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Throughout this series of articles I referenced the WEB Enlightenment tool. WEB is a way for you to consciously and deliberately notice the words, emotions, and behaviors that are woven together to create the way you act as a person.

 

W.E.B

• Words are how you understand what your brain is thinking.
• Emotions are how you understand the communication between your brain and body.
• Behavior is how you understand what was communicated to your body.

It’s easy to implement and use WEB. The harder part is remembering to do it. But if you’re in a space of self-exploration, which if you’re reading the article we might assume that you are, then I’d recommend giving WEB a try for a month. Click here for a worksheet you can use to get started. In the worksheet I give an example of how WEB works that I’ll repeat here…

 

Example

Let’s look at an example so you can see WEB in action. I (Sarah Weber, The Brain Cleanup Coach) live at risk for Huntington’s Disease, a genetic neurodegenerative disease. Part of the reason I started my coaching journey was because of this circumstance in my life. When I found out that my mom has HD, and I live at risk for it, my WEBs about disease, neurological disease, and health all kicked in. My brain was presented information, and my subconscious mind presented me immediate thoughts to think, which led to emotion and behavior.

Needless to say, my immediate reaction was one of fear. Do I have HD? How would it effect my mom? How would my brother and I take care of her? Am I already experiencing symptoms?

That last one weighed on me. Living with the possibility of disease, it was easy to get stuck in a mindset that anything that even remotely resembled a symptom of the disease was probably proof that I had it. Even though those “symptoms” were also things humans commonly do. Let’s take balance as an example. I’ve never had great balance. But in HD, one of the symptoms is losing your ability to balance and falling quite often.

Let’s look at the subconscious WEB my brain and body created about losing my balance for a moment:

 

Words: It’s probably Huntington’s Disease

Emotions: dread, fear

Behaviors: get lost in thought about HD, crave food or alcohol to change my emotional state, tell myself scary stories, get anxious about other small things

 

This WEB was not serving me well. It made me anxious, distracted, and borderline obsessive about HD. Thoughts are always simply SUGGESTIONS from your brain. When you BELIEVE the suggestions, they become your truth. So let’s build a new WEB for Sarah of the past. The circumstance hadn’t changed, but I could most certainly change my mindset about it to influence my behavior.

The first step was to define that new behavior, the way I wanted to show up moment to moment.

 

Behavior: not obsess about HD, focus on my present life and all the good in it, control my cravings, have compassion for my own thinking mind and practice controlling it

Next, I had to identify the emotions that would create those behaviors:

 

Emotions: calm, curious, thoughtful, determined

And the final step was to find powerful words formed into a thought that would connect to those emotions:

 

Words: There is way more to my life than Huntington’s Disease.

And there was a beautiful new WEB to utilize to create intentional behavior.

 

W: There is way more to my life than Huntington’s Disease

E: calm, curious, thoughtful, determined

B: not obsess about HD, focus on my present life and all the good in it, control my cravings, have compassion for my own thinking mind and practice controlling it

 

It’s important to note that the words that work for my brain might not work for yours. You have to find thoughts that are actually believable, that your current mind can buy into. If not, you’ll just have a lot of doubt created by your subconscious, and the new WEB will never stick.

The brain always wants to default to subconscious thought because it’s easiest, so after creating a new WEB it’s important to remind your brain of the new thought you created. Once tasked to use it enough your brain will incorporate it into your subconscious as a default WEB. That’s how you change behavior, and the results in your life.

Click here to get the WEB worksheet.

Click here to read the entire series of articles.

Header Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash.