You are in charge of what happens in your life.

Gandhi said “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

He could equally have said “Nothing happens to me without my permission.”

It really takes a new awareness to see the truth in this. We are conditioned to think that many things in life happen “to” us. We seldom see that we created them that way – without realizing it.
We have the lives we have built for ourselves. It often feels like they just happened, rather than that we set out to build them. That’s because we build them unconsciously – we aren’t aware of doing it. Why? Because we are programmed in a certain way and we just do things without thinking about them.

I know people who are programmed to believe, from the experience of their own childhood, beliefs like this one: “women like me end up bringing up our children alone”. That’s their programming. So that’s what they do. And that’s what their daughters do. Others can see that they choose the kind of marriages that are not likely to last. And that they do not pull out all the stops to save those marriages or reconcile. Why not? Because it does not occur to them. Their childhood conditioning led them to expect the marriage to end. And that is what they created. And they do not know that they created this. They think “it just happened”.

That’s just one example. We all hold ideas about money, success, love, meaning, truth. Many of these we are unaware of – just like in the previous example. They were taught to us as children. They are still reinforced today. Some are good … some of these things hold families together, create positive homes, happy hopeful futures. Others keep us stuck, endlessly repeating actions that do us no good.

What creates our conditioning? Our parents. Our teachers. Our churches. Mass media. Public opinion.

We should be aware that some of this conditioning is paid for to make others profits. Financial institutions. Lenders of money. Sellers of ‘investments’. All these companies pay money for advertising and public relations that shapes our thoughts towards what is good for their profits. If we are unaware of the power and pervasiveness of their influence, then we do not know how much of our actions are unconsciously shaped towards their ends, not ours.

This explains high debt levels. Steep mortgages. The consumer culture. The belief that spending money makes us happy. And that material things will fulfil our dreams. Which keeps us tied to a job, stuck in a trap.

The good news is that although our beliefs are often unconscious and always very powerful, once we see what they are, we can easily change them. This is what we do during Kaizen Wealth. We swap limited beliefs for empowering beliefs that work for us in a big way!

The next Kaizen Wealth Transformational Weekend, takes place on the 30 – 31 August – if you’d like to enquire further, phone my office on 012 542 4560