If you've ever found yourself starting to accomplish something,, and then destroying it, mixed neuro-associations are usually the culprit. Perhaps your business has been moving in fits and starts, flourishing one day and floundering the next. What is this all about? It's a case of associating both pain and pleasure to the same situation.
One example a lot of us can relate to is money. In our culture people have incredibly mixed associations to wealth. There's no doubt that people want money. They think it would provide them with the pleasure of more freedom, more security, a chance to contribute, a chance to travel, to learn, to expand, to make a difference.
But simultaneously most people never climb above a certain earnings plateau because deep down they associate having "excess" money to a lot of negatives. They associate it to greed,to pain of having to work harder to get it, to stress, to being judged, with immorality or a lack of spirituality, fights with spouse, guilt, sleepless nights, shallowness and complacency.
When you're deciding what to do, if your brain doesn't have a clear signal of what equals pain and what equals pleasure, it goes into overload and becomes confused. As a result, you lose momentum and the power to take the decision actions that could give you what you want.
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