BEN DEPRAZ-BRENNINKMEIJER

Stop rehearsing your old stories.

I remember an inspiring hypnotist I trained with a while back saying: “stop being authored and start authoring”. These words and the message they convey stuck with me.

“That’s the story of my life”.. “that’s just who I am”… we know these sentences; we all know someone who said something along these lines and we might have said it ourselves, at times. Whatever the story, it is less important to know what the story is than to realise that by saying this, the individual is being owned by his or her circumstances. The control is not within, it is external. Whatever happens in this person’s life, it happens TO them. They do not have a choice in what is going on and how they react. This is a powerless and hopeless place to be in.

When you are authored by your life, you see things as happening to you and you are a victim in the face of the events unfolding. Life is unfair, life is miserable. Life is “always” like this, and “never” like that. But these are nothing more than stories that you tell yourself. You can CHOOSE to interpret things in a different way, understand that human beings are developmental creatures and that there is no perfection. There only is a way to grow and learn and use whatever happens in a helpful way. How can I use this? How can I modify this for next time? What does this mean I could change in my way of being? Do I want to make this change? What does it mean if I don’t?

You can develop incrementally with every single experience, if you are in the right mind-set to do so. Everything you tell yourself is just a story. So why not do so in a positive way?

YOU are the greatest hypnotist in your life.

You self-hypnotize constantly, self-suggesting the things that you repeatedly think and repeating to others the things that you say to yourself over and over and over again. You convince yourself of a certain reality and you STRIVE to persuade others that this reality is true and that you are correct in thinking so. Well maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. At the end of the day, it’s just another story.

Suggestions to oneself can be powerful and extremely driving at times. On the flip side, they can also lead to delusion, disempowerment and depression depending on the story that is being rehearsed. The great news is that you can CHOOSE to change your stories!

STOP rehearsing your old stories and START identifying with the new ones: the ones that you want. The ones you DECIDE to live by, from now on and going forwards. How can you do this?

The first step is knowing what you want to create for yourself. Think precisely and review regularly what it is that you REALLY want more of in your life. How do you want to be in the world? What emotions do you want more of? The second step is becoming aware of how you make or think about these beliefs regarding yourself, life, and generally the things that happen to you. How do you judge each situation? What language do you use to describe it? What do you recognise from your old way of being, and how do you feel you would like to react instead? Then discard the description of the situation, discard the “story”, and shift to a resourceful place: how can you use what happened in a positive way? How did you grow thanks to it? What did you learn? What is it that you are not seeing yet that you can be grateful for? Believe me, there is ALWAYS something. Notice how this situation did not have to make you feel the way you did…

I am not saying it is always going to be an easy ride. Development and change do not (always) happen overnight… You might make a few mistakes as you start, and that’s ok. We all do. As the saying goes: you don’t have to be good to start but you do have to start to be good.

And just as an aside, if you are not authoring your life, then who is?