A common misunderstanding that people have, especially when they get older, is they think that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. This is the fixed mindset.
Change happens all the time, unfortunately, for most people this change is forced on them. None of us can get away from the forced change. There are some changes which are inevitable. But, we can all play an active role in self-directed change.
I hope you enjoy this video.
Please let me know if you have any topics you would like to see covered.
Today I wanted to talk about the growth mindset and that everyone can change what they do and who they are. They can change almost any aspect about themselves.
We are all going to grow old. Every one of us. Day by day, we get a bit older than the person that we were before. I will be a bit older by the end of this video than I was at the beginning – you will be too. That’s just a fact of life. But how you age, how you grow old – a lot of that is in your control.
You can control how but much you use or abuse your body. You can control how active you are in life to keep yourself aerobically fit and how to keep your muscles fit, how you control the food that you put into your body, whether you put good food in there or bad.
It’s all under your control.
- You control your thoughts.
- You control the good thoughts you have and the bad.
- You control positive thinking and negative thinking.
- You control all the different mind sets that you have. You might not be in immediate control of that but you are in control because you have the power, you are the only one who has the power to change, those things about yourself.
- You’re the one that limits the frame.
- You’re the one who limits how, what you do in life, how you see yourself by the frame through which you look at yourself, period, it’s just the same.
No matter what you do in life. Whether you apply this to drinking alcohol or whether you apply it to learning a new skill, or not learning a new skill, whether you’re planning to exercise nutrition, whatever you apply it to. If you apply it to how you view yourself as a person. When you look at yourself in a mirror, what do you see? That’s all up to you. It’s the framework by which you view yourself. And that framework not only says a lot about you but it says a lot about where you’re going to go and who you’re going to be in life.
You literally start to control yourself by first understanding and saying to yourself over and over again that you’re the one that’s in control. That you have control. You have the reigns of your own life and then controlling your own life, in small sections. I mean all you can do with these things is do it bit by bit.
You can’t change massive parts of your life overnight. It does happen. People do change when something traumatic happens to them and that can make a huge leap forwards, or backwards in some cases, but in general there is no magic bullet that you can come up with that’s going to change things for you.
I’d love to be, one of my favourite scenes in any movie was where Leo in the Matrix opened his eyes and said ‘I know Kong Fu’. I’d love that you know, five seconds, upload a skill, flying a helicopter, shooting a AK47 or learning Kong Fu. Who wouldn’t like that. Who wouldn’t like to be able to have the ability to just be able to go, yeah, I want this skill, which skill do it want, yeah, press a couple of buttons and you know how to do it. It’s not how things work, maybe some time in the future, but it’s not how things work now.
How things work now is that you have to break the skill down into small chunks and you have to learn it bit by bit, you have to. In order to become a Marathon runner, you don’t just go out and run a Marathon you have to learn how to run first. Most of us know how to run, we’ve been doing it since we were kids. But do you know how to run properly? Certainly, don’t know how to run 26.2 miles, that’s not in anyone’s vocabulary from the start off.
How you learn that is by going out and running a hundred meters first, then running two hundred meters, then a kilometre, then a mile, then two miles, then five miles, ten miles until eventually you can run 26.2 miles. That’s how change happens, just bit, by bit, by bit.
The same thing with quitting drinking alcohol, you don’t all of a sudden change the behaviour of quitting drinking alcohol overnight. You stop the actual action straight away. The moment you stop drinking the alcohol is when you actually stop using it, you’ve quit using it, but the behaviour itself and the habit takes a long time to break down and it’s nothing to do with alcoholism or fucking genes, or anything like that, nothing to do with anything like that, it’s purely to do with the fact that it’s a habit.
A habit will just keep impressing itself on you. That’s just the way habits work, you have to accept that. But it doesn’t mean to say that you can’t change these things because you can. Take the discomfort, push forwards and make the changes in the your life. Everyone’s capable of it. Your brain is wired to change. They say is it the neurones that fire together, wire together, or something like that. So, the things that you do constantly that’s how your habit forms. Your brain starts forming new neural pathways which makes it easier for one neuron to get to another, the message is easier to pass between. I mean I’m not great on this stuff but same thing with your muscles.
If you want to lift a certain weight you’ve got to do it gradually, you’ve got to pump up. If you want to lift a 100 kilos, you’ve got to be able to first life 5 kilos. You can’t lift 100 kilos before you can lift 5 kilos. There is a big chasm between the place where you are now and where you want to be and you have to fill that chasm with still little steps right.
A marathon is 26.2 miles. You can’t go from the beginning to the end of the Marathon in one step, you have to do it in small little steps but eventually you’ll go and you’ll have completed the Marathon. If you want to put an aerial on top of your house, you have to first have a house to put it on. You first have to have the foundations to put it on, then you have to build the walls, then you have to build the roof and then you can put the aerial on the roof. You can’t put the aerial just in thin air and say it’s on top of the house.
Anything in life requires this. We look at life like, we’re approaching death. It’s like a journey. You’re born, you go through your life and then you’re not here any more. Maybe you’re somewhere else, I don’t know. But it’s a step by step journey and it’s how you take that journey that dictates how you are going to enjoy it. How you are going to use or abuse your body as you are growing older, all these things, but believe me that everybody is capable of change.
If you can get your body to do it, if you can get your arms to pick up 5 kilos and then a couple of weeks later you can pick up 10 kilos that you couldn’t do the week before. That’s change. That’s your capability of change. The same thing happens in your mind with neuroplasticity, the joining of neurone pathways, we’re all capable of doing it, we just have to do it in the right way. There is no other way of doing it. Just do it in the right way, step by step.
That’s it for today. If you have any comments leave them down below. Come over to the website http://www.alchoholmastery.com. We have a load of different resources, video courses, books, that kind of stuff, we’ve got a forum. Not on the website but a Facebook Group that you can join. It’s by invite only so you won’t find it, if you’re looking for it, you have to get an invite.
Take care of yourself, keep the alcohol out of your mouth and Good luck.
“You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the old one”
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
Excellent video Kevin; I’ve forwarded this one to my 16yr old son to watch 🙂