Getting rid of our hardwiring — Vivienne Schultz

A new monthly column by social entrepreneur and A2B Transformation Group founder Vivienne Schultz.

I recently read in Psychology Today, an international magazine, that only 1 out of 8 people are willing to work with their own truth. With God’s grace, it sets them on a journey towards humble single-mindedness, righteousness and integrity. Sadly, 7/8 persons resist transformation, rationalising themselves out of it and stay in their false self and bondage mindset.

Our organisation’s 24 years research identified 16 nasty hardwires (or character flaws) that develop in your brain from early childhood, without you even being aware of it happening. During every second that you were/are in a state of fear or experience with sense of “I am not ok”, this hardwiring happens.

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Through advances in neuroscience, it has been proven that your brain was altered every single incident where you were handled unlovingly, felt neglected, ignored, embarrassed, abused, harassed, scolded or where irritation was shown towards you. It caused an unhealthy distortion of your impulse control, your natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits and moral tendencies, and caused character flaws.

How it works
How? A cascade of stress-type neurochemicals starts in the lower brain and literally washes into the rest of the brain. This tells your brain that you are unsafe and need to move into hyper-gear to protect you from further exposure.

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If this triggered reaction occurs frequently and over an extended period of time, where you constantly feel “under attack”, you stay in this prolonged state of fear. As a result, some wonderfully designed parts of the brain, required for taking initiative, thinking in higher gear by being creative, having empathy, and flexibly and patiently getting along with others, are now shutting down and your mind is being driven into a diminishing frame of self-protection. These experiences fuse, alter, warp and limit the way you think. It reduces the unlimited potential of your brain and keeps your mind stuck and biased, thus driving similar stuck behaviour, limiting your possibilities, making life less pleasant for you, and those close to you.

When your pride is threatened, you hide behind a smoke-screen of defensive behaviours. So, too, every hardwire keeps you enveloped in a pall of smoke preventing you from being adaptive, influencing your view of yourself and others. It is your resistor — it blocks you and impairs your vision, causing you to view yourself through a lens that distorts reality.

As seriously hazardous as hardwires are, they are hard to spot. Your ego stands firmly in the way and if you sense the slightest challenge to your self, it is interpreted as a ‘threat’ and you go into self-preservation ‘fight and flight’ mode immediately. Your hardwires will paint even the ‘ugliness’ in your ‘stuckness’ as beautiful and commendable. Those comfortable moments when you pat yourself on the back for how well you are doing, are the moments that should alarm you the most, because it’s your blinkered hardwires running as a default programme in you.

Hardwiring occurs in both men and women, in all civilized cultures and at every socioeconomic level. Each hardwire has its own default pattern and vicious circle of some kind, and, will keep you spinning in this ‘stuck’ trajectory, going nowhere with your life. Substantiating this, by calling it “my personality”, or “my culture,” does not fly any longer. Each hardwire causes new electrical short circuits and new different hardwire abnormalities in you, affecting and influencing you and the people you come into contact with, spreading dysfunctional behaviour in our world. It is the destructive force that prevents both you and your loved ones from change and blocks you from becoming an optimal human.

What can be predicted, can be managed
You have become a combination of the recorded experiences within your brain and your mind. On a conscious level, you probably do not even have any memory of the thousands of exact moments forming these hardwires, especially if you had a disempowering childhood, as this lies deep down in your unconscious mind. If we can take this fact seriously, that a lot of what drives human behaviour, is often irrational and lies at a deep unconscious level in the mind, in other words, we are predictably irrational, then it’s time we spent many more daylight hours understanding ourselves and others better, to navigate through our mire of hardwires. The wonderful news, is that what can be predicted, can be managed.

Step one in your success is always: acknowledge and confront your hardwires with honesty. Suppressing this can cause mental health issues. We live in a society where mental health is still considered a “hush-hush” subject. This is really destructive. We all have weaknesses — we are all under construction — and if you don’t stay under construction, you will self-destruct. Once you know your hardwires, you will typically say: “I wish I had become aware of them much earlier and stopped them from causing the invisible stress and slow destruction to my body and mind. It would have saved me years of medical bills and wasted time through illness recovery.” It’s time to get to a new level of self-awareness, ensuring that you prevent yourself from being fatefully condemned to a life of coddling and/or failing on all fronts:

• Anguish, gloom, and hopelessness on a psychological level,
• The drying up of your ability to love and embrace humans and your simmering latent anger on a moral level,
• Nervous illness and its manifestations on a medical level.

From a Christian point of view, the hardwiring in your brain can cause the death of the soul before physical death — the experience of hell while still in this life.

Identify your hardwires asap. Take ownership over yourself now! Why now? On a secular level, nobody wants to pay salary’s to hardwired employees, nobody wants to be in a relationship with your hardwires, no child wants to be submitting to a hardwired parent. It’s time you become whole, and taste real happiness in your real true you! It’s time you become purposeful and focused on saving souls, before too many around you are too hardwired to change.

It’s a medium-term, committed journey to get unstuck! And you might suddenly one day face your own mortality and realise that you do not have the longevity, vitality and comprehension any more. And then it’s almost impossible. Just like an elastic band that has perforated by being exposed to the sun and rain, you might also be losing that neuroplasticity ability of your mind.

Today is the time to rewire yourself!

Precious Christians, rid the last hardwiring in preparation for our King’s coming.

Information on an assessment scale and toolkit that gives you more insights into your predictable irrationality, followed by tools to help alter and guide you to optimum behaviour is available from Vivienne at info@a2btransformation.com.