I was delivering a workshop to a business a couple of weeks ago and I asked the question…
What gets in the way of what you want to accomplish?
Each person present had some important business and personal goals and I wanted to know what they perceived as the obstacles.
Because, in our own way, we all have them, don’t we?
Limitations (or what we perceive as limitations).
The greatest illusion of all
The greatest (and most persistent) illusion that human beings live under is that there is an objective reality that exists, independently of us, and we experience it.
Or to put it another way, the world is how it is and, consequently, we have to do our best to navigate our way through it.
The deeper truth
We do not realise (until we do) that we each live in a unique world of our own, entirely made of thought.
Quantum physicist David Bohm, who worked closely with Einstein, said:
‘Thought creates our world, and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’
So, instead of there being an objective, fixed world out there, we see the world through the filters of our thinking.
What we see is our thinking reflected back at us.
In the workshop, we were exploring the nature of thought and one of the participants said:
“But even if I don’t think about the obstacle it is still there, isn’t it?”
Well, no.
When we look out into the world and we see obstacles, problems or difficulties, it is because of the state of mind we are in.
In a different state of mind, a higher level of consciousness, we would see things in an entirely different way.
I am sure you must have had the experience of being faced with a seemingly impossible situation, only to sleep on it and the solution becomes obvious to you.
What changed?
Your thinking.
As a transformational coach, it does not seem useful for me to help people navigate through their problems and obstacles by giving them specific solutions – although this is the staple diet of most coaching programmes.
The problem with this is that it may solve one problem, but what about the next one? And the one after that?
I have found it far more powerful to point people towards a deeper understanding of how life works.
There is only one thing blocking you
One of my favourite books is ‘The book of secrets’ by Deepak Chopra.
In it he wrote:
‘The only goal worth attaining is complete freedom to be yourself, without illusions and false beliefs.’
Next time you come up against an ‘obstacle’, rather than being something that stops you or being a cause for lots of unnecessary thinking, it is an invitation to let your mind settle and see the deeper truth.
As human beings we have unlimited capacity to think entirely new, fresh thoughts. A new reality is only ever one thought away.
P.S. The core of this understanding is the work of the late Sydney Banks.
George Pransky has recently summarised Syd’s ground-breaking discovery and the implications. This is material is gaining increasing traction as more and more people benefit from it.
