Most self-help makes the same promise: change the way you think, and your behaviour will follow. Find the right book, the right method or the right sentence to repeat, and the old pattern will give way.
For a while it can feel like it is working. You learn names for what you do, you make a plan, and you start the day with good intentions. Then a familiar situation comes back, and you react the way you always have.
Why the same patterns keep coming back
You would prefer not to react that way. You would prefer different choices in your relationships, your work or your money. And still you end up in the same patterns again and again, even after working on them and getting to know yourself well.
The same happens with beliefs. Someone hears about limiting beliefs, recognises a few of their own and sets out to change them. They repeat new thoughts and write them down, and a few months later they find themselves in the same situations as before.
This happens to committed people who know themselves well. That points past effort and intelligence, to where the pattern is held.
Self-help works on one layer
Most self-help focuses on changing behaviour, and it works through the mind: understanding, deciding, repeating. The mind is a real part of us, and working with it is useful. It is also one layer.
Behaviour is part of a more complex architecture than that. We are made of several layers acting on us at the same time: the physical body, the emotions, the thoughts, and the spirit that expresses itself through all of them. Much of what happens in these layers happens automatically, and it happens all at once.
Behaviour comes out of that whole architecture. So when self-help talks only to the mind, it changes one layer while the others keep running the pattern as they always have.
Every layer is doing its job. What we call the head, the thinking mind together with the emotions it has shaped, keeps records of how things went before, built from our own interpretations, and those records run on their own. The body reports what it receives. A new thought becomes one more record on top of the old ones, which is why an affirmation can feel empty while the old pattern carries on underneath it.
Slowing down
What stops a pattern from repeating is quite the opposite of trying harder with the mind. It starts with slowing down, into a state where you are centred in yourself instead of in what someone else might be thinking about you. From there you become open to possibilities you had stopped seeing, awake to what you are doing while you do it, connected to your own essence, and ready to receive what arrives instead of bracing against it.
Relaxation is what builds this state, because relaxing is how you come back into contact with your essence. It takes practice, and the first attempts usually don't work, and that's normal.
Dropping the should-haves
Much of what we try to live up to was handed to us by family and by society: a long list of what we should want, who we should be and how we should behave. Much of that list is social agreement, and those agreements change from one place and one era to the next. We spend a great deal of time worried about what other people will think of us, and while we worry about it, we lose command of our own choices. Those should-haves take up most of the room.
Stripping them away starts with recognising the role you play for others. Everyone has one, a kind of mask for getting along in the world, and it becomes a trap when you take the mask for who you are. Recognising it as a role is what lets you step out of it.
It also means letting go of the guilt about what could have gone differently. What happened in the past was what had to happen. Understanding what happened is useful for changing the present, without regret over what is already done. Where you can still make amends, make them, even if that only means saying sorry out loud now. Guilt is what keeps an unresolved event alive, and going over it again and again uses up your energy and changes nothing.
And it means accepting your impulses as natural, even the ones you don't understand yet. Many of the things we were taught to call sins, like pride or laziness, are instincts: energies to balance and put to good use. Anger is one of them. It is what sets a limit, and many people carry guilt about feeling it because, as children, they learned that showing anger could cost them love. Swallowing it politely looks like maturity, and the anger stays inside all the same. Stripping the should-haves away is how you begin to hear what is yours.
Getting the head out of the way
Slowing down and dropping the should-haves is what it means to get the head out of the way. The head stops running the show. When the head is quiet, the spirit has room to express itself through the body. Being yourself unapologetically starts there, in trusting what the body tells you before the head has argued it away.
Follow the excitement
Excitement is one of the clearest ways the spirit speaks through the body. It arrives on its own, in the present, and it points towards what is genuinely yours, which rarely needs forcing. When you have to push yourself hard to do what you say excites you, it usually isn't really yours, or a fear is sitting on top of it.
It is also easy to dampen. Very often a belief attaches itself to the excitement, a story about what could go wrong or what you are allowed to want, and the excitement fades under it. To find the story, ask yourself what you would have to believe about yourself to feel the way you do. Then strip that belief away and notice whether the excitement is still there. If it is, that is the spirit talking.
Following the excitement means acting on what excites you as fully as you can and letting go of expectations about how it turns out. Taoism has a name for acting this way, wu wei: acting in harmony with how things unfold, without forcing them. Excitement can also be calm and unhurried, which helps separate it from anxiety, although the two can feel very close in the body. That is why telling anxiety from excitement is worth learning. And the more you practise listening to what the body is saying, the easier the difference is to notice.
If you want a first sense of what may be in the way for you, What's Blocking Your Natural Flow? takes two minutes, it's free and you get your result right away.