In Be the Exception, I share what a client’s good news led me to consider about the authority we give prevailing conditions over what we’re willing to pursue.

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Be the Exception

When Statistics Become Instructions

I received news from a client that she had sold her TV show pilot (a sample episode for a proposed television series) to a major television network.

An established writer and producer in an industry already considered highly competitive and difficult to earn a living in, she has weathered employment contractions brought on by a pandemic, union strikes, industry exodus and other challenges that would overwhelm many people trying to sustain a career.

For all intents and purposes, this client is a success in an extraordinarily difficult field.

As a therapist, I saw many of my peers and colleagues shutter their businesses during the pandemic. Those happened to be some of the better years in my practice's 17-year tenure.

I can readily cite other clients and individuals who continue to gain traction in their endeavors in the midst of doom and gloom headlines. What fundamentally determines whether someone becomes another statistic or becomes the exception?

To attribute the difference to the particular circumstances of each individual in the two groups would be to miss the forest for the trees.

Who Gets to Decide What’s Possible?

I venture to say there's a tacit choice at work here. Who will be the arbiter of possibility?

Will prevailing conditions set the parameters of what's possible, or will you exercise the autonomy to think beyond what those conditions have led you to expect?

Dogged determination can only tell you so much about that choice. The question is what reality you willingly or unconsciously participate in.

I have another client who almost seems to relish citing the obstacles interfering with his goals. He comes close to advocating for the very obstacles he wants to get past and becomes resentful when challenged on them.

What are you electing to participate in?

What Are You Making Relevant?

Participation is determined by what becomes relevant to you. When prevailing limitations become the basis of what you consider relevant, your participation and your experience reflect those constraints.

You can acknowledge constricting conditions and still decide what relevance to give them. The definition of "relevant" is

relevant (adjective) "directly connected to the subject or situation at hand; applicable or meaningful to what is being considered."

Just because a condition is prevalent doesn't mean it determines what's relevant.

Do you want limiting conditions to be `applicable or meaningful to what is being considered'?

Do you want employment statistics to be applicable or meaningful to your pursuit of the work you want?

Do you want an undesirable health condition or diagnosis to be applicable or meaningful to your efforts to improve your health?

Do you want past trauma to be applicable or meaningful to your desire for personal, psychological, and emotional well-being?

You can take troubling indicators into account and still decide what about the matter you want to make relevant. To make relevant is to participate.

Liking or desiring something is one thing. Making it relevant is another.

Who doesn't like the idea of more money, better health, or success in their career?

What becomes relevant to you compels participation. If fears, doubts, doom and gloom headlines, and the echo chambers that amplify them are what you consider relevant, that's what your life participates in and experiences.

As long as limitation is what you consider relevant, it continues to shape your experience even as you desire to be free of it.

Don’t ignore troubling conditions; decommission their relevancy.

Two Ways to Reconsider What’s Possible

Here are two ways to commission the relevancy that helps you become the exception.

1. Flooding

I use the term `flooding' for the practice of saturating the mind with material that helps deprogram its alignment with limitation. That alignment may come from personal history, media exploitation, or other limiting influences.

You might choose an empowering passage from a book, a video, or an audio recording. Choose something you can readily return to.

If you're a client of this practice, it may be one of your personal hypnosis recordings. I always encourage clients to listen to their session recordings frequently.

(Many years ago a client shared with me she prints out every issue of the Flyer and stores it in a reference notebook… ‘Hi, Lynn!’ 😉)

My first suggestion is an audio source you can easily listen to under most circumstances. Seize opportunities to listen, even when you think you've listened enough.

The value of repetition lies in the deeper meaning you can draw from the same material each time you return to it. This is the dynamic behind the statement at the end of each Flyer article encouraging repeated readings.

The more deeply you appreciate what the material communicates, the more relevant it becomes to you and your life. And remember, what is relevant to you becomes what you promote.

Routinely return to material that resonates with you. Return to it, too, when distress is triggered or you catch yourself recycling negative thoughts.

Use flooding to face the challenge directly. It gives you the mental and emotional leverage to face challenges and act with the confidence and focus that help you pursue what's possible.

Make flooding part of your day-to-day living. Its value is in the mindset cultivated, one that allows you to determine how you act when conditions might otherwise set the parameters for you.

Mindsets and the actions that follow derive from influence. (Why do you think so much money is poured into politics?)

What you flood your mind with determines what actions are available to you and through you.

2. The bigness factor

In a past Flyer article on the power of perspective, I pointed out that as you're reading, we're traveling around the center of the Milky Way at about 143 miles per second, or approximately 515,000 miles per hour.

And here we are, concerned about having enough money and facing any number of other constricting circumstances.

A Life that can produce such velocity without effort can surely supply abundantly.

In fact, after eons of supplying and fueling life, how is it that life's capacity for creating and expressing hasn't run out? Plants continue to come into being and grow, and planets continue to form.

Hardly a month goes by without a scientific report of a newly discovered species or subspecies.

From our usual perspective of limitation, that capacity can seem incomprehensible.

And this is the point.

A perspective of limitation produces limiting experiences. Those experiences can then reinforce the perception that produced them, narrowing the range of what you consider possible.

As you deliberately return your attention to the unbounded capacity of life itself, you recalibrate your nervous system to welcome and take part in creating a more expansive, healthy and abundant life.

`Think big' takes on a different meaning when you consider what you're making relevant.

Keep returning your attention to the bigger picture of life's capacity. Let it inform how you see your own capacity as a reflection of it.

Flooding and the bigness factor are two ways of deciding what you make relevant. In flooding, you return again and again to material that resonates with you, giving yourself the opportunity to draw deeper meaning from it until it anchors and informs how you think and act.

In applying the bigness factor, you deliberately return your attention to the remarkable capacity of life itself and begin to reconsider what you've assumed about your own capacity as a reflection of it.

What Would You Consider Worth Pursuing?

Now consider my client who sold her television pilot. The contraction in her industry was real.

What would she have considered worth pursuing if she had given those conditions the authority to determine what was possible for her?

This is where the choice of participation gets practical. You can take stock of a condition and still decide how much authority to give it in determining what you consider possible, what you pursue, and what you do next.

So the next time you find yourself citing the conditions that make a desired outcome unlikely, pause long enough to hear what you're making relevant. Then ask yourself, "If I considered it possible to be the exception, what would I give my attention to, and what would I find myself participating in?"

If you can name what you want but find yourself returning to all the reasons it seems unlikely, I invite you to schedule a hypnotherapy session. We can explore how those reasons came to carry so much authority and what you might consider possible as that begins to change.

I encourage you to read this article several times. With each reading, you begin to absorb its deeper implications and recognize their relevance to your own life.

Disclaimer: The perspectives expressed are offered for consideration and independent inquiry, not as instructions for what to believe or do. They are not a substitute for individualized professional advice or care.