Break Free From Your Self-Made Prison
I want to make you aware today of something that is a major stumbling block in our lives. Something that severely hampers our level of happiness, our personal growth, our relationships and our enjoyment of life in general, something that keeps us locked up in a self-made prison.
And I have found that just by becoming aware of this, causes major, positive psychological shifts in your mind.
So, self-made prison? What am I talking about? We’re free to go and do whatever we want, not so? We’re free to make choices – what to wear, what to eat, what to think and say, so where is the prison?
Premature Cognitive Commitment
Well, in psychology, there is a concept some of you might be familiar with, called Premature Cognitive Commitment. The best way for me to explain this concept I think, is by means of an experiment, which I obviously am not able to physically do (due to obvious reasons), instead I want you to imagine this.
So, let’s say I have a nice big 5 liter jar here with me - do you see the jar? Okay, now, what I have to do, is catch a bunch of sky raisins, aka flies. I then put them all into the jar and then put some plastic wrap over the top of the jar.
So, when the sky raisins inside the jar look up, they still see the sky. There will be enough air in the jar to keep them alive for more than 48 hours.
So what you do now is, you leave them there in the jar, and you start throwing poop at them – just kidding, you just leave them there for two days...
The sky raisins will be doing their usual sky raisin thing you know, buzzing around, vomiting on each other, because there’s nothing else in the jar for them to vomit on – you know that’s how flies eat right?
Anyway, they will be buzzing around and constantly banging up against the plastic wrap, and during that time, they will be making cognitive commitments about their environment and their abilities. They will look up at the sky and say, "There’s the sky, let’s buzz on over"… and then BANG!, hit the plastic wrap and they will say again, "Look there’s the sky, let’s buzz on up" and BANG!, the same thing…
After a couple of hours, they will say, "We can’t go to the sky, let’s just buzz around down here and vomit on each other instead". And most of them will say, "Groovy man, yeah let’s do that", and so they will continue buzzing around and throwing up on each other at the bottom of the jar, totally at peace with their lowly sky raisin lives.
So, after two days you remove the plastic wrap and lo and behold, 99% of the flies will stay inside the jar.
Here and there will be a brave sky raisin (Super Sky Raisin) who will venture out of the jar, but the rest of them will stay inside.
This is because they now have made premature cognitive commitments in their little sky raisin brains about their abilities and the environment in which they live by saying "This is where I live now, I can’t go up and I can’t go out, I’m STUCK!"
How About You?
Do you perhaps sometimes feel stuck in your life?
You see, with the flies, even if the plastic wrap is removed, they won’t bother to go out because they have made up their minds that they can’t go out.
Their environment has changed - the plastic wrap has been removed - and they certainly have the ability to fly out of the jar, but they don’t. They just sit there in their now, self-made prison, thinking about how much life sucks, eating each other’s’ vomit.
The important thing to note here is that they have made a decision, a commitment in their minds. cognitively, that they can’t escape this prison due to certain circumstances being, in this case, the jar and the plastic wrap at the top.
But even after their circumstances have changed - the plastic wrap has been removed - they still do nothing because they have already made up their minds that they can’t escape and therefore we can say that their decision or commitment was premature – they made up their minds too soon that nothing will change for them and they never afforded themselves the liberty of trying again and checking if the plastic wrap was still there.
Now Think About Your Own Life:
Not that I want to compare you to flies, but when last did YOU check YOUR plastic wrap?
When last did you check whether the things that you thought were keeping you from becoming the person you really want to be are still there, or are still as daunting as you once thought they were?
Or have you already made up your mind a long time ago that you can’t do this or that – you can’t become an actress or an artist or speak in front of an audience or live by the sea in a beautiful house overlooking the breakers, and, and, and…
You might say to me that this is a ridiculous example, but it’s not.
The same can be done with fish or elephants or people.
In fact, staff working at aquariums have reported that fish would behave in much the same way as our sky raisins. They would put a glass partitioning in the aquarium so the fish cannot swim from one side to the other but stay confined in their half of the tank.
The fish would keep on bumping up against this glass partitioning for a couple of days. When the partitioning is removed after a couple of days, the fish would stay in their half of the tank without even attempting to swim to the other side of the tank.
Why? Because they have made premature cognitive commitments about their abilities and their environment and those commitments or decisions are now keeping them imprisoned in their little half of the fish tank.
And The Elephants?
Well, elephants in India or in circuses around the world, are trained in much the same way.
Baby elephants are tied with an iron chain around one foot, attached to a stake in the ground. This chain and stake is strong enough to hold the baby elephant. Over a period of time the full-grown elephant is conditioned to believe that this same iron chain, tied to a small stake in the ground is strong enough to keep it in place.
The elephant doesn’t realise that it could easily pull the stake out of the ground and walk away, but it doesn’t because it’s made a cognitive commitment, from its babyhood, that it has adopted as continuing truth, without testing it.
It believes that the small chain and stake in the ground is still stronger than IT is as a full-grown beast. One tug on the chain and the release of the stake from the ground would begin the process of breaking the elephant’s premature cognitive commitment and it would become free.
What is still keeping you tied to a stake in the ground and what exactly is your stake?
Is it a person you can’t forgive, something that somebody once said to you – a parent, a teacher, your boss, bullies at school? Or is it maybe something that happened to you in the distant past that made you feel unworthy or not good enough?
We all have our stakes and chains, but when last did we check if maybe now we are strong enough to pull that stake out of the ground and walk away, setting ourselves free from our self-made prisons?
Or have we just made peace with the fact that we will forever be tied to this stake and not even try anymore?
For years everyone was told that it was impossible to run a mile in under 4 minutes, in “fact”, learned medical practitioners at the time said that a person would "have a heart attack by simply attempting it", but in 1954, Roger Bannister proved them wrong and broke that limit as well as that “fact”.
Although Bannister was aware of the limitations preached by all and everyone, he nonetheless tried to do it and then discovered that it was indeed possible. Interestingly, once people saw that it was indeed possible to run a mile in under 4 minutes, thousands of other athletes managed to do the same thing and running a mile in under 4 minutes is now commonplace.
Oh These Flies are so Stupid!...not to mention the Elephants...
One would think so, wouldn't one? But the thing is, we are just as bad!
We limit ourselves each and every day, depriving ourselves of new and exciting experiences, downplaying our talents and potential, restricting our enjoyment of life, because somewhere, someone put a plastic wrap on top of the jar of our existence, which has long since fallen off, but we haven’t had the guts to check whether it is still there!!
Every day, every moment, consciously or unconsciously, we make estimates about what we think we can and cannot do, based on our life experience. Moreover, we particularly make those estimates based on what we have paid attention to.
How So?
Well, at first, those flies paid attention to the plastic wrap. They made judgements about their abilities when the plastic wrap was still in place and continued to act from those judgements even when the plastic wrap was no longer there.
The flies created a ‘map of their reality’. Even when the real world contradicted their map of reality, the flies continued to behave in the old way. They failed to notice that their world had changed, because of their premature cognitive commitments.
And so, we also forever pay attention to and focus on all the things we believe we can’t do or have or be and this becomes our ’map of reality’ - our beliefs and values about the world, our premature cognitive commitments.
In one way we are not to be blamed for this as these premature cognitive commitments were created mostly accidentally while growing up, through our life experiences and the input of those around us like our parents, teachers and friends.
And while these beliefs and values may have been useful at one time - just as it was once true that there was plastic wrap on the jar for the flies - they may no longer be true today, yet we continue with our lives as if they still are...
If snot-nosed Darren, next door told you years ago, that “You’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny”, this might have left that impression on you for years on end and even today, as an adult, you might still have issues with self-confidence and self-worth, severely limiting yourself in every life experience you could have.
It is actually a very scary thing. Imagine you grew up in a family where the ocean was seen as the devil. As you became older, your belief in this notion would become stronger and stronger and unless you actually made the effort to go and see for yourself if this is true, you would also carry this belief over to your children.
What’s even worse, you would deprive yourself of ever knowing the joy of walking on a white, sandy beach. You will never know what it feels like to take a plunge in the water or to play in the waves or surf the breakers...
The fact is, until we start taking responsibility and dare to re-visit these seeming can-not’s and dare-not’s in our lives, we will remain stuck in the bloody jar!
We Are So Weird!
Human beings are weird – I mean, how many times have you had sleepless nights, thinking about all the good things and all the blessings in your life? Not too often, I presume.
But how many times are you lying awake at night thinking about all the negative stuff, when that little voice in your head says," Uhm...excuse me, sorry to bother, but would you like all the shit that might happen to you tomorrow in numerical or alphabetical order?"
You could go through your day and several people would compliment you on your hair, and ONE person would say something nasty about your shoes for example.
Guess what you’ll be doing tonight? You will not be lying in bed thinking about all the wonderful compliments you received today, no you would be running and re-running in your mind, the stupid scene where some idiot said something nasty about your shoes, isn’t that so?
We box ourselves in, we imprison and severely limit ourselves through what we focus on.
Take people with phobias: A person who has an elevator phobia will drag himself up and down 30 flights of stairs, several times a day instead of just using the elevator. He will construct his whole life in such a way to avoid elevators. It becomes an automatic response for this person – avoid the elevator, and he will repeat this limiting behaviour over and over, even if he wished he didn’t. It is automatic. Why? Because at some stage of this person’s life someone or something placed a plastic wrap on top of his jar.
So How Do We Orchestrate a Prison Break?
Our health, energy, happiness, accomplishments and relationships are greatly affected by the premature cognitive commitments we’ve made.
Only when we stop and question our assumptions and some of our deeply embedded believes about our possibilities in life can we see how severely we are limiting ourselves. Identifying our premature cognitive commitments is as easy as becoming more curious about our expectations and especially those things we have a knee-jerk reaction to.
Ask yourself where this opinion or assumption came from, then open your mind to new possibilities and interpretations.
Wherever your focus goes, energy flows. This is a scientific fact in the field of quantum mechanics. Keep on focusing on your can-not’s and dare-not’s and all the things you perceive as negative, and you will feed more energy to it and thus experience more of it in your life.
Fortunately, the opposite of this is also true – dare to check if that plastic wrap is still there, that stake in the ground, that glass partition. It might reveal a very pleasant surprise for you.
Do take your life seriously enough to acknowledge and accept that YOU are in the driver’s seat of your life; not your childhood fears, not your mother-in-law, not your friends and family, not your spouse, your ex, the situation in the country...
These things can only drive you around where you do not want to go, IF YOU ALLOW THEM!
Be bold, take the steering wheel yourself, by making a commitment to yourself to only focus on the good, the positive, the many things that are going right in your life.
Most of the time we struggle with this because we do not realise how many positive things are out and about in our lives, for the media won’t tell you about that.
I have found it very useful when I’m battling to find something to be grateful about, to just sit down for a moment and imagine how it would be without certain things in my life I take for granted. What would my life be like without running water in my house, an indoor toilet, electricity, my arms or legs, my house, my car, my job and the list goes on.
This will very quickly make you realise just how many things you have going for you, versus the seeming unsurmountable challenges and problems you think you see in your life.
Despite everything going on around us, the violence, the crime and corruption, the economy, always remember that you are still blessed in many, many ways; ways that you may never even think of, and even if there is absolutely nothing else in your life that you feel you can be grateful about, you still need to take control, you need to make your life happen, you need to be bold!
You need to remove the plastic wrap from your jar, you need to swim to the other side of the fish tank, you need to pull that stake out of the ground, because you have long since outgrown it...
I can help you do that...
You are so much stronger than you think!
Make you life magnificent!
