3 Sure Signs You’re Stuck in Your Head

How to Get into Your Heart Instead

Casual conversation is full of common phrases that are so well-worn they’ve become part of the furniture. But words are energy. They are generative, creative seeds of power, worthy of respect.

Consider the word ‘abracadabra.’ It's a word of mysterious origin, and nowadays reduced to a jokey birthday party magician's incantation. It’s believed that this word might have come from the Aramaic phrase ‘avra kehdabra’, meaning “I will create as I speak”.

It seems fitting that in our world such a powerful invocation would have lost its meaning because so few people are aware of their power to create their reality consciously. We don’t truly understand the energetic nature of words, or take their employ seriously, especially in conversation. And yet we all ‘abracabra’ — create as we speak. 

As a life coach, I teach my clients vigilance in their use of words. At first, I suspect they think I’m just being a pain, but once they begin to experience their own power, they tend to adopt this vigilance themselves with gusto. 

There are certain phrases I hear over and over from clients that are indicative of limiting paradigms or belief systems. And these are no doubt phrases that you use in casual conversation every day. Let’s look at a few of the most common ones:

‘Figure out’.

Whenever you catch yourself saying that you have to ‘figure something out’, look deeper to see if you’re deflecting a direct approach, avoiding, or procrastinating. ‘Figuring it out’ is a game of the intellect, which looks to the prevailing conditions or life situation to come up with a solution, using logic and deduction based on past scenarios. There is no room for creative thinking or the new in ‘figuring it out.' It’s usually a sign you’re stuck in the same old story rather than tuning into your intuition and taking inspired action by stepping into the unknown. ‘Figuring it out’ closes us up inside the functional mind when we could be consciously co-creating with the infinite intelligence.

‘Try to’.

Uh oh. Don’t ‘try’ to do something. Do it or don’t do it. When you hear yourself saying you’re going to 'try,' that’s just leaving yourself an escape hatch for if you ‘can’t.’ It’s like writing yourself an excuse note ahead of time, all the while pretending that you’re making an effort. What’s really going on here is that we don’t believe in ourselves or trust ourselves enough to make a commitment to doing something. Or we’re afraid of standing in our truth and saying no when we actually want to say no. I like to offer up a more empowering alternative in the form of ‘endeavoring’. Endeavoring has the feeling of stepping toward something with intention and honest effort.

P.S. The whopper of disempowering phrases is the combo platter of these first two. Beware of ‘trying to figure it out’!

‘Need to/should’.

Implicit in ‘I need to/should’ is the feeling of obligation. When we ‘need to’ do something, we’re convincing ourselves that circumstances are more powerful than we are, and we’re often not listening to ourselves about what would be right for us or what we truly want.

Recognize these? We use them all the time. These expressions are part of how we validate, affirm, and maintain mass belief systems of disempowerment: an agreement that life is happening to us and that we are the unwitting playthings of circumstance.

When we’re stuck in our heads, we’re easily exploitable because we’re disconnected from our hearts. But we can use our awareness to calibrate our words, sending a signal to our subconscious mind that WE are in charge of our state, and raising our vibration in the process. Remember, words are energy, and all energy has a vibration, so the words we use affect our own vibration.

The next time you notice any of the above expressions creeping into your conversation, or you find yourself affirming a self-limiting perception or agreeing with someone else’s, switch from condition-based thinking to vision-driven thinking. Instead of ‘trying to figure it out’ and ‘needing to’ do something, why not take a deep breath and ask yourself, “What would I love?”

And listen for an answer.