Written by Heather M. Burt, YIELD Coach
Heather Burt is the founder of Your Individual EvoLution Directive (YIELD) and author of Personal Evolution: Four Essential Elements For Navigating Your Life. Her passion and vision include helping others embrace an Evolutionary Mindset to align more fully with their authenticity, enabling them to share their gifts with the world.
What if you couldn’t get life wrong? How would your life change if there wasn’t pressure to get it “right” and instead view your life through the lens of personal evolution? There’s freedom in adopting an evolutionary mindset that holds the potential for creating a life you never knew you wanted or dreamed possible.
Conditioned to survive
Our early conditioning trains us to survive in a world where we are helpless and dependent on others for love and safety. These early lessons become embedded in our wiring, buried in our subconscious, laying the foundation for who we will become. Our beliefs, choices, reactions, and preferences are largely controlled by unconscious programming designed to ensure we remain loved and safe by living up to the standards set by the world around us. In other words, by getting life “right.”
With a few exceptions, most of us spend the first half of our lives trying to follow the map handed to us by our family of origin and society at large. For some, the map works well. For others, it may present a constant struggle. Regardless, and almost without fail, the impetus to evolve and move beyond our conditioning (the map) presents itself as some form of discomfort – physical, mental, or emotional.
The personal evolution option
Whether it's a physical illness, some form of depression, personal betrayal, or tragedy, at some point in our lives, we will come to a crossroads where we can either double down on insisting our conditioning (our map) is “right” and refer to it for answers; or, we can adopt an evolutionary mindset that suggests there may not be a definitively “right” or “wrong” answer, but there may be options that are more or less functional given our current circumstances.
That is one of the fundamental differences in how life can be approached when operating from the perspective of personal evolution, you are gifted the freedom to think and respond in terms of functionality within a given situation instead of trying to apply rigid rules to the nuances of life. That is to say, you begin to respond creatively rather than conditionally. Nature demonstrates this beautifully by observing how species evolve and adapt to their environment. It's why we don't see polar bears in the desert or lizards in the Arctic tundra.
Who’s “right”?
The likely argument against an evolutionary mindset is that our civilized world will suffer if people are unwilling to conform to what is "right." The question then becomes, who's “right”? Conservatives, independents, liberals? Catholics, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhists? America (North or South?), Europe, Asia, Africa? Who gets to say who is “right”?
Adopting an evolutionary mindset and acknowledging you are here to personally evolve rather than get it right, suggests that what is right for you might not be right for someone else. Additionally, the innate intelligence embedded in evolution (biological or conscious) ensures harmony and balance through feedback systems built into our bodies and expressed as health or illness, clarity or confusion, and peace or anxiety. The greatest challenge is learning to listen and interpret the feedback we receive through our bodies when we have been so conditioned to rely on the world around us for answers.
This is where Awareness comes in. Awareness is one of the essential elements for navigating personal evolution. Awareness asks us to look beyond the limitations of our current beliefs to make room for a larger reality. In my next article, we will explore how you can cultivate Awareness and use it to anchor your Personal Evolution.
If you would like more information on Personal Evolution, you can visit my website or pick up a copy of my book, Personal Evolution: Four Essential Elements For Navigating Your Life.
Read more from Heather M. Burt
Heather M. Burt, YIELD Coach
Heather Burt skillfully integrates distinct perspectives and methods in order to distill fundamental concepts so they can be applied universally. As a result of her own diverse background and journey to wholeness, Heather has found her passion in understanding and synergistically melding personal growth concepts to facilitate a broader, more individualized application. Her mission involves helping others experience freedom through Evolutionary thinking.
