STEP 2 – GET PERSPECTIVE
In step one, I got up and I got myself moving. I used external motivation to keep myself in a state of motion. Now external motivation is great to get started, but it won’t keep you moving long term. You can’t rely on things outside of yourself to keep you moving but it did move me enough to seek answers. I have always had an analytical mind and a strong desire to understand how things work, so my attention went to Why! Why was I putting myself through this? What mechanism was causing me to need to return to a state that was clearly not serving me? What was the purpose of being depressed?
Now at this time I didn’t know a lot about the inner working of the human body, all I knew was that I was in a cycle and it had to stop. I started reading – my go-to was self help books, I have often read them, but the message was quite often lost by the time I finished it. The first book I read was “Awaken the Giant Within” By Tony Robbins. I read it intently and I took much of it in. The one thing that stood out to me was the fact that Tony Robbins had a time in his life where he struggled and felt down and so he made a goal to read one book a day for a year. Now I didn’t quite have the time or the commitment to do that, but I could see myself reading a book a week. I set a goal to read one book a week for 52 weeks and that was it – I was off. Inspired by this goal, I rearranged my schedule to ensure that I could fit in 30 minutes to 1 hour of reading every single day.
I was inspired by some of the greatest self-help proponents the world has ever seen with names like Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield, Michael Gerber and Dale Carnegie as well as spiritual masters like Eckhard Tolle and Dr Joe Dispenza. At the end of the year I hit 39 books and had learned so much information consciously that my life had truly started to improve. There were so many books which impacted me in that period, but the one that really stood out for me was “The Biology of Belief” by Bruce Lipton. Talk about my mind being blown….BOOM! Coming from a scientific background, this book resonated with me on so many levels. It married up scientific understandings in Biology and Chemistry with the more esoteric concepts of thoughts and feelings and (for me at least) pioneered the concept that what you believe and how you think has a profound impact on your chemistry and your biology. In short, your thoughts can literally “make you sick” and conversely your thoughts can also “make you well”. OMG, I realised that I had spent a lot of time making myself sick over my lifetime and it was time to balance up the ledger.
“Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” – Jim Rohn
As I read more and more about other people’s stories, their challenges and their triumphs, I started to learn and understand that everyone has their own unique challenges and the thing that defines us is not what we have been through, not our life situation, but how we respond to it and how we rise above it to become something more.
I have continued to study and broaden my horizons, reading many more books and also branching out into Audiobooks and Udemy courses to improve my knowledge in areas of the mind, body and even spirituality. While the change I saw by becoming consciously aware of these concepts was real, and it lifted me up from a downward spiral, I still had low points and I knew that it wasn’t enough to just consciously understand this stuff, I knew there was more to do and so I kept looking. Then I discovered the power of reflection…..