You’re Not Broken — You’re Conditioned

In this episode of Rise Up, I explore what it really means to feel misaligned — even when life looks fine on the outside.

Over more than 30 years of working with intelligent, capable, often successful people, I’ve noticed a common thread: many are holding it all together, doing what’s expected, yet feeling quietly unfulfilled underneath the roles, pressure, and responsibility. Something feels off — and they can’t quite name why.

I share how personality is shaped through life, how those patterns quietly create the life we’re living now, and why misalignment shows up as confusion, frustration, self-doubt, or restlessness. Not because anything is wrong with you — but because you may be living from conditioning rather than from who you truly are.

In this episode, I talk about the power of language, unconscious patterns, and early programming — how the stories we tell, the meanings we attach, and the beliefs we’ve absorbed shape our behaviour without us realising it. I explain why people often don’t know what they want, why forcing change never works, and how awareness — not fixing — is the real starting point.

This is an invitation to begin noticing what’s been shaping you beneath the surface, to reconnect with your own inner guidance, and to start creating a life that feels aligned and true to you.

No pressure.
 No forcing.
 Just awareness — and the possibility of change.

Here is to your success,
 Love Vicky

Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Hi, and welcome to Rise Up the Inner work with me, Vicki Ross. So over the years I have worked with people who look like they're doing fine on the outside. They're capable, intelligent, even successful, and yet underneath something feels off. They're busy, they're trying. They're actually just holding it all together, but they've lost touch with who they are underneath the pressure, the roles, the expectation, they feel unfulfilled really. So what I've learned through more than 30 years of this work is that who we become through life shapes our personality, and that personality quietly creates the life that we are living now when that life doesn't feel like a true reflection of who we are. That's when it doesn't feel like it's our life that we are living in alignment. That's where confusion, frustration, self-doubt, starts to creep in. So my work is all about helping people unravel what's been shaping them underneath the surface. Not to fix them, but to remember themselves and who they are. Reconnect them with their dreams, their desires, the wish to live life on their terms. So I help them see patterns that they couldn't see before to understand what's been in the way, and from that place of awareness to consciously create a life that feels aligned, a life lived on their terms. The one thing that I know for sure is what we want is available to us. So welcome to this journey. Let's begin. So sometimes people ask me who comes to work with me, what's wrong with them, and why they're coming to you? What is it that they are hoping for? And very often the people that come and work with me on the outside look fine. In fact, most of the times they look fine until I start speaking to them and I ask them a question. If I had the magic wand. And I could go ab Debra and change your life. What would you ask for? What would you change? I listen to what they tell me, and it's very often people don't actually know what they want. They might start telling me all the things that they don't want about their life. But whatever they do, whether they're telling me what they want or what they don't want, I listen to their language because I love language communication. It's just one of my biggest, wow. Nothing is random. We may not be aware of why we choose to talk about something in the way that we do but it's not random. It reveals all sorts of things. It reveals how we feel. It reveals. What we believe about ourselves, what is possible. I listen to the tone of voice. I also listen to the way that they explain things. I listen to the stories that people tell me about why they haven't got what they've got or what they want. And I also listen to where they're putting blame and is it they're blaming themselves? Are they blaming people, other people? Are they blaming circumstances? Like I said, it's all in the story. It's in the language. It's all intricately and perfectly woven in. And It can be quite complex. When you're trying to fix it, because it's like, where do you begin? You know what do I fix? What don't I fix? What do I blame? What don't I blame? So this is what I do. I look for patterns. I look to see what's repeated. I look to see what is blamed. There's so much that gets revealed in a very short space of time. And how did I get to this? I remember when I first started assisting Paul McKennan, Richard Bandler on the NLP Practitioners Master Practitioners Train the Trainer Events in London, Richard Bandler. Who's one of the co-creators of NLP said that in the first five minutes, somebody will tell you what the problem is and how to fix it. And when I heard this, I just went, wow, that is going to be amazing. I just can't wait to understand this. I must have spent about two or three sessions listening to him. If not, maybe that whole practitioner course and missing the obvious. I thought every time, how did he do it? I sat watching the interaction with somebody from the audience. I didn't hear them say, this is my problem and this is how to fix it the way that Richard talked about. So I went back home and I looked at all of this and I just thought to myself, what is it that he's doing? And I realized that the first book he ever wrote was called The Structure of Magic. And the structure of magic is all about the language patterns that people use unconsciously to describe a problem. So the next time I went to assist them on a course in London, I sat and I tracked if what he was doing was tracking their language patterns and what they were, what they meant, why they were picked, and then what did he do with it. And that's where I found the magic. So I became a huge, big student of the language patterns. So what I do when I listen to people, I listen to the language patterns. I look at what they've unconsciously picked to drive that particular behavior and what has to be true. I often ask what has to be true for this person to believe this and therefore to behave this way around something? And does it always happen? So it's quite interesting if you look at behavior as a recipe to creating a cake, for instance. So it's not enough for me to say, we're gonna make a chocolate cake and just bring chocolate cake ingredients and we'll just put them together and we'll make them, because something will happen. I dunno if it's gonna be a good cake or not. Good cake or a pancake or, a hard piece of biscuit rather than a cake. And will it taste the same as the chocolate cake that I wanna copy? Probably not. So I've gotta be very specific when I want to get a specific chocolate cake to be the way I've seen it and I like it. I need to know exactly. How much flour, how much this, how much that, what are the ingredients? What are the portions? What is the method that they use to mix together? How long have they put it into the oven? The size of the tin also plays a role. All these things. For me to replicate the actual cake. And behavior's the same way. It's got criteria. So I will ask them for their recipe for that behavior. And I find it always quite interesting because as I play the stupid, I don't know, I don't understand. And I ask the questions around what, what's going on or what they are. The, the way that they create whatever it is that we are working on, that sometimes they will stop and look at me like. Oh my goodness. I never realized I did that. So it's always very interesting when the aha moment comes in because once they've seen it, they can't unsee it. They can't turn around and say, it's not me. They can't say, I didn't do this, or I didn't choose this for myself. It's now become very blatantly obvious that when this happens, this is the way that they react. And now it's all about undoing it all. So I always see in front of me a real perfect human being, a beautiful human being that has got lots and lots of capabilities and lots of attributes and skills and hopes and dreams and desires and all of that. And then I also notice how they play small. And how they pretend to themselves that they can't do what they want to do. So that's what I do when I listen to language and I listen to the patterns, and I look at the patterns and I just observe and I just ask questions. And some of the questions are for me to get more clarity, but some of the questions offer them to have clarity by answering me and correcting me, because I'll sometimes say, so this is what it means, and I'll reflect back what I think I heard. And of course, if it's wrong, they. Like everybody are compelled to correct me and in correcting me, they start to become very aware of what they're doing. So the other question that people will always ask me is why do we become misaligned? When does it start? What happens? You know what, so I do a lot of talks about this. I've done some podcasts, some presentations. Because it's always an interesting topic about how did we get to where we are? How did I happen to be 35, 40, 45, whatever age. And I have these patterns and personality traits that I don't want. They stop me from living the life that I desire in my dreams. And it all comes from the early stages. So if you look at. Neuroscience and what we learn from neuroscience in very simple terms. We have brainwaves in our brains, from the age of zero to two, we have Delta. And if you look at hypnotherapy and how we use delta brainwaves will actually induce a very deep state of relaxation, like almost comatose type of thing. And this is really good if we gotta teach somebody on how to have such a deep state of relaxation because they can't, for instance, have an aesthetic. And we need to do some sort of procedure and we need to zone them out so much so that they can have the procedure without having the pain or the awareness of the pain or control the pain. So from the age of zero to two babies, whether they're asleep or not, are in the delta mode, which means they're very suggestible and they have to be because they grow the most in every sense. In this one year of their life. In fact physically you almost double in size. You learn how to sit, how to start eating, how to not only one year, two years of your life, how to walk, how to start talking, how to start getting dressed, how to pick up things. There's a hell of a lot of learning. So this is not a time to start questioning everything that's going on around you, give or take from the age of two till about eight. We'd now become we are in theater, so we are less suggestible, but still very suggestible and still very unconscious. And you can see that the curiosity is there for kids of trying to work things out and trying to understand things, but we still don't have a concept of self and the concept of life per se. It's starting to develop the older we get, but it's not a hundred percent there. And then between the age of eight to 12, give or take, we have the alphabet brainwaves that are developing. And that is a very creative site. It's also very problem solving site. It's it's a beautiful place. It's calm, it's playful, it's creative. It's all of those things. And roughly at the age of 12, we have what we call the. Beta brainwaves. The minute that happens or starts to happen, this is when we have a separation between the unconscious and the conscious mind. What does that mean? Is that now we have a concept of life and self and meaning we, we can now start attaching meaning to things. So why is this important to know and how does this actually misalign us? Is that in all our early years, this is where we depend on others to teach us about being human, about living, about being in on this planet. How do we exist as human beings? The meaning of things, but it's not ours, it's theirs. And they do the best they can with what they are given. So I know that sometimes people feel quite angry and resentful and blaming to their parents, but parents did the best they could with what they had. So we've gotta take that into account. In our teenage years, really problematic years in some ways from the point of view that this is the transition between child to adult. This is the time in our lives where it would be wonderful, absolutely wonderful if our parents and our peers, but more our parents and our teachers would turn around and say, okay, you've learned my way of living. Now you need to play around and see if that aligns with you, if that's good. And start transitioning into your own ways, your own belief systems, your own paradigms, your own experiences, your own definitions, and start creating your own sort of life. But what happens is a lot of times children, when they want to do something, parents or teachers will turn around and go, you don't know. This is not right. This is wrong. Why do you think this way? Why are you defying me? I've heard things like, oh, I'm much older than you. I've got more experience. I know what I'm talking about. You dunno what you're talking about. All, all that kind of stuff happens when you're a teenager and this is why. We rebel as well with our parents because we start getting ideas and it's our own ideas and that conflict with our parents' ideas. And a lot of times parents think that you are defying them, that you're not respecting them and you're not listening to them. And sometimes that is quite true, but it's not the only thing. So what happens then is we learn how to be somebody else, somebody that. Your parents want you to be somebody that your teacher wants you to be. It's also in those. Early years of our life going into teenage years, that we also learned to not trust ourselves because we've been told we are wrong all the time, so therefore we don't trust ourselves. And then we find it very hard to make these kind of decisions and therefore we accept somebody else's definitions of life, somebody else's belief systems, paradigms. And we try and fit that in with that. Inner calling that we all have. And I was listening to a interview from Steve Harvey and he was talking about what he wanted to do and everybody was laughing at him because he wanted to be on tv and he used to stutter and, all that. And he a preacher said to him that, that dream was implanted in you. It wasn't implanted in somebody else. So nobody else could understand that. And in the same way, we all have come onto this planet with a dream and when we want to go out and do it, if we start listening to what other people think about your dream, some of them will think it's great, and some of them will think you're crazy. But at the end of the day, it's nobody's dream but your dream. So when you're misaligned because you're believing what other people have said, your dream sometimes won't make sense to them, and it won't even make sense to you if you are seeing your dream and your passion, your desire through the paradigms and the belief systems of somebody else. And this is that agitation that we feel, and this is what our, all my work is based on. This is that we have a desire to do or be something somehow. And we are not. And even though we have succeeded in other things, there's a unrested feeling energy inside of us because you. Haven't and fulfilled the whole thing that you've come here to do. And therefore you are living out of a misaligned place. And that feels uncomfortable. And it's meant to feel uncomfortable because the soul wants what the soul wants. And if you're not living your purpose, it's going to kick you in the ass. And he's gonna say, Hey. I've given you x amount of years and you've already used 40 and you're not even close. So get going. You're running out of time. So these are the signs that rest restless that you've got inside is a sign that you restless that something is not right and something is off. Something actually feels off. When you start working with yourself and going down the personal development, which can be a minefield by the way, and I totally get that. Been in it for 30 odd years, in fact, a little bit more. So I totally get that. But the first thing that I would say to anybody is you've gotta raise an awareness. You've got to start. Becoming aware of what you're thinking, how you're feeling, understand yourself so that you're able to make sense out of the nonsense because there's so much nonsense going on. And that would be your first shift, is to start realizing how you are choosing to be and how you're choosing to show up in life, how you're choosing to take care of arguments and fights and things like this and then asking yourself, always the question to me, there's no right and wrong in life. But you can always ask yourself the question, is what I'm doing giving me the outcome that I want? And then you can start taking a step back and thinking about things differently. So the other question that I get asked is why forcing something is the wrong approach? I think it speaks for itself, or it does, at least to me. That if you're forcing it, it's not coming from your natural self. It's almost like you're pushing, you're trying harder for somebody else's reason, because what you want to do and what you love doing comes natural. It feels, it's when you lose sense of time and space and in that place of absolute bliss and joy that you know that you are now in alignment with your soul. With your spirit, with yourself, rather than doing something that somebody else wants you to do. you know, Your body has no ability to lie. It can only tell the truth. So if you ask yourself and listen and feel your body and say, is this right for me? If your body feels heavy at the idea of something, it's not right for you. And then if you go forward to do that, you're forcing it. And how many times have we all said in our lives something didn't work out and you go, I knew it. I knew it was wrong for me. I just didn't know what else to do and I didn't know what, how to change things. And this person seemed like they knew what they were talking, and I'm sure they had right intentions, but it wasn't right, because you're forcing it to be. How do I start making sense out of the nonsense? And again, I've said the personal development world is a minefield. It's like laborinth, it's, you dunno which start but that's because we are complex and there isn't a right way to start. There isn't, oh, you've gotta do this first, or you've gotta do that first, or if you learn this, or if you do that, if you go from an energetic or if you go from a practice, there is no right way, but you have to trust that if you've opened up your curiosity as to what is next that. It's just gonna go in the right direction. And even if you're going in the wrong direction, something about the way you're meant to be going will show up and then you will change directions. So in some ways, you've always gotta trust the process that you will always be at the right time in the right place. And when the student is ready, the teacher appears. So it could be a book, it could be a webinar, it could be a podcast if you just put it out there. That you want to change, that you want to have an awareness, that you want to be guided, that you want something, you have to trust that your unconscious will. Lead you. It'll place the your attention, whether you realize it or not. It'll place your attention to the forefront of your mind that you want to change or you want help, or you want support. And it'll start scanning through your social media. It'll scan through books, it'll scan through emails, whether you realize it or not, and you will find the right thing. So you've gotta trust that. What I always encourage people to, to start doing for themselves. It's a simple awareness, an awareness of how you're thinking what are you thinking about? What are you observing? If you have to go straight into a more conscious way of being, rather than being the reactive, unconscious, automatic self. And it could be, I start everybody by saying. Be in the moment and just place your attention to your feet on the ground to your bum sitting on the chair to where your elbows are, where your hands are. Notice what you can see in front of you, what you can see around you, what you can hear, how you feeling. And then to become aware of your thoughts and how your thoughts make you feel, because how are you feeling on the outside being the world that is tactile, that you can touch to the world that's on the inside, which is your imagination? Are two different worlds that we live in simultaneously to start becoming aware that in the outside nothing's happening. I'm sitting here, it's raining, it's not raining, whatever it is. But on the inside, I am planning my next workshop, or I'm on a holiday, or I'm cooking dinner, or I'm reviewing a fight that I had 10 years ago with someone, whatever it may be. It's just interesting to start becoming aware that we live in the two separate worlds and when those separate walls are truly separate in the moment, we are not in alignment of, we're not present. Stop becoming aware and bring your focus back to the here and now and just start becoming curious about that. So as you go back into your day, just start noticing with curiosity, with an awareness, who you are, how you're showing up, how you're feeling, and. Just become more and more aware of self and when you are upset about something and maybe it's not upset, maybe you get angry or maybe you're bored, or maybe you're frustrated, maybe you're scared. Just ask yourself the question is like, what was it that I was thinking? So was it an inside world kind of thing that was happening that created the thoughts, that created the feeling? Or was it something on the outside that happened that made me feel this way? So I would say just start becoming aware of where your attention was in that moment so that you can start to unravel what's going onhat they don't want, I listen to their language because I love language communication. It's just one of my biggest, wow. Nothing is random. We may not be aware of why we choose to talk about something in the way that we do but it's not random. It reveals all sorts of things. It reveals how we feel. It reveals. What we believe about ourselves, what is possible. I listen to the tone of voice. I also listen to the way that they explain things. I listen to the stories that people tell me about why they haven't got what they've got or what they want. And I also listen to where they're putting blame and is it they're blaming themselves? Are they blaming people, other people? Are they blaming circumstances? Like I said, it's all in the story. It's in the language. It's all intricately and perfectly woven in. And It can be quite complex. When you're trying to fix it, because it's like, where do you begin? You know what do I fix? What don't I fix? What do I blame? What don't I blame? So this is what I do. I look for patterns. I look to see what's repeated. I look to see what is blamed. There's so much that gets revealed in a very short space of time. And how did I get to this? I remember when I first started assisting Paul McKennan, Richard Bandler on the NLP Practitioners Master Practitioners Train the Trainer Events in London, Richard Bandler. Who's one of the co-creators of NLP said that in the first five minutes, somebody will tell you what the problem is and how to fix it. And when I heard this, I just went, wow, that is going to be amazing. I just can't wait to understand this. I must have spent about two or three sessions listening to him. If not, maybe that whole practitioner course and missing the obvious. I thought every time, how did he do it? I sat watching the interaction with somebody from the audience. I didn't hear them say, this is my problem and this is how to fix it the way that Richard talked about. So I went back home and I looked at all of this and I just thought to myself, what is it that he's doing? And I realized that the first book he ever wrote was called The Structure of Magic. And the structure of magic is all about the language patterns that people use unconsciously to describe a problem. So the next time I went to assist them on a course in London, I sat and I tracked if what he was doing was tracking their language patterns and what they were, what they meant, why they were picked, and then what did he do with it. And that's where I found the magic. So I became a huge, big student of the language patterns. So what I do when I listen to people, I listen to the language patterns. I look at what they've unconsciously picked to drive that particular behavior and what has to be true. I often ask what has to be true for this person to believe this and therefore to behave this way around something? And does it always happen? So it's quite interesting if you look at behavior as a recipe to creating a cake, for instance. So it's not enough for me to say, we're gonna make a chocolate cake and just bring chocolate cake ingredients and we'll just put them together and we'll make them, because something will happen. I dunno if it's gonna be a good cake or not. Good cake or a pancake or, a hard piece of biscuit rather than a cake. And will it taste the same as the chocolate cake that I wanna copy? Probably not. So I've gotta be very specific when I want to get a specific chocolate cake to be the way I've seen it and I like it. I need to know exactly. How much flour, how much this, how much that, what are the ingredients? What are the portions? What is the method that they use to mix together? How long have they put it into the oven? The size of the tin also plays a role. All these things. For me to replicate the actual cake. And behavior's the same way. It's got criteria. So I will ask them for their recipe for that behavior. And I find it always quite interesting because as I play the stupid, I don't know, I don't understand. And I ask the questions around what, what's going on or what they are. The, the way that they create whatever it is that we are working on, that sometimes they will stop and look at me like. Oh my goodness. I never realized I did that. So it's always very interesting when the aha moment comes in because once they've seen it, they can't unsee it. They can't turn around and say, it's not me. They can't say, I didn't do this, or I didn't choose this for myself. It's now become very blatantly obvious that when this happens, this is the way that they react. And now it's all about undoing it all. So I always see in front of me a real perfect human being, a beautiful human being that has got lots and lots of capabilities and lots of attributes and skills and hopes and dreams and desires and all of that. And then I also notice how they play small. And how they pretend to themselves that they can't do what they want to do. So that's what I do when I listen to language and I listen to the patterns, and I look at the patterns and I just observe and I just ask questions. And some of the questions are for me to get more clarity, but some of the questions offer them to have clarity by answering me and correcting me, because I'll sometimes say, so this is what it means, and I'll reflect back what I think I heard. And of course, if it's wrong, they. Like everybody are compelled to correct me and in correcting me, they start to become very aware of what they're doing. So the other question that people will always ask me is why do we become misaligned? When does it start? What happens? You know what, so I do a lot of talks about this. I've done some podcasts, some presentations. Because it's always an interesting topic about how did we get to where we are? How did I happen to be 35, 40, 45, whatever age. And I have these patterns and personality traits that I don't want. They stop me from living the life that I desire in my dreams. And it all comes from the early stages. So if you look at. Neuroscience and what we learn from neuroscience in very simple terms. We have brainwaves in our brains, from the age of zero to two, we have Delta. And if you look at hypnotherapy and how we use delta brainwaves will actually induce a very deep state of relaxation, like almost comatose type of thing. And this is really good if we gotta teach somebody on how to have such a deep state of relaxation because they can't, for instance, have an aesthetic. And we need to do some sort of procedure and we need to zone them out so much so that they can have the procedure without having the pain or the awareness of the pain or control the pain. So from the age of zero to two babies, whether they're asleep or not, are in the delta mode, which means they're very suggestible and they have to be because they grow the most in every sense. In this one year of their life. In fact physically you almost double in size. You learn how to sit, how to start eating, how to not only one year, two years of your life, how to walk, how to start talking, how to start getting dressed, how to pick up things. There's a hell of a lot of learning. So this is not a time to start questioning everything that's going on around you, give or take from the age of two till about eight. We'd now become we are in theater, so we are less suggestible, but still very suggestible and still very unconscious. And you can see that the curiosity is there for kids of trying to work things out and trying to understand things, but we still don't have a concept of self and the concept of life per se. It's starting to develop the older we get, but it's not a hundred percent there. And then between the age of eight to 12, give or take, we have the alphabet brainwaves that are developing. And that is a very creative site. It's also very problem solving site. It's it's a beautiful place. It's calm, it's playful, it's creative. It's all of those things. And roughly at the age of 12, we have what we call the. Beta brainwaves. The minute that happens or starts to happen, this is when we have a separation between the unconscious and the conscious mind. What does that mean? Is that now we have a concept of life and self and meaning we, we can now start attaching meaning to things. So why is this important to know and how does this actually misalign us? Is that in all our early years, this is where we depend on others to teach us about being human, about living, about being in on this planet. How do we exist as human beings? The meaning of things, but it's not ours, it's theirs. And they do the best they can with what they are given. So I know that sometimes people feel quite angry and resentful and blaming to their parents, but parents did the best they could with what they had. So we've gotta take that into account. In our teenage years, really problematic years in some ways from the point of view that this is the transition between child to adult. This is the time in our lives where it would be wonderful, absolutely wonderful if our parents and our peers, but more our parents and our teachers would turn around and say, okay, you've learned my way of living. Now you need to play around and see if that aligns with you, if that's good. And start transitioning into your own ways, your own belief systems, your own paradigms, your own experiences, your own definitions, and start creating your own sort of life. But what happens is a lot of times children, when they want to do something, parents or teachers will turn around and go, you don't know. This is not right. This is wrong. Why do you think this way? Why are you defying me? I've heard things like, oh, I'm much older than you. I've got more experience. I know what I'm talking about. You dunno what you're talking about. All, all that kind of stuff happens when you're a teenager and this is why. We rebel as well with our parents because we start getting ideas and it's our own ideas and that conflict with our parents' ideas. And a lot of times parents think that you are defying them, that you're not respecting them and you're not listening to them. And sometimes that is quite true, but it's not the only thing. So what happens then is we learn how to be somebody else, somebody that. Your parents want you to be somebody that your teacher wants you to be. It's also in those. Early years of our life going into teenage years, that we also learned to not trust ourselves because we've been told we are wrong all the time, so therefore we don't trust ourselves. And then we find it very hard to make these kind of decisions and therefore we accept somebody else's definitions of life, somebody else's belief systems, paradigms. And we try and fit that in with that. Inner calling that we all have. And I was listening to a interview from Steve Harvey and he was talking about what he wanted to do and everybody was laughing at him because he wanted to be on tv and he used to stutter and, all that. And he a preacher said to him that, that dream was implanted in you. It wasn't implanted in somebody else. So nobody else could understand that. And in the same way, we all have come onto this planet with a dream and when we want to go out and do it, if we start listening to what other people think about your dream, some of them will think it's great, and some of them will think you're crazy. But at the end of the day, it's nobody's dream but your dream. So when you're misaligned because you're believing what other people have said, your dream sometimes won't make sense to them, and it won't even make sense to you if you are seeing your dream and your passion, your desire through the paradigms and the belief systems of somebody else. And this is that agitation that we feel, and this is what our, all my work is based on. This is that we have a desire to do or be something somehow. And we are not. And even though we have succeeded in other things, there's a unrested feeling energy inside of us because you. Haven't and fulfilled the whole thing that you've come here to do. And therefore you are living out of a misaligned place. And that feels uncomfortable. And it's meant to feel uncomfortable because the soul wants what the soul wants. And if you're not living your purpose, it's going to kick you in the ass. And he's gonna say, Hey. I've given you x amount of years and you've already used 40 and you're not even close. So get going. You're running out of time. So these are the signs that rest restless that you've got inside is a sign that you restless that something is not right and something is off. Something actually feels off. When you start working with yourself and going down the personal development, which can be a minefield by the way, and I totally get that. Been in it for 30 odd years, in fact, a little bit more. So I totally get that. But the first thing that I would say to anybody is you've gotta raise an awareness. You've got to start. Becoming aware of what you're thinking, how you're feeling, understand yourself so that you're able to make sense out of the nonsense because there's so much nonsense going on. And that would be your first shift, is to start realizing how you are choosing to be and how you're choosing to show up in life, how you're choosing to take care of arguments and fights and things like this and then asking yourself, always the question to me, there's no right and wrong in life. But you can always ask yourself the question, is what I'm doing giving me the outcome that I want? And then you can start taking a step back and thinking about things differently. So the other question that I get asked is why forcing something is the wrong approach? I think it speaks for itself, or it does, at least to me. That if you're forcing it, it's not coming from your natural self. It's almost like you're pushing, you're trying harder for somebody else's reason, because what you want to do and what you love doing comes natural. It feels, it's when you lose sense of time and space and in that place of absolute bliss and joy that you know that you are now in alignment with your soul. With your spirit, with yourself, rather than doing something that somebody else wants you to do. you know, Your body has no ability to lie. It can only tell the truth. So if you ask yourself and listen and feel your body and say, is this right for me? If your body feels heavy at the idea of something, it's not right for you. And then if you go forward to do that, you're forcing it. And how many times have we all said in our lives something didn't work out and you go, I knew it. I knew it was wrong for me. I just didn't know what else to do and I didn't know what, how to change things. And this person seemed like they knew what they were talking, and I'm sure they had right intentions, but it wasn't right, because you're forcing it to be. How do I start making sense out of the nonsense? And again, I've said the personal development world is a minefield. It's like laborinth, it's, you dunno which start but that's because we are complex and there isn't a right way to start. There isn't, oh, you've gotta do this first, or you've gotta do that first, or if you learn this, or if you do that, if you go from an energetic or if you go from a practice, there is no right way, but you have to trust that if you've opened up your curiosity as to what is next that. It's just gonna go in the right direction. And even if you're going in the wrong direction, something about the way you're meant to be going will show up and then you will change directions. So in some ways, you've always gotta trust the process that you will always be at the right time in the right place. And when the student is ready, the teacher appears. So it could be a book, it could be a webinar, it could be a podcast if you just put it out there. That you want to change, that you want to have an awareness, that you want to be guided, that you want something, you have to trust that your unconscious will. Lead you. It'll place the your attention, whether you realize it or not. It'll place your attention to the forefront of your mind that you want to change or you want help, or you want support. And it'll start scanning through your social media. It'll scan through books, it'll scan through emails, whether you realize it or not, and you will find the right thing. So you've gotta trust that. What I always encourage people to, to start doing for themselves. It's a simple awareness, an awareness of how you're thinking what are you thinking about? What are you observing? If you have to go straight into a more conscious way of being, rather than being the reactive, unconscious, automatic self. And it could be, I start everybody by saying. Be in the moment and just place your attention to your feet on the ground to your bum sitting on the chair to where your elbows are, where your hands are. Notice what you can see in front of you, what you can see around you, what you can hear, how you feeling. And then to become aware of your thoughts and how your thoughts make you feel, because how are you feeling on the outside being the world that is tactile, that you can touch to the world that's on the inside, which is your imagination? Are two different worlds that we live in simultaneously to start becoming aware that in the outside nothing's happening. I'm sitting here, it's raining, it's not raining, whatever it is. But on the inside, I am planning my next workshop, or I'm on a holiday, or I'm cooking dinner, or I'm reviewing a fight that I had 10 years ago with someone, whatever it may be. It's just interesting to start becoming aware that we live in the two separate worlds and when those separate walls are truly separate in the moment, we are not in alignment of, we're not present. Stop becoming aware and bring your focus back to the here and now and just start becoming curious about that. So as you go back into your day, just start noticing with curiosity, with an awareness, who you are, how you're showing up, how you're feeling, and. Just become more and more aware of self and when you are upset about something and maybe it's not upset, maybe you get angry or maybe you're bored, or maybe you're frustrated, maybe you're scared. Just ask yourself the question is like, what was it that I was thinking? So was it an inside world kind of thing that was happening that created the thoughts, that created the feeling? Or was it something on the outside that happened that made me feel this way? So I would say just start becoming aware of where your attention was in that moment so that you can start to unravel what's going on. If something in today's episode stirred something for you, let it settle. You don't need to do anything right now. Just notice what stays with you. And if you're listening at a later date and you feel drawn to explore this work more deeply, you'll always be able to find current ways to work with me@vickiross.com. Until next time, stay curious, stay aware and remember when you understand yourself more clearly, everything begins to change.