First off, what does it mean to have a victim mindset?? To put it in the simplest of terms, it's having the mentality that our current condition of life is someone else's fault or responsibility. Have you ever blamed someone else for how you're feeling? It's not something that's uncommon. Our ego likes to place outside blame when we are in a state of vulnerability. However, it's important for us to remember to not let this belief overtake our conscious beliefs and run away from us. Even though there seems to be a lot of societal conditioning currently being pushed to make victim mentality the new expected status quo.
Our quality of life is determined by the quality of the relationship we have with ourselves.
Are you dealing with feeling inadequate? Or maybe a feeling of abandonment? Scarcity?
These are a few of the insecurities that I, myself, have had to work through most of my life. The thoughts I would attach to these feelings I allowed to dictate the quality of my life. I bet you can guess how far I got with this mentality.
I blamed everyone and everything outside of myself for how miserable I felt. It wasn't until I learnt this one secret on how to redirect my thoughts to the ones I wanted to be having that my life changed. It's called "breaking the cycle."
***We break the cycle of our thought patterns and interject it with the thought that we want.***
That's it. Yet, many of us out there, including myself, make this so much harder than it needs to be. It really is this simple, however, it can be tedious. We have to do this practice over and over again until one day we forget that we didn't have to mentally interject a new thought. It begins to happen automatically. Then we realize the new thought habit actually stuck in our mind without any effort.
I like to look at our brain as a big telephone operator board from the early years. We would call the operator and they would manually unplug our line and plug it into a new auxiliary. This is how the brain works, through the process of neuroplasticity -The ability of the brain to change in structure or function in response to experience. We rewire our brain to what we want to be thinking about.
The issue is, we have a lifetime of beliefs and what we perceive to be 'supporting factors' of these beliefs, to solidify whatever narrative we are currently telling ourselves. It's a matter of retraining our mind to tell ourselves a different story. To change the identity we're holding onto.
What thought do I want to put in there? Just like breaking a habit of cracking knuckles or trying to quit smoking, we interject the new habit over and over again until we no longer have to do it consciously because the new practice became the new habit.
How do we redirect our thoughts??
It's important to remember that - life just "is." Life is neither good nor bad, however, the way WE perceive it to be makes it so. Holding onto a victim mindset clearly does not serve us. Here are 2 questions we can ask ourselves when we feel as if we are slipping into this mindset that will direct our thoughts in the direction we want them to go through the process of elimination.
1) Does this thought serve me?
When we're in a situation and we begin to feel that 'yuk' in our gut and we want to blame somebody else for how we feel, or a circumstance that happened, or anything along the lines of - "I'm this way because 'this' happened." We ask ourselves, "Does this thought serve me?"
No. No, it probably doesn't. We know that it doesn't, because if the thought served us, we wouldn't have to ask ourselves this question in the first place.
2) Is this belief rooted in love? Or is this belief rooted in fear?
Much like the first question, if we're asking ourselves this question, it's probably fear. Because if it was rooted in love we wouldn't feel any yuck in our guts going on. We tend to ignore the feelings that we get going on in our gut. Trusting our intuition and trusting who we are is a good practice to start.
If we know this thought is out of fear, what are we afraid of?
This is how we start getting down to the core root beliefs.
"Life just 'is.' Life is neither good nor bad, however, the way WE perceive it to be makes it so." (Click to Tweet)
Now that we've established our break in our thought habit cycle, we input the desired thought framed in a scope of growth, abundance, love, opportunity etc. For example, instead of saying "I always seem to be broke," say, "This is not in the budget at this moment." Notice how the second phrase doesn't create a negative identity attachment around the belief of being 'broke' and leaves room for hope and opportunity.
Simple doesn't always mean easy, but I promise you if you stick to this practice - break the thought habit cycle and interject the new desired thought, one day, you will feel that inner peace and freedom in a life you are truly proud of.
Let me know below how this shows up for you!
- Dillon "Wolverine" Andres
