There seems to be three ways in life to get ahead. 1) By stepping on those around you, pushing them down, and as a consequence appearing to be rising up. 2) By working with others to uplift us all 3) To simply step away from others, own our own value and rise above
"Don't speak poorly of others. You don't need to minimise other people to maximise your own potential." - Brendan Burchard.
Far far too often in business the first is still applied, despite there being ample evidence that is is not an effective approach. So what is it about how our brain works and we think that would have us believe that the best way up is to step on others and progress at their expense.
This all come down to how we view ourselves; the concepts of self-identity, self-esteem, and self-worth - let's group those together as value of self or self-value. How is this created and how do we change or nurture it?
What is self-value? Let's start by defining what I mean by self-value. The definition I prefer states that Self-value is "the extent to which we accept, approve, and like ourselves, as well as how much we value ourselves" It is highly related to our concept of self which deals with the idea of “Who am I?”. Self-value deals with how we feel about our concept of self. People who have high self-value possess positive regard about themselves, whereas people with low self-value possess negative regard. An important aspect of self-value to keep in mind is that it’s subjective, meaning it’s based on our perception rather than reality and therefore it is highly influenceable.
Where does our self-value come from?
Self-value can be viewed as a measure of your own history of developmental acceptance and rejection. We are once again heading back to our old friend the subconscious mind and the patterns and beliefs that were imprinted there during in our theta brainwaves focussed period before age 7. It really is scary how much of our lives are run from this computer like brain that just repeated the programmes day after day, and so creates a life designed as a result of unconscious, unedited, unreviewed version of the world we saw when we were young. So the usual culprits are behind the blueprint of our self-value, including parents, family, peers, and society. Our early development of self-value is heavily influenced by parental (or caretaker) attitudes and behaviour. This later shifts as our social interactions move outside of the home, becoming influenced by school, the media, our peers and wider society.
Where does self-value live in your brain?
Now what is really exciting is that we now know exactly where in the brain the neurons that hold our self-value are located. Researchers at Dartmouth College in 2017 identified a region of the human brain that is directly related to self-value, and seems to predict a person's self-value levels.
It's called the frontostriatal pathway (nice and snazzy), and the stronger and more active it is in the brain, the more self-value someone has.
This pathway connects the medial prefrontal cortex, which deals with self-knowledge, to the ventral striatum, which deals with feelings of motivation and reward. Remembering that the neural pathways in these areas were in most cases created through the repetition of experiences in those early years and form the pathways used by the sub-conscious brain.
It's fascinating as they also discovered they can differentiate between long-term and momentary self-value too. They called these the "road" which described the physical boundaries of the pathway and the "traffic" which was the activity levels on that pathway.
They found that if a person had a very strong "road," they are more likely to have higher long-term self-value. The "traffic" levels on that road, however, predicted higher momentary self-value. They also showed that these two types do not necessarily inter-relate. To me that makes perfect sense, as I would say this is the difference between the subconscious (longer-term) and conscious (momentary) brains - they don't interact. This is why we can surprise ourselves in both directions when it comes to our behaviours. I know i've said "that really wasn't like me, i don't know why i did that" on a lot more than one occasion.
So taking this knowledge back to the scenario at hand here around the ways we chose to get ahead in life. Our sub-conscious brain has a major role to play here to unfortunately. It's sad but true, that if we can see the trait of pushing others down to raise ourselves up in in our actions, that likely means we saw and heard those sorts of things as a child - from family, school, in the media, the advertising around us, societal expectations and norms - if we experienced them enough times we would then have created a programme that said - "this is how you survive!"
Without boring those of you who have read all my blogs, a short recap in the world of subconscious programming:
The primal drive behind the sub-conscious is survival. In pre-historic times that was more about surviving each day from predators, hunger or disease, but as humanity and civilisation has matured, the complexities of what we have to "survive" has also moved on, but the basic tenant that drives us has not.
In a world that is perceived as survive or die - you will use examples you have seen and apply them. If you need food and can run faster than the others you'll survive, if you can climb higher you'll survive. So logically if you can give the answer first or pitch the idea first then you get the job, you get the salary, you can buy food and shelter - hence you survive.
In this primitive sub-conscious world there is scarcity and competition, so being first is all that counts. Clearly in the complicated modern world, that just isn't true. And increasingly there is evidence that shows that even back in pre-historic times, often working together within a tribe ensured greater chances of survival for all! It's not a dog eat dog world, but that is how our subconscious mind works.
So if our sub-conscious, longer-term, self-value level is based on observed views, perceptions and techniques that tend to see the world as dog eat dog, and tell you that to survive you need to do whatever is needed, and everyone is a competitor doing the same thing; then it is logically true that you will seek to get ahead at their expense.
So, if we know consciously that behaving in this way is not the best way in the realities of modern life, then we need to help alter our longer-term levels of self-value and thus change our sub-conscious patterns of behaviour.
How do we do that?
There’s an overwhelming amount of evidence that indicates self-value is the foundation of mental health and general well-being. Individuals with high self-value are less affected by negative experiences and show less brain activation when confronted with distressing stimuli. Not only that, researchers have found that self-value is actually a predictive and not an outcome variable for success and well-being.
This is saying that self-value predicts success and it’s not success that dictates self-value. You don’t need to be where you want to be to feel worthy, instead feeling worthy will take you where you want to be.
The foundation of self-value is the knowledge and experience of yourself. When we treat someone with disrespect, we are just showing that we do not know our own self, and are behaving from a perceived limitation we have placed upon our self. So to treat others differently, we have to first treat ourselves differently. We have to raise our relationship with our self to a higher level.
"Once you know who you really are, being is enough. You feel neither superior to anyone nor inferior to anyone and you have no need for approval because you've awakened to your own infinite worth". - Deepak Chopra
I have shared more information on the sub-sconscious brain and how we can use it for a multitude of different benefits. It really is the ultimate hack. Anything you desire to have more of in your life - just get the sub-conscious brain to have a patternf or it - then you will be working towards that for 95% of the day, rather than the 5% your conscious mind gets to control. A few of the best blogs of this topic are:
So if we want to raise our relationship with our self to a higher level, we need to change the patterns of our sub-conscious around our we judge ourselves and therefore the level of self-value we evidence in our everyday lives. That doesn't sound easy does it. And if we don't follow how the sub-conscious brain learns and works, it's a pointless effort.
Firstly it is not a quick silver bullet process, this requires effort and commitment. There are 3 ways to affect your sub-conscious, and these vary with the amount of time taken to see the change, and the amount of investment required - be that time, effort and money.
Bruce Lipton says that "The function of the mind is to create coherence between your beliefs and your reality" - so putting the beliefs we want into our sub-conscious helps to ensure we instinctively (in the 95% of the day the sub-conscious is in control) make decisions based from what we want now, not what we saw when we were little.
The three ways are:
1) Repetition
This is the most common, and easiest but slowest way and just requires repetition until you create a new “habit,”. This has been the primary way we acquire sub-conscious programs since we were aged 7.
Note that this can’t just be sticky notes on the mirror - that is suggestion. To make it to a habit status it must be felt and experienced. This can be difficult if we are experiencing great contrast to the thing we want. Remember habits are made by repeating something over and over and over again. Practicing, repeating, practicing! So this requires a commitment to a daily consistent focus of your conscious mind to repeat a practice over and over until a new neural, sub-conscious, pathway is created and the conscious mind is no longer needed to guarantee it happens. Let's take the example of driving a car - the first few times you drive everything is done by the conscious mind - you have to think, mirror, signal, manoeuvre, getting the balance between clutch and accelerator results in stalling or bunny hopping. After a few lessons and multiples times or repeating the same thing over and over, you don't even think about it, and before too long you're singing while you drive. That is the conscious to sub-conscious habit loop at work. You can do the same with emotions and beliefs - if everytime you feel bad you say "i am happy", and you do it consistently even when you don't feel it, your brain will eventually ensure that you feel it in order to ensure coherence is achieved between beliefs and reality. Note that this approach is totally free and very easy, bu8t requires that consistency every day for anything from 3 to 6 months.
2) Self-hypnosis
This is based on the way we learned our programs in the first 7 years of life. During this time the mind is operating in theta state at all time. (for more on this check out this blog). As adults we enter this theta state every day before falling asleep and just before waking up. So we can use this time to add additional beliefs and patterns directly into the brain.
An easy way to do this is to make, and listen to a recording of what new programmes you want. As long as you speak them in a positive present tense, as if the belief or feeling you are wanting to reprogram has already happened. For example: "I am healthy","I am worthy and loved", "I have strong self-value" or "I can achieve anything I desire". Listening to positive and present tense affirmations helps to create this coherence. It's a fun exercise to create your own Conscious Review and play it as you fall asleep, I have used this extensively myself. It would appear this approach would reduce the new pattern creation time down to about 6 weeks.
3) Energy Psychology.
You could also call this super-learning where new belief modification programs are designed to engage the brain’s super-learning processes, allowing programs to be changed within minutes. There are more and more of these coming online, as this area of research expands. The most prevalent, and the only one I have personal experience with is Psych-K. But Bruce Lipton has a whole resource section on these on his website.
It may strike you as odd that an article about how we treat others, is almost entirely dedicated to talking about how you change how you feel about yourself, but I hope you are seeing why that is exactly the case.
Until next time...
