Before knowledge, emotions, and experiences come into the picture, your natural roots as a human being lie in your very specific and unique DNA code. Combine this with the world’s most powerful supercomputer — your brain — and your life truly is a miracle!

Unfortunately, this miracle did not come with an operator’s manual…

You entered the world and were raised by a community that did the best they knew how with the information they had, thanks to the highest form of on-the-job training they could ever receive: life.

When it comes to how we’re wired, it’s important to understand that there are two very distinct components at play here: hard-wiring and soft-wiring.

In simple terms, hard-wiring is your natural tendencies from birth — your DNA — whereas soft-wiring is a culmination of everything you have been taught and absorbed by the community that raised you.

Soft-wiring is very unique because we are not naturally born with any of it. Unlike hardwiring, your soft-wiring is all community influenced, making your community largely responsible for how you think and what you believe about the world today.

The good news is, if you learned it, you can unlearn it!

If you recognize that what you are doing is not working, all you have to do is develop new habits that reframe your belief structure. Sure, this process is not necessarily that simple, but when it comes to hard-wiring, we don’t exactly have this luxury… what we’re born with is pretty much what we’re stuck with, which will be one of your greatest gifts once you discover and embrace it.

Without getting too technical and deep into neuroscience, our brain is made up of about 300 million pattern processors with millions of unique synapses connections. This would be considered the neural network that processes your belief structure.

You can think of each pattern processor as a “bucket” that contains 3 components: an experience, an emotion, and a set of rules, all tied together. When you combine millions of pattern processors (or buckets) together, you create patterns and stories that form your belief structure.

That said, what do you think happens as you get older and the vast majority of your belief structure was formed as a young child? In most cases, we never personally experienced the initial emotions for ourselves, we subconsciously learned them through observation of our influencers. Things like being afraid of spiders, for instance…

Imagine a young child helping his mom in the kitchen — we’ll call him Ricky. As 6-year-old Ricky watches his mom jump on the table screaming as a spider runs across the kitchen floor, he witnesses fear in his protector — his mom — and instinctually follows her lead, climbing on a chair to escape the spider. Mom has now subconsciously conditioned Ricky to fear spiders, instead of capturing and releasing it back outside.

Same house, different day, Dad is making dinner and another spider runs across the floor. Ricky’s 8-year-old sister watches as dad stomps the spider, and wipes it up off the floor with a tissue. “That’s how you handle that!”, dad says with a little victory dance. Daughter now knows how to handle spiders without fear of them.

Different house, different day, Grandpa is reading a story to Ricky’s twin brother. A spider crawls across the arm of the couch and Grandpa says, “Look… there’s one of God’s beautiful creatures.” He scoops it up with the newspaper and they release it out in the garden where it belongs.

Think about how uniquely each person handled and witnessed the encounter with a spider. One is taught to run and fear it, one to squash it and celebrate, and the third to appreciate it and set it free. Three adults with very different reactions and three kids with very different conditioned responses about how to handle a spider.

This subconscious conditioning is happening all day, every day, never-ending, whether you are the one being conditioned, or the one doing the conditioning. Once you are aware of who you are and where you are going, you will amaze yourself with the number of habits, fears, and reactions you start undoing, giving yourself the freedom to live life at an entirely new level.

Think about all the things you have learned in your life that started as a set of “rules” that apparently made sense to somebody else during a particularly vulnerable time in your life. As a young person, those 300 million brain “buckets” are empty and waiting to be filled with life experiences, emotions, and rules that ultimately form your belief structure.

The challenge is, you’re then stuck filtering the world through a belief structure that was largely influenced by the community that raised you… And chances are, that belief structure is likely not aligned with who YOU truly are…

As young people, we kind of just show up in the world and experience the day. No level of intention, no understanding about what I am, who I am, how I am hard-wired from birth, or how the community around me works. All we know is what we have been taught or what we have witnessed, and all we believe is what we were raised to believe.

One of the hardest truths I have learned through decades of research and discovery is that we are all just wounded, traumatized children attempting to survive in our adult bodies. In order to grow at an exponential rate, you must be honest with yourself… if you are not getting the results you want in ALL aspects of your life, then it’s likely time for some updates to your soft-wiring.

As you think about the community that raised you and your own life experiences, what are some of the fears, habits, and conditioned responses you’ve developed over time that may not align with who you want to be, and could actually be holding you back? How did your first year of the decade end up? What will your 2021 look like? Have you set your intentions for the new year? For the decade?

Remember, we way over-estimate what we will do in a year and way under-estimate what we can do in a decade, so ask yourself… Do I have the right resources and people in my life to help me win BIG this year and beyond?