The Rough Road to Transformation: "We all want to stay safe, but playing it safe is not actually changing.".

• Author: Payne, Richelle
• Position: PSYCHOLOGY

WE ALL WANT to grow toward the highest version of ourselves. There are many components involved in moving your life forward. Growing toward our goals is much like driving a car. There seemingly are infinite moving parts involved in keeping your car on the road. Well, negative thought patterns are like the pesky check engine light that alerts you to a problem but does not help you fix it--or maybe you do not notice, or try to ignore, the light, until the car sputters or, worse, stalls.

We readily accept that we cannot drive a car without oil or gas, or even a driver's license, registration, and insurance. It is the same when we expect something from ourselves that does not exist, or when we undervalue the truth that we know about ourselves. When we disconnect and begin sputtering through life, we impede our ability to achieve our goals.

We cannot always immediately pinpoint why we feel disconnected, but there is a solution--if you are willing to do the work. There is a proven way to create meaningful, lasting, transformative change, and it starts with tackling unresolved childhood memories, undoing early learning patterns, and reprogramming the thinking and behaviors we have picked up along the road of life.

As children, we are told bedtime stories of people performing great feats of supernatural strength, knights in shining armor riding horseback, pumpkins turning into carriages, and talking frogs. They are stories of good versus evil to remind us of the rewards of beneficial behavior. We tell stories to make sense of the world. Since there is no escape from life's negative or painful experiences, we form certain curious beliefs about ourselves to help understand what is happening around us and how to get our needs met. So much of what happens in our early years is unconscious and involuntary, so we as humans have developed a set of survival skills to fill in the gaps that our parents or primary caregivers could not, or did not, explain to us.

"The soul is a recorder of all memories," says personal coach Jaime B. Haas. "The subconscious mind holds onto messages that were told to you as a child and creates a belief system that you shaped your life around to make sense of the world."

According to Haas, much of our early learning patterns are layered with assumptions and messages that have been reinforced over time. "The key to personal growth is to stop placing our well-being on external factors and deal with the core wounds that inform our...