Do You Have a ‘Default Gap Syndrome?
Do You Have a ‘Default Gap Syndrome?
Could a ‘Default Gap’ Be Holding You Back?’
The answer to both these questions is highly likely to be, YES!
Do you believe your past actually happened how you think it happened? Do you believe the story that you tell yourself or others regarding your life and why you think you have not made the big time, achieved your goals and dreams? Do you believe your ‘Default Gap Syndrome’ could actually be holding you back in a big way?
What do I mean?
With the past you either make it rosier or make it more gloomy than it was. Worst still you are incapable of actually seeing what it really was. You cannot see what is really staring you in the eyes because it is all hidden from sight by blindfolds you put in place yourself most probably without realising. These are called filters. Some filters are called normality filters. Those are created by your past normal behaviours. Others are called defence filters. Normality filters are deeply set in your unconscious mind. Defence filters are more likely to be hovering at the edges of your conscious thoughts. Defence filters are created so that you should not be reminded of what is so obvious but incomprehensible or too painful. Then there are other filters and filters within filters and so on, all of which can be appropriately listed as self imposed stumbling blocks.
Have you ever been to a film, show or concert or some type of event and at the time it was pretty good but not exceptional. When you are telling a friend about it a few days or weeks later, the concert was AMAZING or frankly just about OK. Or perhaps you speak about the good old days often or how bad things used to be?
How come?
You and I simply distort and delete information each and every day and we make meaning for ourselves from everything we see, feel, hear, taste, smell or sense through our intuition awareness. We will re-asses and adjust what happens. All conclusions are according to our perspective, experience and our values.
The interesting news is the meaning you made is often incorrect, and your past literally only has one purpose. Yes sometimes it can be nice to reminisce but the only purpose of the past is for you to learn from it. However, if your interpretation is littered with veils and stumbling blocks i.e. ‘Default Gaps,’ this is easier said than done. How can you learn from it when you have a blindfold filter so you cannot see it or see the real facts or truth?
It’s that simple.
You have a story (like we all do) regarding your life. Your upbringing, what did and didn’t happen throughout your life, who did and said what and what you are convinced that meant. The hurt, the embarrassment, your failings or successes at school or at work and as a mother, father, brother, sister etc. All these things relate back to the models of behaviour and expectations you learnt to be normal before your sixth birthday or the following few years.
You have made meaning from all of the above and that doesn’t mean that it’s true. (Highly likely it’s not, well, at least not all of it.) The problem is your story containing truths, facts, distorted facts, fiction and all the emotions and distortions becomes you because they all control how you think, therefore how you create your future.
The more that truth, facts and fiction gets jumbled the more and the bigger the stumbling blocks you create in the way of your progress. Each time you tell yourself your story you reinforce the illusions you have taught yourself to be fact and truth.
Maybe it justifies what you do or don’t have, or maybe you think it explains why you are like you are and why you only achieve what you do. Perhaps you need it to explain the mess in your life is all other people’s fault. Why you are having so much difficulty to be like others you envy. What this attitude does not do is to explain why when you do try to make changes you eventually change back to where you were before. Look deeper and you will likely find what you have fallen back to, are the behaviours of your early childhood environment.
Right now I’m sharing with you what you have created (made up) who you think you are and if you’d like to be different in some ways, you can be. Most people never do this because it is tough to accept the real truth or facts that you are secretly aware of. Nonetheless what you are unaware of is their power also their significance concerning your current condition. Therefore the effort and possibly emotional pain will likely be repaid in truck loads of rewards.
Change your personal story for the better and you WILL change your life and your future for the better.
Sounds good but how do you change your story and still be yourself?
Ah! There lies another important stumbling block. You insist on being yourself. Wait a minute it is yourself that is not working so why are you insistent in continuing to shoot yourself in the foot?
Okay yes, it is scary. Good, now you are beginning to think more clearly. Scary, fear, doubt! Great! Remember these are your emotional friends not your enemies. When you have decided the good bits that do work, which may be worth keeping and the bits that do not work that you should really change, you are making real progress. Also when you have planned in detail who you would like to be, then the scary, fear and doubt will fade into the mists of time and you will be ready to create the new you with confidence without all those stumbling blocks.
Well, if you want to do it by yourself you can attempt to identify the events that have happened to you and the distortions you wilfully made through your life. However you will do much better to read through the following and then find yourself a competent and experienced coach specializing in this field of support.
The secret in finding your ‘Default Gap’ is to find the behaviours you regarded as normal, which you were not aware of creating roughly between the age of 3 to 9 or 10 years of age. Then you find the ones that are your stumbling blocks. You will find they are the ones you are still doing the same thing albeit in a variety of different ways. Yet fundamentally they amount to the same behaviour or pattern of thinking you programmed yourself to regard as normal in your early childhood. Analyse them and you will find they are holding you back today.
Let me explain how this works.
Imagine you grew up in a family environment where you essentially lived a privileged existence. You lived in a large house in a beautiful garden of say 6 or 8 acres. In your environment and education, etiquette, good manners, politeness, caring and expectations for a high society life is the norm. You are taught to respect everyone and everything, do as you are told and be silent unless spoken to but sometimes you can be a little naughty. Then something goes seriously wrong when you are just 4 years old. Your parents have lost everything as the family fortune has been eradicated by an irresponsible bank employee investing in high risk panic trading. Also at this time your father is taken seriously ill so the family income is more than drastically reduced.
You begin to notice how things have changed. Your parent’s friends are no longer coming to dinner parties or cocktails. The house is not as warm as it used to be in the winter and you tend to live mostly around the kitchen table rather than a large and comfortable dinning and sitting rooms. Much of the garden is now given over to producing vegetables, and fruit. A chicken run is built to produce eggs and chickens to eat. There are new bee hives at the bottom of the garden. An old greenhouse is renovated to produce tomatoes and salad. There is no more a gardener so you are co-opted to helping tend the garden, collect eggs, chop wood and other duties that become your daily life.
In the evening after school you help in the garden and most of your weekend is taken up by mowing the extensive lawns, learning and helping to maintain the house and out houses, washing the car and other constantly demanding tasks. Even at this tender age you begin to learn how to mend things that can no longer be sent for repair. It is still a beautiful place to live and grow up and you learn to love and really enjoy a great deal including the tennis court, the swimming pool also other sports facilities in the garden such as a small golf course of a few holes, ping-pong, baseball, flying kites and so on. Because you are no longer invited to birthday parties, your home has become your world and your universe. Everything you need is in this little heaven, which you have learnt to take for granted. You do not have to be told what to do because you have come to love and appreciate so much. As you are growing up there are few new purchases, even a packet of sweets is a rear treat. Because there is no spare money to buy what you want you learn to use the resources in your little world that nature provides or you find in the many garages or storage sheds. You miss the times when you had played ball with your father, mother and siblings. So now you imagine games of your own or make a den and pretend play cowboys and Indians. Perhaps you play pirates turning a tree and a few bits of old rope and a hammock into an imaginary galleon or you gallop around the garden on your make believe horse chasing or being chased by a hoard of Indians.
Now do you understand how for six years 24/7 you have been programming your mind with this default behaviour program? You have not the slightest idea what has been happening or the consequential effect on your future life’s thinking patterns and strategies.
Up to the age of 10 to 12 years of age is when you create your most fundamental beliefs, values, attitudes and habits or behaviours.
Now you are 9 years old and your father dies. The big house is sold, and you move into a small house with a small garden. Half the garden is still for producing fruit and vegetables and still producing chickens and eggs. In the house much of the furniture you have grown familiar with, is still around you so your new environment has a semblance of normality. However your mother now goes to work and you find yourself left to your own devices without any guidance so you make the best you can of your life, school and college days then go out into the big bad world.
Now guess what is the first thing you do? That is right, you go straight into survival mode to plan your life how to survive rather than planning how to be abundantly wealthy. The worst think is that because ‘abundantly wealthy’ has not been part of your survival up-bringing it does not enter your thoughts as a practical option. This means that you may certainly create wealth with one significant hitch. Your income or wealth generation will always be adequate for your needs with no allowance for abundance or substantial savings for the real luxuries of life.
The years slip by, 25, – 35, – 45. In middle age you begin to realise no matter how hard you work you seem to take two steps forward and one back. This gives you a feeling of a sort of elegant survival where you just keep on shooting yourself in the foot as you make the same or similar regrettable life mistakes. There seems to be a notion in the back of your mind about what this means but you just cannot quite put your finger on it. You don’t really understand because you had a wonderful upbringing and lived the elegant life but then it somehow melted away. For as far back as you can remember, just as you are about to reach goals or dreams of things you will do, they vaporize just before you reach them. You feel as if you belong to a different age that had a different order.
Then one day you are pondering your past and you suddenly realise you are still doing essentially what you learnt to do from the age of 3 to 9 years old. As you grew up you became used to a behaviour of survival while you never realised that it was survival. You never noticed the gap between the former richness and wealth that had created your environment and background and the actual almost financial also social poverty you had adopted as normal. Now it hits you that the feeling of mismatching and belonging to a different time is actually the distortion or gap you are living of the behaviours , attitudes, beliefs, values and education of an elite family while actually living the behaviours, values and attitudes of near survival and not realising or noticing anything was wrong. So for the past 25 years in your career, instead of thinking progressively you are constantly in a survival mindset. The consequences are that you keep missing that promotion. Your salary increases only slowly and instead of paying for companies to provide services for you, you have to find ways to provide your needs by any means you can. Instead of holidays like other families you enjoy your vacation at home with occasional day trips to somewhere nice. You provide for your needs by using whatever resources you have in your home or plan how to stretch your credit card to buy a few more essential items.
Next you realise that despite being a qualified professional, even quite highly regarded by many for your advanced knowledge and expertise, you just keep running into the same old wall of no entry to the high life. You begin to add 2 + 2 and bingo you understand why your college friends are now top executives, or run their own successful companies and not you. Now it is clear how those first few years that set your way of thinking about your future. No, not consciously, this all happened in your unconscious way of thinking.
Your head is reeling in this onslaught of clarity when another block buster slams into your conscious thoughts. You notice a connection between your thinking patterns and the high level of stress in your life. You had always put your stress and persistent near migraine headaches down to pressures of your job. As the picture unfolds you realise that because your default survival strategy thinking of 3 to 9 years of age had by default become your natural way of thinking. The relative success and certain level of renewed wealth in your middle age due to your profession was the real problem. Although not extraordinary it had at one time been quite acceptable subject to certain restraints. Now you see how that level of success and abundance had actually been at log-a-heads with your underlying unconscious childhood default programmed survival strategy way of thinking. You begin to understand it is this, not your job that is driving your stress. Also it is this conflict between your default unconscious thinking and your efforts to succeed that is the actual cause of feelings of constantly running into a wall. In addition it is this conflict that is causing the ‘two steps forward and one back’ behaviour. Suddenly you see why you always got the shitty problems no one else could handle at work. This was because you could be relied upon to think through the seemingly impossible to drag disasters out of a hole. Your managers refer to you as the office Life-buoy. But then someone else would take over when you had saved the day and they got the eventual accolades or rewards as your crucial involvement had been long forgotten. Now you feel a punch of anger as you realise that it was your survival attitude, which prevented you from taking any of those projects through to their successful conclusion. Your managers were right to give all those contracts to someone else after you had rescued them. The underlying feeling that you are loosing the fight is rising and more constantly in your thoughts. Thus you see yourself slipping back to near survival again just as you did in your early youth. Once again you feel there is nothing you can do about it, you are forever caught in an endless cycle.
Well the good news is that there is something you can do to change all that and it is simpler and it can happen faster than you can imagine. Do it on your own and it could take you a life time. However, do it with the guidance of a professional competent to accompany you to unravel this type of problem or syndrome and you may likely do it in days rather than an eternity of re-inventing the wheel of how your mind works.
Do You Have a Default Gap Syndrome?
If you would like to join a Mind Power Recognition Group or have personal guidance to learn how to change your future contact me at: robertdenton@rdcoaching-power.com













