day.
I plastered it on my iPhone wallpaper, and scattered sticky notes around my office - all to ensure this targeted number was omnipresent. Despite these efforts, I fell short of achieving the new income goal and, unsurprisingly, found myself stuck at the income level where my unconscious mind felt a sense of safety.
Why did this occur?
Incongruency.
A profound incongruency existed between my conscious desire (to hit a specific income goal) and the income level my unconscious mind deemed secure.
It wasn't until I delved into the root of this incongruency, guided by my Mindset and Performance Coach, that I made substantial mindset shifts. These shifts raised the minimum income threshold my unconscious deemed safe.
In this edition of the Unstuck Yourself Newsletter, I'm introducing you to the concept of Mindset Congruency. We'll explore why and how it plays a pivotal role in your journey to be more, do more, achieve more, and yes, earn more.
You’re Out of Alignment
Self-sabotage can be defined as getting in your own way despite your best intentions.
This deliberately damaging behavior is the result of incongruency between your conscious and unconscious mind.
When your conscious and unconscious mind are not on the same page, your unconscious always wins. This becomes your default and numerous sabotaging actions are put forth to keep you stuck in a predictable place of comfort.
Think about it like this: Consider your unconscious mind as the floor, the solid foundation of your current results or success. It's like the base level, while your conscious mind is the realm where you can soar above this foundation into the clouds of your dreams and goals.
The floor, being a safe place, is where your unconscious mind prefers you to stay rather than floating in the uncertain (and unsafe) sky. Therefore, your unconscious, prioritizing your safety, prevents you from rising too high, pulling you back down when you venture too far.
It's a protective mechanism for your survival, something I talk about in detail in “Unmasking the Subconscious: The Hidden Driver of Your Actions.”
When your conscious thoughts and aspirations soar significantly above the foundation of safety in your unconscious, incongruency arises. There's a misalignment. In response, your unconscious initiates various sabotaging efforts to bring you back to a place it deems safe.
These seeds of limitation are sown early in your life and are influenced by three key aspects...
The 3 E’s of Unconscious Programming
Until the age of seven, your mind operates predominantly in an unconscious state, generating theta brain waves. In this state, you absorb and assimilate stimuli and communication continually, which paves the way for foundational beliefs to be formed.
The power of the theta brain wave state and its role in rapid change through hypnosis is explored further here.
This is crucial because experts estimate that by the age of seven, up to 95 percent of your belief system is already in place. Simply put, you have little control over the beliefs your unconscious forms to fit in and protect yourself during this critical period.
Grim news, but there's a silver lining. With the guidance of a Mindset and Performance Coach, you gain the ability to release and shed these detrimental mental programs.
Let's delve into the three most influential factors shaping your foundational beliefs.
Environment: This encompasses your place of birth, family dynamics, community customs, and socioeconomic status. Your environment molds the lens through which you view the world.
Elders: As an absorbent adolescent, you unconsciously absorb tonality, body language, energy, attitudes, and beliefs from those around you. Roughly one-third of developed habits result from rebellion against parents, while the other two-thirds stem from mimicry.
Entertainment: Your unconscious mind blurs the line between reality and imagination. Consuming media with strong underlying emotions, attitudes, or beliefs during your formative years embeds these elements into your belief system.
Every unconscious program begins as a seed of an idea. Whether these seeds grow into positive elements aligning with your desired life or into counterproductive weeds depends on their congruence with your goals.
The beliefs formed during adolescence create a working model of the world and a set of beliefs aimed at ensuring your safety and belonging within your community. However, as you age, these beliefs may become outdated and hindrances to your evolution.
A core set of beliefs often revolves around worthiness, capability, and a sense of deservingness. Recognizing and updating these beliefs is essential for personal growth.
In the sections below, I’ll share three common examples of where and how incongruency plagues so many.
Remember: the single catalyst that creates incongruency is your unconscious desire to remain safe. And this safety is rooted in your biological need to belong.
If you recall from my previous newsletter, “Escaping the Fear JAR,” we all have three core fears:
Fear of Judgment
Fear of Abandonment
Fear of Rejection
Each of these is rooted in survival.
Remember - your ancestor’s lives literally depended on being a part of the tribe. Anything that risked being kicked out of the tribe induced a deep-rooted sense of fear to serve as a red flag to stop the behavior immediately or risk, well, again, death.
If your tribe judges you for your behavior, the risk of being kicked out exponentially increases.
If your tribe does abandon you, well, it’s likely a matter of days before you’re impending death.
And, of course, if you are rejected by your tribe, you’re ultimately abandoned, and, well, death.
Bleek times, I know.
Common Congruency Challenge: Money Mindset
Navigating incongruency around money (read: a scarcity mindset) is a common challenge I assist clients with (I find my work here particularly effective given I can draw from my own extensive experience successfully navigating this example of incongruency).
Despite our shared desire for increased income, overcoming seeds of scarcity in our unconscious minds poses a significant hurdle to achieving substantial financial growth.
Consider the impact of your parent’s relationship with money:
How did they discuss money?
How did they manage anticipated and unforeseen expenses?
What were their attitudes toward vacations and individuals with varying financial statuses?
These money-related beliefs were ingrained in you daily, both through spoken words and unspoken cues.
If your upbringing involved financial tightness and just enough to cover basic needs, the idea of substantial wealth might trigger feelings of insecurity (a lack of safety and fear of being rejected and abandoned). Your environment and elders' attitudes formed the foundational floor for your perceived financial safety.
The discrepancy between an expansive financial ceiling and a low foundational floor explains why many lottery winners, despite gaining immense wealth, often lose it rapidly. Their comfort zone is rooted in having very little, and unconscious self-sabotage kicks in to return to that familiar, safe place.
Common Congruency Challenge: Love and Relationship Mindset
Many of my Hypno-Mindset and Performance Coaching clients share a common background of growing up in single-parent or foster homes.
One client vividly recounted the day she met her forever family at the age of nine.
She described the day she met what fortunately ended up being her forever family around the age of nine. She recalled feeling as if she needed to perform and be perfect so that they would like her enough to adopt her.
Feeling the need to be perfect to secure their affection and adoption, she spent nearly a decade constantly trying to please others to fit in and belong. This pursuit of unconditional love formed the belief that perfection and meeting others' needs were necessary to prevent abandonment.
This persistent feeling of inadequacy haunted her for years. She sacrificed her boundaries and overextended herself in attempts to salvage romantic relationships, creating a pattern of moving from one relationship to another.
Desperate for love and belonging, she compromised her identity to feel secure, as being alone reminded her of a childhood marked by neglect, abuse, and a sense of unworthiness.
Common Congruency Challenge: Weight and Health Mindset
If your family or close friends practice poor self-care, are unhealthy, and are overweight, you likely share similar challenges in self-care, health, and weight. Your environment and the people you spend the most time with shape an unconscious sense of safety in remaining unhealthy.
Research shows that 85 percent of people who diet regain the weight they lost within a year, increasing to 95 percent within three years.
An often overlooked reason for struggling to maintain significant weight loss is the deep-seated feeling that it doesn't feel safe.
If you can relate, you may have experienced cycles of successful weight loss followed by self-sabotage leading to regaining lost weight.
I’ve been fortunate enough to personal coach nearly 3,000 men and women and to have helped them collectively lose tens of thousands of pounds of body fat for good.
Through coaching thousands of individuals, I've observed a recurring pattern of fear of abandonment and rejection, coupled with a lack of belief in worthiness and capability, fueling self-sabotaging behaviors.
Yes - working with a Hypno-Mindset and Performance Coach can help you break free from the vicious yo-yo dieting cycle. And I’d be glad to help you here.
Apply to work with me and schedule a coaching discovery call here.
Creating Congruency to Accelerate Change
To create congruency between your conscious and unconscious mind, you need to go to the source of your foundational floor of safety, which is your unconscious mind.
You need to do the deep work necessary to raise your foundational floor so that you can exponentially increase feelings of safety around money, love, and health, while improving feelings of worthiness, capability, and deservingness.
The more you can raise the collection of the above, the more congruency you can create, and the more success you can experience.
Enter Hypno-Mindset and Performance Coaching, which is the key to accelerating your journey toward getting out of your own way and unlocking your full potential.
This intensive, one-on-one transformational coaching experience will cut to the core of your biggest fears, limiting beliefs, and sabotaging patterns so that you can tap into unstoppable levels of performance, achieve your most ambitious goals, and create a life rich in fulfillment, impact, and income.
Apply to work with me and schedule a coaching discovery call here.
Your Next Step
Congruency between your conscious and unconscious mind is key to achieving your biggest dreams.
If you continue to find yourself stuck - like I have been financially and in my romantic relationship patterns - you must look within to spot the source of incongruency and begin working on raising your foundational floor of safety.
You can’t change unless you change.
Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter.
Interested in learning more about how I help high-performers just like you unstuck themselves and unlock their full potential?
Apply to work with me and schedule a coaching discovery call here.
You may catch up on previous newsletters here.
Subscribe and listen to The Unstuck Yourself Podcast here.
If you have a question about anything I discussed in this week’s Unstuck Newsletter, please message me on Twitter (@pauljsalter7) or Instagram (@paulsaltercoaching).
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