Insights Over Information

How to create shifts in your life.

Remember when ...

Remember when we used to wonder about things? I wonder what the temperature is in Helsinki today? Hmmm, what other movies has Laura Linney been in? 3) What’s the best banana bread recipe?

Then, you’d shrug you shoulders. Oh well. And then, you’d go on with your day, with no answers! Remember that? Wow.

Those days are long gone. Now, we all just google it. No more wondering and sitting with the unknown. It’s kind of bonkers when you think about it – What once were sacred texts, belonging to the elite, are now at your fingertips. You don’t even have to own recipe books anymore to be a great cook.

Has all this information made us wiser?

At the beginning of the Information Age, we thought all we needed was the right information, then we’d be healthy, wealthy, and wise. We cast aside our books (too slow!) and poured videos straight into our brains. We exchanged carefully curated magazines for social media feeds where anyone’s opinion can go viral over night.

Writing is now commoditized as “content” (oh, how I shrink from that horrible word) that we consume like hungry ghosts.

Yet, it seems that with all this information a click away, we are not wiser. In fact, we’re drowning in information. It’s being fire-hosed directly into our overwhelmed brains.

Forget information. Try insights instead.

I’d like to suggest that, if you’re trying to make a change in your life, you don’t need more information. You need insights. 

Insights are what create shifts, ah-ha’s, and woh’s that are customized to you and to your journey. 

A single insight can help you stand outside the out-dated story, of who you are and what you’re capable of, so you see things in a fresh new way. 

“I never thought of it that way before,” many of my clients exclaim as we create a perspective shift. New possibilities appear, without effort, as if you stepped out of a fog. You update your own personal software to who you are today, versus who you used to be.

Where do I get these insights, you ask?

It all begins with the premise that all the wisdom you’ll ever need, about you and your life, is within you. It is merely obscured by the layers of social fitting-in that we and others have imposed upon us. 

All we need to do is peel away the layers, insight by insight, and all we really wanted or needed is there for us. 

This is done through self-inquiry. This is the essence of coaching. It’s hard to do by yourself. it’s easier when there’s someone who is standing outside your life, who is not caught up in your history and the emotions imbedded into that history.

There are so many ways to access this. In the near future I’ll do a post just on this. At last count, I had rounded up about 50 different tools and ways to create insights and shifts for yourself. 

The value of an insight shift.

I have a client who had a deep belief, established in her childhood, that should could only have things she needed, not things she wanted. The thing is, she didn’t know she had this belief. She just knew that her friends had nice houses, kids, great jobs. But, she seemed stuck, unable to have these things. As Jung is famously quoted as saying, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Did she need a nice home? No, but she wanted one. Denied! Did she need a car? No, but she wanted one. Denied! Did she need a roof-top garden? No, she wanted one. Denied! Others can have roof-top gardens, but not her. Why?

When we did some enquiry on this, we saw this deep, imbedded belief about wants vs needs and got to ask. “is this true? Can I, like my friends, actually want and even have nice things in my life?” She decided she could. She updated her own personal software. 

Since then, without much conscious effort, she has bought a new car, has upgraded her living arrangements, and sent me a photo of her rooftop garden. 

That’s the value of an insight. it gets you back to you. You shift out of longing and bitterness, and into the life that’s been waiting for you. 

Insights Over Information