What Creates A Breakthrough In Our Life?

Why do some parts of our life seem easier than others? For some, it is easy to create a successful career; for others, they’ve developed a wonderful relationship that weathers life’s ups and downs; for someone else, it’s mastering a healthy lifestyle that keeps them trim and fit without constant struggle against bad habits. Yet, when trying to achieve success in other areas there’s a block–despite repeated attempts we can’t get the results we want. We want that shift–a guaranteed path–to finding work we love, or a good relationship, or to finally lose and keep off the excess weight.

It all starts with our thoughts. Thoughts that we’ve had so often they create a strong belief system. Typically these thoughts were formed many years ago–possibly as early as high school or college. If success in a particular area came easily we likely formed thoughts as simple as “this is easy,” “I’m good at this” or “I really enjoy this”.  The more our brain produced thoughts like “I’m really good at finding and keeping jobs,” or “exercise is fun and it’s easy from me to lose weight,” the better we got at those areas of our life. And the better we got, the more positive emotion we felt as a result.  Even if we experience a setback such as losing a job or being unable to exercise because of injury or illness, our belief in our ability to bounce back is strong because we’ve created so much “proof” that we can.

Understanding the link between our beliefs and our success is the first step towards creating major transformations in the parts of life that we find hard. If we’ve always found it difficult to lose weight, or have struggled finding work (or a person) we love, our brain is going to continually offer us reasons for why we’ll never get what we want. To create a breakthrough with “difficult” challenges we must start believing something entirely new, which in itself is a challenge as our brain resists change and likes to maintain the status quo.

Making a breakthrough means committing to believing something new about ourselves without immediate evidence that it’s true. We must be willing to consider new thoughts about ourselves and practice thinking them long enough that they create new beliefs. That’s the shift that creates transformation. This shift could take a week, a month or a year. But ultimately, we’ll achieve the breakthrough we desire. And much else will we have gained along the way?