Thanks Pixabay for this awesome image that shows what’s possible when you let your mind expand
Being A Smarty Pants Is Really A Huge Handy Cap
I know you are a smarty pants. You obviously love learning or you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
You are a deep thinker, a reader, a questioner, a seeker, a lifelong student. You are constantly absorbing new information like a thirsty sponge and you love that. Me, too.
Being smart confers lots of advantages, but it’s also a huge handicap. I mean, it’s a huge handy cap, as in the kind of cap you wear to block out the sun.
You’ve learned to control the world with your big brain and you are conveniently hiding under the big brim of your encyclopedic knowledge. That will only get you so far.
You Are Stopping The Flow Of Your Own Creativity.
Creativity is intelligence having fun. ~ Einstein
One of the challenges of being such a brainiac is that you think you are supposed to know anything and everything. That internal pressure is like quicksand to your creativity and to your confidence.
You cannot possibly know everything there is to know in the world. You are off the hook, Whew!
Learning is by definition doing something new.
Think about it. If you already knew how to do it, you wouldn’t need to learn it, right?! Whether you are learning to read, to write, to speak a new language, to play a musical instrument, to ride a bike, to swim, to use a computer, to run a 6-figure business, to run a 7-figure business, to do a cartwheel… the first step is the same in every case.
You take the first step into uncharted territory. You start doing what you have never done before. It’s scary. Take a deep breath and step in with an open mind. It’s unknown. Stop thinking about it. Feel your desire to have the result, and then head in the direction of your desire.
This makes obvious sense, when you stop and think about it, which is what you are automatically doing, because that’s your habit. To stop and think.
But most people don’t think about learning like this, with what Zen Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” This is an attitude of openness, curiosity, and eagerness to receive a new perspective.
Instead, most people get stuck “thinking” that they supposed to know everything before they start, and therefore they never start because they haven’t “figured it out” yet. They just keep spinning their wheels and iterating the same thing over and over and they never get out of their heads.
You never get real traction when your mind is stuck in the grooves it already knows. There’s a saying in neuroscience, “The neurons that fire together wire together.” What literally happens in your brain when you think the same thing repeatedly is that those neurons actually get closer to each other, so the signals happen faster. This become the path of least resistance.
The natural tendency of all human behavior is toward the path of least resistance. When you resist this tendency, you become stronger and more powerful.
~ Brian Tracy
You can create a new neural path. It takes deliberate attention and intention to do it. Your subconscious patterns account for over 95% of all your brain’s activity. The first step to changing your subconscious patterns is to become aware of them in the first place.
The etymology of our word learn means “to follow or find the track.” When you are learning something new, you are literally creating new neural tracks in your brain. Putting thoughts and associating ideas and concepts that you have never put together before. Soon this new path becomes the preferred path, and that old path looses its attractiveness.
The only way to learn something new is to stop thinking about what you already know.
If you want to open your creative, associative mind to that next big idea, you’re going to have to learn to quiet your analytical, thinking mind so that you are able to receive more information than you already know you know.
You want to access MORE than you already know. There’s no way you’ll find it in the files of what you already know because you haven’t learned it yet. Make sense? Your mind needs to stop self-referentially looking at itself for the answers, and it needs to be willing to open to something way, way, way bigger than it will ever know.
Call that bigger something the quantum field, the God Field, the Universe, the Sa, the All That Is. It does not matter my what name you call it because it’s all One and the same.
Hiding Under Your Handy Cap Is Protective. It’s Also Super Limiting.
This is you wearing your thinking cap. It looks cool. It completely protects you. No way anything can hurt you when you are wearing a handy cap like this.
This kind of protection is great for playing baseball or hockey, but it’s not so useful for everything else you want to do in life. How are you going to eat? Sleep? Kiss someone? Blow your nose? A lot of people walk around in life without ever taking off their protection. That only gets you so far.
As some point, you’re going to want to take this hat off and be vulnerable. Yes, you will be criticized. You will be judged. You will get haters. You will get pushback. So what. Scary? At first. And then it isn’t. After a while, it feels scarier to walk around being so guarded all the time.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.~ Dr. Seuss
The only way for you to access more of life and for life to access more of you is for you to access more of you.
You and life are not separate, unless you separate yourself from it.
When you walk around with the belief that you already know everything, you are limiting anything new from coming in. You are declaring, “My cup is already full, so no more tea for me!”
If you want to receive more — learn something new, make a new friend, make more money than you have ever made before — you need to stop hiding behind what you think you know.
What you think you know is not the whole picture. Yet you act as if it is. This belief limits you terribly. There are so many resources, ideas, inspirations, opportunities, and possibilities floating out there beyond your mask, but they can’t get to you if you won’t let them in.
This is why practices like mindfulness, meditation, yoga, swimming, qi gong, dance, showering, going for a walk, doodling, daydreaming, and other seemingly mindless activities are so beneficial for your thinking mind.
When you are always “trying to figure it out,” there are a few subconscious stories running that are actually making it impossible for you to figure it out.
- Any time you tell yourself that you are trying, you are automatically activating the part of the brain that is in resistance. When you tell yourself, “I’m trying to…” your brain instantly knows that it’s not happening easily, which is why you have to try. Stop saying, “I’m trying to …” and replace that with “I’m doing it.” Your nervous system will feel an immediate relief that you’re already doing it. Running the tape that says, “This is going to be really, really really hard and it’s going to take a lot of work” creates struggle. Doing it is just doing it.
- Any time you tell yourself that you figuring it out, you are running headlong into a brick wall. There’s that state of resistance again. Figuring it out does not happen by working harder, longer, staring at your computer until your eyes are burning. No. This way madness lies.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. ~Einstein
Doing the same thing over and over is just being caught in your own thought loop. That’s all. When you find yourself doing this, know that you have accidentally fallen into a habitual trap of overthinking and overanalyzing. The reason that does not work is that when you enter this rabbit hole, you inadvertently activate the fear centers of your brain, which go into overdrive.
You can’t access the higher cortical levels of your brain where new associations are main, where creativity happens, where true inspiration happens, if you are putting all your attention on your limited perspective. If all your awareness is focused in those areas of the brain that are feeling scared and defensive, you are not giving yourself a chance to focus on what else is possible.
Your reactive brain is so busy thinking: I might do it wrong. I might make a bad decision. I might make a fool of yourself. I don’t trust myself. Why can’t I figure this out? I’m smart? If I’m so smart, then if I just spend more time thinking, surely I’ll figure it out. This is a downward spiral that makes you want to quit and give up on yourself. This is why being so smart handicaps you. You need to take off your handy cap of being a know-it-all and surrender to what you have not yet learned.
Conclusion
Stop trying to figure it out and give your brain a break. Step away from your computer. Take a shower. Go for a bike ride. Dance. When you stop clinging so tightly to the small truth of what you think you know, you discover there’s more Greater Truth than you ever imagined. This includes the truth of what you know and a whole lot more.
You can access The All That Is the minute you decide to give your brain a break. It’s crazy simple to learn anything when you deliberately press pause on thinking and press play instead.
Here’s A Brainy Idea For You!
Quiet your mind and you’ll 10x your creativity, your productivity, make more money, have more fun, and enjoy your life more.
Enjoy these 108 easy, fun, relaxing, powerful and proven ways to give your mind a timeout so that you can create awesome shizz with ease. Your mind does not know everything. It does not have all the answers, although it likes to think that it does.
Your brilliant analytical mind is like one pixel in the mega-super-duper-ginormous-jumbotron of life. That one pixel does not the entire picture tell. Download the book and start relaxing and expanding into your greater potential right now!
