In my last piece, I wrote about blame—how blame is a prompt, an instruction running beneath my awareness, repeating on a loop. Accountability showed me what went wrong. Responsibility is the daily work of rewiring.
But rewiring what, exactly? This is the piece underneath that one.
An instruction is a sentence you repeat so often you stop hearing it. "I can't afford it." "I'm not that kind of person." It arrives already finished, before you have thought. You did not choose it in the moment. It was written earlier—a label from childhood, a fear from a season that ended, a sentence you borrowed from someone who did not know you—and it stayed, running quietly underneath every decision.
In Chapter 2 of my book, Awakening I AM—"The Context"—I tell the story of the nickname they gave me growing up: Knee Boy. I was the shortest kid in the blue building, and the name stuck—not because it meant anything, but because the community decided it did. That's the thing about names. You don't choose them—at least not at first. The environment hands them to you. And I didn't just live with that name. I fueled myself with it. If I wasn't competing, I wouldn't be alive.
A label is a context input. It trains the system until you replace it with truth. You are not the label. You are the awareness observing it. Context decides long before effort ever gets a vote.
Here is how you know it is an instruction and not a reaction: it shows up in different rooms. The same sentence at work, at home, with money, with people. A reaction belongs to one moment. An instruction follows you from room to room, deciding before you decide. The pressure does not create it. The pressure reveals it.
We can be seduced by our own negative love language—familiar words we mistake for truth. They are not truth. They are instructions—and instructions can be rewritten.
As a mindset coach, I teach people to monitor their thoughts. Most of us don't monitor them. We take orders from them. Researchers at Queen's University measured it: we move from one thought to the next about six and a half times a minute—more than six thousand thoughts a day—and most of us let those thoughts lead us. Here is what I want you to do instead: observe and rewire.
Set your phone timer for three minutes if you've never sat in silence before. Breathe in through the nose; count to four. Breathe out; count to four. Feel the body relax. Sit in the seat and watch your thoughts as a third-party observer. The goal is to get to ten or fifteen minutes—we are hardwiring, and this work takes time. There's no failure here. Just practice.
As you watch, notice: Are your thoughts more negative or positive? When you catch a negative one, stop—and find two positive thoughts within the same context. For every one negative, force two positives. Same situation, new instruction.
And watch the language you replace it with. Most of us were trained in "I want." But "I want" signals distance. It tells your nervous system the thing you seek is out there. "I Am" collapses distance. The word want is weak—the subconscious hears want and loops on delay. There's a line I come back to: "I shall not want." Not pleading from lack—defining the environment. "I Am" already supplied. Transformation begins when you move from "I want" to "I Am." "I want to be confident" becomes "I Am confident." "I want to heal" becomes "I Am living healed." What repeats without awareness becomes identity.
The practice is simple, and it is not easy. Notice the sentence. Name where it came from—the context that wrote it. Choose a truer instruction. Repeat it until the new one runs on its own.
Notice. Name. Choose. Repeat.
You do not become a different person. You choose a new instruction, one sentence at a time, and you repeat it until it is the one running underneath. Change the inner dialogue, and the life follows.
