Personal Growth Choices

Project yourself Part I

Projecting is a concept you may want to familiarize yourself with when you decide to really change your life, especially your finances.

Before you can project anything, you need to take a good, hard, honest look at yourself. This is not the type of examination that takes five minutes, like checking your body for mosquito bites. This type of examination has, in fact, no time limits; though you will intuitively know when the process is complete. A word of advice here: don’t try to rush it.

So what is the nature of this examination? It’s almost like engaging in a form of psychic self-surgery. You first have to figure out the factors in your life that have prevented you from getting close to your financial goals, then you can start to fix things. Look at your upbringing, family values, and conditioning about money; those are good places to start.

When I went through this process myself, I found that when I really honestly looked at things my mother didn’t care that much about money, my father tended to be a little cheap, and both my parents were prone to spend everything they made. However, both my parents also instilled in me that I could do anything I wanted in life.

These things are quite useful to realize; they give us a keen insight into the type of conditioning we were subjected to and provide a great starting off point for some things we may want to change about ourselves.

In my own case, I decided that I didn’t want to be cheap and did not want to live above my means, so I decided to discard these things; but I liked having the belief that I could do anything in life, so I kept that. Failing to be honest at this point can really sabotage any change, so please try and stay the course.

Our past conditioning will control us until we first understand it, then we can let it go. Have you ever noticed that some people in life are struggling with the idea that they are stupid, or not good enough, or not deserving of life’s riches, or they should always play it safe? Do you know where they got these ideas from? More likely than not, they grew up in an environment where they were constantly told (by parents, teachers or other authority figures) that they were stupid, not good enough, not deserving of life’s riches, or never to risk anything.

And more likely than not, these messages were projected onto them again and again until they could not distinguish between those ideas (of unworthiness or safety) and themselves. In other words, these people became stupid, not good enough, not deserving of life’s riches, and risk adverse because of what was projected onto them, not because of any inherent qualities in themselves.

When we can realize that our fundamental ideas about ourselves are very much(if not totally)created by what was projected onto us while growing up, we are almost at the end of part one of this process. And by the way, it is important to not cast any blame on anyone who was “kind enough” to have projected these things onto you:  no one has  perfect conditioning growing up and everyone has challenges to overcome. Also, these so called authority figures doing the projecting onto us were no more than unconscious beings placed in our life to help us learn and grow. Again, everyone has these people interspersed in their lives.

Want you guys to absorb this for a little while; will talk soon about how to project what you want for yourself into the future.