Faith
Do you have faith? Not a faith, but faith?
Listening to people you would think they don’t but on further inspection, it seems that they do. Perhaps a story would be helpful . . .
Many years ago I worked with a woman who was deathly afraid of flying. It all stemmed from when she was a teenager and was on a flight that was going through some “weather” as the pilots affectionately call it. It was quite choppy. All of a sudden this flight hit an air pocket and dropped like the Tower of Terror at Disney World.
This girl in stark fear reached out and grabbed the hair of the woman in front of her and came away with a hunk of the woman’s hair. The plane eventually made its way through the chop and landed quite safely. Fast forward to many years later when this woman’s husband has an opportunity to take a business/pleasure trip to an exclusive resort in Costa Rica. All the top sales people and their spouses were invited. This involved flying there.
She came to me and wanted help because she didn’t want her husband to miss out on this career acknowledgement and a much needed vacation. He wouldn’t go without her. She was terrified of flying. Just talking about it gave her goose bumps and a turned stomach. She said she didn’t have faith in her ability to fly again. I agreed with her. I said you have dedicated all your faith to the plane going down. I told her our job was to reallocate that faith.
I got a wonderful postcard from Costa Rica. It said, “I’m not in love with flying yet, but I haven’t ripped anyone’s hair out. Thank you! Janice.”
I remembered that story when I got this musing from The Grasshopper over the weekend:
“Do you have faith in your ability to fail?”
It seems we can’t muster the faith to succeed, but we have no problem in churning up enough of it to fail.
The transformation from one to the other begins with just noticing how much faith we naturally put in things everyday without even thinking about it. We have faith that the light switch will go on, the toaster will work, that our car will take us from here to there. Anyone of these things could fail at a moment’s notice, but we don’t allocate our faith there.
The lack of faith we have comes down to conditioning. Oftentimes, like Janice, we take one event and extrapolate it across our entire lives and automatically lack faith in a certain area. It’s not necessary to find the root cause, but only to start noticing that you do have faith. It’s just been misappropriated.
Faith is another word for confidence. Both are feeling sensations in your body. The good news is those feelings are transferable to any situation – including a scary airplane or amusement ride.
It takes a little rehearsal and the practice is worth it. Here’s one exercise that works wonders:
Think of a time when you felt confident about anything. Notice what your body feels like when you are confident. Then think of another time you felt confident and again notice how that feels in your body. Practice knowing what confidence feels like. Then, think of a situation where you lack faith in yourself or lack confidence. You’ll notice those feelings are different. The moment you feel those feelings begin, have your mind switch back to what confidence feels like.
Do this exercise over and over. The second you feel the scary feelings, throw the switch to allow the confident feelings to show up. The more often you practice in your mind, the better you will get at it in real life. What happens, over time, is that the switch automatically throws itself. It’s a wonderful method for reconditioning your mind and reallocating your resources.
I have faith that you’ll find this exercise as time well spent.
All the best,
John
http://cdbaby.com/cd/johnmorgan
http://www.cafepress.com/grasshoppernote/3580301
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