Stop Waiting for Your Big “Aha” and Make It Happen!

5 Essential Ingredients You Need to Attract Your Aha Moment.

Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, ‘it will be happier.’ -Alfred Lord Tennyson

The elusive aha, the moment when it all makes sense. The obstacles fade away.

Everything falls into place and you know just what you’re supposed to do.

If it’s work, your decision about your next career move.

If it’s a relationship, the best way to understand and be understood.

If it’s your body, making changes that support your health.

Sometimes it feels like the aha moment will never come, no matter what.

You wait, you’re open, you try to clear your mind of wanting, yet at the same time desiring change.

But, it doesn’t happen.

You might be envious of the people who have the experience where the light bulb pops on and the light cast is divine in nature and their life is never the same again.

Epiphany’s do happen but, they’re rare.

I’ve wished for this many times, but it’s never really happened, in that the clouds parted and I saw the light sort of way. Instead, moments of aha in my life have been much smaller in scale, yet have been helpful in many ways.

One of my aha moments.

One aha moment that I think of a few times a year, was at a workshop in Big Sur, California. This is a gorgeous part of the north-central California Coast where the cliffs fall into the ocean. The setting, obviously, is very conducive to aha experiences, but that’s not what drove the aha. The workshop center is kind of 1960–1970’s California vibe and it’s not really a spa, but you can get massages and at the pool and hot tub it’s clothing optional-for the massage therapist too!

This particular aha of mine happened over the course of the weekend. The dining hall where I had dinner with my friends overlooked the lawn and pool where the naked massage therapist is giving a massage and then just beyond the pool was the cliff that drops down to the ocean below. It was not my typical mealtime entertainment! Over the course of the weekend as we giggled about the experience and talked about this is what it must have been like in the 1960's. I’m a native Californian born and raised in the Los Angeles area, so this wasn’t totally out of the ordinary, but something happened instead of brushing it off as another, “only in California” experience.

My relationship with my body changed. I started to shift in what I thought was as beautiful. I became less judgmental. Perhaps it was the view that I initially thought of as a juxtaposition but instead saw it as just one slice of life.

One of the definitions of an aha moment is, “a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension.”

It’s that place where you feel a strong sense of, Eureka, “that’s it!” And, the clarity you have is easy to accept.

If you’re reading this article, what you probably want from the aha is transformation. The people I work with to help become Conscious Eaters as they improve their relationship with food and their bodies need to experience a shift through awareness for lasting change to become part of who they are.

The wish for the aha or epiphany is that someone will take all of the work out of the transformation and you’ll be different, food and body image worries will be a thing of the past.

A better version of yourself is presented to you and magically replaces the old painful version. Of course, this would feel great in the moment, but would any of us feel a sense of pride of ownership for the change?

For most people, the aha is a series of smaller aha moments that lead to big changes, which is great because it leads to lasting change.

Change happens in many ways, one of them is gaining increased insight through learning from your experiences. Typically change happens in the form of:

1. A desire for things to be different.
2. Learning about the problem and its solutions.
3. Considering how the solutions apply to your life.
4. Taking action.

This process repeats daily on the small scale of getting to a meeting in the morning as you make a decision to change your usual route as you navigate the traffic to bigger decisions like changing your job or career path. The process also happens when you make personal changes in the way you live your life.

So, if this is how change happens where do you find the aha?

The question becomes how do you open yourself to possibilities so when it comes around you will recognize the potentials?

While you can’t force an aha moment what you can do is create the environment where awareness, change and understanding grows

Here are 5 Ingredients for your aha moment listed in order of importance.

1. Openness to New Ideas.

Becoming is better than being.― Carol S. Dweck

Mindset is most important because it is the foundation for everything else. Carol Dweck, Stanford researcher and author of the book Mindset: The Psychology of Success, states that we all vacillate between a fixed mindset, ‘this is the way things are and will always be’ and a growth mindset, ‘I wonder what I can do to make things better.’

The key is to increase your awareness of when you’re in a fixed mindset and shift as needed.

People can change at any point in life.

The human brain changes through the new experiences we have in life. As you adopt a growth mindset you will naturally engage in new opportunities and possibilities. The aha moment can be found there.

2. Be a lifelong learner.

In learning, persistence is often far more important than intelligence. — Barbara Oakley

To get the aha moment you need to put new information in your head.

The new aha moments come from making new connections with what you know and what you didn’t know you didn’t know until you learned something new.

This can create the aha by putting two and two together to make an entirely unique understanding. Synergy with what you know and what you’re learning.

Barbara Oakley, in her book Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential talks about how being a lifelong learner helps to build new knowledge through building new neurons, new brain pathways between what’s already known, the newly acquired information and then potentially understanding in new and different ways. One of them might be your aha moment.

3. Stay Positive

Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others. — Martin Seligman

The power of positive thinking has been around for a long time. It’s part of having a growth mindset as well as being a lifelong learner. Positivity is more about a frame of reference than wishful thinking.

A positive outlook doesn’t pretend that setbacks and challenges won’t happen, rather a positive outlook helps you to accept them. Then you need to address what needs to be addressed so you can continue to move forward.

Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology defines positive psychology as the study of what makes life worth living. It’s looking for the good in life, living in a way that takes into account fulfillment, happiness, life satisfaction and fundamentally focusing on a life well-lived. When you live from this perspective you’re more likely to think favorably on the aha moment as meaningful and integrate it rather than discount it.

4. Embrace change.

When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. — John Wooden

Some people love change and the challenges of new beginnings, the curiosity of understanding something new or the excitement of the challenge. You don’t have to be one of these people to embrace change.

You can still embrace change all the while not liking it. Change is the backbone of opening yourself up to things being different. An aha is rooted in the fact that change is a process that happens over time.

The Japanese’s philosophy of Kaizen process is a helpful practice. A little bit of progress over time helps to get you where you’re going. It’s easier to embrace one percent change over time than ten percent today. Bit by bit you will get there and the changes are much more likely to stick because you can intergrade them more easily.

It’s also easier to accept the aha when it happens because you’ve been building it all along.

5. Acknowledge & Accept.

The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little. — John Kabat-Zinn

It’s easy to dismiss when a sign comes around. When the stars align it’s easy for a skeptical mind, logical mind, to go in the opposite direction. But, what if you took the risk to jump in when it seems like things might be on the path you want them to be on?

Use all of the ingredients above and when you get to the stopping point, the point where self-doubt creeps in, push through it. The best way to work through a feeling is to acknowledge it, accept that is where you are in this moment and then go through it to get to the other side.

John Kabat-Zinn talks about acceptance and non-striving as being essential. Non-striving is doing less and being more. When you quiet yourself, and acknowledge where you are, accept it for what it is, you can be more open to the aha moment that gives you what you need to move on.

Aha moments are found in awareness.

Sometimes the aha moment is a big shining star that you can’t help to notice. More often it’s the small gift of presence when you’ll find the aha moment. Consciously living your life and accepting the growth opportunities when they arrive will get you where you want to be.

Would you like a roadmap to help find your aha moment and stop emotional eating today?

If this article spoke to you, please head on over to consciousmindbody.com and I’ll send you the 5 Step Stress Eating Quick Stop. Your aha process is ready for you!