Wired for JOY - Day 8

Knowing what you want

Welcome to day 8 of the Wired for Joy challenge. I'm so glad that you're here and no doubt over the first seven days of this challenge, You've learnt a lot more about what joy in your life looks like. You've understood what your blockers are, you've come to understand what things are within your control and what things are not. And it's probably led you to think a little bit about those things that are in your control. How do you change them? What are the things you need to do to get more joy in those areas? And with the things that are not in your control, it would have led to you to think about letting those things go.

Now, day 8 is all about knowing what you want! In each of the areas that you've identified you would like more joy (that you've been working on over the past seven days), I want you to get really clear on what having joy in that area of your life looks like. Today, we are going to write a clear definition of what having more joy looks like in each of those areas. The reason we're doing this is very, very important. With our minds, we have two parts to the mind. You have your conscious mind, which helps you get your tasks done on a daily basis and then you have your subconscious mind, which is this incredible supercomputer. Your subconscious mind is filtering everything that happens in your day. It sees everything in your environment. Every person, every sight, every smell, it sees every little bit of information and it's filtering all of that, and only passing through the things to your conscious mind that it deems relevant, necessary or true. Now your beliefs and your conditioning plays a role in what gets passed through to your conscious mind. But one of the really powerful things we can do is we can program the subconscious to pass us information by knowing what we want and setting a really structured goal and definition of what we want our life to be like.

I'm going to give you a simple example of how this works. If you've ever decided that you want to buy a new car and that's not necessarily a brand new car, but you've just Wanted to upgrade or change your car. The moment you decide what car you want. Let's say you choose a Mazda 3. You suddenly see that car everywhere. Now this is because as soon as you were very clear, specific and you said that's the car that I want. Your subconscious went “Okay,I've got it. Now I'm going to look in the environment for those cars.” It's not that you woke up that next day and suddenly there were a thousand more of those cars on the road. They were always there. But they were just not important to your subconscious mind. So when it was filtering, it just ignored them. And as soon as you then decide that this is now important, it's like, there's that car, there's that car, there's that car, we see so many more of them.

Our minds can be programmed in this exact same way and because we generally have a negative bias in terms of a survival mechanism far too often our minds are programmed to look for the dangers in our life. And so, we see a lot of the things that we don't like a lot of the things that causes heartache, sadness, discouragement etc. because it wants to keep us away from those things. But we can turn that whole system on its head by getting very specific about what we want and knowing what we want.

So as you build, a definition of what more joy looks like in each of these areas of your life, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be giving your subconscious mind, a clear set of instructions that when it filters to pass you things that meet that definition. Between your subconscious, let's consider the subconscious of this really big supercomputer.that's just seeing so much. There's a little filtering layer called the reticular activating system. And this is the layer through which your subconscious passes information to the conscious mind, the thinking mind. When we program our reticular activating system through beliefs, through conditioning, and through knowing what we want it then decides that the lens that the subconscious looks at our environment with is different. And so the subconscious filters and it goes “Oh what's in this reticular activating system?” “Oh, it’s definitions of Joy” definitions to have more joyIn the money area of our lives, or have more joy in the relationship area of our Lives, or in the friendships or the family or in the self love in, the spirituality area etc. When we've got clear on what that definition is the subconscious works for us and it's like, okay, I'm going to go get all these things and then it sees them and it's like, here's that thing. And it passes through two of conscious mind is like “Bing.”Oh look, there's that thing that brings me more joy. Oh look there's that thing that brings me more abundance. Oh look there's that person that makes me really happy and oh look there's more opportunities and so we start to see the things that bring us so much joy and happiness because we've gotten super clear on what it is that we want.

So this is day 8, you're going to take the areas of your life that you want more joy in, and for each of those areas you are going to write a very clear definition of what having more joy in that area looks like, so that your subconscious can start to work on that for you. We're going to build on this over the coming week but this is it for day 8.

I hope you're enjoying the program and if you have any questions, please let me know.