Are your “filters” holding you back?

Helen Elizabeth Evans-267 (2)

This week we are extremely lucky to have guest blogger all the way from “across the pond” in London, England. I am delighted to welcome the extremely talented and beautiful Helen Elizabeth Evans from Step Into Your Light. Helen has some lovely insight that will certainly help us GLOW!

Having grown-up on a rural farm “in the bush” in southern Africa, my perspective on life can be somewhat different to many of those whom I meet.

I’ve learned that nothing is quite what it seems…

Our big rambling house was taken care of by four rural people, two in the house and two in the garden, which was probably bigger than a couple of football fields. My mother is Welsh and grew up with many European views about how things should be done and found the Swazi way quite challenging at times. She started a local school and so had to rely on our Swazi helpers for many things, including taking care of me.

One day one of them didn’t turn up to work. She was relying on him to do a number of things that day, and was so frustrated and spitting mad that he’d just not come to work. He’d not told her he wasn’t coming to work and there was no way for her to contact him to find out what was going on… I’m sure you can imagine how she felt!

The next day he turned up as if nothing had happened, not even mentioning the fact that he’d not turned up the day before. So, she asked him why he’d not come to work and he told her he’d had a doctor’s appointment. Now she was even more spitting mad, “Why didn’t you tell me?” If he’d told her she could have planned around his absence.

He said “But, Madam, how could I tell you? It is rude to tell a person bad news.”

We have so many stories like that one… living with people who have different rules and different ways of thinking is liberating! Seriously. It teaches you that your own rules, your own way of thinking, your own belief systems are just that… thoughts, perspective. None of it is real or true. It’s just the filter you have developed to look at the world.

We live in a world of information overload. We need some structure, we need a filtering system, that helps us determine what information we want to pay attention to and what we can dismiss otherwise we’d all be “in the nut house”, or at least I certainly would!

So having a belief system, which is effectively “your rules for living”, is essential to your sanity. It gives you a conscious clarity that allows you to make sense of the world and give the experiences you have meaning.

The problem occurs when we forget that those rules we live by are just thoughts, they are nebulous. Their power only comes from our determination to stick to them. The moment your “rules” for how things are or should be becomes more important than your happiness and the happiness of those around you is the moment you lose your power to determine your own life and the results you get from it.

Have you ever sat down and actually examined your “filters”? Do you know what rules you live your life by, at least consciously? What about unconsciously?

For example, consciously I believe that marriage is a place where two people get together on an equal basis with equal responsibilities, and that is the basis my husband and I married on. We lived together for 5 years before we married and we had an amazing relationship, but within a few years of being married I wasn’t “happy” but I couldn’t figure out why. After some deep self-examination I discovered that unconsciously I believed that my husband should be the breadwinner and I should be able to go out and earn “pin money”. He should be “in charge” and I should be the “not fully present” wife. What?? That was my parents’ dynamic, not mine. My subconscious rules for marriage were determined by the example I was given as a little one. I just had no idea those “rules” were there until they rocked my marriage.

Nothing is quite what it seems…

The way you are seeing the situation you are currently in or the relationship that is not working or even the way you see yourself, is not the “truth”, it’s just your perspective and your perspective is limited by what you want to see, by what you believe “should” be true, by your determination to be “right” and by the subconscious beliefs you don’t even know you have.

If you are unhappy, struggling, overwhelmed or stuck in anyway then I invite you to decide what you really want and then ask yourself “What would I need to believe for me to have what I want?”

 

Helen Elizabeth Evans is a London-based business strategist, who specializes in helping her clients discover their signature brilliance and create businesses aligned with who they are designed to be. Her passion is to get the world to stop seeing themselves through the limits imposed by their experiences and conditioning, to both see and live according to the true spirit that lies within them. She uses the pragmatism of her African upbringing, the deep intuition of her Celtic roots and the map that is life purpose fingerprint analysis to guide her clients into lives that express the best of who they are, and give them the meaning and happiness they seek.

Website:  http://stepintoyourlight.com

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Email: info@stepintoyourlight.com