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Awaken The Giant Within By Tony Robbins 

 

“Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action.” —ORISON SWETT MARDEN

 

PART • ONE UNLEASH YOUR POWER

1 DREAM OF DESTINY

 “A consistent man believes in destiny, a capricious man in chance.” —BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  • I remember the moment my life changed, the moment I finally said, “I’ve had it! I know I’m much more than I’m demonstrating mentally, emotionally, and physically in my life.” I made a decision at that moment which was to alter my life forever. I decided to change virtually every aspect of my life. I decided I would never again settle for less than I could.
  • I learned to harness the principle I now call concentration of power. Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.
  • One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular. In fact, I believe most people fail in life simply because they major in minor things.
  • I decided that somehow I must contribute in some way that would live on long after I was gone.
  • You are destined for your own unique form of greatness, whether it is as an outstanding professional, teacher, businessperson, mother, or father. Most importantly, you not only believe this, but you’ve taken action.

HOW TO CREATE LASTING CHANGE

STEP ONE Raise Your Standards

  • Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards. When people ask me what really changed my life eight years ago, I tell them that absolutely the most important thing was changing what I demanded of myself. I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to become.

STEP TWO Change Your Limiting Beliefs

  • If you raise your standards but don’t really believe you can meet them, you’ve already sabotaged yourself. You won’t even try; Our beliefs are like unquestioned commands, telling us how things are, what’s possible and what’s impossible, what we can and can not do. They shape every action, every thought, and every feeling that we experience.
  • Without taking control of your belief systems, you can raise your standards as much as you like, but you’ll never have the conviction to back them up.

STEP THREE Change Your Strategy

  • One of my core beliefs is that if you set a higher standard, and you can get yourself to believe, then you certainly can figure out the strategies. You simply will find a way.
  • The best strategy in almost any case is to find a role model, someone who’s already getting the results you want, and then tap into their knowledge. Learn what they’re doing, what their core beliefs are.
  • You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.

Master the 5 Areas of Life that Impact us Most 

  1. Emotional Mastery- Virtually everything we do is to change the way we feel
  2. Physical Mastery
  3. Relationship Mastery
  4. Financial Mastery
  5. Time Mastery

 

2 DECISIONS: THE PATHWAY TO POWER

 “Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.” —BORIS PASTERNAK

ASK- “How am I going to live the next ten years of my life? How am I going to live today in order to create the tomorrow I’m committed to? What am I going to stand for from now on? What’s important to me right now, and what will be important to me in the long term? What actions can I take today that will shape my ultimate destiny?”

  • Different actions produce different results. Why? Because any action is a cause set in motion, and its effect builds on past effects to move us in a definite direction. Every direction leads to an ultimate destination: our destiny.
  • In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.

 

  • The key and most important question, then, is this: What precedes all of our actions? What determines what actions we take, and therefore, who we become, and what our ultimate destination is in life? What is the father of action? The answer, of course, is what I’ve been alluding to all along: the power of decision. Everything that happens in your life—both what you’re thrilled with and what you’re challenged by—began with a decision. I believe that it’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
  • If you don’t make decisions about how you’re going to live, then you’ve already made a decision. You’re making a decision to be directed by the environment instead of shaping your own destiny.
  • My whole life changed in just one day—the day I determined not just what I’d like to have in my life or what I wanted to become, but when I decided who and what I was committed to having and being in my life. That’s a simple distinction, but a critical one. Will today be the day you finally decide that who you are as a person is much more than you’ve been demonstrating?
  • If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in your life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.
  • Start by proclaiming, “This is who I am. This is what my life is about. And this is what I’m going to do. Nothing will stop me from achieving my destiny. I will not be denied!”

It’s not where you start out but the decisions you make about where you’re determined to end up that matter. Making a true decision means committing to achieving a result, and then cutting yourself off from any other possibility. Information is power when it’s acted upon, and one of my criteria for a true decision is that action flows from it.

“The Ultimate Success Formula,” which is an elementary process for getting you where you want to go: 

  • 1) Decide what you want
  • 2) Take action
  • 3) Notice what’s working or not
  • 4) Change your approach until you achieve what you want.

 

For most of my life, I’ve pursued what the famed business expert Dr. W. Edwards Deming calls profound knowledge. To me, profound knowledge is any simple distinction, strategy, belief, skill, or tool that, the minute we understand it, we can apply to make immediate increases in the quality of our lives.

“It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”

3 Decisions that Control Your Destiny 

  1. Your decisions about what to focus on. 
  2. Your decisions about what things mean to you. 
  3. Your decisions about what to do to create the results you desire.

 

  • It’s not what’s happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it’s your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you’re going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.

The Niagara Syndrome

  • Most people live what I call “The Niagara Syndrome.” I believe that life is like a river, and that most people jump on the river of life without ever really deciding where they want to end up.
  • They merely “go with the flow.” They become a part of the mass of people who are directed by the environment instead of by their own values. As a result, they feel out of control. They remain in this unconscious state until one day the sound of the raging water awakens them, and they discover that they’re five feet from Niagara Falls in a boat with no oars. At this point, they say, “Oh, shoot!”
  • It’s likely that whatever challenges you have in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream. Set a course for where you really want to go, and have a plan or map so that you can make quality decisions along the way.

Decisions Making System

  • Our brain has already constructed an internal system for making decisions. This system acts like an invisible force, directing all of your thoughts, actions, and feelings, both good and bad, every moment that you live. It controls how you evaluate everything in your life, and it’s largely driven by your subconscious mind.

This system consists of five components: 

  • 1) your core beliefs and unconscious rules
  • 2) your life values
  • 3) your references
  • 4) the habitual questions that you ask yourself
  • 5) the emotional states you experience in each moment

We don’t have to allow the programming of our past to control our present and future.

  • We must overcome our fears of making the wrong decisions. Without a doubt, you will make wrong decisions in your life. I have determined that no matter what decisions I make, I’ll be flexible, look at the consequences, learn from them, and use those lessons to make better decisions in the future.
  • Remember: Success truly is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is often the result of bad judgment! Those seemingly bad or painful experiences are sometimes the most important.
  • As important as personal experience is, think how invaluable it is to have a role model as well—someone who’s navigated the rapids before you and has a good map for you to follow. They can save you years of pain and keep you from going over the falls.
  • One of the most important decisions you can make to ensure your long-term happiness is to decide to use whatever life gives you in the moment.
  • In order to succeed, you must have a long-term focus.
    • As a society, we’re so focused on instantaneous gratification that our short-term solutions often become long-term problems.
    • Often, what seems impossible in the short term becomes very possible in the long term if you persist.
  • Success is the result of making small decisions: deciding to hold yourself to a higher standard, deciding to contribute, deciding to feed your mind rather than allowing the environment to control you—these small decisions create the life experience we call success.
  • A metaphor that I use to remind myself of this is comparing life’s ups and downs to the changing of the seasons. No season lasts forever because all of life is a cycle of planting, reaping, resting, and renewal.

HARNESS THE POWER OF DECISION

  1. Remember the true power of making decisions.
  • The minute you make a new decision, you set in motion a new cause, effect, direction, and destination for your life. You literally begin to change your life the moment you make a new decision.
  • Remember that when you start feeling overwhelmed, or when you feel like you don’t have a choice, or when things are happening “to” you, you can change it all if you just stop and decide to do so. Remember, a real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.
  1. Realize that the hardest step in achieving anything is making a true commitment—a true decision. 
  • Carrying out your commitment is often much easier than the decision itself, so make your decisions intelligently, but make them quickly. You know you’ve truly made a decision when action flows from it.
  • A critical rule I’ve made for myself is never to leave the scene of a decision without first taking a specific action toward its realization.
  1. Make decisions often. The more decisions you make, the better you’re going to become at making them.
  2. Learn from your decisions.
  • Ask yourself, “What’s good about this? What can I learn from this?” This “failure” may be an unbelievable gift in disguise if you use it to make better decisions in the future.
  1. Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.
  2. Enjoy making decisions. You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever: If you really want your life to be passionate, you need to live with this attitude of expectancy.

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” —HELEN KELLER

Know that it’s your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.

3 THE FORCE THAT SHAPES YOUR LIFE

  • Human beings are not random creatures; everything we do, we do for a reason. We may not be aware of the reason consciously, but there is undoubtedly a single driving force behind all human behavior.
  • What is this force that is controlling you even now and will continue to do so for the rest of your life? PAIN and PLEASURE! Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure. There is one elementary reason: they keep trying to change their behavior, which is the effect, instead of dealing with the cause behind it.

Procrastination

  • What is procrastination? It’s when you know you should do something, but you still don’t do it. Why not? The answer is simple: at some level you believe that taking action in this moment would be more painful than just putting it off. Yet, have you ever had the experience of putting something off for so long that suddenly you felt pressure to just do it, to get it done? What happened? You changed what you linked to pain and pleasure to. Suddenly, not taking action became more painful than putting it off.

“A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.” —SENECA

  • For most people, the fear of loss is much greater than the desire for gain. “The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life controls you.”
  • Why is it that people can experience pain yet fail to change? They haven’t experienced enough pain yet; they haven’t hit what I call emotional threshold.
  • We’ve all experienced those times in our lives when we’ve said, “I’ve had it—never again—this must change now.” This is the magical moment when pain becomes our friend. It drives us to take new action and produce new results.

 

LIFE’S MOST IMPORTANT LESSON

  • The most important lesson we learn in life is what creates pain for us and what creates pleasure. This lesson is different for each of us and, therefore, so are our behaviors.

WHAT YOU LINK PAIN TO AND WHAT YOU LINK PLEASURE TO SHAPES YOUR DESTINY

 

Tony linked Pleasure with Learning

  • One decision that has made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life is that at an early age I began to link incredible pleasure to learning. I realized that discovering ideas and strategies that could help me to shape human behavior and emotion could give me virtually everything I wanted in my life.
  • It could get me out of pain and into pleasure. Learning to unlock the secrets behind our actions could help me to become more healthy, to feel better physically, to connect more deeply with the people I cared about. Learning provided me with something to give, the opportunity to truly contribute something of value to all those around me.
  • It offered me a sense of joy and fulfillment. At the same time, I discovered an even more powerful form of pleasure, and that was achieved by sharing what I’d learned in a passionate way. When I began to see that what I could share helps people increase the quality of their lives, I discovered the ultimate level of pleasure! And my life’s purpose began to evolve.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” —MARCUS AURELIUS

It’s not the events that matter most to us, but rather, it’s how we interpret those events that will determine how we think about ourselves and how we will act in the future. It’s our neuro-associations— the associations we’ve established in our nervous systems—that determine what we’ll do. Although we’d like to believe it’s our intellect that really drives us, in most cases our emotions—the sensations that we link to our thoughts—are what truly drive us.

  • The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.

IF YOU DON’T HAVE A PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE, SOMEONE ELSE DOES

  • Any time we’re in an intense emotional state, when we’re feeling strong sensations of pain or pleasure, anything unique that occurs consistently will become neurologically linked. Therefore, in the future, whenever that unique thing happens again, the emotional state will return.
  • The force shaping world opinion and consumers’ buying habits is also the same force that shapes all of our actions. It’s up to you and me to take control of this force and decide on our own actions consciously,
  • Advertisers understand how to change what we link pain and pleasure to by changing the sensations we associate to their products. If we want to take control of our lives, we must learn to “advertise” in our own minds—and we can do this in a moment.

Steps to Creating Change

  • The first step is simply becoming aware of the power that pain and pleasure exert over every decision, and therefore every action, that we take. The art of being aware is understanding that these linkages—between ideas, words, images, sounds, and sensations of pain and pleasure—are happening constantly.
    • Remember, too, that it’s not actual pain that drives us, but our fear that something will lead to pain. And it’s not actual pleasure that drives us, but our belief—our sense of certainty—that somehow taking a certain action will lead to pleasure. We’re not driven by the reality, but by our perception of reality.
    • Most people focus on how to avoid pain and gain pleasure in the short term, and thereby create long-term pain for themselves.

LET’S MAKE SOME CHANGES RIGHT NOW 

  • First, write down four actions that you need to take that you’ve been putting off.
  • Second, under each of these actions, write down the answer to the following questions: Why haven’t I taken action? In the past, what pain have I linked to taking this action?
  • Third, write down all the pleasure you’ve had in the past by indulging in this negative pattern.
  • Fourth, write down what it will cost you if you don’t change now.
  • How does that make you feel? Don’t just say, “It will cost me money” or “I will be fat.” That’s not enough. You’ve got to remember that what drives us is our emotions. So get associated and use pain as your friend, one that can drive you to a new level of success.
  • The final step is to write down all the pleasure you’ll receive by taking each of these actions right now. Make a huge list that will drive you emotionally, that will really get you excited:

4 BELIEF SYSTEMS: THE POWER TO CREATE AND THE POWER TO DESTROY

  • It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean. You see, it’s never the environment; it’s never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events—how we interpret them—that shapes who we are today and who we will become tomorrow.

What are our beliefs designed for? 

  • They’re the guiding force to tell us what will lead to pain and what will lead to pleasure. 
  • Whenever something happens in your life, your brain asks two questions: 1) Will this mean pain or pleasure? 2) What must I do now to avoid pain and/or gain pleasure? The answers to these two questions are based on our beliefs, and our beliefs are driven by our generalizations about what we’ve learned could lead to pain and pleasure. These generalizations guide all of our actions and thus the direction and quality of our lives. Generalizations simplify our lives and allow us to function. Unfortunately, generalizations in more complex areas of our lives can oversimplify and sometimes create limiting beliefs.
  • Once you believe something is true, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You may say, “Why even try if I’m not going to follow through anyway?” Or perhaps you’ve made a few poor decisions in business or in relationships, and have interpreted that to mean you will always “sabotage” yourself.
  • The challenge with all these beliefs is that they become limitations for future decisions about who you are and what you’re capable of. We need to remember that most of our beliefs are generalizations about our past, based on our interpretations of painful and pleasurable experiences.

 

The challenge is threefold: 

1) most of us do not consciously decide what we’re going to believe 

2) often our beliefs are based on the misinterpretation of past experiences 

3) once we adopt a belief, we forget it’s merely an interpretation. We begin to treat our beliefs as if they’re realities as if they are gospel.

  • In fact, we rarely, if ever, question our long-held beliefs. If you ever wonder why people do what they do, again, you need to remember that human beings are not random creatures: all of our actions are the result of our beliefs.

If you want to create long-term and consistent changes in your behaviors, you must change the beliefs that are holding you back.

  • We all have the capacity to create meanings that empower us, but so many of us never tap into it or even recognize it. If we don’t adopt the faith that there is a reason for the unexplainable tragedies of life, then we begin to destroy our capacity to truly live. The need to be able to create meaning out of life’s most painful experiences was observed by psychiatrist Viktor Frankl as he and other Holocaust victims survived the horrors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
    • Frankl noted that those special few who were able to make it through this “hell on earth” shared one thing in common: they were able to endure and transform their experience by finding an empowering meaning for their pain. They developed the belief that because they suffered and survived, they would be able to tell the story and make certain that no human being would ever suffer this way again.

Beliefs Change You

  • Beliefs are not limited to impacting our emotions or actions. They can literally change our bodies in a matter of moments. I had the pleasure of interviewing Yale professor and best-selling author Dr. Bernie Siegel.
    • Their bodies would literally transform before the researchers’ eyes and begin to reflect a new identity at a moment’s notice. Studies document such remarkable occurrences as patients’ eye color actually changing as their personality changes, or physical marks disappearing and reappearing! Even diseases such as diabetes or high blood pressure come and go depending on the person’s belief as to which personality they’re manifesting.
    • One demonstration of this was a groundbreaking experiment in which 100 medical students were asked to participate in testing two new drugs. Unbeknownst to the students, the contents of the capsules had been switched: the red capsule was actually a barbiturate, and the blue capsule was actually an amphetamine. Yet half of the students developed physical reactions that went along with their expectations—exactly the opposite of the chemical reaction the drugs should have produced in their bodies! These students were not just given placebos; they were given actual drugs. But their beliefs overrode the chemical impact of the drug on their bodies.

Global Beliefs 

  • Sometimes we develop beliefs that create limitations or strengths within a very specific context; for instance, how we feel about our ability to sing or dance, fix a car, or do calculus. Other beliefs are so generalized that they dominate virtually every aspect of our lives, either negatively or positively. I call these global beliefs.
  • Global beliefs are the giant beliefs we have about everything in our lives: beliefs about our identities, people, work, time, money, and life itself, for that matter. These giant generalizations are often phrased as is/am/are: “Life is…” “I am…” “People are …”

WHAT IS A BELIEF?

  • All it is is a feeling of certainty about something. If you say you believe that you’re intelligent, all you’re really saying is, “I feel certain that I’m intelligent.” That sense of certainty allows you to tap into resources that allow you to produce intelligent results.
  • It’s important to note that we can develop beliefs about anything if we just find enough legs—enough reference experiences—to build it up.
  • People can succeed if they imagine something vividly enough just as easily as if they had the actual experiences. That’s because our brains can’t tell the difference between something we’ve vividly imagined and something we’ve actually experienced. With enough emotional intensity and repetition, our nervous systems experience something as real, even if it hasn’t occurred yet.

Optimists

  • Every great achiever I’ve ever interviewed has had the ability to get themselves to feel certain they could succeed, even though no one before them had ever accomplished it. They’ve been able to create references where no references existed and achieve what seemed to be impossible.
    • After attempting to learn a new skill, the pessimists are always more accurate about how they did, while the optimists see their behavior as being more effective than it actually was. Yet this unrealistic evaluation of their own performance is the secret of their future success. Invariably the optimists eventually end up mastering the skill while the pessimists fail.
  • The reason success eludes most people is that they have insufficient references to succeeding in the past. But an optimist operates with beliefs such as, “The past doesn’t equal the future.”- how we deal with adversity and challenges will shape our lives more than almost anything else.

Learned Optimism

  • In his book Learned Optimism he reports on three specific patterns of beliefs that cause us to feel helpless and can destroy virtually every aspect of our lives. He calls these three categories permanence, pervasiveness, and personal.
  • 1st Achievers rarely, if ever, see a problem as permanent, while those who fail to see even the smallest problems as permanent.
  • The second difference between winners and losers, those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic, is their beliefs about the pervasiveness of problems. An achiever never sees a problem as being pervasive, that is, that one problem controls their whole life. They always see it as, “Well, it’s just a little challenge with my eating pattern.” They don’t see it as, “I’m the problem. Conversely, those who are pessimistic—those who have learned helplessness—have developed a belief that because they screwed up in one area, they are a screw-up!
  • The solution to both permanence and pervasiveness is to see something you can take control of in your life, and begin to take action in that direction. As you do this, some of these limiting beliefs will disappear. Momentum breeds momentum. 
  • The final category of belief, which Seligman calls personal, I refer to as the problem being personal If we don’t see a failure as a challenge to modify our approach, but rather as a problem with ourselves, as a personality defect, we will immediately feel overwhelmed.
  • Remember, as long as you believe something, your brain operates on automatic pilot, filtering any input from the environment and searching for references to validate your belief, regardless of what it is.

 

HOW TO CHANGE A BELIEF 

  • All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs. So how do we change? 
    • The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain with the old belief. Then you must associate tremendous pleasure to the idea of adopting a new, empowering belief. 
    • Secondly, create doubt. New experiences trigger change only if they cause us to question our beliefs. Remember, whenever we believe something, we no longer question it in any way. The moment we begin to honestly question our beliefs, we no longer feel absolutely certain about them. Have you ever doubted your ability to do something? How did you do it? You probably asked yourself some poor question that limited your belief.  But questions can obviously be tremendously empowering if we use them to examine the validity of beliefs we may have just blindly accepted. In fact, many of our beliefs are supported by information we’ve received from others that we failed to question at the time. If we scrutinize them, we may find that what we’ve unconsciously believed for years may be based on a false set of presuppositions. If you question anything enough, eventually you’ll begin to doubt it. This includes things that you absolutely believe “beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

3 Categories of Beliefs 

  • I’ve classified beliefs into three categories: opinions, beliefs, and convictions. 
    • An opinion is something we feel relatively certain about, but the certainty is only temporary because it can be changed easily.
    • A belief, on the other hand, is formed when we begin to develop a much larger base of reference legs, and especially reference legs about which we have strong emotion. These references give us an absolute sense of certainty about something. People with beliefs have such a strong level of certainty that they are often closed off to new input.
    • A conviction, however, eclipses a belief, primarily because of the emotional intensity a person links to an idea. A person holding a conviction does not only feel certain, but gets angry if their conviction is even questioned. A person with a conviction is unwilling to ever question their references, even for a moment; they are totally resistant to new input, often to the point of obsession.
    • Probably the single biggest factor separating belief and conviction, though, is that a conviction has usually been triggered by significant emotional events, during which the brain links up, “Unless I believe this, I will suffer massive pain. If I were to change this belief, then I would be giving up my entire identity, everything my life has stood for, for years.” Holding the conviction thus becomes crucial to the person’s very survival. This can be dangerous because anytime we’re not willing to even look at or consider the possibility that our beliefs are inaccurate, we trap ourselves in rigidity which could ultimately condemn us to long-term failure.

Often the best thing you can do to create mastery in any area of your life is to raise a belief to the level of conviction.

How to Create Conviction

1) Start with the basic belief. 

2) Reinforce your belief by adding new and more powerful references.

3) Find a triggering event, or else create one of your own. Associate yourself fully by asking, “What will it cost me if I don’t?” Ask questions that create emotional intensity for you.

4) Finally, take action. Each action you take strengthens your commitment and raises the level of your emotional intensity and conviction.

“What do you believe makes you different? What are the beliefs you have that separate you from others?”

“We are what we think. All that we are arises With our thoughts. With our thoughts, We make our world.” —THE BUDDHA

Kaizen 

  • Kaizen is based upon the principle of gradual improvement, simple improvements. But the Japanese understand that tiny refinements made daily begin to create compounded enhancements at a level that most people would never dream of.
  • The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way,
    • I don’t worry about maintaining the quality of my life, because every day I work on improving it. I constantly strive to learn and to make new and more powerful distinctions about ways to add value to other people’s lives. This gives me a sense of certainty that I can always learn, that I can always expand, that I can always grow.

Get upstream of problems to discover problems in the making and handle them before they become crises. After all, the best time to kill a “monster” is while it’s still little.

 

SMALL IMPROVEMENTS ARE BELIEVABLE AND THEREFORE ACHIEVABLE!

  • Brainstorm all the beliefs you have, both those that empower you and disempower you:
    •  If-then beliefs like, “If I consistently give my all, then I will succeed,” or “If I’m totally passionate with this person, then they’ll leave me.”
    • Global beliefs, like beliefs about people—“People are basically good” or “People are a pain”—beliefs about yourself, beliefs about opportunity, beliefs about time, beliefs about scarcity and abundance.

 

EMPOWERING BELIEFS   DISEMPOWERING BELIEFS

  • Decide upon and circle the three most empowering beliefs on your list. How do they empower you? How do they strengthen your life?

DISEMPOWERING 

  • Ask yourself some of the following questions: 
    • 1. How is this belief ridiculous or absurd? 
    • 2. Was the person I learned this belief from worth modeling in this area? 
    • 3. What will it ultimately cost me emotionally if I don’t let go of this belief? 
    • 4. What will it ultimately cost me in my relationships if I don’t let go of this belief? 
    • 5. What will it ultimately cost me physically if I don’t let go of this belief? 
    • 6. What will it ultimately cost me financially if I don’t let go of this belief? 
    • 7. What will it cost my family/loved ones if I don’t let go of this belief?
  • Finally, we can’t get rid of a pattern without replacing it with a new one. So right now, write down the replacements for the two limiting beliefs you’ve just eliminated.

Getting Results

  • If you’re not getting the results you want in your life, I suggest you ask yourself, “What would I have to believe in order to succeed here?” Or “Who is already succeeding in this area, and what do they believe differently than I do about what’s possible?” Or “What’s necessary to believe in order to succeed?”

 

5 CAN CHANGE HAPPEN IN AN INSTANT?

  • The first belief we must have if we’re going to create change quickly is that we can change now.
  • The second belief that you and I must have if we’re going to create long-term change is that we’re responsible for our own change, not anyone else.

1) First, we must believe, “Something must change”—not that it should change, not that it could or ought to, but that it absolutely must.

2) Second, we must not only believe that things must change, but we must believe, “I must change it.” We must see ourselves as the source of the change. Otherwise, we’ll always be looking for someone else to make the changes for us, and we’ll always have someone else to blame when it doesn’t work out.

3) Third, we have to believe, “I can change it.” 

  • After a few years of witnessing thousands of transformations and looking for the common denominator, finally, it hit me: we can analyze our problems for years, but nothing changes until we change the sensations we link to an experience in our nervous system,

THE POWER OF YOUR BRAIN

  • Each time we experience a significant amount of pain or pleasure, our brains search for the cause and record it in our nervous systems to enable us to make better decisions about what to do in the future.
  • When we do something for the first time, we create a physical connection, a thin neural strand that allows us to re-access that emotion or behavior again in the future. Think of it this way: each time we repeat the behavior, the connection strengthens. We unconsciously develop these neuro-associations by allowing ourselves to indulge in emotions or behaviors on a consistent basis. Each time you indulge in the emotion of anger or the behavior of yelling at a loved one, you reinforce the neural connection and increase the likelihood that you’ll do it again.
  • If you’ll just stop indulging in a particular behavior or emotion long enough, if you just interrupt your pattern of using the old pathway for a long enough period of time, the neural connection will weaken and atrophy.

 

6 HOW TO CHANGE ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE: THE SCIENCE OF NEURO-ASSOCIATIVE CONDITIONING

  • If you and I want to change our behavior, there is only one effective way to do it: we must link unbearable and immediate sensations of pain to our old behavior, and incredible and immediate sensations of pleasure to a new one.

 

NAC MASTER STEP 1 

Decide What You Really Want and What’s Preventing You From Having It Now.

  • We’ve got to remember that we get whatever we focus on in life. If we keep focusing on what we don’t want, we’ll have more of it. The first step to creating any change is deciding what you do want so that you have something to move toward. The more specific you can be about what you want, the more clarity you will have, and the more power you will command to achieve what you want more rapidly.

NAC MASTER STEP 2 

Get Leverage: Associate Massive Pain to Not Changing Now and Massive Pleasure to the Experience of Changing Now!

  • But change is usually not a question of capability; it’s almost always a question of motivation. But the problem is that change is often a should and not a must. Or it’s a must, but it’s a must for “someday.” The only way we’re going to make a change now is if we create a sense of urgency that’s so intense that we’re compelled to follow through. If we want to create change, then, we have to realize that it’s not a question of whether we can do it, but rather whether we will do it.
  • The greatest leverage you can create for yourself is the pain that comes from inside, not outside. Knowing that you have failed to live up to your own standards for your life is the ultimate pain.
  • One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity. So why would someone not change when they feel and know that they should? They associate more pain with making the change than not changing.
    • To get true leverage, ask yourself pain-inducing questions: “What will this cost me if I don’t change?”
    • The second step is to use pleasure-associating questions to help you link those positive sensations to the idea of changing. “If I do change, how will that make me feel about myself? What kind of momentum could I create if I change this in my life?
    • The key is to get lots of reasons, or better yet, strong enough reasons, why the change should take place immediately, not someday in the future.

NAC MASTER STEP 3 Interrupt the Limiting Pattern.

  • The challenge is that most people want a new result, but continue to act in the same way. I once heard it said that the definition of insanity is “doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result.”
  • The resources you need to change anything in your life are within you right now. It’s just that you have a set of neuro-associations that habitually cause you to not fully utilize your capability. What you must do is reorganize your neural pathways so that they consistently guide you in the direction of your desires rather than your frustrations and fears.
  • One of the key distinctions to interrupting a pattern is that you must do it in the moment the pattern is recurring. Pattern interrupts happen to us every day.

HOW TO BREAK LIMITING PATTERNS OF FEELING AND ACTING

THE SCRAMBLE PATTERN

1) See the situation in your mind that was bothering you so much. Picture it as a movie. Don’t feel upset about it; just watch it one time, seeing everything that happened.

2) Take that same experience and turn it into a cartoon. Sit up in your chair with a big, silly grin on your face, breathing fully, and run the image backward as fast as you can so that you can see everything happening in reverse. Do this at least a dozen times, back and forth, sideways, scratching the record of your imagery with tremendous speed and humor.

3) Now think about the situation that was bothering you, and notice how you feel now. 

Why does it work? Because all of our feelings are based on the images we focus on in our minds and the sounds and sensations we link to those specific images.

 

NAC MASTER STEP 4 Create a New, Empowering Alternative. 

  • This fourth step is absolutely critical to establishing long-term change. In fact, the failure by most people to find an alternative way of getting out of pain and into the feelings of pleasure is the major reason most people’s attempts at change are only temporary. Often, if we just break our old patterns enough, our brains will automatically search for a replacement pattern to give us the feelings we desire. This is why people who finally break the pattern of smoking sometimes gain weight: their brains look for a new way to create the same kinds of pleasurable feelings,

NAC MASTER STEP 5 Condition the New Pattern Until It’s Consistent.

  • If you rehearse the new, empowering alternative again and again with tremendous emotional intensity, you’ll carve out a pathway, and with even more repetition and emotion, it will become a highway to this new way of achieving results, and it will become a part of your habitual behavior. The first organizing principle of any type of “Success Conditioning” is the power of reinforcement.
  • THE LAW OF REINFORCEMENT-Any pattern of emotion or behavior that is continually reinforced will become an automatic and conditioned response. Anything we fail to reinforce will eventually dissipate. TIMING IS EVERYTHING Appropriate timing is absolutely critical to effective conditioning. The most important thing to remember about conditioning, however, is to reinforce the desired behavior immediately.

NAC MASTER STEP 6 Test It!

 

7 HOW TO GET WHAT YOU REALLY WANT

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

  • Isn’t it true that what you really want is simply to change the way you feel? What it all comes down to is the fact that you want these things or results because you see them as a means to achieving certain feelings, emotions, or states that you desire.
  • When somebody kisses you, what makes you feel good in that moment? Is it wet tissue touching wet tissue that really triggers the feeling? Of course not! If that’s true, kissing your dog would turn you on! All of our emotions are nothing but a flurry of biochemical storms in our brains—and we can spark them at any moment. But first we must learn how to take control of them consciously instead of living in reaction.
  • Most of our emotional responses are learned responses to the environment. We’ve deliberately modeled some of them, and stumbled across others.
  • There are unlimited sensations, unlimited ways of looking at virtually anything in life. All of the sensations that you want are available all of the time, and all you’ve got to do is to tune in to the right channel. There are two primary ways, then, to change your emotional state: by changing the way you use your physical body, or by changing your focus.

Your behavior is not the result of your ability, but of the state that you’re in at this moment.

PHYSIOLOGY: THE POWER OF MOVEMENT

  • One of the most powerful distinctions that I’ve made in the last ten years of my life is simply this: Emotion is created by motion. Everything that we feel is the result of how we use our bodies.
  • Once you learn how you use your body when in certain emotional states, you can return to those states, or avoid them, simply by changing your physiology.
  • “Someday you’ll look back on this and laugh.” If that’s true, why not look back and laugh now? Why wait? Wake your body up; learn to put it in pleasurable states consistently no matter what’s happened.

“We know too much and feel too little. At least we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.” —BERTRAND RUSSELL

  • The key to success, then, is to create patterns of movement that create confidence, a sense of strength, flexibility, a sense of personal power, and fun. Realize that stagnation comes from a lack of movement.

FOCUS: THE POWER OF CONCENTRATION

  • If you wanted to feel like you were in ecstasy right now, could you? You could do this just as easily. Could you focus on or remember a time when you were in absolute, total ecstasy?

WHATEVER WE FOCUS ON BECOMES OUR IDEA OF REALITY

  • Focus is not true reality, because it’s one view; it’s only one perception of the way things really are. Think of that view—the power of our focus—as being a camera lens. The camera lens shows only the picture and angle of what you are focused on. Because of that, photographs you take can easily distort reality, presenting only a small portion of the big picture.
  • The number-one fundamental they teach in driving is: Focus on where you want to go, not on what you fear. If you resist your fear, have faith, and focus on where you want to go, your actions will take you in that direction, and if it’s possible to turn out of it, you will—but you stand no chance if you focus on what you fear.
  • When you change your focus, often you don’t immediately change direction. Isn’t that true in life as well? Often there’s a lag time between when you redirect your focus and when your body and your life’s experience catch up.

“Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” —MATTHEW 7:7

  • The most powerful way to control focus is through the use of questions. For whatever you ask, your brain provides an answer; whatever you look for, you’ll find.

Submodalities (Submodalities extra info) 

  • Submodalities in NLP are fine distinctions or the subsets of the Modalities (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory, Gustatory, and Ad) that are part of each representational system that encode and give meaning to our experiences.
  • They are the building blocks of the representational systems by which we code, order, and give meaning to the experiences we have. Submodalities are how we structure our experiences.
  • How do you know what you believe and what you do not believe? You code the two different kinds of beliefs in different submodalities. We create meaning by using different submodalities to code our experience, for example, someone we like and someone we dislike.
  • Changing submodalities is a very effective and powerful way of changing the meaning of an experience. When we set a goal, for example, the more attention we pay to the submodalities, the more specifically refined it becomes. The finer our distinctions, the more clearly and creatively we can design our future.
  • One image I’ve found very useful is to think of submodalities as the grocery store UPC bar codes, those clusters of little black lines that have replaced price tags in just about every supermarket you patronize today. The codes look insignificant, yet when pulled across the checkout scanner, they tell the computer what the item is, how much it costs, how its sale affects the inventory, and so on. Submodalities work the same way. When pulled across the scanner of the computer we call the brain, they tell the brain what this thing is, how to feel about it, and what to do. You have your own barcodes.
  • For example, if you tend to focus upon your visual modalities, the amount of enjoyment you get from a particular memory is probably a direct consequence of the submodalities of size, color, brightness, distance, and amount of movement in the visual image you’ve made of. If you represent it to yourself with auditory submodalities, then how you feel depends on the volume, tempo, pitch, tonality, and other such factors you attach to

Understanding Submodalities 

  • For example, in order for some people to feel motivated, they have to tune in a certain channel first. If their favorite channel is visual, then focusing on the visual elements of a situation gives them more emotional intensity about it. For other people it’s the auditory or kinesthetic channels. And for some, the best strategy works like a combination lock. First the visual lock has to be aligned, then the auditory, then the kinesthetic. All three dials have to be lined up in the right place and the right order for the vault to open.
  • Visual- How many times have you heard someone say, “I can’t picture doing that”? They’re telling you what the problem is: if they did picture doing it, they’d go into a state where they’d feel like they could make it happen. Someone may have once said to you, “You’re blowing things out of proportion.” If you’re really upset, they may be right. You may be taking images in your mind and making them much bigger, which tends to intensify the experience.
  • (Kinesthetic)-If someone says, “This is weighing heavily upon me,” you can assist them by helping them feel lighter about the situation and thereby get them in a better state to deal with it.

Change Your State

  • The key in life is to have so many ways to direct your life that it becomes an art. The challenge for most people is that they have only a few ways to change their state: they overeat, overdrink, oversleep, over-shop, smoke, or take a drug—none of which empower us, and all of which can have disastrous and tragic consequences. The biggest problem is that many of these consequences are cumulative, so we don’t even notice the danger until it’s too late.
  • People who are dyslexic do not reverse letters or words every time they read something. They may do it most of the time, but they don’t do it all of the time. The difference between when they’re able to read clearly and when they reverse letters all comes down to state. If you change their state, you immediately change their performance. Anyone who’s dyslexic or has any other state-based challenge can use these strategies to turn themselves around.

 

The first skill you must master is to be able to change your state instantly no matter what the environment, no matter how scared or frustrated you are.

The second skill is that you should be able to change state consistently in any environment—maybe in an environment that used to make you uncomfortable, but in which you can now change your state time and again, conditioning yourself until you feel good no matter where you are.

The third skill, of course, is to establish a set of habitual patterns of using your physiology and focus so that you consistently feel good without any conscious effort whatsoever. My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel tons of pleasure and very little pain—and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain.

The fourth goal is to enable others to change their state instantly, to change their state in any environment, and to change their state for their whole life. This is what my franchisees learn to be able to do in their seminars and in their one-on-one work with people.

 

8 QUESTIONS ARE THE ANSWER 

“He who asks questions cannot avoid the answers.” —CAMEROON PROVERB

OUR QUESTIONS DETERMINE OUR THOUGHTS

  • We need to realize that most of what we do, day in and day out, is ask and answer questions. So if we want to change the quality of our lives, we should change our habitual questions. These questions direct our focus, and therefore how we think and how we feel.
  • This entire book and my life’s work is the result of my asking questions about what makes us all do what we do and how we can produce change more quickly and easily than it has been done before.
  • Questions are the primary way that we learn virtually anything. In fact, the entire Socratic method (a way of teaching that dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates) is based upon the teacher doing nothing but asking questions, directing the students’ focus, and getting them to come up with their own answers.
  • successful people asked better questions, and as a result, they got better answers. They got answers that empowered them to know exactly what to do in any situation to produce the results they desired.

 

  • Questions set off a processional effect that has an impact beyond our imagination. Questioning our limitations is what tears down the walls in life—in business, in relationships, between countries. I believe all human progress is preceded by new questions.

“Some men see things as they are, and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were, and say, ‘Why not?’” —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

So what’s the quickest way to change focus? Simply by asking a new question. When people are depressed, it is more than likely due to asking themselves disempowering questions on a regular basis. Remember, ask and you shall receive. If you ask a terrible question, you’ll get a terrible answer. Your mental computer is ever ready to serve you, and whatever question you give it, it will surely come up with an answer.

  • When facing a problem ask, “How can I use this? Because of this, what will I be able to contribute to others?” These questions are what created the difference in destinies: “Why me?” rarely produces a positive result, while “How can I use this?” usually leads us in the direction of turning our difficulties into a driving force to make ourselves and the world better.
  • Remember, it’s not only the questions you ask but the questions you fail to ask, that shape your destiny. Keep failing to achieve your goals, maybe it’s time to ask why…

HOW QUESTIONS WORK 

Questions accomplish three specific things: 

  1. Questions immediately change what we’re focusing on and therefore how we feel.
  • “How can I change my state so that I am feeling happy and am being more lovable?” you’ll focus on solutions.
  • Get leverage: ask yourself, “If I don’t change this, what is the ultimate price? What will this cost me in the long run?” and “How will my whole life be transformed if I did this right now?”; interrupt the pattern (if you’ve ever felt pain, then been distracted and not felt it, you know how effective this is); create a new, empowering alternative with a set of better questions; and then condition them by rehearsing them until they become a consistent part of your life.

 

Walt Disney had a unique way of requesting input. He designated a whole wall on which he would display the project, script, or idea, and everyone in the company would come by and write down the answers to the question: “How can we improve this?” They’d write solution after solution, covering the wall with suggestions. Then Disney would review everyone’s answers to the question he’d asked. In this way, Walt Disney accessed the resources of every person in his company and then produced results commensurate with that quality of input.

 

  1. Questions change what we delete.
  • If you’re feeling really sad, there is only one reason: it’s because you’re deleting all the reasons you could be feeling good. And if you’re feeling good, it’s because you’re deleting all the bad things you could be focusing on. So when you ask someone a question, you change what they’re focusing on and what they’re deleting. Questions are the laser of human consciousness. They concentrate our focus and determine what we feel and do.

THE PROBLEM-SOLVING QUESTIONS 

  1. What is great about this problem? 
  2. What is not perfect yet? 
  3. What am I willing to do to make it the way I want it? 
  4. What am I willing to no longer do in order to make it the way I want it? 
  5. How can I enjoy the process while I do what is necessary to make it the way I want it?

 

THE MORNING POWER QUESTIONS

  1. What am I happy about in my life now? What about that makes me happy? How does that make me feel? 
  2. What am I excited about in my life now? What about that makes me excited? How does that make me feel? 
  3. What am I proud about in my life now? What about that makes me proud? How does that make me feel?
  4. What am I grateful about in my life now? What about that makes me grateful? How does that make me feel? 
  5. What am I enjoying most in my life right now? What about that do I enjoy? How does that make me feel? 
  6. What am I committed to in my life right now? What about that makes me committed? How does that make me feel? 
  7. Who do I love? Who loves me? What about that makes me loving? How does that make me feel?

 

THE EVENING POWER QUESTIONS 1. What have I given today? In what ways have I been a giver today? 2. What did I learn today? 3. How has today added to the quality of my life or how can I use today as an investment in my future? Repeat the Morning Questions (optional).

9 THE VOCABULARY OF ULTIMATE SUCCESS

Most beliefs are formed by words—and they can be changed by words as well.

  • Many of us are well aware of the powerful part that words have played in our history, of the power that great speakers have to move us, but few of us are aware of our own power to use these same words to move emotionally, to challenge, embolden, and strengthen our spirits, to move ourselves to action, to seek greater richness from this gift we call life.
  • An effective selection of words to describe the experience of our lives can heighten our most empowering emotions. A poor selection of words can devastate us just as surely and just as swiftly. Most of us make unconscious choices in the words that we use; we sleepwalk our way through the maze of possibilities available to us. Realize now the power that your words command if you simply choose them wisely.
  • What a gift these simple symbols are! We transform these unique shapes we call letters (or sounds, in the case of the spoken word) into a unique and rich tapestry of human experience.
  • The words you habitually choose also affect how you communicate with yourself and therefore what you experience. People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished emotional life; people with rich vocabularies have a multi-hued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.

Transformational Vocabulary 

  • This is the essence of Transformational Vocabulary: the words that we attach to our experience become our experience.
  • You must realize that the English language is filled with words that, in addition to their literal meanings, convey distinct emotional intensity. I realized that by changing my habitual vocabulary, I was transforming my experience; I was using what I would later call “Transformational Vocabulary.”
  • Unfortunately, most of us have not consciously evaluated the impact of the words we’ve grown accustomed to using. The problem occurs when we start consistently pouring any form of negative sensation into the word-mold of “furious” or “depressed” or “humiliated” or “insecure.” And this word may not accurately reflect the actual experience. The moment we place this mold around our experience, the label we put on it becomes our experience. What was “a bit challenging” becomes “devastating.”

“Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men.” —CONFUCIUS

10 DESTROY THE BLOCKS, BREAK DOWN THE WALL, LET GO OF THE ROPE, AND DANCE YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS: THE POWER OF LIFE METAPHORS

  • Throughout human history, symbols have been employed to trigger an emotional responses and shape men’s behavior. Many things serve as symbols: images, sounds, objects, actions, and, of course, words. If words are symbolic, then metaphors are heightened symbols.
  • What is a metaphor? Whenever we explain or communicate a concept by likening it to something else, we are using a metaphor. The two things may bear little actual resemblance to each other, but our familiarity with one allows us to gain an understanding of the other.
  • Metaphors are symbols and, as such, they can create emotional intensity even more quickly and completely than the traditional words we use.
  • Do you think you might be a little bit more stressed if you thought about dealing with your challenge in terms of “struggling to keep your head above water” rather than “climbing the ladder of success”?
  • When we don’t understand something, a metaphor provides a way of seeing how what we don’t understand is like something we do understand. Often you’re using a metaphor that intensifies your negative feelings. When people are experiencing difficulties they frequently say things like “I feel like the weight of the world is on my back” you can change the metaphor just as quickly. So if someone tells me they feel like they have the weight of the world on their back, I’ll say, “Set the world down and move on.”
  • All you need to do is ask yourself, “Is this what I really mean? Is this really the way it is, or is this metaphor inaccurate?”

for many years without realizing it, I’d helped people change how they were feeling by interrupting their patterns and changing their metaphors. I just wasn’t aware of what I was doing. (That’s part of the power of creating a label: once you have a label for what you do, you can produce a behavior consistently.)

  • Remember, anytime you use the words “I feel like” or “This is like,” the word “like” is often a trigger for the use of a metaphor. So ask yourself a more empowering question.
    • Ask, “What would be a better metaphor? What would be a more empowering way of thinking about this? What else is this like?”
  • As I’ve become more sensitized to metaphors, what I’ve begun to believe is that having only one metaphor is a great way to limit your life. So if we want to expand our lives, we should expand the metaphors we use to describe what our life is or what our relationships are, or even who we are as human beings.

SELECT YOUR GLOBAL METAPHORS

  • With all the power that metaphors wield over our lives, the scary part is that most of us have never consciously selected the metaphors with which we represent things to ourselves. In school you might have labeled yourself as unintelligent because you did badly in a class in the first grade. 
  • The challenge is that a lot of people have metaphors that help them in their professions, but create challenges at home.
    • I know an attorney who found herself trying to apply the same adversarial metaphors at home that served her so well at work. Her husband would start a perfectly innocent conversation with her, and the next thing he knew, he felt like he was upon the witness stand being cross-examined!

Do you think that the metaphors you use in representing your relationship to yourself as well as to others would affect the way you feel about it and how you relate to one another? You bet!

  1. What is life? Write down the metaphors you’ve already chosen: “Life is like …” what? Brainstorm everything you can think of, because you probably have more than one metaphor for life. What are their advantages and disadvantages? What new metaphors might you like to apply to your life in order to feel more happy, free, and empowered?
  2. Make a list of all the metaphors that you link to relationships or marriage. Are they empowering or disempowering?
  3. Pick another area of your life that impacts you most—whether it’s your business, your parents, your children, your ability to learn—and discover your metaphors for this area. Write these metaphors down and study their impact.
  4. Create new, more empowering metaphors for each of these areas. Decide that from now on you’re going to think of life as four or five new things to start with, at least. Life is not a war. Life is not a test. Life is a game, life is a dance, life is sacred, life is a gift, life is a picnic—whatever creates the most positive emotional intensity for you.
  5. Finally, decide that you are going to live with these new, empowering metaphors for the next thirty days.

 

11 THE TEN EMOTIONS OF POWER

 “There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” —CARL JUNG

4 Ways People Deal with Emotions

  1. Avoidance. We all want to avoid painful emotions. As a result, most people try to avoid any situation that could lead to the emotions that they fear. And ultimately, you can’t avoid feeling. A much more powerful approach is to learn to find the hidden, positive meaning in those things you once thought were negative emotions.
  2. Denial. A second approach to dealing with emotion is the denial strategy. People often try to disassociate from their feelings by saying, “It doesn’t feel that bad.” Meanwhile, they keep stoking the fire within themselves. If the message your emotions are trying to deliver is ignored, the emotions simply increase their amperage; they intensify until you finally pay attention.
  3. Competition. Many people stop fighting their painful emotions and decide to fully indulge in them. Rather than learn the positive message their emotion is trying to give them, they intensify it and make it even worse than it is. It becomes a “badge of courage,” and they begin to compete with others, saying, “You think you’ve got it bad? Let me tell you how bad I’ve got it!”
  4. Learning and Using. If you want to make your life really work, you must make your emotions work for you. You can’t run from them; The emotions you once thought of as negative are merely a call to action. In fact, instead of calling them negative emotions, from now on in this chapter, let’s call them Action Signals.

They are Action Signals trying to guide you to the promise of a greater quality of life.

So what is the source of emotions? You are the source of all your emotions; you are the one who creates them. You can feel any way you choose at any moment in time. When you do feel good, who’s making you feel good? You are! But you simply have a rule that says you have to wait until A, B, and C occur before you allow yourself to feel good. Why wait? You don’t need any special reason to feel good—you can just decide to feel good right now, simply because you’re alive, simply because you want to.

 

SIX STEPS TO EMOTIONAL MASTERY

STEP ONE: Identity What You’re Really Feeling

STEP TWO: Acknowledge and Appreciate Your Emotions, Knowing They Support You

STEP THREE: Get Curious about the Message This Emotion Is Offering You

STEP FOUR: Get Confident Get confident that you can handle this emotion immediately. The quickest, simplest, and most powerful way I know to handle any emotion is to remember a time when you felt a similar emotion and realize that you’ve successfully handled this emotion before.

STEP FIVE: Get Certain You Can Handle This Not Only Today But in the Future as Well

STEP SIX: Get Excited, and Take Action

 

THE TEN ACTION SIGNALS

The ten primary emotions most people try to avoid but which you will instead use to drive yourself to action.

  1. DISCOMFORT.
  • The Message: Boredom, impatience, unease, distress, or mild embarrassment are all sending you a message that something is not quite right. Maybe the way you’re perceiving things is off, or the actions you’re taking are not producing the results you want.
  1. FEAR.
  • The Message: Fear is simply the anticipation that something that’s going to happen soon needs to be prepared for. In the words of the Boy Scout motto, “Be prepared.”
  • The Solution: Review what you were feeling fearful about and evaluate what you must do to prepare yourself mentally. Figure out what actions you need to take to deal with the situation in the best possible way.
  1. HURT.
  • The Message: The message the hurt signal gives us is that we have an expectation that has not been met.
  • The Solution: 1) Realize that in reality, you may not have lost anything. Maybe what you need to lose is a false perception that this person is trying to wound or hurt you. Maybe they really don’t realize the impact of their actions on your life. 2) Secondly, take a moment and reevaluate the situation. Ask yourself, “Is there really loss here? Or am I judging this situation too soon, or too harshly?” 3) A third solution that can help you get out of a sense of hurt is to elegantly and appropriately communicate your feeling of loss to the person involved.
  1. ANGER.
  • The Message: The message of anger is that an important rule or standard that you hold for your life has been violated by someone else, or maybe even by you.
  • The Solution: 1) Realize that you may have misinterpreted the situation completely, that your anger about this person breaking your rules may be based on the fact that they don’t know what’s most important to you (even though you believe they should). 2) Realize that even if a person did violate one of your standards, your rules are not necessarily the “right” rules, even though you feel as strongly as you do about them. 3) Ask yourself a more empowering question like “In the long run, is it true that this person really cares about me?” Interrupt the anger by asking yourself, “What can I learn from this? How can I communicate the importance of these standards I hold for myself to this person in a way that causes them to want to help me, and not violate my standards again in the future?”
  1. FRUSTRATION. Frustration can come from many avenues. Any
  • The Message: The message of frustration is an exciting signal. It means that your brain believes you could be doing better than you currently are.
  1. DISAPPOINTMENT.
  • The Message: The message disappointment offers you is that an expectation you have had—a goal you were really going for—is probably not going to happen, so it’s time to change your expectations to make them more appropriate for this situation and take action to set and achieve a new goal immediately. And that is the solution.
  1. GUILT.
  • The Message: Guilt tells you that you have violated one of your own highest standards, and that you must do something immediately to ensure that you’re not going to violate that standard again in the future.
  1. INADEQUACY.
  • The Message: The message is that you don’t presently have a level of skill necessary for the task at hand. It’s telling you that you need more information, understanding, strategies, tools or confidence. 
  1. OVERLOAD OR OVERWHELM.
  • The Message: The message of being overwhelmed is that you need to reevaluate what’s most important to you in this situation. The reason you’re overloaded is that you’re trying to deal with too many things at once, and you’re trying to change everything overnight.
  • The Solution: 1) Decide, out of all the things you’re dealing with in your life, what the absolute, most important thing is for you to focus on. 2) Now write down all the things that are most important for you to accomplish and put them in an order of priority. 3) Tackle the first thing on your list, and continue to take action until you’ve mastered it. As soon as you’ve mastered one particular area, you’ll begin to develop momentum.
  1. LONELINESS.
  • The Message: The message of loneliness is that you need a connection with people.
  • The Solution: 1) The solution to loneliness is to realize that you can reach out and make a connection immediately and end the loneliness. There are caring people everywhere. 2) Identify what kind of connection you do need. Do you need an intimate connection? Maybe you just need some basic friendship, 3) Remind yourself that what’s great about being lonely is that it means, “I really care about people, and I love to be with them. I need to find out what kind of connection I need with somebody right now, and then take an action immediately to make that happen.” 4) Then, take immediate action to reach out and connect with someone.

Your mind is a Garden- Weed it Daily 

“We must cultivate our garden.” —VOLTAIRE Think of your mind, your emotions, and your spirit as the ultimate garden. The way to ensure a bountiful, nourishing harvest is to plant seeds like love, warmth, and appreciation, instead of seeds like disappointment, anger, and fear.

  • Begin to think of those Action Signals as weeds in your garden. A weed is a call to action, isn’t it? It says, “You’ve got to do something; you’ve got to pull this out to make room for better, healthier plants to grow.” Keep cultivating the kinds of plants you want, and pull the weeds as soon as you notice them.

 

THE TEN EMOTIONS OF POWER 

  1. LOVE AND WARMTH.- adopting a core belief such as this marvelous one from the book A Course in Miracles: all communication is either a loving response or a cry for help.

“If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world.” —EMMET FOX

  1. APPRECIATION AND GRATITUDE.
  2. CURIOSITY. If you really want to grow in your life, learn to be as curious as a child.
  3. EXCITEMENT AND PASSION.- Passion is unbridled power to move our lives forward at a faster tempo than ever before.
  4. DETERMINATION.- Determination means the difference between being stuck and being struck with the lightning power of commitment. With determination, you can accomplish anything. Without it, you’re doomed to frustration and disappointment. Our willingness to do whatever it takes, to act in spite of fear, is the basis of courage.
  5. FLEXIBILITY. If there’s one seed to plant that will guarantee success, it’s the ability to change your approach.
  6. CONFIDENCE. The only way you can consistently experience confidence, even in environments and situations you’ve never previously encountered, is through the power of faith.
  7. CHEERFULNESS. Being cheerful means you’re incredibly intelligent because you know that if you live life in a state of pleasure—one that’s so intense that you transmit a sense of joy to those around you—you can have the impact to meet virtually any challenge that comes your way.
  8. VITALITY.
  9. CONTRIBUTION.“The secret to living is giving.”

 

12 THE MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION—CREATING A COMPELLING FUTURE 

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.” —CARL SANDBURG

  • Many people in life know what they should do, but they never do it. The reason is that they’re lacking the drive that only a compelling future can provide.

GIANT GOALS PRODUCE GIANT MOTIVATION

“We are what and where we are because we have first imagined it.” —DONALD CURTIS

  • Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible—the foundation for all success in life. It’s as if infinite Intelligence will fill any mold you create using the impression of your intensely emotional thoughts. In other words, you can chisel your own existence by the thoughts you consistently project every moment of your life. The conception of your goals is the master plan that guides all thought.
  • All goal setting must be immediately followed by both the development of a plan, and massive and consistent action toward its fulfillment.
  • The process of setting goals works a lot like your eyesight. The closer you get to your destination, the greater clarity you gain, not only on the goal itself but the details of everything around it. Often, we don’t realize how far we’ve come because we’re so caught up in the process of achieving.

There is power in the pressure of dissatisfaction, in the tension of temporary discomfort. This is the kind of pain you want in your life, the kind of pain that you immediately transform into positive new actions. This kind of pressure is known as eustress as opposed to distress.

  • When we feel excited, we feel a sense of pressure or tension within ourselves. However, the level of stress is not overwhelming, but rather stimulating.
  • It’s not just getting a goal that matters, but the quality of life you experience along the way.
  • Instead of measuring your success and failure in life by your ability to achieve an individualized and specific goal, remember that the direction we’re heading is more important than individual results. If we continue to head in the right direction, we may not only achieve the goals we’re pursuing but a lot more!

Sometimes we need to trust that our disappointments may truly be opportunities in disguise.

THE KEY TO ACHIEVING GOALS

  • Reticular Activating System. It sounds complex, and undoubtedly the actual process is, but the function of your RAS is simple and profound: it determines what you will notice and what you will pay attention to. It is the screening device of your mind.
  • This shift in mental posture aligns you more precisely with your goals. Once you decide that something is a priority, you give it tremendous emotional intensity, and by continually focusing on it, any resource that supports its attainment will eventually become clear.

“Climb high; Climb far. Your goal the sky; Your aim the star.” —INSCRIPTION AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE

  • I wrote down all my long-term goals for my spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and financial destinies, and then created a series of milestones for each one, working backward. For example, in order to achieve my top spiritual goal ten years from now, what kind of person would I have to be, and what things would I need to accomplish by nine years from now, eight years, seven years, and so on, reaching all the way back until today? What specific action could I take today that would lead me on that road to the destiny of my choice? But I had been willing to suspend judgment for a short period of time in order to make it work.

 

1) Personal development goals, 2) Career/business/economic goals, 3) Toys/adventure goals, and 4) Contribution goals.

  • Constantly ask yourself, what would I want for my life if I knew I could have it any way I wanted it? What would I go for if I knew I could not fail? Suspend the need to know precisely how. Just discover what it is you truly want. Do this without questioning or doubting your capability.
  1. Personal Development Goals 
  • Step 1: On the chart provided (or on additional sheets of paper when you need more room) write down everything that you’d like to improve in your life that relates to your own personal growth. How would you like to improve your physical body? Emotionally, what would you like to experience, achieve, or master in your life? Maybe you want to be able to instantly break patterns of frustration or rejection. Maybe you want to feel compassion for those people you used to feel anger toward.
  • Step 2: Now that you’ve got a list of goals for your personal development that you can get excited about, take a minute now to give a time line to each and every one of these. At this stage, it’s not important to know how you’re going to accomplish these goals. Just give yourself a time frame from which to operate. Remember that goals are dreams with a deadline.
  • Step 3: Now choose your single most important one-year goal in this category—a goal that, if you were to accomplish it this year, would give you tremendous excitement and make you feel that the year was well invested. Take two minutes to write a paragraph about why you are absolutely committed to achieving this goal within the year. Why is this compelling for you? What will you gain by achieving it? What would you miss out on if you didn’t achieve it? Are these reasons strong enough to get you to actually follow through?

 

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS   II. Career/Business/Economic Goals 

The next step is setting your career/business/economic goals. 

  • Step 1: Write down anything you want for your career, business, or financial life. What levels of financial abundance do you want to achieve? To what position do you want to rise?

III. Toys/Adventure Goals

  • Step 1: Take five minutes to write down everything you could ever want, have, do or experience in your life.
  1. Contribution Goals These can be the most inspiring, compelling goals of all, because this is your opportunity to leave your mark, creating a legacy that makes a true difference in people’s lives.

 

  • Achieving goals by themselves will never make us happy in the long term; it’s who you become, as you overcome the obstacles necessary to achieve your goals, that can give you the deepest and most long-lasting sense of fulfillment. So maybe the key question you and I need to ask is, “What kind of person will I have to become in order to achieve all that I want?”

THE ULTIMATE LESSON The most important lesson in this chapter is that a compelling future creates a dynamic sense of growth.

 

13 THE TEN-DAY MENTAL CHALLENGE 

“Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters.”

  • The mark of a champion is consistency—and true consistency is established by our habits. In order to take our lives to the next level, however, we must realize that the same pattern of thinking that has gotten us to where we are will not get us to where we want to go. To do this, we must once and for all break through the barriers of our fear and take control of the focus of our minds.
  • The leader’s path is one of balance. He notes the weeds with a smile upon his face, knowing that the weeds’ visit to the garden is all but over—because he’s spotted them, he can and will immediately act to remove them. We don’t have to feel negative about weeds. They’re part of life. We need to see them, acknowledge them, focus on the solution, and immediately do whatever it takes to eliminate their influence from our lives. Pretending they’re not there won’t make things better; neither will becoming inflamed with anger by their presence nor devastated by fear.

 

For the next ten days, beginning immediately, commit to taking full control of all your mental and emotional faculties by deciding right now that you will not indulge in or dwell on any unresourceful thoughts or emotions for ten consecutive days.

What stands in the way of just deciding to banish them? Three things, really. 

  • One is laziness.
  • The second obstacle is fear. All too often, the security of a mediocre present is more comfortable than the adventure of trying to be more in the future.
  • The third challenge is a force of habit. We have our old emotional patterns: the deadening force of routine. Like a plane on automatic pilot, our brain dredges up the same old responses it always has.

 

Success is processional. It’s the result of a series of small disciplines that lead us into habitual patterns of success that no longer require consistent will or effort.

 

LEADERS ARE READERS

  • He got me hooked on the idea of reading a minimum of thirty minutes a day. He said, “Miss a meal, but don’t miss your reading.” I’ve found this to be one of the most valuable distinctions in my life.

 

PART • TWO TAKING CONTROL—THE MASTER SYSTEM

14 ULTIMATE INFLUENCE: YOUR MASTER SYSTEM

  • If someone is doing better than we are in any area of life, it’s simply because they have a better way of evaluating what things mean and what they should do about it. The goal, then, is to be able to evaluate everything in your life in a way that consistently guides you to make choices that produce the results you desire.

STATE

1) The first element that affects all of your evaluations is the mental and emotional state you’re in while you’re making an evaluation. There are times in your life when somebody can say one thing to you and it will make you cry, while other times the same comment makes you laugh. What’s the difference? It might simply be the state you’re in.

QUESTIONS

2) The second building block of our Master System is the questions we ask. Questions create the initial form of our evaluations. Remember, in response to anything that happens in your life, your brain evaluates it by asking, “What is happening?

VALUES

3) The third element that affects your evaluations is your hierarchy of values. Each of us throughout our lives has learned to value certain emotions more than others. We all want to feel good, i.e., pleasure, and avoid feeling bad, i.e., pain. But our life’s experience has taught each of us a unique coding system for what equals pain and what equals pleasure. This can be found in the guidance system of our values.

BELIEFS

4) The fourth element that makes up your Master System is beliefs. Our global beliefs give us a sense of certainty about how to feel and what to expect from ourselves, from life, and from people; our rules are the beliefs we have about what has to happen for us to feel that our values have been met. For example, some people believe, “If you love me, then you never raise your voice.” This rule will cause this person to evaluate a raised voice as evidence that there is no love in the relationship. This may have no basis in fact, but the rule will dominate the evaluation and therefore that person’s perceptions and experience of what’s true.

EXPERIENCE

5) The fifth element of your Master System is the hodgepodge of reference experiences you can access from the giant filing cabinet you call your brain. In it, you’ve stored everything you’ve ever experienced in your life—and, for that matter, everything you’ve ever imagined. These references form the raw material that we use to construct our beliefs and guide our decisions.

“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.” —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

15 LIFE VALUES: YOUR PERSONAL COMPASS 

“Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.” —BRUCE BARTON

  • Values guide our every decision and, therefore, our destiny. Those who know their values and live by them become the leaders of our society.
  • If we want the deepest level of life fulfillment, we can achieve it in only one way, and that is by doing what these two men have done: by deciding upon what we value most in life, what our highest values are, and then committing to live by them every single day.
  • If you and I are not clear about what’s most important in our lives—what we truly stand for—then how can we ever expect to lay the foundation for a sense of self-esteem, much less have the capacity to make effective decisions? If you’ve ever found yourself in a situation where you had a tough time making a decision about something, the reason is that you weren’t clear about what you value most within that situation. We must remember that all decision-making comes down to values clarification.
  • When you know what’s most important to you, making a decision is quite simple. Most people, though, are unclear about what’s most important in their lives, and thus decision-making becomes a form of internal torture. This is not true for those who’ve clearly defined the highest principles of their lives.
  • We need to realize that the direction of our lives is controlled by the magnetic pull of our values. They are the force in front of us, consistently leading us to make decisions that create the direction and ultimate destination of our lives. This is true, not only for us as individuals, but also for the companies, organizations, and the nation of which we’re a part.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR TRUE VALUES, PREPARE FOR PAIN

  • There are two types of values: ends and means. If I ask you, “What do you value most?,” you might answer, “Love, family, money…” Of these, love is the End value you’re pursuing; in other words, the emotional state you desire. Conversely, family and money are merely Means values. In other words, they are simply a way for you to trigger the emotional states you really desire.
  • The challenge in life is that most people are not clear on the difference between means and Ends values, and therefore, they experience a lot of pain. So often people are too busy pursuing means values that they don’t achieve their true desire: their ends values.
  • The Ends values are those that will fulfill you, make your life rich and rewarding. One of the biggest challenges I see is that people keep setting goals without knowing what they truly value in life, and therefore they end up achieving their goals and saying, “Is this all there is?”

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” —JOHN WOODEN

  • We all need to realize that we must accomplish our highest values first—these are our utmost priority.

THE SOURCE OF SELF-SABOTAGE: VALUES CONFLICTS

  • People will do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure. If you’re truly going to succeed at the highest level in life, don’t you have to be willing to risk rejection?
  • So often I see people who take huge strides forward, only to mysteriously pull back at the last minute. Or they’ll say or do things that sabotage the very personal, emotional, or physical success they’re pursuing. Invariably the reason is that they have a major values conflict. Part of their brain is saying, “Go for it!” while the other part is saying, “If you do, you’re going to get too much pain.” So they take two steps forward, and one step back.

Step One is to gain awareness of what your current values are so you understand why you do what you do. What are the emotional states you are moving toward, and what are the states you are moving away from?

Step Two: You can then make conscious decisions about what values you want to live by in order to shape the quality of life and destiny you truly desire and deserve.

HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR CURRENT VALUES

  • “What’s most important to me in life?” Brainstorm the answer to this question. Is it peace of mind? Impact? Love? Now put your values in order, from most important to least important.
  • “What do my values need to be in order to create my ultimate destiny, in order to be the best person I could possibly be, in order to have the largest impact in my lifetime?”
  • “What values should I eliminate from my list in order to achieve my ultimate destiny?” I began to realize that by constantly focusing on how to be free, I was missing out on the freedom I already had.
  • I began to ask, “What benefit do I get by having this value in this position on my hierarchy?” Then I asked a question that kind of scared me, a question I had never asked before: “What could having passion at the top of my list cost me?” Finally asked the last question: “In what order do my values need to be to achieve my ultimate destiny?” Not “What’s important to me?” but “What do they need to be?”

“Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.” —SOCRATES

Uncovering Values 

Step 1. Find out what your current values are, and rank them in order of importance. This will give you insight into what you want

Step 2. If you’re willing to take the bull by the horns, you have an opportunity to redirect your destiny. Ask yourself a new question: “What do my values need to be in order to achieve the destiny I desire and deserve?” Brainstorm out a list. Put them in order. See which values you might get rid of and which values you might add in order to create the quality of life you truly want.

 

16 RULES: IF YOU’RE NOT HAPPY, HERE’S WHY! 

“Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you.” —HENRY WARD BEECHER

  • Ultimately what we do and who we become is dependent upon the direction that our values have taken us. But equally, or possibly even more importantly, what will determine our emotions and behaviors is our beliefs about what is good and what is bad, what we should do and what we must do. These precise standards and criteria are what I’ve labeled rules.
  • Rules are the trigger for any pain or pleasure you feel in your nervous system at any moment. It’s as if we have a miniature court system set up within our brains. Our personal rules are the ultimate judge and jury. They determine whether or not a certain value is met, whether we’ll feel good or bad, whether we’ll give ourselves pain or pleasure.
  • I’d discover your rules by asking the key question, “How do you know you’re a great lover? What has to happen in order for you to feel you’re a great lover?”
  • Everything in our lives, from work to play, is presided over by this judge-and-jury system. The point here is simple: our rules are controlling our responses every moment we’re alive. And, of course, as you’ve already guessed, they have been set up in a totally arbitrary fashion.
  • For some people, rules are formed out of their desire to rebel against rules they grew up with. Are the rules that guide your life today still appropriate for who you’ve become? Or have you clung to rules that helped you in the past, but hurt you in the present? Have you clung to any inappropriate rules from your childhood?
  • Rules are a shortcut for our brains. They help us to have a sense of certainty about the consequences of our actions;
  • For most of us, our rules for what’s valuable dictate that we covet things that are scarce, instead of appreciating the miracles that abound.
  • Our experience of this reality had nothing to do with reality, but was interpreted through the controlling force of our beliefs: specifically, the rules we had about what had to happen in order for us to feel good. I call these specific beliefs that determine when we get pain and when we get pleasure rules.
  • What really has to happen in order for you to feel good? The truth is that nothing has to happen in order for you to feel good. You could feel good right now for absolutely no reason whatsoever! Think about it. If you make a million dollars, the million dollars doesn’t give you any pleasure. It’s your rule that says, “When I hit this mark, then I’ll give myself permission to feel good.”
  • At that moment, when you decide to feel good, you send a message to your brain to change your responses in the muscles of your face, chest, and body, to change your breathing, and to change the biochemistry within your nervous system that causes you to feel the sensations you call pleasure.
  • I made a distinction that changed the quality of my life forever: as long as we structure our lives in a way where our happiness is dependent upon something we cannot control, then we will experience pain.
  • Since I wasn’t willing to live with the fear that pain could shake me anymore, and I considered myself to be intelligent, I redesigned my rules so that when I feel pain and when I feel pleasure is whenever I feel it’s appropriate based on my capacity to direct my own mind, body, and emotions.
  • The key to our happiness could be found in one key rule we shared: we decided that our rule for the day was that we were going to enjoy this event no matter what happened. It wasn’t that we didn’t have expectations; it was that we decided that no matter what happened, we’d find a way to enjoy it.
  • Bateson turned to his daughter and said, “Honey, it’s not that things get muddled so easily. It’s that you have more ways for things to get muddled. You have only one way for things to be perfect.”
  • Most of us have created numerous ways to feel bad, and only a few ways to truly feel good. I never fail to be amazed at the overwhelming number of people whose rules wire them for pain. 
  • “What has to happen in order for you to feel successful?” (Remember, this is the key question you’ll always ask to discover your rules or anyone else’s.)
  • Like the CEO who wasn’t meeting his own rules, you could be winning and feel like you’re losing because the scorecard you’re using is unfair. Not only is it unfair to you, it’s also unfair to your spouse and children, the people you work with every day, and all the others whose lives you touch. If you’ve set up a system of rules that causes you to feel frustrated, angry, hurt, or unsuccessful—or you have no clear rules for knowing when you’re happy, successful, and so on—those emotions affect the way you treat the people around you as well as how they feel when they’re near you.
  • Also, whether you are aware of it or not, often you are judging other people through a set of rules that you may never have expressed—but we all expect others to comply with our rules, don’t we? If you’re being hard on yourself, you’re likely to be hard on others as well.

DO YOUR RULES EMPOWER OR DISEMPOWER YOU?

SET UP THE GAME SO YOU CAN WIN

    • Rules are the triggering device of human emotion
    • If any of us made our ability to feel loved dependent on everyone accepting our views, we wouldn’t feel love very often, would we?
    • How do we know if a rule empowers or disempowers us? There are three primary criteria: 
  • 1. It’s a disempowering rule if it’s impossible to meet.
  • 2. A rule is disempowering if something that you can’t control determines whether your rule has been met or not.
    • 3. A rule is disempowering if it gives you only a few ways to feel good and lots of ways to feel bad.

THE SOLUTION 

  • The solution is very simple. All we have to do to make our lives work is set up a system of evaluating that includes rules that are achievable, that make it easy to feel good and hard to feel bad, that constantly pull us in the direction we want to go.
  • So what’s our goal? Once we design our values, we must decide what evidence we need to have before we give ourselves pleasure. We need to design rules that will move us in the direction of our values, that will clearly be achievable, using criteria we can control personally.
  • You and I need to remember that our self-esteem is tied to our ability to feel like we’re in control of the events in our environment.
  • In sociology, there’s a concept known as “ethnocentricity,” which means we begin to believe that the rules, values, and beliefs of our culture are the only ones that are valid. This is an extremely limiting mindset. Every person around you has different rules and values than you do, and theirs are no better or worse than your own. The key question is not whether rules are right or wrong, but whether they empower or disempower you.
  • At the base of every emotional upset, you’ve ever had with another human being is a rules upset. Somebody did something, or failed to do something, that violated one of your beliefs about what they must or should do.

“If I’m respectful, then I’m truthful about all my feelings and all my emotions—good, bad, and indifferent—and I express them with all my intensity in the moment.”

  • Rules determine everything—where we go, what we wear, who we are, what’s acceptable to us, what’s unacceptable, who we have as friends, and whether we’re happy or sad in virtually any situation.
  • So if you ever feel angry or upset with someone, remember, it’s your rules that are upsetting you, not their behavior. This will help you to stop blaming them. You can get past your upset quickly by first stopping and asking yourself, “Am I reacting to this, or am I responding to the situation intelligently?”

THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGING RULES

  • The best way to deal with this is to remember that your rules are not based on reality. They’re purely arbitrary. Just because you’ve used them and feel strongly about them doesn’t mean they’re the best rules or the right rules.
  • Rules should be designed to empower our relationships, not destroy them. Any time a rule gets in the way, the question we need to ask ourselves is, “What’s more important? My relationship or my rules?”

COMMUNICATE YOUR RULES

  • Don’t expect people to live by your rules if you don’t clearly communicate what they are. And don’t expect people to live by your rules if you’re not willing to compromise and live by some of theirs.

THERE ARE SOME RULES YOU CANNOT BREAK!

  • We have a hierarchy of rules, just as we do values. There are certain rules that, to break them, would give us such intense pain that we don’t even consider the possibility. We will rarely, if ever, break them. I call these rules threshold rules.
  • Conversely, we have some rules that we don’t want to break. I call these personal standards. If we do break them, we don’t feel good about it, but depending upon the reasons, we’re willing to break them in the short term. The difference between these two rules is often phrased with the words must and should.
  • We have certain things that we must do, certain things that we must not do, certain things that we must never do, and certain things that we must always do. The “must” and the “must never” rules are threshold rules; the “should” and “should never” rules are personal standard rules. All of them give structure to our lives.
  • The law of averages says your rules are going to be violated constantly, and therefore you’re going to be in continual stress, reacting to everything.
  • If you’ve ever procrastinated on anything, were you perhaps using some “should” rules such as, “I should start this project” or “I should begin an exercise program”? What would have happened instead if you had decided, “I must start this project” or “I must start this exercise program,” and then followed through by conditioning it into your nervous system?
  • Remember, we all need some structure. Some people have no clear rules for when they’re successful. Rules can provide the contextual environment for us to create added value. Rules can motivate us to follow through; they can cause us to grow and expand. Your goal is simply to create a balance between your “must” rules and your “should” rules and to utilize both types of rules in the appropriate context.

RULES REALIGNMENT

  1. What does it take for you to feel successful? 
  2. What does it take for you to feel loved—by your kids, by your spouse, by your parents, and by whoever else is important to you? 
  3. What does it take for you to feel confident? 
  4. What does it take for you to feel you are excellent in any area of your life?

Now look at these rules and ask yourself, “Are they appropriate? Have I made it really hard to feel good and easy to feel bad?” Do you have 129 things that must happen before you feel loved? Does it take only one or two things to make you feel rejected? If that’s true, change your criteria and come up with rules that empower you. What do your rules need to be in order for you to be happy and successful in this endeavor?

  • Design your rules so that you’re in control so that the outside world is not what determines whether you feel good or bad. Set it up so that it’s incredibly easy for you to feel good, and incredibly hard to feel bad.
  • For the rules that govern your moving-toward values, use the phrase “Anytime I…” In other words, create a menu of possibilities of ways to feel good. For example, “I feel love anytime I give love, or anytime I spend time with people I love, or anytime I smile at someone new,

 

17 REFERENCES: THE FABRIC OF LIFE 

“Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.” —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

  • If we want to understand why people do what they do, a review of the most significant and impactful reference experiences of their lives certainly gives us clues. References—the fifth element of a person’s Master System—really provide the essence, or the building blocks, for our beliefs, rules, and values.
  • The larger the number and greater the quality of our references, the greater our potential level of choices. A larger number and greater quality of references enables us to more effectively evaluate what things mean and what we can do.
  • Which references play the largest role in our life experiences? It all depends on what we get reinforced for.

WHAT ARE REFERENCES? 

  • References are all the experiences of your life that you’ve recorded within your nervous system—everything you’ve ever seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled—stored away inside the giant file cabinet of your brain. Some references are picked up consciously, others unconsciously. Some result from experiences you’ve had yourself; others consist of information you’ve heard from others, and all your references, like all human experience, become somewhat distorted, deleted, and generalized as you record them within your nervous system.
  • We have enough references within us to back up any idea we want: that we’re confident or that we’re weak, that we care or that we’re selfish. The key is to expand the references that are available within your life. Consciously seek out experiences that expand your sense of who you are and what you’re capable of, as well as organize your references in empowering ways.

“The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet” —LORD CHESTERFIELD

  • How do you use your references? Do you consciously interpret them in ways that empower you, in ways that support the achievement of your goals?
  • The way we use our references will determine how we feel because whether something is good or bad is all based on what you’re comparing it to.
  • References are not limited to your actual experience. Your imagination itself is a source of references. We need to remember that our imagination is ten times more potent than our willpower. Imagination unleashed provides us a sense of certainty and vision that goes far beyond the limitations of the past.
  • One of the finest beliefs I developed years ago that helped me to enjoy all of my life experience was the idea that there are no bad experiences, that no matter what I go through in life—whether it’s a challenging experience or a pleasurable one—every experience provides me something of value if I look for it.
  • Could it be possible that what seems like the worst days in our lives are actually the most powerful in terms of the lessons we can choose to learn from them? Think about one of the worst experiences that have ever happened to you. As you look back upon it now, can you think of any ways in which it had some kind of positive impact on your life?
  • Limited references create a limited life. If you want to expand your life, you must expand your references by pursuing ideas and experiences that wouldn’t be a part of your life if you didn’t consciously seek them out. Remember, rarely does a good idea interrupt you; you must actively seek it. Empowering ideas and experiences must be pursued. Expand your references, and you’ll immediately expand your life.

Take a moment now and write down five of the most powerful experiences that have shaped who you’ve become as a person. Give not only a description of the experience, but how that experience impacted you.

  • If you write down anything that seems to have impacted you negatively, immediately come up with another interpretation of that event, no matter what it takes.
  • “In order to really succeed at the highest level, to achieve what I really want for my life, what are some references I need?”

18 IDENTITY: THE KEY TO EXPANSION 

“Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.” —CHARLES DE GAULLE

  • These are the beliefs you have about your identity. What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.
  • If you’ve ever found yourself unable to even consider doing something, where your response to someone is, “I could never do that” or “I’m just not that kind of person,” then you’ve run up against the barriers of limited identity.
  • What exactly is identity? It is simply the beliefs that we use to define our own individuality, what makes us unique—good, bad, or indifferent—from other individuals. And our sense of certainty about who we are creating the boundaries and limits within which we live.
  • Your capability is constant, but how much of it you use depends upon the identity you have for yourself.
  • For example, if you feel certain that you are an outgoing, outrageous person, you’ll tap the resources of behavior that match your identity. Whether you see yourself as a “wimp” or a “wild man,” a “winner” or a “wallflower,” will instantly shape which capabilities you access.
  • Pygmalion in the Classroom, which details the dramatic change in students’ performance when they become convinced that they are gifted. Time and again, researchers have shown that students’ capabilities are powerfully impacted by the identities they develop for themselves as the result of teachers’ belief in their level of intelligence.
    • In one study, a group of teachers was told that certain students in their classes were truly gifted and to make sure that they challenged them to continue to expand. As can be expected, these children became the top achievers in their class. What makes this study significant is that these students had not actually demonstrated higher levels of intelligence—and, in fact, some had previously been labeled poor students. Yet it was their sense of certainty that they were superior (which had been instilled by a teacher’s “false belief”) that triggered their success.
    • The impact of this principle is not limited to students. The kind of person other people perceive you to be controls their responses to you.
  • We all will act consistently with our views of who we truly are, whether that view is accurate or not. The reason is that one of the strongest forces in the human organism is the need for consistency. Throughout our lives, we’ve been socialized to link massive pain to inconsistency and pleasure to being consistent.
  • Conversely, there are tremendous rewards for remaining consistent with our stated identities. What do we call people who are consistent? We use words like trustworthy, loyal.
  • The Pygmalion effect also works in reverse. If you feel certain that you are “learning-disabled,” it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • A person who believes they have developed a drug addiction can clearly change. It will be difficult, but a change can be made, and it can last. Conversely, a person who believes himself to be a drug addict will usually return to the use of drugs even after weeks or months of abstinence. Why? It’s because he believes that this is who he is. He doesn’t have a drug addiction; he is a drug addict. In addition, there’s often a secondary gain involved in the process of maintaining this negative behavior. After all, this man can blame his addiction on something he can’t control—it’s simply “who he is”—instead of facing the reality that taking drugs is a conscious decision.
  • We all have a need for a sense of certainty. Most people have tremendous fear of the unknown. Uncertainty implies the potential of having pain strike us, and we’d rather deal with the pain we already know about than deal with the pain of the unknown.
  • Thus, living in an ever-changing world—one in which we are constantly surrounded by the flux of new relationships, redefined job roles, changing environments, and a steady stream of new information—the one thing that we all count on to be constant is our sense of identity. If we begin to question who we are, then there is no foundation for all of the understandings upon which we’ve built our lives.
  • As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identity. In fact, one shift in identity can cause a shift of your entire Master System. Think about it. Doesn’t a drug addict have a completely different system of evaluation—the states he consistently experiences, the questions he asks, the values that guide his actions, and the references he organizes into beliefs—than does someone who considers himself to be a leader, a lover, an athlete, or a contributor?
  • If you’ve repeatedly attempted to make a particular change in your life, only to continually fall short, invariably the challenge is that you were trying to create a behavioral or emotional shift that was inconsistent with your belief about who you are.- We determine who we are—our own identities—by judging our own actions as well. In other words, we look at what we do to determine who we are.
  • The Chinese realized that in order to achieve their broader objective of changing the prisoner’s beliefs about his identity, all they had to do was get the prisoner to do things that a collaborator or a Communist would do.
  • “Isn’t my identity limited by my experience?” No, it’s limited by your interpretation of your experience. Your identity is nothing but the decisions you’ve made about who you are, what you’ve decided to fuse yourself with. You become the labels you’ve given yourself. The way you define your identity defines your life.

Finding Your Identity

“Who am I?” Write down the answer, and then ask it again. Each time you ask it, write down whatever surfaces, and keep probing deeper and deeper. Continue to ask until you find the description of yourself that you have the strongest conviction about. How do you define yourself? What is the essence of who you are? What metaphors do you use to describe yourself? What roles do you play?

1) If you were to look in the dictionary under your name, what would it say? Would three words just about cover it, or would your epic narrative consume page after page, or demand a volume of its own?

2) If you were to create an ID card that would represent who you truly are, what would be on it—and what would you leave off? Would it include a picture or not? Would you list your vital statistics? Your physical description? Your accomplishments? Your emotions? Your beliefs? Your affiliations? Your aspirations? Your motto? Your abilities? Take a moment to describe what would be on this identity card and what would be left off in order to show someone who you really are.

“I decided that was not who I wanted to be anymore.”- It’s a choice 

The reality is that we could do this any day of the year! We could completely redefine ourselves, or we could simply decide to let our “real selves” shine through.

THE POWER TO REINVENT YOURSELF

  1. Make a list right now of all the elements of your identity you want to have. As you make the list, revel in the power you have right now to change simply by deciding to. Who are some people who have these characteristics you aspire to have? Can they serve as role models? Imagine yourself fusing with this new identity. Imagine how you’d breathe. How would you walk? How would you talk? How would you think? How would you feel?
  2. If you’d truly like to expand your identity and your life, then, right now, consciously decide who you want to be. Get excited, be like a kid again, and describe in detail who you’ve decided you are today. Take a moment now to write down your expanded list.
  3. Now develop a plan of action you could take that would cause you to know that you’re truly living consistently with your new identity. In developing this plan, pay special attention to the friends you’re choosing to spend time with. Will they reinforce or destroy the identity you’re creating?
  4. The final step is to commit to your new identity by broadcasting it to everyone around you. The most important broadcast, however, is to yourself. Use your new label to describe yourself every single day, and it will become conditioned within you.
  • Even after completing this exercise, you’ll want to continue to refine your identity, expand it, or create better rules for it. We live in a dynamic world where our identities must continually expand in order to enjoy a greater quality of life. You need to become aware of things that may influence your identity, notice whether they are empowering or disempowering you, and take control of the whole process. Otherwise, you become a prisoner of your own past.

 

If you were to ask me who I am today (and I might decide to change tomorrow!), I would say that I am a creator of possibility, an instigator of joy, a catalyst for growth, a builder of people, and a producer of passion. 

You and I need to expand our view of who we are. We need to make certain that the labels we put upon ourselves are not limits but enhancements, that we add to all that’s already good within us—for whatever you and I begin to identify with, we will become. This is the power of belief.

“If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” —THOMAS A. EDISON

Begin to ask yourself, “What more can I be? What more will I be? Who am I becoming now?” Think about your values and dream list, and commit to yourself that, regardless of the environment, “I will consistently act as a person who is already achieving these goals.

 

Relationship

In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take. One of the most important patterns that Becky and I discovered early that is critical to making our relationship last is to focus each day on making it better, rather than focusing on what might happen if it ended.

 

Each day, reassociate what you love about this person you’re in a relationship with. Reinforce your feelings of connection and renew your feelings of intimacy and attraction by consistently asking the question, “How did I get so lucky to have you in my life?” Become fully associated to the privilege of sharing your life with this person; feel the pleasure intensely, and continuously anchor it into your nervous system. Engage in a never-ending quest to find new ways to surprise each other. If you don’t, habituation will set in, and you will take each other for granted. To find and create those special moments that can make your relationship a role model—one that’s legendary!

I sat down and asked myself, “What states would I be in if I were my highest and best? What states will I commit to being in every single day, no matter what? Regardless of the environment, regardless of whatever challenges break loose around me, I will be these states at least once every day!”

“You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.” —OLIVER GOLDSMITH

“Every man is an impossibility until he is born.” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

 

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