All right, I’ve said this before, but really, I’m about to share something with you that will blow you away.

How would you feel if someone told you that a five-year-old is running your life?

For those of you who don’t have children who are five, you would look at the person saying that and think they were absolutely crazy.

But, I’m going to tell you right now, they’re not crazy.

Most of us are operating on old, encrusted beliefs. Beliefs you basically downloaded into your brain before you were five years old.

These are beliefs that your parents taught you, and the things you saw and learned as a kid. Basically, the majority of the decisions you’re making are things that you downloaded into your super human computer before the age of five, and for pretty much the remainder of your life, you’re operating based on these old beliefs.

Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

A five-year-old is running your life, and you don’t even realize it.

Becoming More Aware

So, what do we do, and how do we change it?

First off, I think you need to become more aware of everything that’s around you. You need to understand that there are so many more things going on around you. When you reach for something that you’ve been reaching for your entire life, maybe it’s a jar of spaghetti sauce, maybe it’s the same toilet paper, maybe, it’s being attracted to the same type of person, ask yourself, is this you doing this, based on your taste? Based on who you are? Based on what you learned?

Or, is it the five-year-old running your life? Most of us are doing things without even thinking about it because that five-year-old is constantly running our lives, day-in and day-out. It’s pretty amazing when you realize that.

So, think about what you’re doing. Start looking outside the box. Start looking outside your life, and start reaching for different things in all areas.

The Mind and Actions of a Five-Year-Old

When you ask a five-year-old to go and do something, they’ll often look at you and say, “I’ll try but I can’t do that.” Five-year-olds don’t even lift their finger to go get their own water. They feel like they can’t get it, so they don’t.

running your lifeI have a five-year-old, so I know exactly what she does and what she doesn’t do. She’ll look to me and tell me she can’t do something even though she’s never tried it; she immediately thinks she can’t do it. Sometimes, she thinks she can, just depending on the situation. But most of us like make things difficult. We keep telling our friends and ourselves that it’s hard to do something when we’re still working on it.

Look at how many times you’ve used the words hard or try or challenging.

How about the terminology that things in my life have always been like that. Or my bad luck runs in my family. My family has a string of bad luck, no one’s been successful in my family, so of course I’m not going to be successful at all.

Start Running Your Life

We spend so much time talking about what doesn’t work that we miss the entire point. And what is the point? We’re allowing the five-year-old to run our lives.

We’re talking about things that don’t work. We’re talking about how challenging things are, how hard things are. What if that’s just the way it is, because it’s always been that way in my family and it’s always been that way for me forever and ever.

No one in my family was successful so there was no way in the world that I was going to be successful.

No one in my family was really good at marriages so there was no way I was going to be great at marriages.

We have the power to create something that is positive but we spend so much time talking about what doesn’t work that we miss the whole point.

The whole point is that we all have the power to create something that does work, just by changing our words and changing the way we say things.

Life is not destined to be a certain way because of things that happened to you in your family dynamic. You have the power to change your mind, change your thoughts and change your belief system. It really is that simple.

But the problem is we’re constantly talking about what’s wrong. We love that. We talk about all the things that are wrong in our life. We tend to look negatively at something that’s great. Ask somebody what their day is all about and they’ll tell you things are not going great. We prefer to focus on the negative.

The only positive thing we do is we reaffirm all the bad things that are going on. It’s hard to become more self aware folks, but you need to realize you’ve got the power to change your thoughts, change your mind, change your beliefs. It really is something you have the power to do.