Richard Hogan: Are you caught living a label that no longer has anything to do with who you are?

Richard Hogan: Each time you introduce a little change the potential for something huge to come into your life increases dramatically

There is a famous saying in neuroscience: ‘neurons that fire together wire together’. What they are explaining with this saying is how we come to think in a particular way.

When we are young and the plasticity in our brain is significantly more malleable, the story we hear about ourselves gets written. When we learn something new synapses are connecting, so our brain literally changes with new information. Billions of neurons fire when we are thinking, which is all the time. The more we think a thought, the more those neurons connect. Once they start to connect, all those other potential thoughts fade.

So, let’s just say you are constantly making yourself sound weak in work, you wonder why you never go for a promotion or you say ‘yes’ all the time and wonder why others find it so easy to say ‘no’. And of course, trying to please everyone is a futile endeavour and it only gives root to self-loathing and resentment of those you attempt to please. So, disrupting how you think and learning to think in a more positive and productive way is going to be one of the most significant changes you will bring into your life.

But it isn't easy — because once we repeat a thought and find confirmation, it becomes a pathway. Like an algorithm, the more you watch a particular video the more the algorithm gets written and all other potential videos disappear. So, the more you think something, the more the neural growth factor knits around that thought. Which means all other thoughts never get a chance to be heard. This can cause an incredible amount of distress as we quickly get caught thinking in negative patterns, even though we know it’s not correct, we still think it. We think we are thinking but, in reality, all we are doing is running a neural circuit loop. Now, that can cause a lot of suffering. We can feel trapped.

But once you understand that to change your behaviours, which will impact your feelings, you must begin to re-wire those neurons that fired many years ago. Once you do that, you can do anything.

However, people often feel like they cannot change. Immanuel Kant, the famous German philosopher, once said that if the premise of your argument is incorrect all the conclusions you arrive at will be wrong.

And there is nothing more erroneous than the premise that you are unable to change. Change is everywhere and in everything. If you change one small thing about your life over the course of two weeks and then look back to where you were before you started, you would be surprised at the amount of change that has come into your life. People often look at their life and think the change required is too great.

Like climbing Everest. You don’t think about the summit, you concentrate on the steps in front of you. Changing something small is like an astronaut making a tiny recalculation on their journey, this minute alteration, unnoticeable as it is, will have a massive effect on the final destination. The belief that you cannot change gives birth to a profound hopelessness which becomes more pervasive, it metathesizes and spreads into every facet of your life. That is something you should avoid. Because you can be powerful and take responsibility for your own happiness and become who you know you were meant to be. But that can be a scary proposition.

Richard Hogan. Pic: Moya Nolan

In my experience, one of the main causes of low mood is knowing who you were meant to be and not knowing how to be that person. A significant cause of suffering is when the projected self is incongruent with how it wants to be perceived. If there is a gap between how you are viewed and how you want to be viewed it will cause you distress. The family system can be the progenitor of this kind of suffering. The good daughter, the intelligent one, the lazy one, the selfish one, the aggressive one, I could go on and on. These labels were designed to make sense of an incredibly complex system. They are flawed but we live them.

Remember, a label doesn’t predict the future, it writes it.

Often we get caught living a label that no longer has anything to do with who we are and it causes suffering. We feel stuck playing the fool in a production of our life. We feel powerless and unable to break the shackles that bind us. But that is a false premise. And often we look at others and just see the success, we are blind to what it took to achieve that success. We are oblivious to all the setbacks, failures, and disappointments that person had on their way to achieving in life.

Progress is not a straight line. Carl Jung described it as an oscillating circle. It moves forward and, at times, it moves backwards. That’s life.

Each time you introduce a little change the potential for something huge to come into your life increases dramatically. But if you are expecting your progress to move in a straight line, you will be utterly disappointed and collapse the minute you meet an obstacle.

The beliefs of others significantly shape the beliefs we come to hold about ourselves, which impacts how we behave and how we feel. Being true to ourselves will disrupt others and the beliefs they have come to hold. If you are going to grow and change, you have to get comfortable with the discomfort of others. When you introduce a change about who you are, watch how others react. You are helping them to rewire their thinking also. It takes time, but they will change how they view you.

Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ says it better than anyone: ‘but now old friends they’re acting strange/And they shake their heads and they tell me/That I’ve changed/Well something’s lost, but something’s gained/In living every day’.

When you start living authentically, things will change dramatically. You lose that old fake persona and you gain truth. What a wonderful gift to give yourself.