Prior to reading a particular book called The Battlefield of the Mind, I never really understood the important role our minds play in major day-to-day decisions in our lives. But the interesting thing about our minds is that they grow what is nurtured. That is to say, if we continuously accept a particular thing or feed our minds with certain content, it gradually thinks, “Oh, this is good for me, and that’s why I’m continuously being fed with this,” and so it stores that kind of information in a special place. Other times, it doesn’t even have to be fed with it all the time, but that one time made you feel really good or bad, and your mind hardly ever forgets that.
Your brain subconsciously stores information, and other times it consciously stores information as well. The subconscious information is the kind we easily tell ourselves isn’t there, but sadly, it is what controls us even more in times when we feel vulnerable—those times when we just let our guards down a little. And that’s why, when people find us in those moments when we seem like a completely different person from who they are used to, they often say that is the real us, and they either want to distance themselves or draw closer to us now that they know that vulnerable part of us.
So, our minds only work based on the information we expose them to. In a system that tells us that no matter what you do, you won’t even get rich or achieve a particular thing, our minds store that, and even when we work so hard or try to follow a different pattern, any little mistake or setback feels like, “I knew I was just being overly optimistic. They said it wasn’t going to work, so bold of me to think differently,” and so much more. This happens because we have been in a failing system for too long, and our brain just keeps interpreting every failing process as “nothing can change no matter what I do differently.”
So, in simple response to the real-talk question on what makes us poor, I’ll say both our mindsets and our systems play a major role in poverty. Most times, the moment we change the systems we’ve been so used to and we see results—better results, our mindsets automatically start to shift from what they always used to know to something like, “I think there is hope after all.” But if we fail again, we go back to the start almost immediately. So, it is good to always surround ourselves with different systems and find the one that pushes us beyond what we’ve always known almost all our lives, and see the one that makes a difference for us.
Thank you for reading through. 💜