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Where do you go when you feel you’ve been doing everything right and you still aren’t getting the results you want? When this happens it is important to understand there is a cycle of improvement. If you recognize the cycle you can break away from stagnant results. Whether your problem is a lack of meaningful relationships, poor health and failed diets, or financial troubles and debt, you need to take a look at your cycle to see what’s missing.
The Cycle of Growth - Think, Feel, Act
The results you are getting are a combination of three factors interacting with the world. Your thoughts, your feelings and your actions. Each of these factors has an impact on what you get. But the reason that many attempts to improve fail is because these three factors aren’t separate. Each aspect of the cycle of growth feeds the other aspects.
Thoughts, your ability to solve problems and make decisions influences how you feel and what you do. Feelings, your filter for the world, influences the decisions you make and how you act. Actions create effects in your world that feed back into how you feel and what you think.
Have you ever noticed that once you experience a little success, it is easier to keep it? Or that when you fail, that can stall your results for days, weeks or even months? This is because each effect in the cycle of growth loops back on itself. Success builds success and failure creates more failure.
The real question is: when you’re cycle of growth is destroying itself, how do you stop it? Breaking your cycle is done by interrupting the flow at one of the key points, thinking, feeling or acting. Although ideal results come from interrupting all three, the best way to start is by breaking the chain in a single link.
Interrupt Your Thinking
Thinking is how you solve problems. Let’s say you are deep in debt. Your thinking represents the possible solutions you draw to this problem. You could cut back spending or consolidate your interest payments. You could work more hours or cut up your credit cards. Depending on your thinking you might draw multiple solutions to your problem.
Interrupting your thoughts means improving the quality of the solutions you come up with. There are many different ways you can interrupt your thinking and push your cycle of growth ahead:
- Read books and articles for new ideas.
- Take out a pad of paper and brainstorm.
- Ask someone for ideas.
- Consult an expert for advice.
- Create a plan of action.
Interrupt Your Feeling
Emotions are a filter by which you process the world. It is impossible to fully engage with every aspect of your world, so feelings create a screen which only lets particular information pass through. The Law of Attraction is basically a process for interrupting your feeling to get new results.
Interrupting your feeling isn’t really about getting “motivated” or thinking positive. It is about forcing your emotional state towards a set of feelings that produces the result you want. Emotions are a filter so you need to ensure that opportunities are getting through your filter and aren’t being blocked out. Here are a couple ways to interrupt your feelings:
- Keep a journal
- Write down your goals regularly
- Surround yourself with positive ideas, people and material
- Change your physiology and posture to trigger emotional changes
- Ask yourself what is positive about any situation you are in
Interrupt Your Action
Actions are the final link in your cycle of growth. Interrupting your actions means actually changing what you are doing. All interrupts will eventually lead to a change of action, but this means focusing on interrupting the action first. Action interrupts mean you don’t try to do a lot of research or think positive, you just experiment a lot.
Here are a couple ways to interrupt your action:
- Conduct a personal experiment
- Start working on a new idea
- Change a habit
- Stop doing something
- Give yourself a unique experience
Find Your Dominant Interrupt Strategy – And Know When to Abandon It
Each of us has a dominant strategy for interrupting their cycle. If it isn’t already clear, my interrupt strategy weighs heavily on the thinking link in the chain of growth. When I encounter a problem, my immediate instinct is to research, brainstorm and think out new solutions.
Your dominant interrupt strategy is what you do first. All breaks in your cycle will reflect throughout all three, but your dominant interruption is what you tackle first. If your immediate reaction when seeing a problem is to brainstorm solutions, research or consult – you’re a think breaker. If your reaction is to visualize, change the way you feel and get motivated – you’re a feel breaker. If your reaction is to immediately go out and experiment – you’re an action breaker.
Having a dominant strategy is okay, but each problem in your life might respond to interrupts differently. You need to recognize when your interruption strategy is faulty so you can approach the problem from an entirely new angle. Here is a couple signs to look for to see if you need to change your interrupt:
- If you can’t seem to find a solution to your problem, and reading more books, listening to more people or brainstorming doesn’t cut it – change your approach. Try altering your feelings or action directly.
- If you are trying to think positive and affirm your goals but they aren’t manifesting, try changing your thinking or action strategies.
- If you are working really hard towards your goal and it isn’t getting results, try altering your thinking or feeling strategies.
You should be flexible in the type of interrupt you choose. It is easy to become so dominant with one form of cycle breaks that you forget the other two exist. If you are frustrated after doing what seems like everything and not getting results, break the cycle at a different link.
