Our brains are more powerful than we realize in any given moment. They make decisions about what and isn’t reality, what will or won’t work, what is and isn’t possible, and, most especially, how things Have to get done in order to achieve some goal.  And all without necessarily accessing any empirical data at all like say, facts or current information.  This can be amazingly problematic when you’re trying to change things, do something new, or create something from scratch, because the brain is a problem solver and those look like problems to be solved.

This problem is highlighted when people are making significant changes in their life-like moving from a regular job to be a sole proprietor, leaving a group practice or clinical position for private practice, moving from Western to Eastern medicine, or shifting what was a hobby into the financial center of their lives.  There are many practical concerns that are involved in anything like this including the finances necessary to make them happen successfully.  And, let’s face it, unless you’re a teen or just out of college the concept of starving for your life goal’s has lost it’s luster.  So the brain jumps in to start solving problems including figuring out how the finances are going to work.  Of course, there is no way to actually know how they are going to work because there are far too many variables to account for including the seemingly synchronistic multi-stage cause/effect occurences which might bring new dimensions to the equations.

But the brain puts everything in perspective, tells us what we Have to do in order to make things work, gives us a timeframe based on the runway the current finances will allow, and we agree with these assumptions because they are logical and rational and common sensical, even if they are absolutely wrong.  People decide they have to stay in their jobs for 1 or 5 or 10 more years even though it is killing them, but they have to have the money and they won’t be able to get it any other way.  (any?  really?  Have you problem solved how that absolute makes no sense?) They decide that they have to look for work in exactly the same field, with exactly the same parameters that it had before, including being exhausting, being too many hours, and being injurious to their spirit, but they will get the money they need. (Can we subtract the house and the exhaustion and still get the money?  That’s what new jobs are for, right?)

They decide that the only way to get the money is through the means they know and therefore screen out any other possibilities even though they are presented over and over again and the person can recite them for you. :/  The mind is a powerful thing and through its problem solving it can sometimes influence the outcome of what you’re trying to achieve by so narrowing its parameters that it can only squeeze through the one door.  The remedy to that is to not accept what your brain is stating at face value.  Challenge its assumptions, make it stop focusing on the money, give it some other shiny object to figure out, meanwhile your soul and your heart and your body can do what they do best, ignore artificially imposed limits and create the path that is for your best and highest good.