Swinging from The Trapeze

How many times have you heard “Be the change you want to see in the world” or “To change your world, change your thoughts”? Simply snap your fingers and BAM! Instant change, right?

Heh.

Thoughts are stubborn creatures. They insist on reinforcing themselves. If we want to shift from, say, “I can never pay the bills,” to “I always have enough to do what I need,” it can take a lot of fumbling and running around in circles as we try to find a way from point A to point B.

That’s perfectly normal.

Changing beliefs is like swinging from a trapeze. In order to shift to a new belief, you’ll need to let go of the first one. You can’t both “never be able to pay the bills” and “have enough to do so.”

This means you’ll be mid-air for a moment. That’s alright.

The most important thing a trapeze artist learns isn’t how to grab the other bar in mid-flight. The most important thing a trapeze artist learns is how to fall. Because they do. Frequently. Only after they feel safe falling do they then focus on reaching for the other bar.

How do you feel safe falling? By starting small. By having support. By planning ahead on the small increments, to have a fallback for these introductory steps, to have a safe landing space for these first small steps.

As an example, moving from “I can never pay the bills” to “I always have enough to do what I need” might need some intermediate steps:

• I can never pay the bills.
• I know where my money goes. (Starting to keep a register, making a budget.) I still can’t pay the bills, but I can see where all my money goes, so I know why I can’t pay the bills.
• I can see where I can make my money stretch. (Getting coffee at McDonald’s instead of Starbucks, making lunch instead of eating out, cutting down cigarette consumption, buying and rationing cartons instead of single packs, drinking out less…) Now that I know where my money is going, I can look for ways to use it more effectively.
• I can use the money I saved from stretching to pay down my credit cards/loans. By paying down bills that include interest, more money is freed up by paying less interest on the remainder. Once loans are paid off, a sudden new influx of money comes in.
• I don’t need everything I am paying for. (I can stop watching cable, and can read instead, or I can remove the premium channel lineup.)
• I can reduce my monthly bills. This step, a result of the previous ones, reinforces that I can pay my bills. This is the first major shift in beliefs that the previous small steps led to.
• I can wait to buy something until I have the money to buy it.
• I don’t need everything I want to buy.
• I don’t actually need that much.
• Because I’m not buying everything that I want, and I see how little I actually need, I can see that I have enough to pay for whatever I need.

In small increments, we’ve moved from being in a space of despair to being in a space of comfort with where we are. By being able to pay for what we need, we can then increase our sense of security and stability. Once we feel more secure financially, we then feel more secure personally, which translates to being more confident, which translates to being a more desirable employee, consultant, or what-have-you. As you become more marketable, you can then increase your financial base, which allows you to start improving your standard of living without increasing debt. This further increases confidence – the ability to change our own lives for the better – which then continues in a virtuous circle.

It all started by saying “I can see where I spend my money.” And at no point did we shift to thinking in terms of “I can’t do this anymore.” It was always from a space of “I can make this stretch” or “I don’t need to pay for things I don’t need.”

Those first swings on the trapeze were small. “I can see where I spend my money” has a small cost of failure. But it still took us from a space of “There’s nothing I can do” to “I can do something.” We can’t hold onto “I can’t do anything” anymore.

We’ve also reinforced that we can make these steps without failing brutally. We can see that, over that period of time, step by step, we actually shifted from “I can never pay the bills” to “I always have enough for what I need” to, eventually, “I can create a life I enjoy.” The entire traversal was huge, steep, and scary from the position of not starting. And, having gotten to the other side, we discover that it was a lot of little shifts.

And we can do it again. With incrementally larger steps. And, with more practice, it becomes easier, smoother, quicker.

Until, with practice, we can change the world by changing our thoughts.