Self-abandonment is the symptom of something that has happened a long time ago

Do you know what is one of the things I love about writing the most? As I sit down to write to you, I never know where this text takes us until I begin the writing and the thought begins to formulate in my mind exactly like what is happening right now.

I know I have mentioned it before, there is this trait in most of us as entrepreneurs: We are quick to start new things, but not so great in finishing them. And I do recognise that in myself. We move fast to the next thing, and we are always looking for that bright and shiny object.

(Which reminds me to remind you about the Black Friday and Cyber Monday opportunity that is going away at Cinderella time today. However, this program doesn't qualify as something you can dismiss when something brighter comes along...in this one, you are required to commit - all the way through. But you can, because I have built it so, that you can.)

So the bright and shiny object syndrome keeps us always reaching for that next thing. Whatever that thing is, that takes us from the current thing we are doing. We get bored, and tedious tasks amplify the need to move onto the next thing.

It would be okay unless it wouldn't automatically mean, that you have your drawers filled with unfinished projects.

If I had to choose one thing to fix in my business, this would be it. I am the epitome of bright and shiny objects, that is why I know how easy it is to lose interest and move on, especially when you combine that with the tendency to self-abandon. The results - or lack thereof - is mind-boggling.

That is also why I have integrated the Marketing & Mindset program with the monthly reviews. They are designed to keep you committed to your goals.

The self-abandonment is one of my life lessons. I didn't even realise it until I heard that it actually was a thing. I had heard the word before, but I never knew what it meant and what it looks like when a person is affected by that.

And after my eyes opened to it, I started to see it everywhere. It was a few years ago when I was taking my coaching studies, and I realised I have behavioural patterns emerging in my life.

I would make a decision to do something, and as time passed and I hadn't focused on it, I would walk away from that and think, well it wasn't meant to be.

I would want to buy something for myself, I would try it on and put it in my basket, I might even have few items there, and before going to check out, I had put all of them back and talked myself out of buying any of them.

I would commit to doing a specific thing in my business and then something more interesting would come along, and I would quickly shift to that new thing.

I would create a goal for myself, and then something would happen - like it always does - and I would just let the whole thing disappear. Now, at the time when I was creating a goal, it mattered, it meant something to me, but when the time came to pull through, I didn't.

Self-abandonment is a recurring pattern that you can easily spot in your life when you look for it. There is a lot of advice given about that because it is so common.

These are the pieces of advice I remember just on top of my head:

• Do one thing until completion.
• Let your word mean something.
• Find a partner to hold you accountable.
• Stay in integrity in your life.
• Practice personal responsibility.

They are all great and sound pieces of advice, but they don't help you eliminate the problem because for a person to become aware of this and then realise that she struggles with this issue, it is not because she doesn't know what the right thing to do would be.

If it were, we would fix it.

There is one thing that the list of advice does though. It makes you feel shitty and a bad person. Because it makes you think, that you don't have integrity, that you don't practice personal responsibility, that your word doesn't mean anything.

And that is not true.

So we have to look deeper, we cannot just willpower our way through this or conclude that we are flawed humans or that one thing automatically means another thing. Something is going on behind this behaviour.
So let's tap into that for a moment.

So what could it be? Like always, the answers are hidden somewhere below our consciousness, in our subconscious mind, and the driver and the origin of this behaviour are rooted somewhere in our childhood. So let's dissect this a little further and see where it takes us.

To self-abandon means, that when facing a situation that calls for a changed behaviour or a new habit or pushing through something to accomplish something new, we try to solve the situation without facing it, swaying away, distracting ourselves. We walk away, talk ourselves out of it, make it wrong, use the spiritual bypass of it wasn't meant to be and so on and so on.

And apparently this is still an issue for me, or I too would be a skinny billionaire, right? Also as this is an ongoing issue, it feels a bit tender to write about this, but since we are here, we keep going.

So if self-abandonment is a way to deal with and bring a solution to the challenge, where did we learn to walk away? More specifically, what happened to us that caused us to choose this behaviour? Where did this begin?

Well, it has begun early.... when we were babies, we never consciously thought that we need support and we need help. It just was, that we had needs, and someone would take care of our needs. As long as they were taken care of, we were okay, but in our brain, when the need occurred and we didn't get a response right away, when we had to wait, we were automatically in the new territory. We had to learn ways to cope. The one way a baby can cope is to begin to cry. It is baby's way of saying notice me. I have this need. I need attention. Then the carer would come to the baby, and the baby learns, when I cry, she arrives. And that is all great, until the situation occurs, that she cries and is forced to learn, that it doesn't every time work like that. Now baby has experienced abandonment. It may be only two minutes as mommy is stepping into the shower, but the baby has learned that she doesn't always be there. Now baby has to find another way to cope, to calm herself. Now the seed of distrust and abandonment has been established. Every similar situation after that reinforces this pattern.

When we grew older, and someone gave a task that was difficult, more than we could handle, we would again feel that same uncertainty and feeling of being left on our own devices. So again we experienced being abandoned. Then what happens when we don't complete a task? The carer comes and tells us off because we haven't done the thing that she expected. So if we cannot complete a task given to us, we are now getting afraid that we are getting judged. Guess what the next step it? Yes, we are so scared of being judged of the outcome, that we might not even begin or at least we try to avoid doing it at any cost. And you already know where this is headed right? Yes. We learn how to procrastinate.

Now this enters to another world of coping mechanisms, but I want you to understand, that you may look any unwanted pattern in your life, and it all connects to the situations that you have stored in your subconscious mind earlier in your life.

I trust that you get the picture: We are a result of our unique life experiences. However, it is very intriguing how similar our unwanted behaviours are when we look at the ways we behave.

So as adults, we have had numerous encounters that have reinforced this experience in our mind. We are confident that we know how life works and because we have learned ways to cope with these situations, now in our adult world, it shows up as these unwanted behaviours, that we really cannot explain. Because on the one hand, we know what to do, but on the other hand, we don't know how to change the behaviour. So we throw this random advice at each other and call that support or even inspiration, when in fact it leaves every recipient feeling inadequate and somehow flawed. It is time to understand that willpower works only as long as you work it. It is a muscle, and yes, you may train it, but you cannot flex it forever. It just doesn't work.

So this is where we need a new solution, that tackles the real origin of the script that we keep acting out. And that, my friend, is called the science of memory reconsolidation.

So if you have read this far, you realise, that self-abandonment is not just something that few of us experience. It is in all of us. The way I see it is that this idea of working through our issues with sheer willpower, consumed us and became a measure of our success, so much so, that the real solutions are getting lost. It looks like as we keep painting this picture of before life was like that, now I am healed, and it is like this. We have lost the sight of what is real and what isn't.

We are not a before and after photo of our butt cheeks or abs or size of a house or the price of our car or the number of followers you have or comments you receive or frequency of the posts that you post. That is not the life you seek, the happiness you seek. As there is nothing wrong with having a great butt, you cannot find your happiness through that. You need to look elsewhere. You need to look inside underneath all the glitters. We are evolving human beings that have unique experiences and unique ways of dealing with life. And until we heal the source of the hurt we have experienced and re-write that, we are stuck in this hamster wheel of continuously pushing and forcing things to happen.

For those of us, who are choosing the journey in memory reconsolidation it never ends because the life experiences happen all the time and we load on at least the same speed we load off. But you can weed out the most hurtful behaviours and the drama from your life in a relatively short time. Like for instance in six months, which is the time the Marketing & Mindset program takes.

Yeah. That's what I want for you.

Much love,
Mari