Virtually everyone has imagined the life they want, but most people become so bogged down with daily obligations and routines that they eventually stop pursuing their dreams. In Awaken the Giant Within, life coach and self-help guru Tony Robbins provides insights and exercises to help you optimize every aspect of your life—from your relationships to your finances—and achieve your dreams by mastering your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
This guide will teach you the principles and practices to transform your life and the world around you. You’ll learn strategies to take control of your thoughts and emotions, kickstart your life transformation with a seven-day challenge, and learn how to apply the self-improvement skills you’ve learned to benefit those around you.
Our commentary will compare and contrast Robbins’s ideas with those of other popular self-help authors, as well as current scientific theories. This will provide you with background and a deeper understanding of the lessons in Awaken the Giant Within, as well as some additional tools for taking control of your life.
Robbins is a leadership coach and business strategist who has worked with CEOs, champion athletes, popular musicians, and four different US presidents. As a former janitor who never attended college, Robbins credits his current success to the system he lays out in Awaken the Giant Within.
Robbins believes that the first step in taking control of your life is understanding the power of your decisions. Many people mistakenly believe their lives are shaped by their circumstances—they go where the current takes them without making any active decisions, and this makes them feel out of control. However, your life is actually dictated by your decisions. When you decide who you are and what you want, you’re committing to do anything necessary to realize that vision.
To embrace your decision-making power, Robbins says you must first understand that decision-making is like a muscle that you strengthen by making frequent decisions—so take every opportunity to make decisions, big and small. Second, make your decisions wisely, but don’t mull over them endlessly; if you think about them for too long, you’re likely to lose your conviction. Third, learn from your successful and failed decisions.
(Shortform note: In Rework, David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried note that the most dangerous thing you can do is fail to make a decision. They argue that making no decision is even worse than making a bad decision: If you make a bad decision, you can learn from the mistake, correct it, and make better decisions in the future. However, if you’re paralyzed by fear of a bad decision and don’t make a choice (or tell yourself that you’ll “decide later”) then you’ll stay stuck in your current situation.)
To kick off your journey of self-transformation, Robbins gives a list of three decisions to think about. Be conscious about how you make these three decisions and what impact you notice going forward—how you feel, what you do, and who you become:
Start With Values
What you focus on, what’s meaningful to you, and what you do all have their roots in what you value. In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson explains that our values are what lead us to feel and behave the ways we do. Therefore, Manson argues, the key to changing your life is changing your values.
Manson says that all positive values—values that lead to happiness, fulfillment, and productivity—share three qualities:
They are based on facts, not opinions or emotions. For example, integrity is a positive value because it’s rooted in concrete, knowable facts—you just have to tell the truth about those facts. On the other hand, happiness is a negative value because it’s feeling-based instead of fact-based (Manson believes that happiness is a natural result of living well, not a value or a goal to pursue).
They are constructive: They improve your life and the lives of those around you. For example, responsibility is a positive value because it pushes you to do the best you can in every situation. Power is a negative value because it relies on pushing others down in order to elevate yourself.
They are within your control. Positive values can’t rely on outside forces such as other people’s opinions or actions. Both of the previous examples of positive values are things that you personally decide to do: Nobody else can force you to tell the truth or make you take charge of your own life—and, conversely, nobody can stop you from doing so.
Robbins says that the driving force behind all of your decisions—and, thus, your actions—is the subconscious motivation to avoid pain (including unpleasant feelings like frustration and humiliation) and seek pleasure (enjoyable feelings such as ecstasy and comfort).
Robbins explains that pain and pleasure associations start in your brain: Every time you experience a positive or negative emotion, your brain links the emotion with other aspects of the experience, creating a “neuro-association.” As a result, your future thoughts about that activity or subject automatically trigger the same emotion. For example, if you once got emotionally painful news while listening to a certain song, your brain will associate that song with your negative emotion; each time you hear the song in the future, you’re likely to feel emotional pain.
(Shortform note: While Robbins focuses on how neuro-associations impact behavior, others suggest creating and manipulating your (or others’) neuro-associations to improve memory, increase productivity, and make a better impression on others.)
Robbins says that your brain creates neuro-associations because it’s looking for patterns, trying to form generalizations about which experiences are painful or pleasant. These generalizations create your beliefs about life and the world, and they are critical for learning. However, your generalized beliefs can also hold you back—for example, if your boss treats you badly, you could end up with a generalized belief that all bosses are bad people, and you may go through your career with an attitude of fear and mistrust. Thus, it’s important to recognize and evaluate your neuro-associations to identify which ones are holding you back.
The Power of Pain and Pleasure
The idea that all motivation stems from pleasure and pain dates back to the Greek philosopher Epicurus. The core belief of Epicureanism is that pleasure is the ultimate good and pain is the ultimate evil, as evidenced by the fact that we naturally seek one and avoid the other. However, Epicurus also taught that you must seek pleasure in a balanced way—if you overindulge (for example, drinking too much alcohol or sleeping in too late) you’ll cause yourself pain in your pursuit of pleasure.
Robbins’s advice about recognizing your mental associations aims at the same goal of maximizing pleasure while minimizing pain. Once you understand your mental associations, you can determine whether they’re accurate—and therefore whether they’re actually helping you find pleasure and avoid pain, or if they’re holding you back.
If some of your neuro-associations are causing you to act in ways that are not positive or empowering, change them: Robbins explains how to rewire your brain by weakening your existing neuro-associations and consciously creating new, empowering ones.
Robbins suggests doing this with what he calls Neuro-Associative Conditioning (NAC), a six-step process through which you condition your nervous system to develop neuro-associations that support the changes you want to make:
Counterpoint: NAC Isn’t Scientifically Proven
A 2001 report found that, while NAC does draw on established behavioral science and techniques, it may not be as effective as Robbins claims. The report’s author, psychologist Anthony Grant, doesn’t have a problem with NAC per se, but rather with the claims that the average layperson can use these techniques to make any lifestyle changes he or she wants. Grant believes that those claims are extravagant and not scientifically supported—tantamount to false advertising.
Grant’s report does note that NAC closely resembles clinical procedures used in behavioral therapy and psychology—however, those procedures are guided by a professional as part of an overall treatment plan for a specific condition or conditions. The report concludes that a proper scientific study of NAC is necessary to either support or disprove its effectiveness for general lifestyle changes.
Now that you know how to recondition your neuro-associations, the next step in Robbins’s process is to identify which associations and beliefs are impeding your success, and recondition yourself to turn your disempowering beliefs and associations into empowering ones. This is critical because your beliefs dictate how you interpret your experiences, and these interpretations determine your decisions, which collectively shape your life.
Robbins emphasizes making this shift with two different types of belief:
Shift to a Growth Mindset
Altering your beliefs goes hand-in-hand with altering your mindset: In order to make any kind of major change, you first have to believe that change is possible. Psychologist Carol S. Dweck wrote the book Mindset to discuss her ideas about two different ways of thinking, and the various beliefs that come with those mindframes:
Fixed Mindset
Global beliefs: People’s abilities and intelligence are innate and unchangeable. Some people are more talented or more intelligent than others, and there’s no way for the less talented people to overcome that deficit. People’s personalities don’t change much—there are “good” people and “bad” people.
Limiting beliefs: You are good at certain things and bad at other things. No matter how hard you work, you’ll never match someone who’s naturally talented in an area that you’re not. Your IQ determines your potential.
Growth Mindset
Global beliefs: People can continue to develop their skills and abilities throughout their lives. Hard work and good learning strategies can overcome a difference in natural talent. It’s impossible to predict someone’s potential based on his or her current abilities and IQ. People can learn social skills such as empathy and awareness just like any other skill.
By definition, a growth mindset doesn’t include any limiting beliefs. However, Dweck notes that many people have fixed mindsets for certain aspects of life and growth mindsets for other aspects, so you may still find limiting beliefs creeping into your thoughts.
If you find yourself believing that the changes that Robbins talks about are impossible, you may be stuck in a fixed mindset.
In addition to your beliefs and associations, what you choose to focus on determines how you experience life and what emotions you feel. You can think of your focus like a spotlight at a crowded concert: If the light stays on the musicians, you’ll be focused on enjoying the music. If it highlights somebody acting out in the crowd, it’s harder to focus on the performance, and you might feel annoyed or amused by that person’s antics—either way, the experience is different than if the spotlight had stayed focused on the performers.
In this section, we’ll talk about how to control your focus through the questions you ask yourself and the words you use.
How Language Affects Experience
Research reveals you can control your emotions—and thus your experiences—by controlling the language you use to describe them. Specifically, the research focuses on psychological constructionism, a theory of psychology stating that emotions are formed (“constructed”) from several different psychological elements:
Our understanding of a concept. For example, our knowledge of what “excitement” is.
What we perceive. For example: loud music, flashing lights, and a large crowd of people.
Physical sensations. In this example: increased heart rate, explosive energy, and (in extreme cases) muscle tremors.
In simple terms, this theory states that emotions are the results of us explaining our experiences to ourselves.
Therefore, since language is a key part of understanding and explaining concepts, the words we use can affect what emotions we feel and how strongly we feel them. For example, a study showed that participants who had been primed with fear-related words were less likely to take risks than those who were primed with anger-related words, or who were not primed with a specific emotion.
Robbins says that thinking is merely a sequence of asking and answering questions—in other words, virtually every thought you have is preceded by a question, even if it’s not one you consciously asked. Therefore, the questions you ask yourself set the tone for your thought patterns—it’s critical to make a habit of consciously asking yourself positive questions that lead to empowering thoughts.
For example, instead of asking yourself, “What am I doing wrong?” (a negative question that assumes you’re making a mistake), try asking, “What do I need to do differently?” (a positive question that assumes there is a solution and that you can achieve it).
(Shortform note: Limitless author Jim Kwik explains another way to use empowering questions in his podcast Kwik Brain: Intentionally ask yourself questions that prime your brain to look for answers. For example, if you ask yourself, “How can I lose weight?” your mind will naturally focus on things like healthy recipes, local gyms, and convenient at-home workout routines. Kwik’s point is that those things were always there, but your brain was filtering them out until you asked a question that made them relevant. He calls this type of question a dominant question.)
Just as your questions influence your focus and thought patterns, so do your words. Robbins says that you can change your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors by changing the words you habitually use to describe feelings and experiences.
1. Use words that dull negative emotions and intensify positive ones. For example, say that you’re “annoyed” instead of “angry” and “thrilled” instead of “happy.”
(Shortform note: As a counterpoint, some psychologists urge you to accept your emotional experiences—especially the negative ones—without trying to judge them or suppress them. They argue that trying to ignore, downplay, or eliminate negative feelings prevents you from dealing with them in a healthy way; as a result, the negative experiences become more intense and last longer.)
2. When you’re upset, use words that disrupt your emotional pattern. For example, replace the word “frustrated” with “overinvested”—it’s a strange enough word choice that it’ll distract you from your negative feelings and redirect your attention toward the thing you’re actually invested in.
(Shortform note: Another way to disrupt your patterns is to think about upsetting events and emotions in the second-person or third-person. Removing the “I” helps you to create mental and emotional distance between yourself and what’s upsetting you. It can be easier to think about things if you ask yourself, “Why do you feel that way,” or “Why is he upset about that?”)
3. Expand your vocabulary to include words that accurately reflect how you feel. Having a limited vocabulary limits your ability to feel and express emotions. For example, when you say you feel “fine,” does this mean you are peacefully content, or dejectedly resigned?
(Shortform note: One way to more accurately observe and describe your feelings is to consider not only what you’re feeling, but how strongly you feel it. Try gauging your emotional response on a scale from 1 (barely noticeable) to 10 (utterly overwhelming), and consider which words you could use to describe each of those intensity levels.)
Although you’ve learned strategies for controlling your emotions, Robbins cautions you not to overlook the fact that emotions provide feedback for your actions: Positive emotions let you know that you’re doing something right, and negative emotions signal that you need to alter something.
For this reason, Robbins says, negative emotions (which people often try to avoid) are actually invaluable, because they guide you to the life you want—if you know how to interpret them. For example, fear tells you that there’s a problem looming and you’ll need to be ready to handle it; anger tells you that somebody’s violated one of your personal values.
Robbins asserts that understanding your feelings and acting on them is one way to build a happy and fulfilling life for yourself. Just remember that emotions are only feedback from your mind and body, and that you decide how to respond; the emotions don’t control your actions.
Understanding Emotional Intelligence
The ability to understand your emotions and use them effectively is called emotional intelligence. There are four aspects of emotional intelligence:
Self-awareness: Recognizing your emotions, being able to tell them apart from each other, and understanding why you’re experiencing them.
Self-management: Monitoring and regulating your emotions.
Social-awareness: Practicing recognition and empathy for others’ feelings.
Relationship management: Using your emotions to connect with others more deeply and improve your interpersonal skills.
There are also a number of different activities you can do to boost your emotional intelligence, ranging from cataloging your emotional strengths and weaknesses to practicing mindfulness meditation.
You’ve learned practical strategies to transform your life—from reconditioning your beliefs and neuro-associations to altering your habitual questions and words. Now, Robbins urges you to jumpstart your life transformation with a seven-day challenge: Each day for the next week, you’ll tackle an assignment to begin improving a different area of your life.
(Shortform note: Robbins introduces this challenge as a way to begin making significant changes in your life. With this in mind, it could help you to approach this with a mindset of “kaizen,” which Robin Sharma describes in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. Kaizen is a Japanese word that roughly translates to “continuous improvement”—it means that you understand you won’t reach all your goals in a day, but you’re committed to being a little better every day than you were the day before.)
Robbins’s first challenge is to change your habitual emotional patterns. The goal is to experience fewer negative emotions and spend more time in positive, empowering states.
He suggests writing a list of every emotion you experience in a typical week, as well as the situations and events that trigger each one. Next, develop a plan for addressing each negative emotion and replacing it with a different, empowering emotion. The more consistently you do this, the more effectively you’ll change your emotional patterns.
Counterpoint: Accept Your Emotions
It’s not always possible (or even desirable) to dismiss negative emotions and try to force positive ones. In Radical Acceptance, psychologist Tara Brach says that there are two steps to mastering your emotions, neither of which have to do with controlling them:
Recognition: Understand what you’re experiencing; name it and acknowledge it. For example, if you notice that your hands are shaking and you’re flooded with nervous energy, you would recognize that experience as anxiety.
Compassion: Once you understand your feelings, the second step is to meet that experience with compassion. In other words, don’t try to control what you’re feeling or berate yourself for your emotions; let the experience happen and then fade away.
Brach says this method—which is based on Buddhist mindfulness practices—allows you to fully experience your emotions without dwelling on them. As a result, you spend less time in negative mental states.
Robbins’s second challenge is to make a commitment to your physical well-being so that you can enjoy your emotional health to the fullest. Assess your current level of health, make a commitment to maintain your health (or improve it, if needed), and make regular exercise part of your routine.
(Shortform note: Scientific evidence links good physical health to good mental health, which supports Robbins’s Day 2 challenge. For example, regular exercise reduces the effects of anxiety and depression, while boosting your mood and self-esteem. Among other reasons, experts believe exercise improves your mood by increasing blood circulation to the brain.)
Robbins’s third challenge is to improve your relationship with your partner. Relationships are not only essential to your well-being, but they are also powerful forces in influencing your beliefs, values, and character.
Robbins urges you to maintain a healthy relationship in the following ways:
1. Talk to your partner about what each of you values most in a relationship.
(Shortform note: In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that everything from your emotions to your goals ultimately stem from values. That’s why mastering your relationship begins with comparing values—it helps you to understand each other much more deeply, and to see where your values align and where they differ.)
2. Prioritize the health of your relationship over winning arguments.
3. Brainstorm pattern disruptions that you’ll both use when either or both of you become really upset.
4. When you notice yourself feeling resistance toward your partner, immediately communicate your feelings and use vocabulary that minimizes the intensity of your negative feelings. For example, using the word “annoyed” instead of “furious,” as we talked about earlier.
(Shortform note: The book Difficult Conversations is a guide for approaching uncomfortable, upsetting, and offensive topics in a productive way. The first and most important piece of advice is: A conversation is not a contest. In other words, don’t go into the conversation assuming that you’re right and your partner is wrong, or with a mindset that you have to win an argument—instead, do whatever it takes to understand your partner’s point of view. Once you understand each other, even if you don’t agree, you’ll be able to have a conversation instead of an argument.)
Financial stress causes intensely disempowering negative emotions. Robbins’s next challenge is to take charge of your finances by doing the following:
(Shortform note: In The Total Money Makeover, Dave Ramsey similarly argues that to take control of your financial life, you must first overcome false beliefs about money; however, Ramsey argues that many obstacles are societal myths, rather than individual beliefs. He also suggests that you set aside an emergency fund of at least $1,000 before taking any other step, such as investing or paying off debt—Ramsey believes a buffer against unexpected expenses is a crucial first step toward financial security and peace of mind. Finally, he doesn’t specifically suggest getting a financial adviser, but he does emphasize the importance of educating yourself about finances.)
Robbins’s fifth challenge is to create a personal code of conduct that ensures you live by your values every single day.
Because acting in line with your values creates positive emotions, Robbins suggests you start by writing a list of seven to 10 emotional states you want to experience every day. Next, write some guidelines for each emotional state: How do you reach it? How do you know when you have?
(Shortform note: Robbins suggests that the seven to 10 emotional states you choose should align with your values, but doesn’t specify how many values should be covered. In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown advises you to choose only two core values. She argues that having too many values renders them meaningless. If you’re having trouble narrowing down the values that are most important to you, Brown suggests starting with a list of 10 and whittling it down.)
Depending upon what you’re doing and the frame of mind you’re in, time can seemingly pass too quickly or drag on forever. However, Robbins says you can learn to control your perception of time and work it to your advantage. He offers two strategies:
1. Practice switching your focus to the past, present, or future. Focusing too much on one time frame puts you in a disempowered state, while exercising this muscle gives you control.
(Shortform note: There’s a common belief that focusing too much on the past leads to depression, while focusing too much on the future leads to anxiety. The given solution is usually to be present—however, Robbins is arguing that focusing too much on the present causes its own problems, such as an inability to learn from past mistakes or plan for the future. Therefore, the key is to take a broad view of time that encompasses past, present, and future, and limit the time you spend dwelling on any one of those.)
2. Create a to-do list of tasks that will have the most meaningful impact on your life (like the exercises in this book), rather than those that are merely urgent (like returning phone calls). Focusing on what’s important instead of what’s urgent will help you escape the feeling that there’s never enough time.
Make the Most of Your Time With the Eisenhower Matrix
Former US President Dwight Eisenhower created the Eisenhower Matrix as a method to prioritize items on your to-do list and determine how to approach each task. The matrix is divided into four quadrants:
Important and urgent—do it. You should do tasks that are both significant and time-sensitive as soon as possible (or at the required time). Examples include treating a serious injury or going to a doctor’s appointment.
Important but not urgent—schedule it. Something that you need to do, but don’t need to do right now, should be written into your schedule so that you make sure to get to it in a timely manner. Examples include planning for the future, working out, and making time for rest and recreation. Robbins’s exercises and challenges fall into this category.
Urgent but not important—delegate it. The ideal way to handle tasks that are time-sensitive, but not important to you, is to get someone else to do them (preferably someone to whom they are important). Another way of thinking about this quadrant is time-sensitive tasks that don’t need you, specifically, to do them. Examples include running errands and attending (some) meetings.
Neither important nor urgent—ignore it. Something that’s not important and not time-sensitive is, by definition, something that you can safely ignore. Examples include mindlessly scrolling social media, answering unimportant phone calls, and playing video games.
After working diligently all week, it’s time to rest and enjoy yourself. Robbins offers two options for this final challenge:
Rest Is as Important as Work
Psychologists are coming to understand the importance of rest, recreation, and leisure time. Far from being a waste of time, recreation actually improves your health and your mood.
Studies have linked recreational activities with decreased stress, anxiety, and depression, and with increased overall well-being. Furthermore, viewing leisure activities as pointless or a waste of time makes those activities ineffective.
In short, to maintain your health, you have to allow yourself to indulge in things you enjoy. Refusing to do so—or begrudging yourself the time you spend on them—causes your mental and physical health to suffer.
You now know that you have the power to make individual decisions that improve your life. However, Robbins says, you also have the power to participate in the joint decisions that people make collectively as communities, societies, nations, and the world. These joint decisions—ranging from how we take care of our neighborhoods to how we tackle climate change—will determine whether we collectively succumb to or overcome the problems we face.
Hold yourself, your community, our society, and our world to a higher standard. Stop thinking that chronic problems such as hunger and homelessness are permanent and inevitable. Instead, recognize that these problems all stem from people’s values and their choices. To solve these problems, Robbins urges us to use and teach the lessons in this book to help people identify their values and make choices that will be better for everyone.
Use Interdependence and Synergy to Solve Big Problems
Stephen Covey’s self-help book First Things First recommends creating the best outcomes for everybody by developing a mindset of interdependence and synergy.
Covey asserts that all of our lives are connected, and that by depending on one another, we create synergy (effective cooperation). For example, think about how many people’s work goes into a simple ear of corn that you buy at the grocery store: the farmer who grew it, the driver who transported it, and the employee who put it on display, just to name a few. The cooperation of these people makes it possible to buy corn cheaply and conveniently. Their efforts synergize with one another to create favorable outcomes for everybody involved—much better than if each of us had to grow our own corn independently.
Robbins’s system is about mastering yourself and overcoming your own problems, but he encourages us to also use this information for the greater good, and interdependence and synergy aids that notion.
Just about everyone has dreamed of the life they want. However, most people become so bogged down with daily obligations and routines that they eventually stop pursuing their dreams and give up any hope of meaningfully shaping their destinies.
Life coach and self-help guru Tony Robbins wants to restore your dreams and give you the tools to achieve them. He believes you have the power to create your destiny by mastering your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. In this summary, through empowering insights and exercises to help you put the principles to practice, you’ll gain the tools to optimize every aspect of your life, from your relationships to your finances.
The principles and practices in the coming chapters can produce meaningful changes in your life—and they often require only small adjustments, such as swapping out just one word in your vocabulary, or changing one belief that’s holding you back. These are the “leverage points” in your life, where minimal effort can create transformational results. While many people fail to reach their dreams because they divide their attention and effort among too many things, you’ll be on your way to success as you learn to identify these leverage points and direct all of your energy and resources toward mastering them.
Robbins’s own success is proof that his methods work: In less than 10 years, he went from working as a janitor, being broke, feeling lonely, and being overweight to becoming a motivational speaker and drawing crowds of thousands of people. His transformation began when he started reflecting on how he could take control of his life immediately, learn more about improving his quality of life, and share that knowledge with others. Since then, his advice has helped people facing all kinds of challenges—from drug addiction to the threat of divorce.
In four parts, this summary will teach you the principles and practices to transform your life and the world around you:
In the following chapters of Part 1, we’ll talk about the elements that are key to creating change, and how to alter these elements to unlock positive changes in your life. Specifically, we’ll discuss:
(Shortform note: For improved clarity, we have reorganized some information from the book.)
Since this book is all about making positive changes in your life, we’ll start by discussing the principles of change and recommending a lifelong, incremental approach to improving your life. Later in this chapter, we’ll talk about how to implement these changes through decision-making.
Before we discuss how to create change, first acknowledge that you need to make some strategic changes. Your current thoughts and behaviors have produced the life you have now, so you can’t expect to get different results as long as you continue to follow the same patterns. Whether you’re an individual looking to improve your life, the head of a company seeking to make the organization successful, or a government leader trying to raise your country’s international profile, the basic principles of change are the same:
Throughout this summary, you’ll be learning insights and tools that will empower you to change your life. While this is exciting and liberating, it can also be overwhelming. Rather than trying to do everything at once, commit to constant and never-ending improvement (CANI!™).
The key to CANI! is to consistently take actions to make small improvements. On one side of the spectrum, this prevents you from trying to take on too much at once—on the other end of the spectrum, it prevents you from stagnating. Over time, these incremental improvements compound to produce incredible results.
CANI! can even change the way you look at failure. Committing to CANI! means constantly looking for ways to improve yourself and your life, and a failure in some area of your life provides valuable feedback that your current approach isn’t working. This creates a critical experience and an opportunity to improve by altering your flawed approach.
Although in this summary you’ll gain a lot of knowledge about how to take control of your life now, you’ll also encounter opportunities to improve yourself throughout life. Your ultimate success depends on your long-term commitment to CANI!—in your personal life, finances, health, relationships, work, and spirituality.
To reinforce your commitment to CANI!, ask yourself these three questions each night:
The first step in taking control of your life is deciding to make a change. When you make a decision about what you want, you’re making a commitment to do anything necessary to bring that vision to fruition. This is the Ultimate Success Formula:
Decision-making is like a muscle—you have to use it and strengthen it. Follow these steps to keep this muscle in tip-top shape and harness the transformative power of decisions:
No matter your circumstances, there are three critical decisions that you make constantly—whether or not you realize it—which impact what you notice, how you feel, what you do, and who you become. Controlling these three decisions is the first step in controlling your life and your destiny:
If you’re not living the life you want, change the way you’re making these three decisions moment-to-moment.
(Your brain actually has a Master System for decision-making, which determines what you do, how you feel, and how you shape your life. In Part 2, we’ll explore the five elements of this system and explain how to optimize each one to create the life you want.)
Although the road to change begins with a decision, many people never take this first step because they believe their lives are shaped by their circumstances. These people ride along the river of life without making any active decisions to change course. They go wherever the current of life takes them, and they end up feeling out of control. Robbins calls this state of living Niagara Syndrome.
When you suffer from Niagara Syndrome, you spend all your energy trying not to let the current crash you into rocks, and you have no resources left to make proactive plans for your future. You may not even realize you’re being pulled along until you’re about to go over the edge of a waterfall—and by then, it’s too late to fight the current.
There are a number of reasons why people develop Niagara Syndrome and avoid making decisions:
1) They’ve made so few real decisions in life that they struggle to make even simple choices, such as what to have for dinner. This is a symptom of weak decision-making muscles: Avoiding some decisions creates a snowball effect that causes people to avoid even more decisions. As with any other muscle weakness, the solution to this problem is to practice by making decisions at every opportunity.
2) They’re afraid of making the wrong decision. Mistakes and failures are inevitable—instead of lamenting them or trying to avoid them through indecision, learn from them. Failures lead to experiences, which build good judgment and lay the groundwork for successful future decisions. When you face failures in the short term, persist and keep your focus on the long-term goal.
As you build your decision-making muscles and learn to embrace mistakes, instead of viewing challenges as potential failures, you’ll see them as opportunities to make critical decisions.
3) They think about decisions loosely, instead of seeing them as commitments. As a result, when they think they’re making a decision, they’re really only making a casual resolution. When you make a true decision, you cut yourself off from any other possibility. For example, when an alcoholic decides to be sober, she doesn’t consider having even one drink. That commitment gives you clarity and focus, which are empowering.
4) They don’t know how they’ll achieve what they’ve decided to do, so they avoid commitment. When you make a decision, don’t worry about the how. Trust that, if you’re truly committed to your decision, you’ll find a way to manifest it.
Even if you avoid making decisions for any of these reasons, your inaction is actually a decision in itself: Namely, the decision to take a passive role in shaping your life and allow external factors to dictate your actions. Don’t fall into this trap: Instead, take an active role in your life and make decisions that will take you where you want to be.
Reflect on how you can use the power of decision-making to transform your life.
Describe one decision you’ve put off making. Why have you procrastinated making this choice?
Make the decision right now. What did you decide?
What is the first action you can take toward executing this decision?
How will you ensure that you take this first step today?
How will you ensure that you continue to make steady progress toward fully implementing this decision?
Given the importance of decisions in taking control of our lives, why do we often decide not to do things that we know would benefit us? Why do we snack on chips when we know fruit is better for us? Why do we put off working on our resumes even though we constantly complain about our jobs?
The answer lies in our pain and pleasure associations. The driving force behind all of our decisions—and, thus, our actions—is the motivation to avoid pain and seek pleasure. For instance, when we indulge in a junk-food habit, it’s because we gain pleasure from munching on salty snacks, and we associate pain with eating veggies instead. There are different forms of pain (such as inconvenience and humiliation) and pleasure (such as ecstasy and comfort). Generally, fear of pain or loss is a stronger motivator than the desire for pleasure or gain—in other words, you’ll continue to eat junk food if your love of chips isn’t as strong as your aversion to healthy food.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss the ways that pain and pleasure associations like this can prevent you from reaching your goals and living the life you want. First, let’s look at what, exactly, these associations are and how they form.
How do we come to associate certain things with pain and other things with pleasure? It all starts in your brain: Every time you experience a positive or negative emotion, your brain links the emotion with other aspects of the experience, creating a “neuro-association.”
Your brain’s billions of neurons (brain cells) take in sensory information and work together to process that sensory data. In this process, your neurons communicate by sending signals to each other via neural pathways, which are physical connections in your brain. Those neural pathways create neuro-associations by linking your emotions and sensations from a particular experience. As a result, your future thoughts about that activity or subject automatically trigger the same emotion (unless you recondition yourself, which we’ll explain in the next chapter). For example, if you go to a new restaurant with a group of friends and enjoy a great evening out, you’re likely to associate positive feelings with that restaurant in the future—even if your enjoyment had more to do with your friends’ company than the food or service.
Furthermore, the more you repeat the same or similar experiences, the stronger those neural pathways and neuro-associations become—and the more automatic and habitual that behavior becomes. When it comes to pain and pleasure associations, the habitualized behavior is your response to a particular stimulus (such as feeling happy when you think about the restaurant you and your friends visited).
In other contexts, deeply embedded neural pathways allow you to perform habitual tasks without thinking about each step. (Shortform example: Strong neural pathways allow you to drive a car without consciously thinking about it. The first time you drive, you have to think about each action, from how much pressure you’re putting on the gas pedal to how often you’re checking your rearview mirror. After you’ve been driving a while and the relevant neural pathways are reinforced, all of those actions become second nature.)
Since they’re based on experiences, your neuro-associations, and the behaviors that they trigger, are entirely unique to you. For example, while you may associate pleasure and joy with the song “Jack and Diane” because it evokes happy memories of your mom singing along to it in the car, your friend could associate the same song with painful heartbreak because it was playing on the radio when her high school sweetheart dumped her. Your distinct associations will then prompt you and your friend to behave differently when each of you hears or thinks about the song.
As we’ve noted, neuro-associations help you to habitualize your behaviors, which, on one hand, can be a tremendous benefit when those associations and behaviors are empowering. On the other hand, your neuro-associations can also reinforce and form habits of disempowering behaviors. Let’s take a look at the various ways in which neuro-associations can cause problems by:
Not only do your pain and pleasure neuro-associations influence all of your decisions—by motivating you to avoid pain and seek pleasure—but they are also strong enough to withstand any logic that contradicts them. This means that your associations can drive you to engage in self-destructive behavior and poor decision-making against logic and your better judgment. Furthermore, since neuro-associations are subconscious, you often can’t figure out why you keep acting illogically.
For example, if you watched your parents live lavishly off credit—and you never saw them deal with any negative consequences from the habit—you may associate credit with happiness and luxury. This association may, without you even realizing it, cause you to rely heavily on your credit card as you seek the pleasure you derive from using it, despite any advice and information from your financial advisor.
Ultimately, if you don’t understand the power of pain and pleasure associations to motivate your every action, including your decisions, you can’t take control over your behavior, and you end up perpetually reacting to things around you instead of acting of your own will.
Sometimes the problem isn’t one disempowering neuro-association but rather a harmful combination of mixed associations—as in, you associate both pain and pleasure with the same thing. When your brain gets these mixed signals, it becomes confused and can trigger self-sabotaging behaviors that are partially driven by positive associations and partially by negative ones. For example, many people have mixed associations about money:
If you have mixed associations with money, your positive neuro-associations with money may motivate you to increase your income by picking up a side job. At the same time, your negative neuro-associations may sabotage your efforts by making you reluctant to follow through and actually pick up shifts at your side gig.
As we talked about, your neuro-associations can subconsciously influence your active decision-making. Additionally, you can develop neural pathways that turn a negative emotion or action into a habit, causing you to engage in that behavior without even thinking about it. This is why willpower alone is inadequate to make lasting change, because it does not eliminate the neuro-associations driving your behavior.
Although it’s difficult to fight against the force of that habit to implement a more positive behavior, it is possible. We’ll explain in detail how to recondition these bad habits in the next chapter. A positive note: Research shows that when you stop indulging in a frequent behavior, the neural pathway actually weakens, reducing its power over you.
We’ve talked about several ways your neuro-associations can cause problems, but sometimes the root of the issue is that the neuro-association itself is inaccurate. Your brain can make mistakes when it interprets your experiences, creating false associations that reinforce bad behavior or impede positive behavior.
When you experience significant pain or pleasure, your brain looks for a cause of this feeling based on these criteria:
Although these criteria are fairly logical, they’re not fool-proof: Your brain can easily falsely generalize how consistently a potential cause is linked to the emotion. (Shortform example: If you get a stomach ache after eating cheese two or three times, your brain may assume that the cheese is the cause, when it could be merely a coincidence.) Given how powerful associations are in your decision-making and behavior, there’s a real danger that false neuro-associations can lower your quality of life because they cause you to act based on wrong information. This is why it’s critical to your growth and success that you evaluate and question your associations.
Now that you know how easily you can develop disempowering neuro-associations and the negative impact they can have on your life, let’s talk about how to change them. Since your neuro-associations are wired into your brain, the only way to change them is to recondition yourself by creating new neural pathways and weakening the old ones. To do this, associate pain with your old, disempowering behavior and pleasure with a new, healthier habit.
In this chapter, we’ll explain how to do this using the Science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning™ (NAC). This is a six-step process through which you condition your nervous system to develop neuro-associations that support the changes you want to make:
But first, let’s briefly dispel some common misconceptions about change.
The NAC process we’ll discuss can trigger significant changes in your life instantly. However, people often mistakenly think that significant change takes a long time. There are a couple of reasons why so many people perpetuate this falsehood:
1) People often spend years trying—and failing—to make changes through willpower. However, as we talked about, willpower doesn’t alter the neuro-associations at the root of your behavior. As long as those neuro-associations are intact, the behavior they cause will ultimately persist.
2) Our culture perpetuates the idea that profound change must take a long time. The flip side of this is the belief that if you can change quickly, you must not have really had a problem in the first place. For example, smoking is a notoriously tough addiction to break—so if you go from being a regular smoker one day to quitting the next day, the people around you are likely to be skeptical either that the change will stick or that you had much of a smoking habit to begin with.
However, as we’ll see, change doesn’t have to take a long time, and you don’t gain anything by prolonging your change—in fact, the opposite may be true, because procrastination delays achieving the goal of change you’ve set for yourself.
In reality, it takes just one action to initiate a change, and transformation can happen in an instant—you just have to commit to the change and do it. However, you must put in sustained effort to make that instant change last. In fact, you must condition yourself to make lasting changes to your thoughts and behaviors by making a change, reinforcing it, and then training your nervous system to maintain it. The conditioning process requires that you adopt certain beliefs:
Once you have the beliefs to support your change, follow the six steps of NAC to condition your change.
The first step to creating a positive change is to decide exactly what you want, which gives you a destination and a direction. The more specific you are about what you want to do, the clearer you’ll be on your destination, and the better your chances are of reaching it.
Be sure to frame your destination in a positive light: in other words, in terms of what you do want. When it’s time to make a change, people often focus on what they don’t want instead. However, that way of thinking leads to getting even more of what you don’t want.
Additionally, figure out what’s standing between you and your goal. The reason you haven’t made this change already is that you’re associating more pain with making the change—or with the unknown that comes with change—than with maintaining the status quo. Identify what pain you’re associating with the change, and then use the NAC process to eliminate that pain association so that you can reach your goal.
Once you know what change you want to make, create a sense of urgency about making it. Often, people don’t make the changes they want to because they continually delay them. They know that the change would improve their lives, but they don’t muster up the motivation to actually do it.
This lack of motivation often occurs because people have mixed emotions about change: They associate both pain and pleasure with it. Sometimes those mixed emotions come from a secondary gain, which is an often-subconscious association of pleasure with the bad behavior you want to change. For example, a smoker who wants to quit may associate pleasure with the thought of better health and the savings from not buying cigarettes, but she may also associate pleasure with the social aspects of smoking. These mixed associations prevent you from committing your full focus and energy to making the change.
If you’re struggling to get enough motivation to make a change now, due to a secondary gain or something else, you need psychological leverage. Psychological leverage is a tool that makes the heavy burden of change more achievable, just as physical levers are used to lift heavy items. You gain this leverage when you reach the pain threshold, where the pain associated with continuing your behavior finally outweighs the pain of change. This is the moment when you feel you just can’t take it anymore, and that feeling gives you the motivation to finally take action.
You can have external leverage, when someone or something pushes you to make a change—for example, when your spouse nags you to stop smoking or your doctor implores you to lose weight. However, you’re more likely to push back and rebel if someone else is pressuring you to change.
By contrast, the most effective leverage is internal leverage, when you’re motivated to make the change for yourself. One way to gain internal leverage is by realizing that the behavior you want to change contradicts your personal standards, values, and principles. Realizing that you’ve failed to act in a way that honors your standards and your identity causes a lot of pain, which in turn creates a strong motivation to change. Gain insight into whether your behavior is undermining your principles by asking self-reflective questions, such as “How does this specific behavior support these specific values?” and “What kinds of actions support this specific value?”
If you have a behavior or emotional pattern you want to change, first, go through Step 1 and identify what you want and why you haven’t achieved it yet. Then, create motivating leverage by asking yourself:
Next, ask yourself questions that reinforce the pleasure you’ll gain from making the change, such as:
Once you know what you want to change and have gained the motivation to do it, refine your approach to creating change. If you’ve continually seen the same results in your life, despite your desires and efforts to change things, it’s probably because you’ve developed patterns of thinking that cause you to consistently focus on the same things—things that aren’t helping you to change. Given the power of your thoughts on your decision-making and actions, your unwanted behavior will continue until you change your pattern of thinking. Even if you gain leverage to make changes, your efforts won’t be effective until you’ve addressed this root issue.
To truly create change in your life, interrupt your old patterns of thinking by doing something unexpected and totally different than previously. For example, to interrupt a pattern of lashing out at coworkers when you’re stressed, the next time you feel that way, stand up and yell something silly and ridiculous. The sudden outburst and change in mood will snap you out of your usual pattern of yelling at other people. Create the disruption in the middle of the pattern—before the pattern reaches its usually destructive conclusion—and consistently disrupt the pattern every time you start slipping into it. Over time, these disruptions will distort and weaken the neural pathways responsible for your old pattern of behavior.
Patterns of thoughts and behavior arise not only during experiences, but also when you’re remembering certain events. Sometimes you may replay negative thought patterns and obsess over past experiences, which intensifies your negative emotions about the situation you’re recalling.
Although you can’t change what you’ve already experienced, you can change how you feel about what happened by scrambling the memory to disrupt the pattern. Since a memory is a bundle of sensations you recall from an experience—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings recorded in your brain—scrambling certain sensations distorts the memory, causing you to feel differently about it.
To practice this, think of an incident that frustrates, saddens, or angers you. Then, follow the first few steps of NAC by asking yourself:
Next, scramble the sensations you associate with the memory:
As you practice this, your old, negative neural pattern will weaken, making it easier to replace with a new, empowering pattern. When you stop using your old pathway, it will weaken and its influence over you will diminish. This method can work for memories of negative incidents that happened yesterday or years ago.
Once you break your old, negative pattern, you need an empowering pattern to replace it with. Your new pattern should still produce the pleasure you got from your old behavior, without any of the negative side effects. For example, if you want to quit smoking but enjoy the social aspect of the habit, develop a new habit of writing check-in letters or emails to friends instead. If you don’t have a positive alternative to your old behavior, the change won’t last and you’ll revert to your old pattern or to a new, negative one. (For example, sometimes when people quit smoking, they gain weight because they replace their habit of smoking with eating.)
Research proves that having a new habit to replace the old one increases the likelihood that the change will be long-lasting. One study evaluated how successful three groups of drug users were in kicking their habits:
Once you’ve replaced your old pattern with a new one, condition the new behavior to reinforce it so that it endures long-term. Reinforcement makes the difference between a change that eventually becomes automatic and one that ultimately fades. There are two kinds of reinforcement:
Use positive reinforcement to cement your new pattern by creating a reward system. Determine goals or milestones that you’ll reach quickly as a result of your new pattern, and reward yourself as soon as you hit one. For example, if your goal is to work out every day, reward yourself after your first workout. Reinforce the behavior early and often, and you’ll quickly strengthen the pleasure association with your new pattern.
The positive reinforcement must happen immediately after the behavior, so that you link the pleasure association to the pattern. Additionally, the consistency of the reinforcement impacts its effectiveness:
1) Varied or intermittent reinforcement is the most effective way to encourage consistent effort. If you never know when you’re going to be rewarded for your performance, you’re more likely to keep your effort high so that you’re always deserving of a potential reward. For this reason, when you try to break a habit but allow yourself to indulge every once in a while, you’re actually reinforcing the habit you’re trying to break because you are intermittently enjoying the pleasure you get from that habit. (Shortform note: To read about how social media companies use intermittent rewards to keep people hooked on their sites, read our summary of Digital Minimalism.)
2) A jackpot—when an intermittent reward is occasionally much larger than usual—is an even stronger method of intermittent reinforcement, because it builds the anticipation for the possibility of a big prize. This can also be used to jump-start performance with someone who’s not motivated to do anything to earn a reward. Give her a jackpot for no reason, and the unexpected reward may be enough to spark her motivation to start acting in hopes of earning another reward.
3) Scheduled reinforcement (for example, being rewarded every fourth time you implement the positive behavior) is less effective, because you come to expect the reward and the pleasure loses its luster.
Reinforce your new response by playing it out in your head over and over to strengthen the neural pathways. When you imagine something with a lot of emotional intensity, your brain reacts the same way it would if you were actually experiencing what you imagine; in other words, rehearsing the new pattern in your head repeatedly is the same to your brain as doing the new behavior over and over.
Companies often employ different forms of reinforcement to motivate employees, with mixed results:
Optimize workers’ performance using the principles of intermittent reinforcement, through unexpected rewards, bonuses, promotions, and other forms of recognition. If employees know that they’re often rewarded for good work, but that those rewards are unpredictable, then they’ll consistently work hard in an effort to earn a reward.
Through the first five steps of Neuro-Associative Conditioning, you’ve successfully made a change and conditioned yourself to make the new behavior consistent. The final step of the process is to ensure that the change will last in the future.
To do this, make sure that the changes you’ve made have strongly changed your associations and will also fit your lifestyle, principles, and beliefs:
If your old response surfaces as you’re future pacing, go back through the first five steps of NAC:
Take the first steps toward correcting negative associations that are holding you back.
What is one thing that would improve your quality of life, but that you’ve been putting off implementing? Why have you been putting it off?
What pain do you associate with implementing this change? (Even if the pain is as simple as making time in your busy day, identifying this will give you insight into what obstacle has been preventing your progress.)
What pleasure have you experienced from not changing your behavior? (Often, we put off change not just to avoid pain, but also because we get some pleasure from your current behavioral pattern. For example, some smokers are reluctant to quit because they enjoy the social aspect of cigarette breaks. The only way to truly reform is to find a way to still feel this pleasure from more positive behaviors.)
What are the negative consequences of not correcting your behavior? How does contemplating these consequences make you feel? (Exploring the negative emotions you’ll feel if you continue your bad habits is critical in pushing you to change them.)
List all the short-term and long-term benefits you’ll gain if, right now, you implement the change you’ve been putting off.
We’ve discussed several ways in which neuro-associations shape your life, such as impacting your decision-making, establishing bad habits, and causing self-sabotaging behavior. Additionally, your neuro-associations are strongly tied to your beliefs—and your beliefs dictate how you interpret and react to your life experiences. Empowering beliefs help you reach your goals and navigate life in a positive way, while disempowering beliefs perpetuate negative thoughts and harmful behavior. In this chapter, we’ll discuss:
Your beliefs lead from and to your neuro-associations: Your collective pain and pleasure neuro-associations form your beliefs, which then influence your behavior, while also reinforcing those neuro-associations. Here’s how it works, along with an example to illustrate the circular relationship between neuro-associations and beliefs:
While your generalizations about neuro-associations form your beliefs, your sense of certainty in those beliefs strengthens them. Without your certainty, a belief is merely an idea that holds little power over you. Your sense of certainty in a belief is based on the experiences that you’ve interpreted as evidence—or references—to support the belief. For example, if you believe that you can do anything, your references may be your past achievements.
There are different types of references, some of which are stronger than others. We’ll discuss references in detail in Part 2 of the summary, but for now, here’s a brief overview of the different types of references you may have:
When you combine an idea and your certainty, the results are powerful: Your certainty doesn’t make an idea more or less true, but it does affect whether you tap into the resources to turn that idea into reality. For example, if you believe that you can achieve anything, then you’ll be more motivated to work hard and make it happen. By contrast, if you didn’t believe that you could achieve anything, then why would you waste your effort on trying?
Your beliefs are so powerful that they can actually influence your physiological responses to events. In one experiment that illustrates this, 100 medical students were given either a red or a blue pill. They were told that the red pill was a stimulant and that the blue pill was a depressant. In reality, the pills each contained chemicals that did the opposite—the red was a depressant and the blue was a stimulant—but the students’ expectations overrode the actual chemical reactions in their bodies, and they had physical reactions that aligned with their false beliefs of what the pills would do.
There are three categories of beliefs—opinions, beliefs, and convictions. Each category affects your behavior in a different way:
There are two important distinctions between a conviction and a belief:
While negative convictions can doom you to a pattern of destructive behavior, positive convictions can be the key to achieving at high levels. Since convictions push you to take action, they motivate you to persevere through obstacles to reach your ultimate goal. For example, a conviction that you’ll finish your undergraduate degree within four years will push you to carry on through tough classes and busy semesters. To turn a positive belief into a conviction:
Some of your beliefs pertain only to certain areas of your life—for example, perhaps you believe in your ability as a skilled pianist, but you believe that you’re incompetent as a cook. This is a specific belief. By contrast, some beliefs are global, meaning that you overgeneralize and believe that you’re either skilled or incompetent in everything you do. Global beliefs are often phrased with the declarative verb “is,” “am,” or “are,” as in “People are good at heart.”
Whether or not they’re measurably true, people accept their beliefs as facts. Considering this, global beliefs can be powerful forces for positivity or negativity: A single negative global belief can be destructive. On the other hand, one positive global belief, or a positive change to a formerly negative belief, can be hugely empowering.
Sometimes, as your brain is generalizing and creating beliefs about a difficult, complex experience—for instance, a failure—it oversimplifies the experience and comes to a false conclusion. This creates a limiting belief: a false, overly simplistic negative belief that holds you back from doing things that you want to do and that would benefit you.
For example, if you’re trying to start a business and you’ve failed at your first few attempts, your generalization may lead you to believe that you’ll always fail as an entrepreneur because you’re just not cut out for it. This belief doesn’t take into account the fact that entrepreneurs often fail before they succeed and that many goals can only be achieved after several failures, which provide the lessons necessary to ultimately succeed. Instead, your generalization focuses on the pain you’ve felt through your multiple failures, and it creates this limiting belief to deter you from trying and potentially failing again to protect you from more pain in the future.
Limiting beliefs can become self-fulfilling prophecies, as they inform your decisions, which dictate your actions, which shape your future. For example, your limiting belief about your potential as an entrepreneur could prevent you from trying again to launch your startup, which means you’ll never realize your dream of owning your own business.
To break your limiting beliefs and pursue your goals despite your past failures, rely more heavily on references of imagination rather than experience. In other words, instead of basing your beliefs on experience-based references that provide evidence of you failing, focus on imagination-based references and vividly envision yourself accomplishing your goal.
A potent and pervasive form of limiting belief is learned helplessness. Learned helplessness results from generalizing one or more failures into a global belief about your incompetence: You believe that nothing you could possibly do would make a positive difference. People who suffer from learned helplessness quickly give up when they face challenges because they assume they’ll fail, which prevents them from ever having the chance to succeed. Conversely, optimistic, high-achieving people find ways to overcome failure.
Psychologist Martin Seligman has extensively studied learned helplessness and has identified three patterns of belief that support it:
The helplessness-driven beliefs are toxic, and their harmful effects compound when combined. If you face a challenge and perceive it to be both permanent and pervasive, the prospect of a better future looks bleak.
Begin to break the mindset of learned helplessness by finding something in your life that you can control, and then taking action to control it. The act of taking control of something in your life—instead of succumbing to helplessness—proves your power and efficacy and shows that you can make a positive difference. This can create momentum for further success and provide a reference for a more empowering belief.
Now that you’ve learned about the different types of beliefs, it’s time to use that knowledge to assess and change your own beliefs to improve your life. Take control of your life by ensuring that all of your beliefs empower you to reach your goals.
First, notice what your beliefs are. Although they influence just about everything you do, most people aren’t consciously aware of their beliefs. In fact, since our beliefs come from our brains’ attempts to generalize our experiences, we generally adopt beliefs subconsciously without ever evaluating them.
This can create problems when our beliefs are limiting or when they’re based on our brains’ misinterpretations of events (such as the entrepreneur falsely attributing her failures to her incompetence instead of external factors). Once we adopt beliefs, we seldom question them, which means that we can carry around self-destructive beliefs that impede us from reaching our dreams—and we may never even realize it. This is why it’s critical to take a full inventory of your beliefs.
Second, as you evaluate your beliefs, take note of the references upholding them. Many people form beliefs based on the mere fact that other people hold the same beliefs. However, assuming that something is accurate because other people believe it to be—a phenomenon called “social proof”—is dangerous and limiting because it prevents you from surpassing the status quo and living to your full potential. For example, everyone believed it was impossible to run a mile in under four minutes—until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. Bannister refused the social proof and broke the record, and, as soon as he did, scores of other runners were suddenly able to do the same.
If you want to reach your greatest potential, you’ll have to hold beliefs and convictions that are uncommon and even contrary to popular belief. Find someone who’s living the way you want to live. Ask this person what she believes that sets her apart from others so that you can adopt the beliefs that made her successful.
Finally, use the six steps of Neuro-Associative Conditioning (NAC) to recondition yourself to release disempowering beliefs and adopt empowering ones.
With the knowledge that beliefs you probably didn’t even realize you had are impacting your life every day, follow these steps to take stock of these beliefs. Hold onto the beliefs that are helping you, and change the ones that are holding you back.
First, spend 10 minutes writing a list of all of your beliefs, both empowering and disempowering. Be sure to include:
Second, look over your list and circle the three beliefs that are most empowering. Commit to strengthening these beliefs, and use the strategies we discussed earlier in this chapter to turn those beliefs into convictions.
Third, circle the two beliefs that are most disempowering. Think of the consequences that you suffer due to holding these beliefs. Vow to let go of these beliefs, and begin by asking yourself questions to dismantle them, including:
Consider the answers to these questions, and link severe pain with these disempowering beliefs.
Finally, write down new, empowering beliefs to replace each of the disempowering beliefs. Think of the references you have to support these new beliefs, and commit to strengthening them through your actions.
In the future, if you feel that disempowering beliefs may be holding you back, uncover the culprit by asking yourself what belief would cause you to behave the way you are. For example, if you’re feeling discouraged, you may realize that believing that you don’t have what it takes would make you feel that way. Identify this belief, and then consciously reject it. Then, create a new, more positive belief by working backward: Consider the results you want, and ask yourself what you’d have to believe in order to achieve that.
Use the techniques from this chapter to replace a disempowering belief with an empowering one.
Describe one behavior you feel you should stop doing. Why do you want to abandon it?
Think backward: What belief must you have that is causing you to behave in this way? Where did you get this belief?
What is the price of holding onto this belief? For example, how is it harming your emotional, spiritual, professional, or financial life?
Describe an empowering belief that you can adopt to replace the old, disempowering one.
We’ve talked about how to alter your neuro-associations to change your beliefs and behaviors—but what about changing your emotions?
Although many people mistakenly think that emotions happen to them, emotions are actually the product of your mental-emotional-physiological state, which is determined by how you position your body (your physiology) and what you choose to focus on. Thus, learning how to control your focus and physiology empowers you to manage your state, which enables you to feel whatever emotions you want, whenever you want.
Since your emotions impact your actions, controlling your emotional state empowers you to promote the behaviors you want to sustain to improve your life. For instance, remaining calm in a situation that would have previously made you angry enables you to make clear-headed, constructive decisions instead of reactive, potentially damaging ones.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to control your state and always feel the way you want by:
To learn how to control our mental-emotional-physiological states, we need to explore the factors that influence our states in the first place. As mentioned, your physiology—your posture, facial expressions, breathing, and gestures—and the things you focus on both determine your state.
Most people develop physiological and mental patterns that consistently produce the same states. For example, if you have a habit of hanging your head down and dwelling on thoughts about your failures, you will habitually feel disheartened and depressed; as we know from our discussion of how habits are wired into the brain, the neural pathways for these postures, thoughts, and emotions become well-trodden, reinforcing the patterns.
Developing these patterns creates two consequences:
Let’s explore how to break out of these patterns by changing your physiology and your focus.
First, develop patterns of physical states and movements that support a happy, powerful, strong emotional state. For example, if you’re standing tall and breathing deeply, you’ll feel more confident than if you have your shoulders slumped and your eyes down.
To get started, try this exercise for the next seven days: Five times a day, spend one minute giving yourself a huge smile in the mirror. Each time you do, your smile will strengthen your neural pathway for happiness. Go a step further by also making yourself laugh three times a day.
In addition to adopting empowering physical patterns, make a habit of focusing on the positive aspects of your experiences. Your focus dictates how you view reality: Whatever you choose to focus on determines how you experience things and what emotions you feel. Therefore, if you focus on negative things, such as sad memories or future problems, you’ll feel negative, too. But, if you focus on positive things—like happy memories, or the good things about your present situation—you’ll feel positive.
Think of your focus as a camera lens and reality as a party: Your camera can only capture one small piece of the whole scene. If the camera focuses on a couple arguing at the party, it gives the impression that the party is full of conflict, but if you focus on a group of friends dancing and laughing, it makes it seem like the party is fun and lively.
Your focus not only affects your interpretation of events, but also impacts your ability to overcome challenges. When you focus on the outcome you want, you will move toward it and increase your chances of reaching it. By contrast, when you focus on a problem or something that you’re afraid could happen, you’re more likely to manifest it—and if it comes to fruition, you’ll have wasted your time worrying about the potential problem instead of coming up with a potential solution. Similarly, when you’re driving a car, you subconsciously turn the steering wheel toward whatever you focus on, whether that’s the road ahead or the guard rail.
Now that you know the positive effects of shifting your focus, let’s discuss several strategies for doing so. First, we’ll explore how to change your focus by manipulating the way you interpret your physical sensations. Then, in the next two chapters, we’ll talk about how to direct your focus through language—specifically, the questions you ask yourself and the words and metaphors you habitually use.
The power of focus isn’t just about what you focus on, but also how you focus using your different senses. You experience everything through your five senses, but sight, sound, or touch impact some people’s emotional experiences more strongly than others. Whichever sense is most influential for you is your modality.
The details within each modality—such as brightness for a visual modality or loudness for an auditory modality—are called submodalities. You have unique positive or negative associations with various submodalities, and when those submodalities are present, they make you perceive that experience more positively or negatively; in other words, if you have positive associations with brightness, you’ll feel more positively about a meeting in a well-lit conference room than a dim one. You can manipulate your submodalities to positively alter your feelings about your experiences.
For example, if you have an auditory modality and you envision a stressful work meeting you had this morning, submodalities such as the speed at which you recall people talking and the pitches of their voices impact the emotions tied to that memory. (This doesn’t just apply to memories but also to future experiences that you’re anticipating.) As we’ll explain, you can replay a version of that memory that alters those submodalities, thereby changing your feelings about it.
First, let’s talk about how to identify your dominant modality. Then we’ll discuss how to manipulate your submodalities to alter your feelings about an experience.
The first step in using your modality to influence your emotions is to actually identify what your modality is. Become attuned to which modalities are most powerful for you so that you can understand how they’re affecting your experiences and learn how to manipulate your submodalities to achieve the outcomes you want.
If you have a visual modality, the intensity of your experience will be affected by submodalities such as brightness, color, distance, movement, and size. Additionally, you may say things like:
If you have an auditory modality, the intensity of your experience will be affected by submodalities such as pitch, tempo, tonality, and volume. You may use phrases like:
(Shortform note: If you have a kinesthetic modality, the intensity of your experience will be affected by submodalities such as balance, pressure, temperature, texture, and weight.) You may use phrases like:
Once you know which modality is most powerful for you, determine how the submodalities affect you, and then adjust them strategically to alter your feelings about an experience. Changing your emotions about an experience could change your ability to take action, enabling you to make measurable improvements in your life. For example, if you have chores to do and a visual modality, build your motivation by envisioning a bright, vibrantly colored image of you completing those tasks.
First, use this exercise to create a identify which submodalities resonate most with you:
Visual submodalities include:
Auditory submodalities include:
Kinesthetic submodalities include:
After you’ve run your memory through the various submodalities and noticed which changes raised or lowered your enjoyment, you’ll know how different submodalities affect you. Next, use this knowledge to change your emotions and, by extension, behavior. For instance, if you discover that turning your memory from fast-paced to a slow tempo raises your enjoyment, then when you think of a task you’ve been avoiding, imagine yourself doing it in slow motion. This will cause you to associate more pleasure with the prospect of doing the task, which will make you more likely to complete it.
Brainstorm actions you can take to change your state anytime you want.
List all of the emotions you experienced today, and the situations that triggered those emotions.
List an emotion you’d like to regularly experience that you didn’t today.
What kinds of postures, gestures, and other physical means can you use to bring on the emotion you want to incorporate into your daily life? (For example, if you want to feel more joy, make a point of smiling and laughing more often.)
How can you manipulate your submodalities to elicit that emotion? (For instance, if you want to feel more joy, and you have a visual modality and positive associations with light, you may benefit from making your workspace brighter with an additional lamp.)
In the last chapter, we talked about the importance of altering your state by shifting your focus to positive things, and we discussed how to do that by manipulating your physical position and submodalities. In this chapter, we’ll explore more strategies to control your focus through the questions you ask yourself. Specifically, we’ll discuss:
The first strategy for using language to direct your focus is to be mindful of the types of questions you ask yourself. The questions you ask yourself set the tone for your thought patterns, so it’s critical to make a habit of asking yourself positive, empowering questions that will lead to empowering thoughts.
Thinking is merely a sequence of asking and answering questions—in other words, virtually every thought you have is preceded by a question, even if it’s not one you consciously asked. Some questions are straightforward ways of evaluating your environment, like asking what made a noise. Other questions interpret your circumstances subjectively, and the answers you come up with strongly influence your emotional state.
Everyone has a set of subjective habitual questions or types of questions that they ask themselves regularly. Since your habitual questions create your thought patterns, and thoughts determine your behavior, if you consistently ask yourself disempowering questions, you will feel worse and you do less to improve your life. You can change your life by becoming aware of your habitual questions and changing those that are disempowering. Disempowering questions include:
By contrast, questions like these will promote more empowered thinking:
For example, imagine you’ve tried and failed to skateboard three times in a row. In this situation, you can ask yourself two different questions that both attempt to diagnose the problem, but which will elicit two distinct answers:
Questions are such a powerful force to change your mental and emotional state because answering an empowering question requires you to come up with empowering references to support your answer. Let’s look at the process step by step:
The same process occurs when you ask yourself disempowering questions, so it’s critical that you start with empowering questions so that you create a positive cycle instead of a negative one. For instance, imagine you’re feeling down. Let’s look at how an empowering question and a disempowering question would each take you down a different mental and emotional path:
Be conscious not only of the questions you ask yourself, but also of the way they’re worded and what they assume or cause you to ignore. Some questions include a presupposition, or an assumption that’s built into the question and, thus, the answer. For example, if you ask yourself, “Why do I always choose the wrong partner?” then your question has made your consistent poor romantic choices a fact without ever stopping to consider whether that’s even true. As a result, your answer will provide evidence for this supposed fact, reinforcing the belief and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Additionally, the questions others ask you can also contain presuppositions. Be aware of how questions are phrased before accepting the question as fact or framing your answer around it.
Now that you know how powerfully your internal questions impact your state, it’s time to take stock of your own habitual questions and condition yourself to ask empowering questions. In order to seize your power and control your questions, use the NAC steps, which are (briefly):
Let’s elaborate on the fifth step of NAC: Creating new, empowering questions to replace old, disempowering ones. First, we’ll look at questions you can ask yourself daily to maintain a positive, empowered mindset.
Each morning, ask yourself a series of questions to set the tone for your pattern of thinking for the day. For each of the questions, think of two or three answers, elaborate on how it makes you feel, and specify why you feel that way. If you struggle to come up with an answer to any question, add “could” to the question—for example, if you can’t think of anything that makes you happy, try to come up with an answer for “What could make me happy?”
The Morning Power Questions include:
Also consider asking yourself questions each evening that help you reflect on your day and find empowerment in your experiences. When you make a habit of asking these questions, they’ll begin to shape your experiences. For example, if you always ask yourself what you’ve learned each day, you’ll start going through your days looking for things you can learn.
The Evening Power Questions include:
Customize these questions and add questions to fit you and your life. If you ask yourself these questions every day, they will become habitual, and they will shape your thinking, beliefs, and behavior.
It’s one thing to ask yourself empowering questions under normal circumstances, but it can be difficult to keep that mindset when you’re facing challenges. However, the questions you ask yourself when you come up against obstacles are critical to helping you overcome those challenges. Consider these five questions any time you’re dealing with a problem:
Besides questions that work toward a solution, you can also ask empowering questions that simply put you in a more positive state of mind, such as “What am I (or could I be) happy about in my life?” and “What can I learn from this problem?” When you’re in a more empowered state, you’ll be better able to identify resources and come up with a solution.
Still, questions aren’t magic spells that effortlessly produce answers—merely reciting the words may not be enough. When you ask yourself questions, ask with the certainty that you’ll come up with an answer. You may even have to ask repeatedly; as long as you maintain confidence and conviction that you’ll find the answer, the question will keep your mindset on track as you search for a solution.
Just as your questions have the power to determine your state, beliefs, and behavior, so do your words and metaphors—and, like questions, you have a pool of habitual words and metaphors that you use heavily in your daily conversations and internal monologues. Make sure your habitual vocabulary is full of empowering words and metaphors to promote empowering thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss:
The words you choose to describe an event influence how you experience that event. For example, is your vacation fun or is it magical? Is the conference bustling or chaotic? The words you use determine the lens through which you view that experience.
Expanding on that, the words you habitually use—those that you use heavily in your daily conversations and internal monologues—influence how you experience life day after day. Think of it this way: Your body constantly relays sensations to your brain—through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. When your brain receives these sensations, it has to assign a label (a word) to each feeling in order to make sense of them. Rather than taking the time and mental energy to find the right word to precisely describe each sensation, your brain develops a habitual vocabulary to pull from quickly. If your habitual vocabulary is full of empowering words, you’ll constantly use words that color your experiences in a positive way. You’ll promote empowering thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
One way to use words to shape your experiences in a positive way is to use “Transformational Vocabulary.” This involves strategically replacing certain words that you use to change your emotional reaction to situations and events. There are two ways to use Transformational Vocabulary:
In addition to populating your habitual vocabulary with empowering words, aim to expand your vocabulary. Since the words you use shape your experiences, having only a limited vocabulary to describe your feelings narrows the scope and richness of your emotions and life, restricting your ability to feel and express emotions. In fact, one study noted that prison inmates often expressed their pain through physical violence because they lacked the vocabulary to describe their emotions.
The words you use shape not only your own experience, but also the experiences of the people around you; therefore, being mindful of the words you use when speaking to others can make your interactions more positive and productive. Imagine that you run into a problem at home and approach your spouse to come up with a solution. If you start by saying, “I’m worried about this,” your spouse is more likely to have a heightened emotional response, and she may even get defensive about the situation, which is counterproductive to finding a resolution. By contrast, if you say, “I’m a little bit concerned about this and want to talk about how we can fix it,” this brings down your emotional intensity and allows your spouse to react from a position of empowerment, which helps you both reach a resolution.
Your words have a particularly powerful impact on your children. Your words communicate to your children whether you attribute their successes and failures to how they’re acting or who they are. When your child makes a mistake or misbehaves, calling her clumsy or disobedient frames the child’s behavior as a character trait, which can damage her sense of identity and self-worth. Instead, tell your child that you’re getting “a little” (softener) “peeved” (less intense word) with her behavior, and ask to talk it over together.
A final word of caution on the way words impact interactions and relationships: People are inclined to adopt the words—and accompanying behaviors—that people around them frequently use. As such, be cautious not to pick up negative words from others.
Use the information we’ve discussed to begin reforming your habitual vocabulary to optimize your life. First, let’s work toward eliminating disempowering words:
Next, repeat the process by writing down three words in your habitual vocabulary that describe feeling mediocre (such as “I’m fine” and “Everything is alright”) and then brainstorm more emphatic, positive words to use instead. For example, replace “alright” with “spectacular” and “content” with “serene.” Again, use NAC to condition the change and ask your friends and family to keep you accountable.
A final strategy to use language to direct your focus is to use empowering metaphors: As powerful as words are on their own, they’re even more potent tools for empowerment or disempowerment as metaphors.
When you use a metaphor to liken your experience to something, you create an image that amplifies the power of your description. For example, when people are stressed at work they often say that they’re “struggling to stay above water.” Consider the image this metaphor evokes: gasping for air as continually rising water threatens to drown you. This imagery associates immense pain with your work. However, instead of using that disempowering metaphor, you could instead say that you’re “climbing the ladder of success,” which puts you in a more empowered position to tackle the tasks in front of you.
While there’s no question that metaphors influence how you experience life, the way that metaphors impact your outlook can depend on the context of a situation and your individual interpretation of it. As you evaluate and work to change your habitual metaphors, it’s important to understand several nuances so that you can use metaphors to their maximum positive effect.
First, many metaphors carry implicit, limiting beliefs—even those that don’t appear to be disempowering on the surface. For example, physicists used to use the solar system as a metaphor for atoms, but the metaphor turned out to be limiting because it didn’t represent the full reality of how atoms behave. The planets’ orbits around the sun represented the way that electrons revolve around the atom’s nucleus, but while planets remain nearly equidistant to the sun throughout their orbits, electrons get closer and farther as they revolve around the nucleus. The analogy had caused scientists to subconsciously assume that electrons behaved like planets, and they didn’t discover that electrons move closer and farther in their orbits until they stopped using the solar system metaphor.
The good news is that you can help safeguard against implicit, limiting beliefs by using multiple metaphors to describe the same thing. Just as expanding your habitual vocabulary broadens your emotional experiences, using multiple metaphors expands your understanding of the thing you’re using the metaphor to describe. Those additional metaphors dilute the effect of one metaphor’s limiting belief. For instance, if the scientists had multiple metaphors for atoms, then the limiting beliefs of this one metaphor wouldn’t have had such a powerful effect.
Second, a metaphor’s meaning depends on your interpretation. For example, two people can use the metaphor that “Life is a game,” and the way each one interprets the word “game” will dictate how they approach life: One may take it to mean that life is fun while the other thinks that life is competitive.
Third, metaphors about the nature of life on the whole—called global metaphors—have potent effects. Global metaphors color how you interpret everything, and that makes them particularly powerful. For instance, if you use a metaphor like “Life is a battle,” then you’ll automatically adopt combative beliefs and behaviors to accompany such an outlook. By the same token, making a single change to a global metaphor can have life-changing effects. If you replace “battle” with “challenge,” it can shift your approach to life so that instead of fighting your way through, you’re rising to meet the challenge.
Finally, some metaphors are helpful in some contexts and harmful in others. For example, a metaphor that serves you well at work could cause problems at home. Successful auditors know that the devil is in the details. However, when they come home, this mindset may cause them to nitpick their spouses and children, creating problems in their relationships.
To improve the way you experience life, there are several strategies you can use to adjust your habitual metaphors:
Now, take stock of your habitual metaphors:
Evaluate and reform your habitual language to empower yourself.
Think of the last problem you faced, big or small (this could even be discovering that you’re out of milk after pouring a bowl of cereal). What’s the first question that comes to mind when you think of that problem? (For example, “Why does my roommate never take the initiative to replace things when they run out?”)
What is a more empowering question you can ask yourself instead? (For instance, “How can my roommate and I work out a system to let each other know when things run out?”)
Still thinking about this recent problem, what word would you use to describe how it made you feel?
How could you use Transformational Vocabulary to rephrase that feeling and reduce its impact on you? (For example, instead of “irritated” you could say that you were “a bit ruffled.”)
As we’ve learned, you can use various techniques to control your emotions instead of allowing them to be dictated by external stimuli. However, sometimes, in order to shift your emotions, you first need to learn from them. Emotions provide feedback on your actions: Positive emotions let you know that you’re doing something right, and negative emotions signal that you need to alter something. For this reason, negative emotions—or “action signals”—are actually invaluable, because they guide you to the life you want, if you know how to use them.
In this chapter, we’ll:
Although using and learning from your emotions is the most effective way to maintain mental and emotional well-being, most people instead respond to their emotions in one of three disempowering ways. Let’s discuss each of these methods, so you can understand and reject them:
Method #1: Avoidance
People who fear certain emotions often avoid situations that risk triggering those emotions, or have a general rule of trying to avoid all emotions. For example, people who fear rejection often either avoid serious relationships or try to suppress their emotions when they are in relationships.
Problem: When people avoid scary emotions, they miss out on the meaningful experiences that accompany them, such as love and intimacy.
Method #2: Denial
People sometimes refuse to accept that an emotion exists. They insist that they’re fine and attempt to dissociate from the emotion. However, their thoughts and questions continue to focus on the emotion.
Problem: If you try to suppress your emotions, they become increasingly intense until you finally acknowledge them. In other words, pretending there’s no problem makes the problem grow until it’s too big to ignore.
Method #3: Internalization
Sometimes people give up trying to avoid or deny their difficult feelings and instead make the emotions part of their identity. They use their negative feelings to one-up everyone else’s misfortunes, and they find a sense of pride in perpetually enduring such difficulties.
Problem: When people identify with their negative emotions, they become trapped in them. If being unhappy is part of your identity, then it feels like you can’t become happy without losing your sense of self. This mentality leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy because you must remain unhappy in order to be who (you think) you are.
People try to avoid and deny their negative emotions because feeling those emotions is unpleasant. But negative emotions arise to let you know that something you’re doing is causing you pain, and that you need to change some aspect of your approach. Therefore, it’s important to listen to these emotions and process them in a healthy way.
As you evaluate and resolve your own negative emotions, you’ll often find their source in your perceptions, your communication, or your actions:
Let’s look at a step-by-step approach to handle painful emotions. The following six steps of emotional mastery explain how to break your limiting emotional patterns, find the useful lessons behind your painful emotions, and carry those lessons into the future so you don’t have to learn them again. Try to use these steps as soon as you feel an unpleasant emotion coming on, before the emotion gains strength and momentum. The more you use this process, the more adept you’ll become at managing and learning from all of your emotions.
The first step in dealing with your emotions is to identify what you’re feeling. When you have painful emotions—such as loneliness, anger, or resentment—you may feel so overwhelmed by them that you can’t distinguish what, precisely, the emotion you’re feeling is. However, it’s important to put a name to the emotion because identifying your pain immediately lessens its sting.
Additionally, in the process of identifying your emotion, you may realize that your pain is rooted in something that wasn’t immediately apparent to you. For example, imagine that your best friend moved out of state last month and has been too busy to catch up over the phone. You may initially feel rejected by your friend and hurt that she hasn’t made time for you. However, if you stop and reflect on that feeling, you might realize that you’re actually feeling sad about her leaving and a sense of separation due to the move. This insight can help you have a more empowered response in which you:
Once you’ve identified your emotion, recognize that it is serving a helpful purpose: It’s meant to guide you toward happiness. Resist the urge to label an emotion as “bad” or “wrong,” and instead embrace all emotions as helpful feedback. When you acknowledge and appreciate your painful emotion, it often becomes less intense.
With the knowledge that your emotion is a signal, reflect on what that signal could be telling you. This response changes your focus from feeling that emotion to investigating it, which:
When you feel a negative emotion, consider what you might learn from it. Do you need to alter the beliefs that are causing you to feel this way? Do you need to take a different action in the situation that’s making you feel this way? How can you prevent this feeling from returning in the future? Investigate your emotions by asking yourself these questions:
Later in this chapter, we’ll explain the meanings of various “action signals,” which you can use to help decode your negative emotions.
Remind yourself that you will get to the other side of this painful emotion. Think of another time you’ve felt this way, and use that memory as a reminder that you eventually got over the feeling. Furthermore, reflect on the strategies you used to handle this emotion in the past, such as talking to a friend, changing your focus, or journaling. Consider using those same strategies to deal with the emotion now.
As you work through this difficult emotion, use this success as a reference for your ability to handle it so that next time, you know what to do and you know that you can do it. Take some steps to reinforce what you’re learning through this experience:
Now that you’ve worked through this emotion today and also made a plan for getting through it in the future, pat yourself on the back. Next, take an action that proves that you’ve learned from and resolved your painful emotion. (Shortform example: If you were previously feeling rejected by your friend who moved away, but you’ve worked through your feeling of rejection and you now recognize that your friendship will simply have to function differently now, you could buy your friend a housewarming gift, such as a framed photo of the two of you.)
You can shortcut the six-step process above if you already know what your emotion is signaling. This section is a cheat sheet: Nearly every painful feeling is a form of one of the following emotions (or a combination of them), and understanding what the emotion is signaling allows you to heed its message and quickly resolve the pain without needing to go through all six steps.
Read through this list multiple times, highlight the emotions that resonate most with you, and jot down their messages and solutions on an index card to carry with you. Learning these 10 action signals and consistently using the guidelines to address them will enable you to master your emotions.
Discomfort comes in the form of impatience, boredom, mild embarrassment, unease, or distress. These emotions let you know that something is not quite right; your perception of a situation may be skewed, or your actions may not be creating the results you want.
Solution: Although discomfort is only mildly painful, it will intensify if you don’t deal with the issue. Deal with your discomfort before it grows by:
Fear encompasses apprehension, concern, anxiety, worry, fright, and terror. The purpose of fear is to urge you to prepare to deal with a situation or prepare to change a situation. Don’t allow yourself to amplify fear by imaging the worst-case-scenarios, or to pretend the fear doesn’t exist.
Solution: Reflect on what’s causing your fear and what kind of preparation you can do to mitigate that fear. For example, if you’re dealing with stage fright because you’re about to make a big presentation at work, ensure that you’re thoroughly prepared for every aspect of the presentation to ease your fears. If you’ve done all the preparation you can and you’re still fearful, use the strategies we’ve discussed to change your focus and remind yourself that you’re well-prepared and that fears are often overblown.
When you feel hurt, it generally means that you feel a sense of loss, and that loss typically comes from an unmet expectation. For example, if you expected your friend not to tell anyone something you shared—even if you never explicitly expressed this expectation—and they shared it with someone else, you probably feel a loss of intimacy or trust.
Solution: Reevaluate the situation and the reason you’re feeling hurt:
You can feel anger through irritation, resentment, fury, or rage. Feelings of anger let you know that you or someone else has violated a rule or standard that is important to you. (We’ll talk more about rules in Chapter 13 but, briefly, they are the conditions you decide must happen in order for you to feel that something has been satisfied or fulfilled. For example, you may have a rule that in order for a relationship to be healthy and intimate, both people must divulge their deepest secrets to each other.)
Solution: Reevaluate the situation that’s angering you, similarly to the way you do when you’re hurt:
Frustration is actually a positive signal because it means that you’re within reach of something you want, but the methods you’re using to get there aren’t working. This is a sign that you need to change your approach to get what you want.
Solution: Think of frustration as a tough-but-fair coach who’s pushing you to achieve greater things. Try these strategies to use your frustration for progress:
Disappointment can feel like sadness, defeat, being let down, or feeling like you’ve missed out on something. Disappointment is similar to frustration because it’s a sign that you’re falling short of your goal—however, whereas frustration signals that your goal is achievable if you change your approach, disappointment signals that your goal is impossible to achieve.
Solution: In order to cope with disappointment, reassess your goal and your approach. There are various ways to do this:
Guilt, remorse, and regret are all in the same family of emotions. Guilt arises when you break one of the highest standards you set for yourself, and it’s meant to deter you from ever violating that standard again. Most people want to avoid guilt more than almost any other emotion, which means that it’s a powerful motivator (pain avoidance). There are three ways people react to guilt:
Solution: In order to make constructive use of your guilt, follow these steps:
Inadequacy is the feeling of being unworthy because you can’t do something that you believe you should be able to do. This emotion signals that you may not have the right tools, resources, strategies, knowledge, or confidence to perform this task.
Solution: Inadequacy often results from setting unrealistic expectations for yourself. First, evaluate whether it’s reasonable to think that you can meet the expectations you set in the first place. Second, determine whether it’s fair for you to feel bad that you couldn’t achieve these expectations. If you still feel that your expectations are reasonable, then you have two options:
If you allow yourself to believe that you’re innately and permanently inadequate, you’ll succumb to a pattern of learned helplessness. By contrast, if you recognize that you’re simply lacking an acquirable skill, then you’ll be empowered to learn and achieve your goal.
When you feel that you’re facing problems that are beyond your control and that provide no empowering lessons, you’re likely to feel overwhelmed, overloaded, depressed, aggrieved, or helpless. This means that you feel that you can’t deal with the quantity, intensity, or pace of problems coming at you—and you’re right. This emotion signals that you’re trying to deal with too much at once, and that it’s infeasible.
Solution: Since the problem is that you’re trying to do too much, the solution is to narrow your focus:
Loneliness can cause you to feel alone or somehow separate from others. This emotion signals that you need connection with other people.
Solution: Lonely people often assume that the connection they need is romantic or sexual, but seeking merely sexual connection can cause frustration and more loneliness because it doesn’t satisfy your deeper emotional needs. A better strategy is to:
If you think of your mind as a garden, the 10 action signals we just discussed are weeds: They must be addressed before they get out of hand and encroach on your flowers (positive emotions). While you address and learn from your negative emotions, be sure to also nurture your positive ones. The more you nurture your positive emotions, the better protection they provide against negative emotions.
Here are 10 common positive emotions, or “emotions of power”:
Mastering your emotions takes time, practice, and persistence. Start the process now with these two simple practices. Take note of how these practices positively affect you, and start conditioning them to become habits:
In the summary up to now, you’ve learned about the tools you need to improve your life and accomplish your dreams. Now, you need the motivation to actually start that improvement. That drive comes from developing a clear, compelling vision of your future, which you can do by setting goals. When you set ambitious goals that inspire you, you become excited to pursue them, creating motivation and momentum, even in the face of challenges.
Setting ambitious goals can be scary. Many people who have fallen short of their goals in the past are reluctant to set new ones because they’re afraid of the pain of failing again. To avoid future disappointment, these people often stop formulating clearly defined, actionable goals about what they want in their lives physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and financially—instead, their goals are merely to get by, pay bills, and survive. They don’t realize that their past failures may not be due to their personal shortcomings, but rather due to:
This chapter will teach you the importance of setting big goals, even if you’ve struggled to set or reach your goals in the past. You’ll learn:
To set goals that motivate and inspire you, they must be ambitious—even if that goal initially seems impossible. By setting a goal, you’re creating an image of a destination, and your thoughts and energy begin to naturally move toward reaching that destination (eventually making the seemingly impossible possible). As we’ve discussed, your thoughts determine what you believe to be possible and what realities materialize in your life. Thus, your potential quality of life is limited only by the goals you set and pursue: Conservative goals beget mediocre lives, while ambitious goals beget extraordinary lives. Let your imagination run wild as you dream up your ideal future.
Next, generate a motivating pressure called “eustress,” which is a positive tension that’s created when you set goals. Eustress stimulates you and pushes you toward your goals. Learning to harness this tension is the key to creating the life you want.
To have eustress, you need some dissatisfaction with your current circumstances to motivate you to work toward improvements. One way to create eustress is to announce your goals to friends who will cheer you on and keep you accountable.
After setting a goal, immediately create a plan to pursue it and start making efforts to achieve it. As you work toward your goal, maintain your enthusiasm and drive to continue. Constant, consistent effort makes the difference between people who live the lives they want and those who fall short. Change your approach as needed—for instance, if your initial approach to meeting your goal doesn’t work—but never take your eyes off your vision.
While you’re pursuing a goal, it’s important to focus hard on it. When you focus intensely on anything, a part of your brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) scans your experiences and draws your attention to anything that’s relevant to what you’re focused on. Focusing on your goal signals your RAS to notice resources and opportunities that can help you achieve that goal.
Thanks to your RAS, you don’t have to know how you’ll achieve a goal when you set it, because your RAS will help you find the resources. All you have to do is to focus intently on your goal, dedicate consistent effort to it, and trust your RAS to reveal a way to achieve it.
When you work hard to pursue a goal, it can be disappointing when you don’t reach it—but there are two reasons that not reaching your goal does not equate to failure:
It’s time for you to set some goals to create your own compelling future. You’ll create goals for the four main areas of your life: personal development, career and finances, leisure, and giving back.
As you follow this exercise, write down exactly what you would want your life to be like if you knew you could do anything. Do a stream-of-conscious brainstorming session of short- and long-term goals, writing without censoring yourself, as if you were a child writing a fantastical Christmas wish list. Don’t get bogged down in the details now—just get down the basics. And, as you write down your vision, believe that you will achieve it.
First, brainstorm your personal goals:
Next, do the same for your career and finance goals, leisure goals, and philanthropic goals. Consider a few questions as you brainstorm goals for each category:
Now, you should have one high-priority goal in each of these four categories. Take a few minutes to write down the skills, beliefs, attitudes, and character traits you need to achieve each of these four goals.
Finally, create a list of achievable actions that you can do to make progress toward each goal every day for the next 10 days. They can be small actions, such as making a phone call or drafting a plan. Whatever it is, start doing them immediately in order to capitalize on the momentum you’ve already created by writing your goals down. This will further solidify your commitment to your goals, and it will help you continue the momentum towards achieving them.
Review all of your goals every six months or so, and revise or reprioritize them as needed. You can also do a new brainstorming session at that point, and you may consider adding or eliminating some goals.
Now, you have four high-priority goals that you want to achieve in the next year, along with compelling reasons to do so. Ensure that your RAS tunes into everything that could help you reach those goals by:
Rehearsing success conditions your nervous system to feel the pleasure of achievement, which strengthens the neural pathways needed to pursue your goals and increases your drive and conviction that you can achieve your goals. As you become more certain that you will accomplish your goals, that certainty will drive your decisions and actions to bring that vision to life.
When you get close to achieving your goals, cue up the next set of goals that you’ll soon begin pursuing. You’ll doubtlessly feel accomplished and energized when you reach your goals, but after the initial excitement wears off, you’ll need something else to motivate you—otherwise, you may feel deflated. For example, several of the astronauts who were the first to land on the moon fell into depression after returning to earth; they’d spent their entire lives preparing to go to space, so now what were they supposed to do? Having new goals lined up will stave off this feeling of emptiness.
If you run out of personal goals to queue up, there are endless ways to create goals for helping others: Choose a cause like homelessness, environmental protection, or child poverty, and find a way to help personally or to work with an organization that tackles that problem. Unfortunately, these issues are so large that there are plenty of individual goals you can make to contribute to their improvement and ultimate resolution. (Shortform example: You could set a goal to organize a community effort to clean up a local park.)
Gain the motivation to set goals and work toward them by reflecting on what your life is like now compared to five years ago.
Reflect on your life five years ago. For each of the following categories, give yourself a score from 0 to 10, based on how well you were aligned with your ideal quality of life in that area. Write a sentence explaining each score.
Categories: Career, finances, living environment, social life, relationships, mental, emotional, spiritual life, attractiveness, physical
Do the same exercise—giving yourself a score and writing a brief explanation for each category—to reflect your life today.
Compare your two sets of scores. What are two things that stand out to you? (For instance, in which category have you made the most progress in getting closer to your ideal? In which category have you stagnated or even backslid the most?)
Do the same exercise to reflect on what you want your life to be like five years from now, assigning each category a score and writing one sentence to describe where you’d like to be. (For example, could you achieve a 10 and reach your ideal level of physical health and fitness? What would that entail?)
Based on what you’ve just written, what are two or three goals you can set right now to work towards your five-year vision?
It’s time to put what you’ve learned in this summary so far to use with a 10-day mental challenge that will help you adopt empowering mental habits to transform your life in a positive way. Creating the life you want requires that you don’t just achieve your goals sometimes, but that you reach your goals consistently—and the way to do that is by adopting new, positive habits. After all, your current mental and behavioral habits created the life you have now, which you’re unsatisfied with. Therefore, improving your life will require you to change some of those habits. Even if certain habits helped you succeed in the past, they need to evolve with you on your path to higher levels of success.
The 10-day mental challenge aims to help you:
First, let’s go over the rules of the challenge. Then, we’ll discuss common obstacles to making these mental shifts. Finally, we’ll explore some tips for success.
This mental challenge is a mental and emotional cleanse that will kick start your positive life transformation by training you to be disciplined with your focus, thoughts, and emotions. The rules are:
Anytime you experience disempowering thoughts or emotions, immediately change your state using any of the strategies we’ve discussed, such as:
Be cautious not to ignore your problems—rather, the goal is to embody a more empowered state, which will make you more effective at addressing the problems. A good rule of thumb (not just during the mental challenge) is to spend no more than 10 percent of your time thinking about problems, and to spend at least 90 percent of your time focused on solutions and empowering thoughts. Above all, don’t let small things upset you—and remember that nearly every problem you encounter is small in the grand scheme of things.
When you start the mental challenge, you may be surprised to discover just how many negative and disempowering thoughts you routinely have. People often allow these kinds of thoughts to persist because:
However, these negative thought patterns are not conducive to problem-solving and action-taking, and they’re likely to paralyze you instead of motivating you.
This mental challenge will push you beyond laziness, fear, and the force of your habits to create transformative, enduring change in your life. You’ll establish a habit of remaining in an empowered state by using positive words and focusing on solutions.
Only take on this challenge if you’re absolutely committed to carrying it through to completion. This challenge is difficult, and if you commit to it, you must commit to the discipline it requires to break out of the habits and fear that have been dictating your thoughts up to this point. Increase your chance of success in the challenge by:
In Part 1, we discussed the power you possess to radically transform your life for the better, and you gained the tools to control your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You now have the building blocks for transformative change, and in Part 2, you’ll get the blueprint for change through learning about your Master System.
Your Master System comprises five elements, some of which we’ve already discussed and some of which we’ll talk about in the next few chapters:
Your Master System controls your “evaluations” or interpretations of everything you experience in life, which in turn determine what you think, feel, and do. Think of your mind as a computer, and your Master System as the operating system, which dictates everything about how you take in, interpret, and react to data.
You can often make broad changes in all aspects of your life by making simple changes to your Master System. In the following chapters, you’ll learn the information and skills you need to take control of this powerful system.
To understand the importance of your Master System, you need to know that its evaluations determine decisions that affect your health, relationships, career, and overall quality of life. There are some critical things to know about evaluations:
1) Two people can evaluate the same situation differently, based on the context and the unique makeups of their Master Systems. For example, imagine you’re playing basketball and you miss a shot. You evaluate it as an embarrassing miss, while your teammate evaluates it as an opportunity to rebound and score, and your opponent evaluates it as a chance to reclaim possession of the ball and win the game. Similarly, when your teammate misses a shot, the beliefs, state, questions, values, and references that comprise her Master System may cause her not to consider the miss to be embarrassing—as you did—but rather as motivation to make the next shot.
2) People tend to generalize their evaluations, which can quickly snowball. For example, after you miss the shot in the basketball game, you might start to think that you always shoot bad balls, which puts you in a disempowering state that could lead you to miss your next shot, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. From there, you may start thinking that you’re a terrible basketball player in general, which leads to thinking that you’re bad at all sports, which leads to thinking that you’re not very skilled at anything in your life.
3) Successful people do a better job of evaluating things. Put another way, people who have Master Systems that produce empowering or unique evaluations are more successful than people whose Master Systems create disempowering evaluations. For example, Wayne Gretzky is the National Hockey League’s all-time high-scorer because he evaluated the game differently than other players—while his teammates and opponents skated toward the puck, Gretzky skated toward where the puck was headed. Gretzky’s evaluations weren’t necessarily more empowered than other players’, but they were more clever.
Although we briefly discussed the five elements of your Master System, let’s look at them each in a little more detail and discuss how they impact the system’s evaluations:
1) Your mental and emotional state impacts your evaluations because it has a large influence on your decisions and behavior as a whole. This means that you could make entirely different evaluations of the same situation depending on your state. For example, if you come home to find that your roommate forgot to take out the garbage, you’re likely to evaluate the situation negatively and react more explosively if you had a stressful day at work, and were thus in a negative state, than if you had a peaceful and productive day, and were thus in a positive state. Thus, if you want to make empowering evaluations, it’s critical to be in a resourceful and empowered state when you make them. (Review more about how to alter your state in Chapter 5.)
2) The questions you ask yourself set the tone for your evaluations. Questions such as “What is going on?” and “Will this lead to pain or pleasure?” determine how you evaluate a situation. If you habitually ask disempowering questions—such as “What if something bad happens?”—then your evaluations will lead to disempowering decisions and actions. (Review more about the power of questions in Chapter 6.)
3) Your values dictate every evaluation and decision you make. Your values are based on your pleasure and pain associations, which are determined by your life experiences. For example, you may value wealth because money was always tight for your family when you were growing up and you associate lack of money with pain. On the other hand, another person may associate wealth with pain because she grew up with plenty of money but her parents were more focused on their careers and material possessions than parenting. (We’ll talk more about values in Chapter 12.)
4) Your beliefs determine not only how you evaluate a situation but also whether you evaluate it to begin with. Let’s look at two types of beliefs: global beliefs and rules. First, as we’ve previously discussed, your global beliefs dictate what you believe to be true and what you expect from life, other people, and yourself. These are the beliefs that determine whether you evaluate something at all. For example, if someone asks you to name your biggest regret, you may have no answer—meaning you can’t evaluate this topic—because you believe that every failure is an opportunity to grow, rather than something to regret.
Second, your rules are your personal set of standards that dictate what must happen to fulfill your values. Rules aren’t necessarily objectively factual, but they still guide your perceptions, evaluations, decisions, and actions. For example, you may have a rule that your value of love is only fulfilled if the relationship is effortless, meaning that if you face challenges with your partner, it indicates a lack of love. That rule will doubtlessly dictate how you evaluate and behave in your relationships. (We’ll talk more about beliefs and rules in Chapter 13.)
5) Your reference experiences impact how you interpret an experience and how you react to it. As we discussed in Chapter 4, your references can be the life experiences that created your beliefs. They can also guide your decisions by serving as reference points to draw meaning from new experiences. For example, if you have many reference experiences of people taking advantage of you, you’ll develop a belief that people can’t be trusted, and you’ll react skeptically when someone offers to help you. Your references will cause you to evaluate the help offer as a ploy with an ulterior motive.
Going forward, be conscious of how you take in and interpret new reference experiences. Although you can’t control your past experiences, you can control how you use them to create either empowering or disempowering beliefs. (We’ll talk more about references in Chapter 14.)
Through the following chapters, you’ll learn how to alter elements of your Master System to change your life. Until now, any efforts you’ve made to improve your life have likely targeted the effects instead of the root of the issue. For example, you may have tried to combat your habit of being sedentary by implementing a daily exercise routine, but that approach addressed only your behavior, which is the symptom of the problem. The real change you need to make may be to your underlying beliefs about whether you’re an active person, how pleasurable or painful exercise is, and what constitutes a healthy lifestyle. Now, by customizing your Master System, you’ll be targeting the cause of your challenges—and when you eliminate the cause, you automatically eliminate the negative effects.
With the information and skills you’ll learn, you can improve your life by changing your Master System so that it asks only empowering questions, rejects disempowering beliefs, and no longer computes certain evaluations.
The first element of your Master System that we’ll discuss how to alter is your values. As we talked about briefly, your values dictate your evaluations, decisions and actions, which create your destiny. Knowing and also living by your values brings deep fulfillment, inner peace, certainty, and joy.
When you’re clear on your values, they act as your compass, guiding you unequivocally toward any action that upholds them. By contrast, if you’re unclear on your values or if you have conflicting values, it can cause enduring unhappiness and frustration. For example, if your highest value is independence and your second-highest value is intimacy, you may frequently struggle in relationships between wanting to connect and yearning to be untethered. Furthermore, if you haven’t identified and committed to your values at all, you may sometimes act in ways that don’t align with them, bringing you further unhappiness.
In this chapter, we’ll explore how to identify your values, recognize how they’ve shaped your life, and alter them to support the life you want.
Before we talk about how to identify your values, let’s explain why you probably don’t know exactly what your values are, despite their impact on your life.
In short, you may not be aware of what your values are because you didn’t consciously choose them: They developed largely without your awareness or input. You adopted your values through life experiences and conditioning from your parents, teachers, friends, culture, and other external forces. When your actions aligned with their values, you were rewarded with social approval, encouragement, or other forms of reinforcement. But when your actions went against their values, you were punished, excluded, or ignored. You also may have picked up values from your role models and from the media.
If you don’t know your values, then you don’t have a compass to guide you to the future you want, which leads to disappointment, frustration, and the sense that you could be getting more from life. Furthermore, not knowing your values means you can’t set goals that help you live up to those values. People in this situation often try to fill the void created by that uncertainty with self-destructive habits such as drinking, smoking, using drugs, and overeating.
Later in this chapter, you’ll have a chance to reflect on what your values actually are. As you reflect on this, it’s important to understand that there are two types of values:
Distinguish between your values that are means and those that are ends to avoid pursuing values that are merely means without ever achieving their ends. For example, you may value owning your own business because you see it as a way to set your own schedule, enjoy more freedom, and have more time to spend with your family, so you set and achieve a goal to launch a startup. However, as your company grows, your responsibilities expand and you end up with less freedom and less time for your family. If you focus only on your means—the business—and forget about your ends—freedom and family time—you could reach your means while ending up further from your ends, leaving you unfulfilled.
Although all of your values are important to you, some are more important than others, creating a value hierarchy. Your hierarchy determines how you make decisions—the values that are highest in your hierarchy will determine your decision, outweighing lower-priority values..
When you are clear on your value hierarchy, you can improve your life by deciding to actively pursue the values that mean the most to you and will bring you the most fulfillment. For example, if you are offered a great promotion at work but it would require you to move overseas, you must determine whether you value success above connection with family and friends, or adventure over comfort.
You actually have not one, but two value hierarchies that guide what you do and don’t do:
Knowing your hierarchy of values is critical not only because it guides you to pursue only the most meaningful values to you, but also because it gives you the insight to see when your hierarchy is creating challenges in your life. This can happen in one of two ways:
Now that you know the role your values can play in shaping your decisions and your destiny, harness that power by taking stock of your values and adjusting them to guide you to the life you want. (If you don’t have a clear vision of the life you want, revisit the last section of Chapter 9 to create your compelling future.)
First, become aware of how you currently prioritize your moving-toward values. There are countless values that you could hold and adopt, but, to get started, rank the following values in order of priority:
When you’re clear on how these forces drive you and which are the strongest forces, you’ll understand how these values have shaped your life.
Second, once you’ve identified your current moving-toward values hierarchy, assess it to see what you’d like to shift in order to create the life you want. Initially, you might feel reluctant to change your values, because they’re such an integral part of who you are—but they don’t define you. Not only will you still be you when you shift your values, but you’ll be you in control of your life and destiny. Remember that you didn’t consciously choose this values hierarchy in the first place, and now you have the opportunity to tailor it to fit who you are and who you want to be.
With that in mind, follow these steps:
After doing this exercise, you can feel confident and at peace knowing that you’ve harnessed the powerful force of your values to drive your decisions and actions toward creating the life you want. Of course, merely putting these words into a list won’t change your life—you need to condition yourself to internalize these values. Hang your values list where you’ll see it frequently, and create leverage by asking the people in your life to hold you to your new values.
To ensure that your hierarchy of moving-away-from values don’t hamstring your progress, the next step is to do the same process with those values. First, rank the following values in order of how far you would go to avoid each:
Then, follow the steps above to reevaluate the importance of these values to you and determine where they should really appear in your hierarchy.
Reflect on how you prioritize some of your values and how this hierarchy affects your life.
Describe a dilemma you recently faced, and how you decided to solve it.
What were the conflicting values in this dilemma?
Which value guided your ultimate decision?
Think about the implications of prioritizing this value above the other, conflicting value. How does this hierarchy shape your life on a larger scale? (For instance, in what other situations have you prioritized this value over the other? What were the effects of this?)
In the last chapter, you identified, evaluated, and tailored your values to lead you to your compelling future. You learned that the greatest fulfillment in life is to not only know your values, but also to live by them—but, as we’ll explain in this chapter, you’ll only feel that you’re living out your values if your rules set you up for success.
As a reminder, your rules are the beliefs you have about what needs to happen in order for you to feel that you’ve fulfilled your value. For example, you may have a rule that you need a certain amount of money in the bank in order to feel that you’ve fulfilled your value of security.
You can live a more fulfilling life by simply changing your rules to make them more achievable. In this chapter, we’ll discuss:
Your rules determine the conditions for you to feel pain or pleasure: If you have rules that are achievable, then you’ll often feel the pleasure of living out your values. But if you have rules that are unreasonable or inadequate, then you’ll frequently feel the pain of falling short. For example, if you value success, your rule might be that you need to make a certain salary to feel successful. If this is your rule, you’ll feel constant pain and disappointment until you earn that salary and finally feel that you’ve fulfilled your value. Alternatively, your rule could be that you need to do your best every day at work to be successful. In this case, it will be much easier to feel the pleasure of fulfilling your values immediately and consistently.
Unfortunately, most people have disempowering rules, which cause unnecessary pain because they:
Many people adopt disempowering rules because society conditions them to believe that strict rules are necessary to motivate them to succeed. In reality, if your rules are so tough that you frequently fall short and feel frustrated and disappointed, then you’ll begin to believe that you can never reach your aim. Over time, you’ll associate the pain of failure with any effort to fulfill your values, and you’ll eventually develop learned helplessness. Furthermore, your self-esteem is dependent upon you feeling in control, and if your rules are impossible to satisfy, then you’ll feel that you have no control over achieving your values. Your self-esteem will suffer.
Fortunately, you can rework your rules to make them empowering and achievable, which will make you feel in control almost effortlessly, and your self-esteem will soar. We’ll talk about how to customize your rules later in this chapter.
Just as you have a hierarchy of values, you also have a hierarchy of rules. There are two kinds of rules in the hierarchy:
Understanding your rules hierarchy is key to ensuring that you have an empowering set of rules. The balance of your threshold rules and your personal standards impacts your life and well-being. On one hand, if you have too many threshold rules, they are likely to cause you stress because they create a lot of rigidity in your life. Too many musts can weigh down on you and crush your motivation, happiness, and sense of control (which directly impacts your self-esteem). On the other hand, you need enough musts to push you to follow through on actions. Having too many shoulds and not enough musts gives you more leeway to potentially fall short of reaching your values.
So far we’ve talked about how your rules impact your life, but they also impact people you have relationships with—and, by the same token, their rules affect you. Everyone has their own rules, and no one’s rules are more or less correct than someone else’s; they’re all arbitrary. Still, we expect others to live by our rules, even if we never articulated or they never explicitly agreed to those rules. In fact, every time we get upset with someone, the root of our agitation is that we feel that person broke one of our rules.
For example, imagine that you have a rule that people who care about each other show their interest by asking the other person questions about herself. Now imagine that your friend has a conflicting rule that people who care about each other don’t prod for personal information, but rather share information about themselves unsolicited so that the other person feels free to do the same. If neither of you articulate your rule but expect the other person to abide by it, you’ll both end up extremely upset and questioning the quality of your relationship; you’ll be waiting for your friend to ask you questions and your friend will be waiting for you to open up.
In order to avoid such conflicts, it’s critical to your relationships—both personal and professional—that you:
You’ll have stronger relationships when you understand people’s rules, because you’ll be able to predict and interpret their behavior and to make them happy by fulfilling their rules. Still, you probably won’t be able to prevent all conflict, so follow these steps next time you get upset with someone:
Even when you know someone else’s rules, you can still run into challenges when you, or other people, have sub-rules and exceptions to your rules. For example, you may have a rule that if someone is listening attentively, then they should respond to what you’re saying—unless you’re talking about something serious or sensitive, then they should listen silently.
Be aware of your sub-rules so that you can communicate them to others, and make an effort to learn about their sub-rules so that you can avoid violating them. Uncommunicated sub-rules can create issues in a relationship when both people think they’re clear on the rules and then one of them violates the fine print without realizing.
Now that you know the power of rules, it’s time to evaluate your own to ensure that they’re not holding you back from living the life you want. Take some time to evaluate and update your own rules. First, answer the following questions:
This will help you to clearly identify your rules.
Second, review each rule and ask yourself:
If you answered “no” to any of these questions, link pain with your disempowering rule and redesign the rule to be more empowering. Check to make sure that your new rule is empowering by asking each of these four questions again—you should be able to answer all of them with an emphatic “yes!” As you redesign your rules, consider these tips:
Reflect on whether your rules are helping or hindering your efforts to live by your values.
What is one of your values? It can be one you identified in the exercise from the last chapter.
What has to happen in order for you to feel you’ve fulfilled this value? For example, if you value happiness, what has to happen for you to feel happy? (Your answer is your “rule” for this value.)
Analyze whether or not your rule is empowering or disempowering. (For instance, ask yourself: Is your rule achievable? Is meeting it under your control, instead of relying on an external factor? Are there many ways for you to meet this rule?)
If your rule is disempowering, what is a new, empowering rule you can replace it with?
In addition to your values and rules, your references are a critical aspect of your Master System. Recall from Part 1 that your references hold up your beliefs because they are experiences or imaginings that serve as evidence to support your beliefs.
The way in which you select, interpret, and organize your references determines whether they’ll empower or disempower you. For example, one cancer survivor can use the painful experiences of undergoing treatment and feeling isolated from healthy family and friends as proof that life is difficult and unfair. Alternatively, another cancer survivor can draw on references of her friends’ and family’s love and support and her eventual remission to support the belief that life is miraculous and full of second chances.
To improve your life, select and organize your references in empowering ways, which will support empowering beliefs and behaviors. In this chapter, we’ll explain:
Let’s look at the different types of references and how you can use each to empower you:
Lived experiences are powerful references because you have the memory of feeling the pain or pleasure that came with each experience. Since life is full of ups and downs, you probably have experiences that could support either an empowering or disempowering belief in any situation—you just need to choose carefully. For example, if you flubbed a presentation at work, you may find memories of times when you’ve made mistakes and fallen short in the past, which would support a belief that you are consistently incompetent. Alternatively, you could choose to empower yourself through references of all the times you excelled at work and in other areas of your life, which support a belief that you are highly competent and merely had a misstep today.
Your imagination is a critical source of empowering references because it’s not limited by what’s already happened, but rather makes what could happen possible. Gather references from things that you imagine so vividly that it feels like it actually happened or that it could happen, and use these to support empowering beliefs about what could be. For example, athletes often visualize themselves successfully running plays, scoring points, and winning games—all of which helps them to make those visions a reality when it’s game time.
Use other people’s experiences as references. Books, poems, movies, television, podcasts, seminars, and other media can provide references you may not have encountered or considered on your own. For example, if you want to make a career change late in life, learning about how someone else close to your age successfully made this shift could provide a reference to support your belief that you can do it. Alternatively, you can use other people’s experiences as “contrasting references” to put things into perspective in your own life. On one hand, you can view the tragedies that befall so many people—and the inspiring ways they rise above them—as proof that your problems are minor and manageable by comparison. On the other hand, you can use other people’s incredible achievements as contrasting references that push you to strive for more.
Use faith as a reference when you don’t have any firsthand experiences that are pertinent, you don’t know of anyone else’s experiences that you could use, and you can’t even imagine what a positive future might look like. For example, if you’re coping with a tragedy and you can’t seem to find any silver lining, choose to believe that there must be something positive that simply isn’t apparent yet. Faith can be the reference holding up that belief.
Clearly, there are plenty of references already available to you—but you can create even more ammo for your empowering beliefs by pursuing experiences that expand your references. For example, you may have plenty of experiences that provide references supporting your belief that you are intelligent, but few references supporting a belief that you’re physically strong. Fortify this belief by trying new experiences that prove your physical strength: Start working with a physical trainer or join a recreational sports league.
Then, be aware of how you’re organizing your references to ensure you use them in an empowering way. For example, if you just finished a tough session with your trainer, you could organize the experience in one of two ways:
As we’ve discussed, you need a broad foundation of references to support your empowering beliefs. Take stock of some of your references, and brainstorm how you could expand your library of references:
As you expand your references and alter the beliefs they support, you may find yourself feeling like a new person. This is because your beliefs about yourself and what sets you apart from others comprise your identity; so, changing your beliefs may make you feel like your identity is changing.
Although your identity is not fixed or innate, it dictates your behavior, as people subconsciously strive to act in ways that reinforce their identity. For example, if you identify as a low-achieving person, you’re less likely to push yourself to excel—regardless of natural ability—than someone who identifies as a high-achieving person. As such, your identity determines your decisions, actions, and fate; so, it’s important that it pushes you in a positive direction. Ensuring that this is the case may involve needing to remake your identity, if it’s not currently pushing you to be who you want to be.
In this chapter, you’ll learn:
Before we talk about how your identity dictates your actions, let’s discuss how you adopt your identity and what it encompasses. Your identity has developed through your life experiences and the influence of other people and things. Like your beliefs, and values, you probably adopted your identity without consciously thinking about it.
Your identity can encompass myriad traits, including:
Additionally, your identity depends on the time frame you focus on: Do you define yourself based on your past, your present, or your future? For example, many people define themselves based on past traumas or achievements, such as being an abuse survivor or a former beauty queen. Some people define themselves by the present (for instance, a new parent) or by their future (such as an aspiring chef).
The way you identify is also a reflection of the way you perceive your friends’ identities. For example, if you consider your friends to be fun and adventurous, you probably identify that way too. This perception of your identity can extend to people outside of your friend group, too, who also assume you’re fun and adventurous because you associate with people like that. For this reason, it’s important to be selective about who you surround yourself with, since their identities impact how you and others perceive your identity.
People tend to think of their identities as an immutable part of them—after all, your identity is who you are, isn’t it? In reality, you can change your identity (we’ll talk more about how to do that later in this chapter). However, you’ve been conditioned to resist such radical change: Your identity amounts to a set of beliefs about yourself, and our society says that changing your beliefs makes you flaky, wishy-washy, and unreliable.
As a result of this societal pressure, people strive to be consistent with their beliefs, so they act in ways that reinforce their existing identities, creating self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, if you believe yourself to be strong, smart, and hard-working, then you’ll behave in a way that means live up to those traits. By the same token, if your identity involves self-destructive behaviors, you’ll continue to engage in those actions despite the harmful effects. (Shortform note: Read our summary of Mindset to find out more about how your identity determines your performance.)
In fact, if you attribute a certain behavior to being part of your identity, you’ll struggle to stop doing that behavior because you think that it’s part of who you are. With this view, changing that behavior becomes tantamount to changing—or losing—your identity, and that prospect seems more painful than the pain of continuing the behavior. Instead, view your behavior as something transient and changeable.
For example, if you’ve been overweight for a long time, being an overweight person has probably become part of your identity (whether you like it or not). As long as that’s how you define yourself, you’ll struggle to maintain weight loss and exercise habits because they conflict with your core sense of self—plus, you can conveniently make the excuse that this is just who you are, shirking your responsibility along with any hope of change. By contrast, if you think of yourself as someone who has merely adopted unhealthy habits, then you’re more likely to successfully change those habits because you haven’t internalized them as part of who you are.
If you take actions that conflict with your identity, it can create internal confusion that leads to an identity crisis. Identity crises cause you to feel disoriented, question your beliefs, and fear the pain of the unknown. For example, if you identify as an honest person and then you lie to your spouse, on top of your guilt for lying, you may be in disbelief that you lied because it goes against who you are, and you may start to question whether you truly know yourself.
In other cases, identity crises are triggered not by actions you take, but by experiences you have. One common example is the midlife crisis, which results from a struggle to transition from the identity of a young person to that of an aging person. A midlife crisis is usually triggered by something that conflicts with your perceived identity as a young person: You reach a certain age, you notice your body aging, or someone says something to you that they wouldn’t say to a younger person.
Anytime you adopt an identity that’s tied to something that changes—such as your age, attractiveness, or job—you’re almost guaranteeing an identity crisis at some point down the road.
To avoid an identity crisis, if you want to change your behavior, change your identity to fit the behavior you want to maintain. Since your identity comprises your beliefs about yourself, use the strategies we’ve already discussed for changing beliefs to do this. For example, if you want to lose weight and become stronger, you need to shed the identity of an overweight person (and the belief that this is fundamentally who you are) and adopt the belief that you are a healthy person. With your new identity, when someone gives you the choice between a donut and oatmeal, you’ll be less tempted to indulge in the donut because that’s just not who you are—rather, you are someone who values your health and longevity, and the way to support those values is to choose the oatmeal.
In some cases, you may not need to discard your old identity entirely, but rather expand it to encompass your ideals. There may be nothing about your current identity that is holding you back from achieving your goals and living the life you want—except that it doesn’t include certain beliefs. As long as the beliefs and characteristics that you want to adopt don’t conflict with your current identity (which could cause an identity crisis), decide to expand your identity to encompass these traits. (Shortform example: If you’re an ambitious introvert with dreams of becoming a top-selling realtor, you don’t have to abandon your introversion or your dream. Instead, become an ambitious introvert who is also confident, personable, and an expert in architecture and design.)
Paradoxically, although you can’t change your behaviors without changing your identity, neither can you change your identity without changing your behaviors to reinforce it. In order to change your identity, first, change what you believe about yourself. Then, internalize those beliefs through your behavior: in other words, through your words and actions. The more you walk the walk and act as if you are the person you’re trying to be, the more you will become that.
Take a few moments now to evaluate your current identity and the identity you’d like to embody:
Once you’ve made this identity shift, you’re not finished. Due to age, experience, and circumstance, you change constantly, and your identity needs to change to reflect that. Regularly evaluate and expand your identity and continually improve the rules you’re implementing to reinforce it and the references you’re using to support it.
Throughout this summary, you’ve learned principles and the practical strategies to completely transform your life. Now, jumpstart your transformation with this seven-day challenge. Each day for the next week, you’ll tackle an assignment to begin improving a different area of your life.
First, change your habitual emotional patterns to experience fewer negative emotions and spend more time in positive, empowering states. We’ve discussed several strategies throughout the book to alter your emotional patterns—some of these strategies help you shift your focus and physiology, and others anchor those changes in new habits. These strategies include:
This exercise will draw your attention to your current emotional patterns so that you can use the strategies above to alter them:
On Day 1, you made a commitment to emotional well-being. Today, you’ll make a commitment to your physical well-being, which helps you enjoy your emotional health to the fullest. When it comes to your physical vitality, the first and most important thing to understand is that there is a difference between fitness and health:
Fitness does not necessarily equate to health because, in pursuit of achieving the strength and stamina to perform an athletic activity, you can subject yourself to injury and fatigue, harming your overall health and wellness. Before we get to today’s assignment, let’s discuss:
You can balance both health and fitness by strategically incorporating both aerobic and anaerobic exercise into your life, which trains your metabolism to burn fat, increases your energy levels, and improves your overall health. First, you need to understand the difference between aerobic and anaerobic exercise:
By adjusting your pace and level of intensity, you can modify most exercises to make them either aerobic or anaerobic. However, in our culture, people tend to prioritize anaerobic exercise because they think that more intense workouts and higher heart rates create better results. On top of that, most people endure enough stress in their daily life that they are perpetually in a heightened, anaerobic state. Between their stressful lifestyles and their intense workouts, they burn through so much glycogen that their bodies have to start using blood sugar as fuel. This is a problem because your nervous system consistently needs two-thirds of your blood sugar, so when you start burning through it with too much anaerobic exercise, you can experience:
Additionally, if you jump into an intense anaerobic workout without properly training and warming up, your body must supply blood to your muscles so quickly that it’s forced to reroute it from your liver, kidneys, and other critical organs. This deprives the organs of oxygen, which can weaken and damage them.
Fortunately, you can avoid the issue outlined above by building an aerobic base, which trains your body to burn fat as its primary fuel. To develop your aerobic system, start by doing only aerobic workouts for two to eight months. This will condition your metabolism, which:
If you already own or can buy a portable heart rate monitor, you can ensure that your heart rate doesn’t rise to anaerobic levels (greater than 180 minus your age). If you don’t have a monitor, gauge your intensity level on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being equivalent to sitting on the couch and 10 being so intense that you feel like your heart is about to explode. During an aerobic workout, try not to rise above a 7, ideally staying between 6 and 7.
Begin with three workouts like this each week:
After building your endurance through an aerobic base, increase your power by adding anaerobic exercise. Anaerobic workouts increase your levels of human growth hormone (HGH), which:
Your body produces the hormone consistently until you’re about 30, after which point your natural HGH levels drop. However, anaerobic exercise raises your HGH, and it’s never too late to start: Research shows that people in their 60s who hadn’t done any muscle-toning exercise in more than a decade increased their muscle mass and energy levels through this kind of explosive anaerobic exercise.
The best time to introduce anaerobic exercise will be when you reach a plateau in your aerobic training—most likely after two to four months—but the ideal timing will be different for everyone. Above all, listen to your body. When you’re ready, incorporate anaerobic workouts into your regimen by adding in weight training and increasing the pace of your aerobic workouts. Aim to add one to three anaerobic workouts a week.
Research shows that if you maintain a consistent exercise routine for one year, it will become a lifelong habit. Although you may stray from this habit intermittently, the conditioning will be strong enough to pull you back every time.
If you associate pain with exercise, use the strategies we’ve discussed throughout the book to retrain your mind to associate it with pleasure. Find ways to enjoy your workout—you can even incorporate another activity into your warmup, such as:
Additionally, ensure that your nutrition properly fuels your exercise. Don’t undereat or cut out too much fat from your diet, because this causes your body to store fat as a means of survival—your body assumes there is a food shortage, and that it must hold onto everything it can. Furthermore, if you do undereat for a while, your body stays in fat-storage mode even after you resume eating your normal quantity, causing even more weight gain.
Now that we’ve covered this background information on health and exercise, it’s time for your Day 2 assignment. Increase your longevity and improve your quality of life by making a commitment to your physical health:
Today, you’ll practice mastering your relationship—specifically, your romantic or domestic relationship—because relationships are not only essential to your well-being, but they are also powerful forces in influencing your beliefs, values, and character. Furthermore, you’ll enjoy the successful and empowered life you’re creating even more if you have someone to share it with.
In this chapter, we’ll explain how to maintain a healthy relationship, and then you’ll have a chance to put that knowledge to use with today’s assignment.
Before explaining today’s exercise, let’s discuss the six keys to maintaining a healthy, long-lasting relationship:
Key #1: Communicate Your Rules
Minimize conflict in your relationship by discovering the other person’s values and rules. As we discussed in Part 2, any time you’re upset with someone, it’s because you feel that they have broken your rules—even if you never articulated those rules. So, take time to share your rules and to find out about your partner’s rules, and agree to both make an effort to meet each other’s rules.
Key #2: Focus on Giving
Focus on what you can give in your relationship, not what you can gain from it. Many people mistakenly enter into relationships in hopes that they will find the missing key to their happiness. However, this approach hurts the relationship along with your chances of finding happiness within it.
Key #3: Don’t Let Problems Fester
Address problems in your relationship early, before they grow into larger issues. The most powerful antidote to problems is early, frequent communication. Explain your rules, use Transformational Vocabulary, and interrupt your pattern when you get into arguments that devolve into senseless bickering.
If you don’t address problems when they’re small, they can evolve into harmful patterns as they go through these four stages:
Key #4: Prioritize Your Relationship
Make your relationship one of your top priorities. Relationships require consistent effort to remain healthy, and they suffer if they’re neglected for too long. Don’t allow your relationship to run on autopilot while you attend to the pressures of daily life.
Key #5: Focus on Your Relationship’s Future, Not Its End
Focus each day on improving your relationship, and avoid dwelling on your fear that the relationship could one day end. If you focus on the relationship’s potential demise, you’ll unconsciously move in that direction by adopting self-sabotaging behaviors. Furthermore, never threaten to leave unless you’re truly considering breaking up. Raising the threat of leaving puts both your and your partner’s focus on a potential breakup rather than a resolution.
Key #6: Consistently Reinforce Your Positive Emotions
Reinforce your feelings of love, intimacy, attraction, and appreciation for your partner every day. Remind yourself of the reasons you’re with this person. Ask yourself how you got so lucky to share your life with this person. To maintain your spark and prevent stagnation, constantly look for ways to surprise and share special moments with your partner.
Abiding by the six keys above will help you maintain a healthy relationship, and today’s exercise kickstarts and supports those efforts:
You’re on your way to mastering your interior and exterior worlds through emotional and physical health, and you’re nurturing a loving, fulfilling relationship. Now, on Day 4 of this challenge, let’s tackle a common external source of pain: money. Financial stress can cause intensely disempowering negative emotions, yet most people get in their own way when it comes to creating and maintaining wealth. Before we get to your assignment for the day, we’ll explore the three common obstacles that prevent people from having the financial lives they want, and then we’ll break down five lessons for successfully building and protecting wealth.
To generate wealth, first, address these three obstacles: Obstacle #1: People Associate Money With Both Pleasure and Pain
Most people have a pain-and-pleasure relationship with money. For example, they want money but they often feel that they don’t have enough, or they enjoy having it but they fear losing it. As we’ve discussed, when you have mixed associations about something, your mind reacts to both the pain and pleasure, and you end up pursuing your goal while simultaneously self-sabotaging your efforts. This means that your negative beliefs about money are causing you to subconsciously impede wealth-building efforts such as working extra hours and saving.
Many common pleasure-oriented beliefs about money revolve around the idea that wealth provides freedom and creates opportunities. By contrast, common pain-oriented beliefs include:
To overcome this obstacle, use Neuro-Associative Conditioning to eliminate your negative associations with money. When you have only positive associations with money, you will be able to build wealth without self-sabotaging.
Obstacle #2: People Don’t Control Their Own Financial Lives
Many people believe that their financial lives are too complex for them to tackle, and so they outsource the responsibility to financial advisers. While there’s no problem with seeking help and advice from experts, handing over total control disempowers you. You’re no longer directing your destiny. For example, if you don’t give any input on your investments, and your financial adviser puts your money into stocks that later take a downward turn, it’ll be easy to simply blame your adviser—but you handed over control in the first place.
Instead, take ownership of your financial decisions in order to create the financial future of your dreams. The theme of this entire summary is improving your life by taking control of it, and money is no exception. Research your options, read about the advice and experiences of successful business people and money managers. Even if you choose to work with a financial adviser, be sure that you still understand and agree with how your money is being handled.
Obstacle #3: People Suffer From Scarcity Mentality
Many people have a scarcity mentality, which causes them to believe that there is only a limited amount of resources available. This means that someone has to lose in order for someone else to gain. This view causes people to believe that they can only have wealth if it comes at the expense of others. This is a limiting belief and runs counter to the reality, which is that technology makes it possible for enough resources to be available for everyone.
In contrast, an abundance mindset is essential to a healthy financial life, and you should adopt one in place of a scarcity mentality. If you have an abundance mindset, then you believe that there is plenty—of money, resources, and success—to go around. In other words, your success doesn’t depend on someone else’s failure. To build wealth, you simply need to practice “economic alchemy,” which is the ability to turn something with little value into a valuable resource. Just as medieval alchemists attempted to turn lead into gold, the wealthiest people in the world today are those who took something not inherently valuable (such as an idea, a material, or information) and morphed it into a useful product or service.
Now that you know what not to do surrounding money, let’s discuss five fundamental lessons for building and maintaining wealth. Consider these lessons a starting point in your financial education, and build upon them with your own research.
Multiply your income without adding to your working hours by finding a way to provide more value to your company or your customers. Expand your knowledge and skills, offer something few other people provide, and be innovative. The more value you continually add to people’s lives, the more money you’ll earn consistently.
Reflect on how you can be more valuable to your company. Can you increase efficiency, develop new systems, improve output quality, or cut costs? How can you make your company more profitable and successful so that they will want to reward you with more money? Find a way to add 10 times the value of the salary raise you want.
You might have to get creative: One massage therapist who was constantly booked up couldn’t possibly take additional clients to increase his earnings, but realized that he could connect with a nearby physical therapist and get referral fees. As a result, he nearly doubled his income without increasing his workload.
Look for ways to add value in all areas of your life, including your home and community. Although you may not be paid for these efforts, you’ll feel fulfilled and enjoy a rich life if you live by this principle.
Now that you’ve increased your wealth, it’s critical that you maintain it. In order to do that, spend less than you make, and invest what you don’t spend. This involves making some decisions about how you’ll use your money before you’re in line at the cash register:
Once you’re managing your spending and investing, further grow your wealth by taking all the returns from your investments and reinvesting them. Continually reinvesting your returns creates compounded growth that can build to critical mass, which is the point at which your investments produce enough money to live off of. The more dedicated you are to reinvesting the earnings from your investments, the more quickly you’ll reach critical mass.
In order to determine what you want to invest and reinvest in, consider your financial goals, timeline, and risk tolerance. Furthermore, commit to understanding your various investment options and developing a clear investment plan. Arm yourself with knowledge to avoid making these common mistakes that cause investors to make little to no money:
As your money grows, consider researching and pursuing a plan to protect yourself from losing money in bad investments or frivolous lawsuits. Identify financial experts and wealthy people who manage their money well, and model your asset protection approach after theirs.
Paradoxically, most people feel more insecure when they’re wealthy than when they’re broke. The reason is that if you have no money, you have nothing to lose—but if you have lots of money that you’ve worked hard to accumulate, it would be extremely painful to lose it.
Once you’ve mastered earning, managing, investing, and protecting your wealth, enjoy it—and enjoy it now. If you wait until you have a certain amount of money in the bank before you reward yourself, you’ll learn to associate the process of building wealth with the pain of sacrifice and self-restraint instead of pleasure. Don’t blow your spending plan, but do give yourself small rewards along the way to reinforce your efforts.
Additionally, enjoy your wealth by spending it on others as well as yourself. Finding ways to make contributions to causes and people you care about ultimately benefits you, as well, because:
As you improve your financial health, remember that money isn’t the end goal—it’s merely a means to access greater opportunities. Furthermore, wealth has nothing to do with how much money you have in the bank; wealth is a state of knowing that you already have everything you need. When you stop chasing money and start recognizing that you already enjoy abundance, you will free yourself to build even more wealth.
Start your road to wealth today by completing the following assignment:
On Day 5 of this challenge, you’ll create a code of conduct to help you master your behavior and live by your values every single day, because the more consistently you uphold these values, the more successful and fulfilled you’ll be. Even if you’re generally meeting your values, there may still be a lot of moments in your day when you fall short—moments when things don’t go to plan, when you feel stressed, or when some other external force influences your state. This code of conduct will serve as a constant reminder to align yourself with your values.
Develop a code of conduct to keep you on course to realizing your ideal life:
Now, on Day 6, you’ll learn strategies to alter your perception of time to feel more positive about how you spend your time. You’ll also learn strategies to manage your time to be more efficient and effective.
If you’ve ever looked at the clock and thought, “It’s only 3:00?” or “It’s already 3:00?” then you know that time is relative. Depending upon what you’re doing and what your frame of mind is, time can seemingly pass quickly or drag on. For example, if you’re doing something that you need to do but don’t particularly want to do, it would normally feel that time is crawling and that the task is interminable. Mastering time helps you avoid that uncomfortable feeling and get the job done without causing yourself any additional pain.
Here are two strategies for altering your perception of time:
Strategy #1: Change your time frame. When you feel stressed, it’s often because you feel stuck in one time frame—either the past, present, or future. If one time frame is weighing down on you, simply change your focus to a different time frame in order to improve your state. For example, if you’re in the middle of a huge task and feel overwhelmed, keep working but shift your thoughts to the future, when you’ll have finished everything. Alternatively, if you’re dreading something you have to do tomorrow, change your focus to the things you can proactively do in the present to make tomorrow’s task more manageable.
Strategy #2: Distort your perception of time. Learn how to consciously make time feel like it’s going faster or slower. To make it seem faster, avoid frequently checking the time or thinking about time. To make time seemingly slow down, do the opposite.
Now, here are two strategies for managing your time so that—even on the busiest days—you can always get the most important things done:
Strategy #1: Distinguish between urgency and importance. To take control of your life and use your limited time to accomplish the things that matter most, prioritize the important tasks, even if it means delaying some urgent ones. Important tasks are the ones that make the most meaningful impact on your life. For example, many of the exercises in this book are important tasks and, although they could easily be pushed off until tomorrow, making time for them today puts you one step closer to transforming your life.
By contrast, urgent tasks are things that are time sensitive, such as finishing a work project before the deadline and answering a ringing phone. People tend to feel pressured by the urgency of these tasks, so they spend much of their time prioritizing urgent matters and delaying important ones. However, this approach leaves them in a constant state of reacting to stimuli instead of strategically allocating their time. (Shortform note: Read our summary of Getting Things Done for a step-by-step approach to organizing your life and prioritizing important tasks over urgent ones.)
Strategy #2: Learn from other people’s experiences. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when you can save yourself time and energy by learning from other people’s life experiences. While this may not make a single moment feel any longer or shorter, it can save you years of trial and error and help you progress toward your goals more quickly. (Shortform example: Instead of learning the best practices for trading stocks through trial and error, save yourself some time—and money—by reading books or attending seminars by financial experts.)
Start learning to master your time so that you can take control of your life:
After working diligently all week, it’s time to rest and enjoy yourself. You have two options for your assignment today:
In this summary so far, you’ve gained the tools you need to take control of your life and shape your ideal future. In this final Part, we’ll discuss how what you’ve learned can also be applied to improve the world around you. Specifically, we’ll explore the importance of:
There are countless problems and tragedies constantly occurring across the globe—from climate change to genocides to chronic hunger. Joint decisions, made collectively by the world’s population, determine whether we succumb to or overcome these problems.
It’s up to every person to make individual choices that contribute to joint decisions and solutions—including you. You know that you have the power to make individual decisions that impact your life: Now, participate in joint decisions to impact communities, societies, nations, and the world. If you don’t take an active role, you’ll merely follow the indifferent current of the masses, and you’ll be forced to deal with the consequences that follow.
As you participate in joint decisions, be sure to:
1) Focus on the long-term effects of joint decisions. Carefully consider whether a decision will actually benefit the community in the long run. Many national and global issues are the results of decisions that were appealing in the short term, but harmful in the long term.
2) Make decisions that address the root cause of an issue. It’s easy to get fooled into fixing symptoms when you’re focused on what’s not working—but, just as we talked about when altering your behavior, the changes you make won’t stick unless you address these symptoms’ causes. For example, some regions are facing frequent droughts and relentless wildfires, issues which local and global communities are trying to respond to. But, those problems are merely symptoms of climate change, which is the real problem that needs to be addressed to enact any lasting change.
3) Remember that everything is the product of countless daily decisions. The issues we face are the results of millions of small decisions that people make every day, and solving these problems will also depend on a critical mass of tiny, daily decisions. For example, climate change has accelerated and now threatens the health of the planet because humans have spent centuries overfishing, using harmful agricultural practices, and polluting water sources. A large segment of the population will have to change their daily habits—from their transportation choices to the food they eat—in order to substantially tackle this problem.
As well as participating in joint decisions, make sure to give back to the community regularly. Brainstorm causes that you care about—whether that’s prison reform or environmental conservation—and commit to dedicate time to that cause each month. Even a couple hours a month can make a huge difference to the cause. You’ll also notice that giving to the cause will improve your life: You’ll feel the sense of joy and fulfillment that comes from selfless contribution to others, and your identity will shift to reflect that this is now a fundamental part of who you are.
While supporting your chosen cause, apply the same strategies you’ve used for your self-improvement to push governments and businesses to improve their practices regarding that cause:
As you make giving back and supporting a cause a regular part of your life, don’t neglect your own needs. Your ability to give back depends on your well-being, and you shouldn’t sacrifice yourself to make a positive impact for others. Additionally, when you understand that giving back doesn’t have to come at the expense of your self-care, you’ll give back more because you’ll eliminate any pain associated with dedicating your time to contribution.
Unfortunately, many people never realize their full potential to give back and support a cause until they face a difficult challenge that forces them to rise to the occasion. Don’t wait until you’re backed into a corner—rise now. Stop believing that chronic problems such as hunger and homelessness are permanent and inevitable. Instead, put yourself into a more resourceful mindset and find solutions.
As we’ve previously mentioned, the purpose of improving your life is not just to benefit yourself, but also to make you better fit to improve the lives of those around you. Make a difference to others by being a living example of what you’ve learned in this book. The happiness, success, and fulfillment that you feel will emanate and become contagious to those around you. Furthermore, share the knowledge you’ve gained from this book with others so that they can achieve the same results in their lives.
It’s especially important to share these insights and skills with your children. Teach them to anticipate the consequences of their actions—on themselves, their family, their community, and the world. When they learn to think through these consequences, they’ll make more responsible decisions. Above all, lead by example. Show your children the power of living out your values, using Transformational Vocabulary, and asking empowering questions. You’ll be training the next generation of empowered difference-makers.
Come up with a plan to make contribution a part of your life.
What is one cause that you care deeply about? Why do you care about it?
How could you use your unique skills to contribute to this cause? (For example, perhaps you’re a great listener and could spend time with assisted living residents, or maybe you’re a lawyer who could offer free legal advice to a nonprofit.)
How many hours can you commit to this cause each month?
What can you do today to set your plan to contribute to the cause in motion? (For example, you could call the organization you want to work with and schedule a date and time for you to volunteer.)