How to Triumph over Defeatism
“Nothing ever works for me!”
Have you ever said this to yourself?
Maybe screamed it at the top of your lungs?
Does it only happen in one part of your life, like career or relationships?
Or is defeatism just the way life is for you?
Have You Tried ________?
Of course, you have. You’ve tried everything.
You’re really smart. You work hard. Way harder than other people.
You’ve read all the books, followed all the advice.
These things work for others, but you are still stuck at zero.
And things are sliding downhill, bit by bit.
You’re thinking it’s waste of time to even keep reading this, because nothing ever works for you, anyway. Right?
I get it.
But, stick with me.
I’ll explain why your life is this constant string of events where you work so hard and it never pays off.
I’ll even show you how it can change. Really.
Where It Starts
To understand this infuriating pattern, we have to go back to your early childhood.
Back then, your brain was a sponge.
It’s job was to soak up how people around you felt about being themselves.
It took all that feeling and turned it into your sense of self…your storage bank for how you feel about being yourself.
Then, your sense of self became the blueprint for every moment of your life.
The Engine That Generates Your Life
Think of your sense of self as a rechargeable battery.
The energy stored in it is how you feel about being yourself.
Each day, your sense of self generates moments and situations that feel identical to the feelings it stores.
Then, while you sleep, your sense of self recharges with the feelings you’ve experienced during that previous day.
Which are the same feelings that generated your situations that day.
See how that works?
The feelings you absorbed from the people around you early in life keep recycling every day and night of your life.
What Went Wrong
If life and people were perfect, your little sponge-brain would have absorbed lots of goodness and turned it into more good for you.
It’s job was to expand your core essence, which I call natural well-being.
Your core well-being is made entirely of the feeling that you are all good, exactly as you are.
If things had worked the way they should have, your natural well-being would have grown into a unique you that fit and worked perfectly with your surroundings.
But, people around you back then had negative moments, or hours, or days. Maybe lots of them.
From those bad times, you absorbed the feeling that there’s something wrong being human.
Your sense of self stored that horrible feeling as the sense that there is something wrong being you, exactly as you are.
It’s called Learned Distress®, and it’s what went wrong.
What Goes Even More Wrong
So, your sense of self is made up of these two kinds of feeling—natural well-being and Learned Distress.
From these two very different energies, your brain generates every moment of your life. Automatically. Without your conscious input or control.
Some moments re-create the feeling that you are all good exactly as you are, and you feel great.
Other moments re-create the feeling that there’s something wrong with you, and you feel awful.
Then, your brain uses those feelings to recharge your sense of self with overnight.
You would think the balance of well-being to Learned Distress would stay roughly the same over time, then.
Unfortunately, not.
Your brain only recharges the most intense feelings you experienced during the day.
9 times out of 10, which feelings are the most intense?
It’s the lousy ones, right?
As your brain recharges with more Learned Distress than well-being, over time, the intensity of your negative feelings grows.
You feel worse.
Your moments and situations feel worse.
The Craziest Thing about Defeatism
As it absorbed all these bad feelings, your young brain developed a survival mechanism to handle the feeling that there’s something wrong with you.
This survival mechanism allowed you to fit well with the way people around you felt best and survived…your brain molded you like a puzzle piece to fit perfectly with your surroundings.
This mechanism says, “As long as I am this certain way, I’ll be OK. I’ll survive.”
Seems like a good idea, right?
The problem is that your brain developed its survival mechanism before you could think, so you didn’t have a choice in the matter.
Your brain couldn’t evaluate the feelings you absorbed or the survival mechanism that was being developed, so it couldn’t say, “That’s an awful way to try and survive. Let’s leave that part out!”
As a result, some survival mechanisms are nutty.
Defeatism is one of them.
Yes, that’s right. Some brains “decide” that the way to fit well in the world is to prove that nothing ever works. As a result, these brains keep generating situations in which…you guessed it…nothing works.
No matter how hard someone tries or how perfectly they do things.
See? I told you it was crazy. But, that’s how it works.
Why It’s So Hard to Break This Pattern
You’ve tried, right?
You’ve felt the power of “this will never work” dragging you under, and you’ve tried to resist it. To think you way out of it. To convince yourself that this time, it might work.
And yet, it always wins somehow.
I used to wonder why the brain would hold onto this wrecking ball so tightly.
I realized that “survival” really means that…your little sponge-brain really believes that you’ll die unless you are this certain way.
The part of your brain that stores your survival mechanism is still two years old, and it doesn’t benefit from your older, thinking brain’s rational capacity to see how ludicrous such a belief can be.
So, you can’t think your way out of your defeatism.
The only way to get rid of it is through feeling, because that’s what your sense of self stores…pure feeling.
The real issue is that while your thinking brain is turned on, you can’t access your feeling brain. It’s a one-way street. You can feel what’s coming out of it, good or bad, but you can’t reach in there to change anything.
But, don’t stop reading. I have good news!
How to Access Your Feeling Brain
A researcher named Mimi Herrmann figured it out.
She discovered how you can hack into your sense of self and tell it to release Learned Distress for you.
She had already discovered that your feeling brain recharges with Learned Distress or well-being during sleep.
Then, she developed a way to tap into that natural renewal process and tell your brain to recharge with well-being, instead of Learned Distress.
I joined in with her, and we refined the Quanta Change process into three integral elements. One is a catalyst that gives your sleeping brain permission for change, one helps you understand how your Learned Distress generates your negative situations, and the last gives you the way to tell your brain specifically what to change.
For the past 20 years, people have experienced the radical changes that come from this process. Layers of Learned Distress peel away permanently, and as a result, core well-being finally gets to expand and take its rightful place as the generating force behind more and more moments.
What Post-Defeatism Looks Like
I’ll let a couple of my clients show you.
The first client is an across-the-board defeatist. Relationships have been especially difficult. He visited his siblings and parents recently, and usually, to guard against the anxiety of failure-in-motion, he hides himself away from them the entire time. Then, he beats himself up for another failed family gathering.
This time, he found himself behaving very differently, without planning for it. He met each family member one-on-one in a way that felt good, and he connected deeply with them and enjoyed the entire visit. He didn’t hide out once. He was shocked at how different it felt and how easily he found himself interacting with the people he had failed to connect with his whole life.
My second client is a defeatist only in the area of professional achievement. Despite multiple degrees from the best universities, he has avoided seeking a position that would use the full scope of his training, because of his defeatism.
Recently, he proposed a small consulting contract to an organization, and to his surprise, they offered him a full-time job where he will be doing the work he trained for several decades ago…for the very first time. The organization is actually creating this position for him. And, instead of dreading failure, he’s excited and looking forward to his new job.
Both men said these radically different experiences came out of the blue, without planning or specific work towards them.
That’s a hallmark of Quanta Change.
Moments generated from Learned Distress are always that way…you’ve never committed yourself to work hard to have a horrible day, right?
Once well-being is free to become the generating force, good moments happen just that easily and automatically.
What if Things CAN Work for You?
I know what you’re thinking.
You’re scared to even hope that things can work for you, after all this time.
After all this work. After all the methods that have failed.
What if you let yourself dream of change one more time, and you fail just as miserably?
But, what if it does work this time?
What if you can have the kind of change my clients describe?
What if you wake up one day, and it feels good to be you?
What if you’re excited to try new things?
What if you have successes to share with your friends, instead of failures?
What if they are shocked at how you could possibly have changed so much for the good?
Isn’t it worth finding out?
Just like everyone else on the planet, the core of who you are is pure well-being, just waiting to be uncovered.
It’s ready to get to work for you.
Are you ready to let it?