Awaken the Giant Within — Robbins

“Many have lost that sense of certainty that creates the winner’s edge.”

Let’s focus on getting it back.

Big Ideas

State Management, Success Conditioning, Asking Quality Questions, Emotional Management, Leverage, Concentration of Power.

“Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.”

“I also remember the moment my life changed, the moment I finally said, “I’ve had it! I know I’m much more than I’m demonstrating mentally, emotionally, and physically in my life. I made a decision in that moment which was to alter my life forever. I decided to change virtually every aspect of my life. I decided I would never again settle for less than I could be. Who would have guessed that this decision would bring me to such an incredible moment?”

“One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power.”

An important question:

“What makes the difference in the quality of people’s lives? How is it that so often people from such humble beginnings and devastating backgrounds manage in spite of it all to create lives that inspire us? Conversely, why do many of those born into privileged environments, with every resource for success at their fingertips, end up fat, frustrated, and often chemically addicted?”

Some good questions:

How can I take immediate control of my life? What can I do today that can make a difference — that could help me and others to shape our destinies? How can I expand, learn, grow, and share that knowledge with others in a meaningful and enjoyable way?

“I’ve learned that the resources we need to turn our dreams into reality are within us, merely waiting for the day when we decide to wake up and claim our birthright. I wrote this book for one reason: to be a wake-up call that will challenge those who are committed to living and being more to tap their God-given power. There are ideas and strategies in this book to help you produce specific, measurable, long-lasting changes in yourself and others.”

“I challenge you not only to do whatever it takes to read this book in its entirety (unlike the masses who quit) but also to use what you learn in simple ways each day. This is the all-important step that’s necessary for you to produce the results you’re committed to.”

Chapter 1: How to Create Lasting Change

1. Raise your standards.

Change what you demand about yourself. What are the things that you would no longer accept in your life? All the things you would no longer tolerate / all the things you aspire to become. See document about raised standards. New Standards

2. Change Your Limiting Beliefs

If you raise your standards but don’t really believe you can meet them, you’ve already sabotaged yourself. You won’t even try; you’ll be lacking that sense of certainty that allows you to tap the deepest capacity that’s within you even as you read this.

Our beliefs are like unquestioned commands, telling us how things are, what’s possible and what’s impossible, what we can and can not do. They shape every action, every thought, and every feeling that we experience. As a result, changing our belief systems is central to making any real and lasting change in our lives.

We must develop a sense of certainty that we can and will meet the new standards before we actually do.

3. Change Your Strategy

These are the tactical things you will do to implement the changes.

Five Areas to Improve

1. Emotional Mastery

Virtually everything we do is to change the way we feel.

“you will discover what makes you do what you do, and the triggers for the emotions you experience most often. You will then be given a step-by-step plan to show you how to identify which emotions are empowering, which are disempowering, and how to use both kinds to your best advantage so that your emotions become not a hindrance, but instead a powerful tool in helping you achieve your highest potential.”

2. Physical Mastery

We are digging our graves with our teeth.

“This second master lesson will help you take control of your physical health so that you not only look good, but you feel good and know that you’re in control of your life, in a body that radiates vitality and allows you to accomplish your outcomes.”

3. Relationship Mastery

Master your relationships: romantic, family, business, and social.

“I’ve found that, for me, the greatest resource is a relationship because it opens the doors to every resource I need. Mastery of this lesson will give you unlimited resources for growing and contributing.”

4. Financial Mastery

“Yet most of us experience financial pressure on an ongoing basis, and we fantasize that having more money would relieve that pressure. This is a grand cultural delusion—let me assure you that the more money you have, the more pressure you’re likely to feel. The key is not the mere pursuit of wealth, but changing your beliefs and attitudes about it so you see it as a means for contribution, not the end-all and be-all for happiness.”

5. Time Mastery

“Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year—and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!”

Decisions: The Pathway to Power

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

In ten years, you surely will arrive somewhere. The question is: where?

Different actions produce different results.

“In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently. The key and most important question, then, is this: What precedes all of our actions? What determines what actions we take, and therefore, who we become, and what our ultimate destination is in life? What is the father of action?”

What are the big decisions I’ve made in the past 18 months?

• Proposed to Nour
• Initially turned down a promotion at LendingHome, saying that I didn’t want to be a director
• Moved to 338 Spear and sub-letted the Lex
• Not bought a car “More than anything else, I believe it’s our decisions, not the conditions of our lives, that determine our destiny. You and I both know that there are people who were born with advantages: they’ve had genetic advantages, environmental advantages, family advantages, or relationship advantages. Yet you and I also know that we constantly meet, read, and hear about people who against all odds have exploded beyond the limitations of their conditions by making new decisions about what to do with their lives. They’ve become examples of the unlimited power of the human spirit.”

“If we decide to, you and I can make our lives one of these inspiring examples. How? Simply by making decisions today about how we’re going to live in the nineties and beyond. If you don’t make decisions about how you’re going to live, then you’ve already made a decision, haven’t you? You’re making a decision to be directed by the environment instead of shaping your own destiny. My whole life changed in just one day—the day I determined not just what I’d like to have in my life or what I wanted to become, but when I decided who and what I was committed to having and being in my life. That’s a simple distinction, but a critical one.”

When you decide that your life is going to be what you commit for it to be and you will become the person you commit to becoming. When you take a driver’s seat, and not a passenger seat in your own life.

“If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in your life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve. You need to set and live by these standards no matter what happens in your life. Even if it all goes wrong, even if it rains on your parade, even if the stock market crashes, even if your lover leaves you, even if no one gives you the support that you need, you still must stay committed to your decision that you will live your life at the highest level.”

“Right now you can make a decision: to go back to school, to master dancing or singing, to take control of your finances, to learn to fly a helicopter, to turn your body into an inspiration, to begin meditating, to enroll in ballroom dancing, to attend a NASA space camp, to learn to speak French, to read more to your children, to spend more time in the flower garden, even to fly to Fiji and live on an island.

If you truly decide to, you can do almost anything. So if you don’t like the current relationship you’re in, make the decision now to change it. If you don’t like your current job, change it. If you don’t like the way you feel about yourself, change it. If it’s a higher level of physical vitality and health you want, you can change it now. In a moment you can seize the same power that has shaped history.”

“Nothing can resist the human will that will stake even its existence on its stated purpose.”

—BENJAMIN DISRAELI”

“Your life changes the moment you make a new, congruent, and committed decision.”

The most exciting thing about this force, this power, is that you already possess it!

Ultimate Success Formula

An elementary process for getting you where you want to go:

1. Decide what you want,
2. Take action,
3. Notice what’s working or not, and
4. Change your approach until you achieve what you want. Deciding to produce a result causes events to be set in motion. If you simply decide what it is you want, get yourself to take action, learn from it, and change your approach, then you will create the momentum to achieve the result. As soon as you truly commit to making something happen, the “how” will reveal itself.”

“When you truly decide you’ll never smoke cigarettes again, that’s it. It’s over! You no longer even consider the possibility of smoking. If you’re one of the people who’s ever exercised the power of decision this way, you know exactly what I’m talking about. An alcoholic knows that even after years of absolute sobriety, if he fools himself into thinking that he can take even one drink, he’ll have to begin all over again. After making a true decision, even a tough one, most of us feel a tremendous amount of relief. We’ve finally gotten off the fence! And we all know how great it feels to have a clear, unquestioned objective.”

Three Decisions that Control Your Destiny

1. Your decisions about what to focus on.
2. Your decisions about what things mean to you.
3. Your decisions about what to do to create the results you desire. > “Too many of us don’t make the majority of our decisions consciously, especially these three absolutely crucial ones; in so doing, we pay a major price. In fact, most people live what I call “The Niagara Syndrome.” I believe that life is like a river, and that most people jump on the river of life without ever really deciding where they want to end up. They wake up and they’re in a raft about to get washed down Niagra Falls, and they ask themselves “How in the world did I end up here?” and not realize that it was their own actions that got them there in the first place! “It’s likely that whatever challenges you have in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream.”

The system you have for making decisions:

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

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

“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

—THOMAS EDISON”

“Mastery takes as long as you want it to take. By the way, were all of my speeches great? Far from it! But I did make sure that I learned from every experience and that I somehow improved until very soon I could enter a room of any size and be able to reach people from virtually all walks of life.”
“what to focus on, what things mean, and what to do in spite of the challenges that may appear to limit us. He raised his standards, backed them up with new beliefs, and implemented the strategies he knew he must.”
“One belief that I’ve developed to carry me through extremely tough times is simply this: God’s delays are not God’s denials. Often, what seems impossible in the short term becomes very possible in the long term if you persist. In order to succeed, we need to discipline ourselves to consistently think long term. A metaphor that I use to remind myself of this is comparing life’s ups and downs to the changing of the seasons.”
Once you’ve decided who you want to be as a person, for example, don’t get stuck on the means to achieving it. It’s the end you’re after. Too often, in deciding what they want for their lives, people pick the best way they know at the time—they make a map—but then don’t stay open to alternate routes. Don’t become rigid in your approach. Cultivate the art of flexibility.”
“Know that it’s your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.”
“When you decide that your life will ultimately be shaped not by conditions, but by your decisions, then, in that moment, your life will change forever, and you will be empowered to take control of the force that shapes your life”

3. The Force that Shapes Your Life

People are wired to avoid pain 3x more than they are wired to gain pleasure.

People will often times go after the behavior (the effect), but instead they should deal with the cause. Why is this happening?

Understanding and utilizing the forces of pain and pleasure will allow you once and for all to create the lasting changes and improvements you desire for yourself and those you care about.

Failure to understand this force dooms you to a future of living in reaction, like an animal or a machine. Perhaps this sounds like a complete oversimplification, but think about it. Why don’t you do some of the things you know you should do?

“The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t life controls you.”

—ANTHONY ROBBINS”

“I never did learn to consume drugs or alcohol. Is it because I was so brilliant? No, it’s because I was very fortunate. One reason I never drank alcohol is that, as a child, there were a couple of people in my family who acted so obnoxiously when drunk that I associated extreme pain to drinking any alcohol. One especially graphic image I have is the memory of my best friend’s mom. She was extremely obese, weighing close to 300 pounds, and she drank constantly. Whenever she did, she wanted to hug me and drool all over me. To this day, the smell of alcohol on anyone’s breath nauseates me.”

“We don’t believe what we hear; rather, we are certain that our perceptions are accurate—and I was certain that day that drinking beer was the next step in my personal growth.”

“If we link massive pain to any behavior or emotional pattern, we will avoid indulging in it at all costs. We can use this understanding to harness the force of pain and pleasure to change virtually anything in our lives.”

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

—MARCUS AURELIUS”

“What you link pain and pleasure to will shape your destiny.”

“Our behavior is instinctive reaction to pain and pleasure, not intellectual calculation.”

“The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors. With smoking, for example, all you must do is link enough pain to smoking and enough pleasure to quitting. You have the ability to do this right now, but you might not exercise this capability because you’ve trained your body to link pleasure to smoking, or you fear that stopping would be too painful. Yet, if you meet anyone who has stopped, you will find that this behavior changed in one day: the day they truly changed what smoking meant to them.”

“The mission of Madison Avenue is to influence what we link pain and pleasure to.”

“What we’ve got to realize is that this is all based on linking pleasurable sensations to specific behaviors. It’s the idea that if we use the product, we’ll live our fantasies. Advertisers have taught all of us that if you drive a BMW, then you’re an extraordinary person with exceptional taste. If you drive a Hyundai, you’re intelligent and frugal. If you drive a Pontiac, you’ll have excitement. If you drive a Toyota, what a feeling you’ll get! You’re taught that if you wear Obsession cologne, you’ll soon be entwined in the throes of an androgynous orgy. If you drink Pepsi, you’ll be able to jam with M.C. Hammer as the epitome of hip. If you want to be a “good” mom, then you feed your children Hostess fruit pies, cupcakes and Twinkies.”

“Simply by linking pain to the behaviors we want to stop at such a high level of emotional intensity that we won’t even consider those behaviors any longer. Then, simply link pleasure to the new behavior you desire for yourself”

4. Belief Systems: The Power to Create and the Power to Destroy

“He was bitter and cruel, an alcoholic and drug addict who almost killed himself several times. Today he serves a life sentence in prison for the murder of a liquor store cashier who “got in his way.” He has two sons, born a mere eleven months apart, one of whom grew up to be “just like Dad”: a drug addict who lived by stealing and threatening others until he, too, was put in jail for attempted murder. His brother, however, is a different story: a man who’s raising three kids, enjoys his marriage, and appears to be truly happy. As regional manager for a major national concern, he finds his work both challenging and rewarding. He’s physically fit, and has no alcohol or drug addictions! How could these two young men have turned out so differently, having grown up in virtually the same environment? Both were asked privately, unbeknownst to the other, “Why has your life turned out this way?” Surprisingly, they both provided the exact same answer: “What else could I have become, having grown up with a father like that?”

“So often we’re seduced into believing that events control our lives and that our environment has shaped who we are today. No greater lie was ever told. It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.”

The meaning we ascribe to our experiences are more significant than the experiences themselves.

“Two women turn seventy years old, yet each takes a different meaning from the event. One “knows” that her life is coming to an end. To her, seven decades of living mean that her body must be breaking down and she’d better start winding up her affairs. The other woman decides that what a person is capable of at any age depends upon her belief, and sets a higher standard for herself. She decides that mountain climbing might be a good sport to begin at the age of seventy. For the next twenty five years she devotes herself to this new adventure in mastery, scaling some of the highest peaks in the world, until today, in her nineties, Hulda Crooks has become “the oldest woman to ascend Mount Fuji.”

“What are our beliefs designed for? They’re the guiding force to tell us what will lead to pain and what will lead to pleasure. Whenever something happens in your life, your brain asks two questions: 1) Will this mean pain or pleasure? 2) What must I do now to avoid pain and/or gain pleasure? The answers to these two questions are based on our beliefs, and our beliefs are driven by our generalizations about what we’ve learned could lead to pain and pleasure. These generalizations guide all of our actions and thus the direction and quality of our lives.”

Generalizations are useful -> they help you open up a new door and move quickly. At the same time, they provide a sense of certainty that is sometimes helpful but other times overfits.

“Unfortunately, generalizations in more complex areas of our lives can oversimplify and sometimes create limiting beliefs. Maybe you’ve failed to follow through on various endeavors a few times in your life, and based on that, you developed a belief that you are incompetent. Once you believe this is true, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You may say, “Why even try if I’m not going to follow through anyway?” Or perhaps you’ve made a few poor decisions in business or in relationships, and have interpreted that to mean you will always “sabotage” yourself. Or maybe in school you didn’t learn as quickly as you thought other kids did, and rather than considering the idea that you had a different learning strategy, you may have decided that you were “learning-disabled.” On another level, isn’t racial prejudice fueled by a wholesale generalization about an entire group of people?”

“The challenge with all these beliefs is that they become limitations for future decisions about who you are and what you’re capable of. We need to remember that most of our beliefs are generalizations about our past, based on our interpretations of painful and pleasurable experiences.”

“The challenge is threefold: 1) most of us do not consciously decide what we’re going to believe; 2) often our beliefs are based on misinterpretation of past experiences; and 3) once we adopt a belief, we forget it’s merely an interpretation. We begin to treat our beliefs as if they’re realities, as if they are gospel. In fact, we rarely, if ever, question our long-held beliefs. If you ever wonder why people do what they do, again, you need to remember that human beings are not random creatures: all of our actions are the result of our beliefs. Whatever we do, it is out of our conscious or unconscious beliefs about what will lead to pleasure or away from pain. If you want to create long-term and consistent changes in your behaviors, you must change the beliefs that are holding you back.”

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy.

“Sometimes we develop beliefs that create limitations or strengths within a very specific context; for instance, how we feel about our ability to sing or dance, fix a car, or do calculus. Other beliefs are so generalized that they dominate virtually every aspect of our lives, either negatively or positively. I call these global beliefs.”
“Once accepted, our beliefs become unquestioned commands to our nervous systems, and they have the power to expand or destroy the possibilities of our present and future.”

Is This Belief Useful?

“The key question, again, is whether this belief is strengthening or weakening us, empowering or disempowering us on a daily basis.”

Beliefs Are Tables

A belief with nothing to substantiate it is like a table with no legs. If you have more references, then you can back up your beliefs and give them legs.

• The strongest and most solid legs are formed by personal experiences that we have a lot of emotion attached to because they were painful or pleasurable experiences.
• The second factor is the number of references that belief has. ### His Ability to Create a Sense of Certainty was his real genius

Anyone who uses a computer is likely to recognize the name “Microsoft.” What most people don’t realize is that Bill Gates, the co-founder of that company, was not just some genius who got lucky, but a person who put himself on the line with no references to back up his belief. When he found out that an Albuquerque company was developing something called a “personal computer” that needed BASIC software, he called them up and promised to deliver it, even though he had no such thing at the time. Once he had committed himself, he had to find a way. His ability to create a sense of certainty was his real genius. Many people were just as intelligent as he was, but he used his certainty to be able to tap into his resources, and within a few weeks he and a partner had written a language that made the personal computer a reality.”

The Story of the Four-Minute Mile

• Think about the story of the four-minute mile, first completed by Roger Banister in 1954: “It had seemed no one would ever be able to break a four-minute mile, yet within one year of Roger’s breaking the barrier, 37 other runners also broke it. His experience provided them with references strong enough to create a sense of certainty that they, too, could “do the impossible.” And the year after that, 300 other runners did the same thing!”

“If you’re going to make an error in life, err on the side of overestimating your capabilities (obviously, as long as it doesn’t jeopardize your life).”

“The past doesn’t equal the future.” All great leaders, all people who have achieved success in any area of life, know the power of continuously pursuing their vision, even if all the details of how to achieve it aren’t yet available. If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible.”

How to Interpret “Failures” and “Defeats”

It’s important because that shapes our destiny.

“One of the biggest challenges in anyone’s life is knowing how to interpret “failures.” How we deal with life’s “defeats” and what we determine is the cause will shape our destinies. We need to remember that how we deal with adversity and challenges will shape our lives more than almost anything else. Sometimes we get so many references of pain and failure that we begin to assemble those into a belief that nothing we do can make things better. Some people begin to feel that things are pointless, that they’re helpless or worthless, or that no matter what they try they’ll lose anyway. These are a set of beliefs that must never be indulged in if we ever expect to succeed and achieve in our lives. These beliefs strip us of our personal power and destroy our ability to act.“

“In psychology, there is a name for this destructive mindset: learned helplessness. When people experience enough failure at something—and you’d be surprised how few times this is for some people—they perceive their efforts as futile and develop the terminal discouragement of learned helplessness.”

Patterns that lead to learned helplessness

Patterns of belief that cause us to feel helpless and can destroy our lives: permanence, pervasiveness, and personal.

Permanence

Is the problem temporary or here to stay?

Achievers rarely, if ever, see a problem as permanent, while those who fail see even the smallest problems as permanent. Once you adopt the belief that there’s nothing you can do to change something, simply because nothing you’ve done up until now has changed it, you start to take a pernicious poison into your system.”

“Eight years ago, when I had hit rock bottom and despaired of ever turning things around, I thought my problems were permanent. That was the closest thing to emotional death I’ve ever experienced. I learned to link so much pain to holding that belief that I was able to destroy it, and I’ve never indulged in it again. You must do the same. If you ever hear yourself or anyone you care about starting to express the belief that a problem is permanent, it’s time to immediately shake that person loose. No matter what happens in your life, you’ve got to be able to believe, “This, too, shall pass,” and that if you keep persisting, you’ll find a way.”

Your problems are not permanent.

Pervasiveness

Is this a small hiccup with something you are doing? Or is it taking over your entire life?

“The second difference between winners and losers, those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic, is their beliefs about the pervasiveness of problems. An achiever never sees a problem as being pervasive, that is, that one problem controls their whole life. They always see it as, “Well, it’s just a little challenge with my eating pattern.” They don’t see it as, “I’m the problem. Because I overeat, my whole life is destroyed.” Conversely, those who are pessimistic—those who have learned helplessness—have developed a belief that because they screwed up in one area, they are a screw-up! They believe that because they have financial challenges, their whole life is now destroyed: their kids won’t be taken care of, their spouses will leave them, and so on. Pretty soon they generalize that things are out of control and feel completely helpless. Imagine the impact of permanence and pervasiveness together!”

The solution to both permanence and pervasiveness is to see something you can take control of in your life, and begin to take action in that direction. As you do this, some of these limiting beliefs will disappear.”

Personal

Is the solution to modify or approach, or is it a personality defect that we cannot fix?

“The final category of belief, which Seligman calls personal, I refer to as the problem being personal If we don’t see a failure as a challenge to modify our approach, but rather as a problem with ourselves, as a personality defect, we will immediately feel overwhelmed. After all, how do you change your entire life? Isn’t that more difficult than just changing your actions in a particular area? Be wary of adopting the belief of the problem being personal. How inspired can you get by beating yourself up?”

Limiting Beliefs

“Holding these limiting beliefs is equivalent to systematically ingesting minute doses of arsenic that, over time, build up to a fatal dose. While we don’t die immediately, we start dying emotionally the moment we partake of them. So we have to avoid them at all costs. Remember, as long as you believe something, your brain operates on automatic pilot, filtering any input from the environment and searching for references to validate your belief, regardless of what it is.”

“It is the mind that maketh good of ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.”

—EDMUND SPENSER”

“If you question anything enough, eventually you’ll begin to doubt it.”

Pyramid: Opinion (Weak), Belief (Medium), Conviction (Strong)

Beliefs vs. Convictions

“Probably the single biggest factor separating belief and conviction, though, is that a conviction has usually been triggered by significant emotional events, during which the brain links up, “Unless I believe this, I will suffer massive pain. If I were to change this belief, then I would be giving up my entire identity, everything my life has stood for, for years.”

Holding the conviction thus becomes crucial to the person’s very survival. This can be dangerous because anytime we’re not willing to even look at or consider the possibility that our beliefs are inaccurate, we trap ourselves in rigidity which could ultimately condemn us to long-term failure. Sometimes it may be more appropriate to have a belief about something rather than a conviction.”

“The conviction that you are an intelligent person who can always find a way to turn things around can help steer you through some of the toughest times in your life.”

“The way to expand our lives is to model the lives of those people who are already succeeding. It’s powerful, it’s fun, and these people are available all around you. It’s just a matter of asking questions: “What do you believe makes you different? What are the beliefs you have that separate you from others?” Years ago I read a book called Meetings with Remarkable Men, and used that as a theme to shape my life.”

“I’ll be happy to help you in your modeling of successful people through my program, but remember: you’re not limited to me. The models that you need are surrounding you every single day.”

Japanese Manufacturing and Kaizen

“Why did this Japanese company hold themselves to a higher standard of quality than even their contract required? They believed that quality costs less, that if they created a quality product they would not just have satisfied customers but loyal customers—customers who would be willing to wait in line and pay more money for their product. They were operating from the same core belief that propelled them to one of the top market positions in the world: a commitment to never-ending improvement and a constant increase in the quality of life for their customers. This belief was an American export—one I believe we need to repatriate in order to change the direction of our economic future.”

“In Japan, they understand this principle well. In fact, in Japanese businesses, as a result of Deming’s influence, there is a word that is used constantly in discussions about business or relationships. That word is kaizen. This word literally means constant improvement, and the word is constantly used in their language. They often speak of the kaizen of their trade deficit, the kaizen of the production line, the kaizen of their personal relationships. As a result, they’re constantly looking at how to improve. By the way, kaizen is based upon the principle of gradual improvement, simple improvements. But the Japanese understand that tiny refinements made daily begin to create compounded enhancements at a level that most people would never dream of. The Japanese have a saying: “If a man has not been seen for three days, his friends should take a good look at him, and see what changes have befallen him.” Amazingly, but not surprisingly, we have no equivalent word for kaizen in English.”

“The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way, that you are increasing the caliber of who you are and that you are valuable to your company, your friends, and your family. I don’t worry about maintaining the quality of my life, because every day I work on improving it.”

“What have I learned today? What did I contribute or improve? What did I enjoy?”

“Remember, the key to success is developing a sense of certainty—the kind of belief that allows you to expand as a person and take the necessary action to make your life and the lives of those around you even greater. You may believe something is true today, but you and I need to remember that as the years go by and we grow, we’ll be exposed to new experiences. And we may develop even more empowering beliefs, abandoning things we once felt certain about. Realize that your beliefs may change as you gather additional references. What really matters now is whether the beliefs you have today empower or disempower you. Begin today to develop the habit of focusing on the consequences of all your beliefs. Are they strengthening your foundation by moving you to action in the direction you desire, or are they holding you back?

“As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

—PROVERBS 23:7”

Why Change is Difficult

“Why is it that most people think change takes so long? One reason, obviously, is that most people have tried again and again through willpower to make changes, and failed. The assumption that they then make is that important changes must take a long time and be very difficult to make. In reality, it’s only difficult because most of us don’t know how to change! We don’t have an effective strategy. Willpower by itself is not enough—not if we want to achieve lasting change.

The second reason we don’t change quickly is that in our culture, we have a set of beliefs that prevents us from being able to utilize our own inherent abilities. Culturally, we link negative associations to the idea of instant change. For most, instant change means you never really had a problem at all. If you can change that easily, why didn’t you change a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, and stop complaining?”

“This is exactly what we have to do if we’re going to succeed in creating long-term change. Once we effect a change, we should reinforce it immediately. Then, we have to condition our nervous systems to succeed not just once, but consistently. You wouldn’t go to an aerobics class just one time and say, “Okay, now I’ve got a great body and I’ll be healthy for life!” The same is true of your emotions and behavior. We’ve got to condition ourselves for success, for love, for breaking through our fears. And through that conditioning, we can develop patterns that automatically lead us to consistent, lifelong success.”

“This is good news for those who want to change their habits! If you’ll just stop indulging in a particular behavior or emotion long enough, if you just interrupt your pattern of using the old pathway for a long enough period of time, the neural connection will weaken and atrophy. Thus the disempowering emotional pattern or behavior disappears with it. We should remember this also means that if you don’t use your passion it’s going to dwindle. Remember: courage, unused, diminishes. Commitment, unexercised, wanes. Love, unshared, dissipates.”

6. How to Change Anything in your life: the science of neuro-associative conditioning

1. Decide what you really want and what’s preventing you from having it right now

“We also must learn what’s preventing us from having what we want. Invariably, what’s preventing us from making the change is that we link more pain to making a change than to staying where we are. We either have a belief like, “If I change, I will have pain,” or we fear the unknown that change might bring.”

1. Leverage: associate massive pain to not changing now and massive pleasure to the experience of changing now. “The greatest leverage you can create for yourself is the pain that comes from inside, not outside. Knowing that you have failed to live up to your own standards for your life is the ultimate pain. One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity.”

“A second group truly wanted to quit, and tried to do so on their own. Their leverage was primarily internal. As a result, their behavioral changes lasted a great deal longer, often as much as two years after the initial commitment. What eventually caused a relapse was suffering a significant amount of stress. When this occurred, they often reverted back to their drug habit as a way of getting out of pain and into pleasure. Why? Because they had not found a replacement for the old neural pathway.”

Using NAC to Negotiate a Contract

1. The first step is to lay the groundwork. Get clear about what you want and what has prevented you from getting it. What does the other person want? What’s in it for both of you? How will you know you have a successful contract?
2. Get leverage by getting that person to link pain to not making the deal, and pleasure to making it.
3. Interrupt the pattern of any belief or idea that’s keeping the deal from moving ahead.
4. Create an alternative that neither of you thought of before that will meet both your needs.
5. Reinforce that alternative by constantly reinforcing the pleasure and the positive impact of this alternative.
6. See if it’s going to work out for everybody, a win-win situation. If so, negotiate to a successful conclusion. # 7. How to Get What you Really Want

What do you crave?

“ What it all comes down to is the fact that you want these things or results because you see them as a means to achieving certain feelings, emotions, or states that you desire.”

“When somebody kisses you, what makes you feel good in that moment? Is it wet tissue touching wet tissue that really triggers the feeling? Of course not! If that’s true, kissing your dog would turn you on! All of our emotions are nothing but a flurry of biochemical storms in our brains—and we can spark them at any moment. But first we must learn how to take control of them consciously instead of living in reaction.”

BEING IN STATE

“The difference between acting badly or brilliantly is not based on your ability, but on the state of your mind and/or body in any given moment.”

“Have you ever found yourself unable to remember a friend’s name? Or how to spell a “difficult” word like… “house”? How come you weren’t able to do this? You certainly knew the answer. Is it because you’re stupid? No, it’s because you were in a stupid state!”

It’s not that you were stupid. You were in a stupid state. It’s not that the sun wasn’t there; rather, the sun was shining but there were clouds.

“You can be gifted with the courage and determination of Marva Collins, the grace and flair of Fred Astaire, the strength and endurance of Nolan Ryan, the compassion and intellect of Albert Einstein — but if you continually submerge yourself in negative states, you’ll never fulfill that promise of excellence.”

Two ways you can change your state: change your physical body, or change your focus.

Emotion is created by motion.

“Every emotion you ever feel has specific physiology linked to it: posture, breathing, patterns of movement, facial expressions. For depression, these are certainly obvious. In Unlimited Power, I talked about the physical attributes of depression, where your eyes are focused, how you hold yourself, and so forth. Once you learn how you use your body when in certain emotional states, you can return to those states, or avoid them, simply by changing your physiology. The challenge is that most of us limit ourselves to just a few habitual patterns of physiology. We assume them automatically, not realizing how great a role they play in shaping our behavior from moment to moment.”

You can change your mental state based on what you do physically.

“You can experience any of these just by changing the way you use your body! You can feel strong, you can smile, you can change anything in a minute just by laughing. You’ve heard the old adage, “Someday you’ll look back on this and laugh.” If that’s true, why not look back and laugh now? Why wait? Wake your body up; learn to put it in pleasurable states consistently no matter what’s happened. How? Create energy by the way you think of something over and over again, and you’ll change the sensations you link to that situation in the future.”

Your body leads your emotions, not the other way around.

If you drink and jerk off all the time, you will always feel hungover and meek and you will become someone who is always hungover and meek.

“The emotional state you’re in then begins to affect your body, and it becomes a sort of endless loop. Notice how you’re sitting even now. Sit up right now and create more energy in your body as you continue not only to read but also to master these principles.”

“Anyone can continue to feel good if they already feel good, or if they’re “on a roll”; it doesn’t take much to accomplish this. But the real key in life is to be able to make yourself feel good when you don’t feel good, or when you don’t even want to feel good. Know that you can do this instantaneously by using your body as a tool to change state. Once you identify the physiology attached to a state, you can use it to create the states you desire at will.”

“The key to success, then, is to create patterns of movement that create confidence, a sense of strength, flexibility, a sense of personal power, and fun. Realize that stagnation comes from lack of movement. Can you think of an old person, someone who doesn’t “get around much anymore”? Getting old is not a matter of age; it’s a lack of movement. And the ultimate lack of movement is death.”

Patterns of movement that create confidence, strength, flexibility, and a sense of personal power and fun.

Racing and Focus

“If you start to skid out of control, the tendency, of course, is to look at the wall. But if you keep focusing on it, that’s exactly where you’ll end up. Drivers know that you go where you look; you travel in the direction of your focus. If you resist your fear, have faith, and focus on where you want to go, your actions will take you in that direction, and if it’s possible to turn out of it, you will—but you stand no chance if you focus on what you fear. Invariably people say, “What if you’re going to crash anyway?” The answer is that you increase your chances by focusing on what you want. Focusing on the solution is always to your benefit. If you have too much momentum in the direction of the wall, then focusing on the problem just before the crash is not going to help you anyway.”

“When the instructors first explained this to me, I nodded my head and thought, “Of course! I know all about this. After all, I teach this stuff.” My first time out on the road I was screaming along, and all of a sudden, unbeknownst to me, they pushed the button. I started to skid out of control. Where do you think my eyes went? You bet! Right at the wall! In the final seconds, I was terrified because I knew I was going to hit it. The instructor grabbed my head and yanked it to the left, forcing me to look in the direction I needed to go. We kept skidding, and I knew we were going to crash, but I was forced to look only in the direction I wanted to go. Sure enough, as I looked in that direction, I couldn’t help but turn the wheel accordingly. It caught at the last moment, and we pulled out. You can imagine my relief!”

“One thing that’s useful to know about all of this: when you change your focus, often you don’t immediately change direction. Isn’t that true in life as well? Often there’s a lag time between when you redirect your focus and when your body and your life’s experience catch up. That’s all the more reason to start focusing on what you want quicker and not wait any longer with the problem.”

“The same thing is true in life. In later chapters, you’ll learn some ways to make sure you condition your focus to be positive. For now, realize that you’ve got to discipline your mind. A mind out of control will play tricks on you. Directed, it’s your greatest friend.”

It’s important to ask the right questions

“The most powerful way to control focus is through the use of questions. For whatever you ask, your brain provides an answer; whatever you look for, you’ll find. If you ask, “Why is this person taking advantage of me?” you’re going to focus on how you’re being taken advantage of, whether it’s true or not. If you ask, “How can I turn this around?” you’ll get a more empowering answer. Questions are such a powerful tool for changing your life. They are one of the most powerful and simple ways to change the way you’re feeling about virtually anything, and thus change the direction of your life at a moment’s notice. Questions provide the key to unlocking our unlimited potential.”

Story of Bo Jackson

“With the bully in his gun sight, he could simply fire and his schoolmate would be history. But at that very instant, he asked himself a question: What will happen to me if I pull the trigger? And another image came into focus: a picture as painful as any imaginable. In that split second which would take the boy’s life in one of two very different directions, he visualized, with chilling clarity, what it would be like to go to jail. He pictured having to stay up all night to keep the other prisoners from raping him. That potential pain was greater than the anticipation of revenge. He re-aimed his gun, and shot a tree.

This boy was Bo Jackson, and as he describes this scene in his biography, there’s no question that at that pivot point in his life, the pain associated with prison was a force more powerful than the pleasure of satisfaction he thought killing the other boy would bring. One change in focus, one decision about pain and pleasure, probably made the difference between a kid with no future and one of the greatest athletic success stories of our time.”

“The journey toward Niagara Falls begins when you don’t control your states, because if you don’t control your states, you won’t be able to control your behavior. If there are things you need to accomplish but you can’t get motivated, realize you’re not in the appropriate state. That’s not an excuse, though, that’s a command! It’s a command to do whatever it takes to change your state, whether it’s changing your physiology or your focus.”

• Intelligence is prerequisite, but most of the time is dependent on the state you put yourself in. ## Taking Conscious Control of Running Your Own Mind

“You’ve got to realize that you must take conscious control of running your own mind. You’ve got to do it deliberately; otherwise, you’re going to be at the mercy of whatever happens around you. The first skill you must master is to be able to change your state instantly no matter what the environment, no matter how scared or frustrated you are.

Change Your State from Being Afraid and “Knowing” You Can’t Do Something, to Knowing You Can Do It and Take Effective Action Towards It.

This is one of the foundational skills people develop in my seminars. They learn how to quickly change their state from being afraid and “knowing” they can’t do something, to knowing they can do it and being able to take effective action.

Developing experiences like this in which you change quickly gives you tremendous power in your life—something you can’t fully appreciate until you really try it for yourself.”

Four Goals in Running Your Own Mind

1. Take conscious control of running your own mind, deliberately. You must master the ability to change your state instantly, no matter what the environment, no matter how scared or frustrated you are.
2. Be able to change state consistently in any environment.
3. Establish a set of habitual patterns of using your physiology and focus so that you consistently feel good without any conscious effort whatsoever. My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel tons of pleasure and very little pain—and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain. Someone who’s achieved a lot but is living in emotional pain all the time, or is surrounded by people in pain all the time, isn’t truly successful.
4. Enable others to change their state instantly, to change their state in any environment, and to change their state for their whole life. This is what my franchisees learn to be able to do in their seminars and in their one-on-one work with people. All that you really want in life is to change how you feel.

You can feel ecstasy right now, or you can feel pain or depression or overwhelmed—it’s all up to you. You don’t need drugs or anything else to do it. There are much more effective ways and, as you learned in the chapter on beliefs, drugs can be overpowered by the chemicals you create in your own body, by changing your focus and the way you’re using your physiology. These chemicals are much more powerful than virtually any outside substance.

State and Frame.

Alt text # 8. Questions Are The Answer

Everybody else in the concentration camp died. Instead, Lech asked “How can I use this to escape?”

“Finally, he heard the sound of the engine starting. He felt the truck shudder. And in that moment, he felt a stirring of hope as he lay among the dead. Eventually, he felt the truck lurch to a stop, and then it dumped its ghastly cargo—dozens of the dead and one man pretending to be one of them—in a giant open grave outside the camp. Lech remained there for hours until nightfall. When he finally felt certain no one was there, he extracted himself from the mountain of cadavers, and he ran naked twenty-five miles to freedom.”

Our Questions Determine Our Thoughts

It’s not the events that shape my life that determine how I feel and act, but, rather, it’s the way I interpret and evaluate my life experiences.

I realized that the main difference between the people who seemed to be successful—in any area!—and those who weren’t was that successful people asked better questions, and as a result, they got better answers. They got answers that empowered them to know exactly what to do in any situation to produce the results they desired.

Quality Questions Create a Quality Life

“Quality questions create a quality life.”

“You need to burn this idea into your brain, because it’s as important as anything else you’ll learn in this book.

• Businesses succeed when those who make the decisions that control their destiny ask the right questions about markets or strategies or product lines.
• Relationships flourish when people ask the right questions about where potential conflicts exist and how to support each other instead of tearing each other down.
• Politicians win elections when the questions they raise—whether explicitly or implicitly—provide answers that work for them and their community. “the difference between people is the difference in the questions they ask consistently.”

“So if you ask, “Why can’t I ever succeed?,” it will tell you—even if it has to make something up! It might come up with an answer like, “Because you’re stupid,” or “Because you don’t deserve to do well anyway.”

Mu.

How do I make a million dollars. That’s a bad question. What is something that people would really value that I can build and market?

“Remember, ask and you shall receive. If you ask a terrible question, you’ll get a terrible answer. Your mental computer is ever ready to serve you, and whatever question you give it, it will surely come up with an answer.”

“Questions determine everything you do in life, from your abilities to your relationships to your income. For example, many people fail to commit to a relationship simply because they keep asking questions that create doubt: “What if there’s somebody better out there? What if I commit myself now and miss out?” What terribly disempowering questions! This fuels the fear that the grass will always be greener on the other side of the fence, and it keeps you from being able to enjoy what you already have in your own life. Sometimes these same people destroy the relationships they do eventually have with more terrible questions: “How come you always do this to me? Why don’t you appreciate me? What if I were to leave right now—how would that make you feel?” Compare this with “How did I get so lucky to have you in my life? What do I love the most about my husband/wife? How much richer will our lives be as a result of our relationship?”

Bad question/ good question:

• What if there’s somebody better out there? What if I commit myself now and miss out?
• Better question: how did I get so lucky to have you in my life?
• How much richer will our lives be as a result of our relationship? “Remember, it’s not only the questions you ask, but the questions you fail to ask, that shape your destiny.”

Superior evaluations create a superior life.

“A genuine quality of life comes from consistent, quality questions.”

How Questions Work

1. They change what we’re focused on, and therefore how we feel.

If you ask bad questions like

• How come I’m so depressed
• Why doesn’t anybody like me
• Why haven’t I hit it big yet “you will focus on, look for, and find references to back up the idea that there is a reason for you to feel depressed and unloved. As a result, you’ll stay in those un-resourceful states”

“If instead you ask, “How can I change my state so that I am feeling happy and am being more lovable?,” you’ll focus on solutions. Even if your brain initially responds, “There’s nothing I can do,” but like Stanislavsky Lech or W. Mitchell you persist with a sense of certainty and expectation in spite of it all, then eventually you will get the answers you need and deserve. You will come up with authentic reasons for feeling better, and as you focus on them, your emotional state will immediately follow suit.”

Instead, ask questions that pump you up or questions that empower you:

• What are my most treasured memories?
• What’s really great in my life right now?
• What am I truly happy about in my life right now?
• What am I truly grateful for? Model the habitual questions of people I really respect.

2. Questions change what we delete.

“If you’re feeling really sad, there is only one reason: it’s because you’re deleting all the reasons you could be feeling good. And if you’re feeling good, it’s because you’re deleting all the bad things you could be focusing on.”

“Questions are the laser of human consciousness. They concentrate our focus and determine what we feel and do.”

If you’re angry…

“How can I learn from this problem so that this never happens again?”

“Presuppositions program us to accept things that may or may not be true, and they can be used on us by others, or even, subconsciously, by ourselves. For example, if you ask yourself a question like “Why do I always sabotage myself?” after something ends disappointingly, you set yourself up for more of the same and set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why? Because, as we’ve already said, your brain will obediently come up with an answer for anything you ask of it. You’ll take for granted that you’ve sabotaged things because you’re focusing on why you do it, not on whether you do it.”

3. Questions change the resources available to us.

• instead of “how do we wind this down,” you’re assuming that you should wind it down. “You and I have that same power at our disposal every moment of the day. At any moment, the questions that we ask ourselves can shape our perception of who we are, what we’re capable of, and what we’re willing to do to achieve our dreams.”

Develop a pattern of consistent questions that empower you.

1. What is great about this problem?
2. What is not perfect yet?
3. What am I willing to do to make it the way I want it?
4. What am I willing to no longer do in order to make it the way I want it?

   1. “I knew that I could no longer whine and complain about how unfair it all was or feel abused when people were really trying to support me.
5. How can I enjoy the process while I do what is necessary to make it the way I want it?” He that cannot ask cannot live.

See Morning & Evening Power Questions

“There’s a point at which you must stop asking questions in order to make progress. If you keep asking questions, you’re going to be uncertain, and only certain actions will produce certain results. At some point, you’ve got to stop evaluating and start doing. How? You finally decide what’s most important to you, at least in the moment, and you use your personal power to follow through and begin to change the quality of your life.”

9. The Vocabulary of Ultimate Success

“Realize now the power that your words command if you simply choose them wisely.”

“People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished emotional life; people with rich vocabularies have a multi-hued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.”

“You and I must realize that the English language is filled with words that, in addition to their literal meanings, convey distinct emotional intensity. For example, if you develop a habit of saying you “hate” things—you “hate” your hair; you “hate” your job; you “hate” having to do something—do you think this raises the intensity of your negative emotional states more than if you were to use a phrase like “I prefer something else”?”

Instead of “I hate,” why not focus on “I would prefer.” Instead of saying you hate a situation, instead say what it is you would prefer!

“Simply by changing your habitual vocabulary—the words you consistently use to describe the emotions of your life—you can instantaneously change how you think, how you feel, and how you live.”

“Unfortunately, most of us have not consciously evaluated the impact of the words we’ve grown accustomed to using. The problem occurs when we start consistently pouring any form of negative sensation into the word-mold of “furious” or “depressed” or “humiliated” or “insecure.” And this word may not accurately reflect the actual experience. The moment we place this mold around our experience, the label we put on it becomes our experience. What was “a bit challenging” becomes “devastating.”

“This is the essence of Transformational Vocabulary: the words that we attach to our experience become our experience. Thus, we must consciously choose the words we use to describe our emotional states, or suffer the penalty of creating greater pain than is truly warranted or appropriate.”

“Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.”

—ALDOUS HUXLEY ## Overloaded vs. Overwhelmed

“After the smoke began to clear, and she realized he was actually furious, she became concerned, so she gave him some very valuable feedback. She said, “Bob, you’re acting so strangely. You never act this way. You know, I noticed something else: you keep using a certain word that I’ve never heard you use before. Usually when you’re stressed, you say you’re overloaded, but lately I hear you talking all the time about how you’re overwhelmed. You never say that; Kelly uses that word, and when she does, she feels this same kind of rage and behaves very much like you just did.”

“Wow,” I began to think as Bob told me the story, “Is it possible that, by adopting someone else’s habitual vocabulary, you began to adopt their emotional patterns as well?” And isn’t this especially true if you’ve adopted not only their words, but also their volume, intensity, and tonality, too?”

“If you don’t have a way of representing something, you can’t experience it as it is.”

“If an assemblage of words you’re using is creating states that disempower you, get rid of those words and replace them with those that empower you!”

“Well, that’s rather inconvenient.” It worked so well in changing their states, now they use the word on a regular basis. On the golf course, if a shot doesn’t go the way he wants, he’ll say, “That shot just underwhelms me.” Tiny shifts like these change the emotional direction and therefore the quality of our lives.”

Try abandoning words.

Depressed => I’m feeling a little bit down.

“If you use phrases like “I’m suicidal,” you have instantly raised your emotional pain to a level that could actually threaten the quality of your life. Or, if you’re in a romantic relationship and tell your partner, “I’m leaving,” you create the very real possibility that the relationship’s about to end. If, however, you were to say, “I’m incredibly frustrated” or “I’m angry,” you have a much better chance at resolution.”

10. The Power of Life Metaphors

“The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.”

i’m waist deep in tony robbins books this break (really good, i highly recommend it), and one takeaway is that the metaphor kind of sets the scene.

— JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET”

“So I asked him why he was so upset, and he said, “Well, it’s like they have us in a box with a gun to our heads” Do you think you’d react rather intensely if you believed or represented in your mind that you were trapped in a situation like this? It’s not hard to figure out why he was in a rage. Now, for many years without realizing it, I’d helped people change how they were feeling by interrupting their patterns and changing their metaphors. I just wasn’t aware of what I was doing. (That’s part of the power of creating a label: once you have a label for what you do, you can produce a behavior consistently.)

“I turned to the CEO and asked, “What color is the squirt gun?” He looked at me in a puzzled state and said, “What?” I repeated the question, “What color is the squirt gun?” This immediately broke his pattern. In order to answer my question, his mind had to focus on my weird question, which immediately changed his internal focus. When he began to picture a squirt gun, do you think his emotion changed as a result? You bet! He started to laugh. You see, virtually any question we ask repeatedly, a person will eventually entertain an answer to, and when they do answer your question, it changes their focus. For example, if I tell you over and over, “Don’t think of the color blue,” what color are you going to think of? The answer, obviously, is “blue.” And whatever you think about, you’ll feel.”

“It’s like they’ve got a gun to our head”

What color is the squirt gun?

“I’m stuck here”

The golden handcuffs must be pretty tight!

“Or if someone tells me that they just can’t make progress, that they keep hitting a wall, I tell them to stop hitting it and just drill a hole through it. Or climb over it, or tunnel under it, or walk over, open the door, and go through it.”

“A whole set of rules, ideas, and preconceived notions accompany any metaphor you adopt. So if you believe life is a war, how does that color your perceptions of life? You might say, “It’s tough, and it ends with death.” Or, “It’s going to be me against everybody else.” Or, “It’s dog eat dog.” Or, “If life is really a battle, then maybe I’m going to get hurt.” All these filters impact your unconscious beliefs about people, possibility, work, effort, and life itself. This metaphor will affect your decisions about how to think, how to feel, and what to do. It will shape your actions and therefore your destiny.”

“having only one metaphor is a great way to limit your life.”

“As I developed “antennae” to sensitize myself to people’s global metaphors, I read an interview with anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson in which she said, “Few things are more debilitating than a toxic metaphor.” That’s quite an insight, and one with which I was soon to gain firsthand experience.”
“With all the power that metaphors wield over our lives, the scary part is that most of us have never consciously selected the metaphors with which we represent things to ourselves. Where did you get your metaphors? You probably picked them up from people around you, from your parents, teachers, co-workers, and friends. I’ll bet you didn’t think about their impact, or maybe you didn’t even think about them at all, and then they just became a habit.
“All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.”

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU”

“I remember when Martin shared with me the moving story of how his life changed years ago while he was making Apocalypse Now. Before that time, he had seen life as something to fear. Now he sees it as an intriguing challenge. Why? His new metaphor is that life is a mystery. He loves the mystery of being a human being, the wonder and sense of possibility that unfolds with his experience of each new day.”
“Years ago, one of my early mentors, Jim Rohn, assisted me in looking at my life in a new way by thinking in terms of the metaphor of the seasons. Often when things look bleak people think, “This is going to go on forever.” Instead I say, “Life has its seasons, and I’m in winter right now.” The great thing is, if you adopt this metaphor, what always follows winter? Spring! The sun comes out, you’re no longer freezing to death, and all of a sudden you can plant new seeds. You start to notice all the beauty of nature, the new life and growth. Then comes summer. It’s hot, you tend to your little plants, and you nurture them so they don’t get scorched. Then there’s fall, when you get to reap your rewards. Sometimes it doesn’t work out—maybe a hailstorm destroys your crop. But if you trust in the cycle of the seasons, you know you’ll get another chance.”
“You see, it’s not for us to decide when somebody becomes a butterfly. We think it’s wrong, but I think God has a better idea when the right time is. Right now it’s winter and you want it to be summer, but God has a different plan. Sometimes we just have to trust that God knows how to make butterflies better than we do. And when we’re caterpillars, sometimes we don’t even realize that butterflies exist, because they’re up above us—but maybe we should just remember that they’re there.” And Joshua smiled, gave me a big hug and said, “I bet he’s a beautiful butterfly.”

Become a metaphor detective.

“Take control of your metaphors now and create a new world for yourself: a world of possibility, of richness, of wonder, and of joy.”

11. The Ten Emotions of Power

The only difference between a rut and a grave is a few feet.

“From my perspective, as I travel around the world, meeting people from all walks of life and “feeling the pulse” of literally hundreds of thousands of individuals, we all seem to instinctively realize the risk of emotional “flat line,” and desperately seek ways to get our hearts pumping again.”

“So many suffer from the delusion that emotions are entirely out of their control, that they’re just something that spontaneously occurs in reaction to the events of our lives. Often we dread emotions as if they were viruses that zero in on us and attack when we’re most vulnerable. Sometimes we think of them as “inferior cousins” to our intellect and discount their validity. Or we assume that emotions arise in response to what others do or say to us. What’s the common element in all these global beliefs? It’s the misconception that we have no control over these mysterious things called emotions.”

Four ways people deal with emotions:

Avoidance

Avoid any situations that could lead to emotions that they fear; or worse, people try to feel no emotion at all.

Example: if you fear rejection, not applying for new things. Not applying for challenging jobs. Shying away from relationships.

“Dealing with emotions in this way is the ultimate trap, because while avoiding negative situations may protect you in the short term, it keeps you from feeling the very love, intimacy, and connection that you desire most.”

“A much more powerful approach is to learn to find the hidden, positive meaning in those things you once thought were negative emotions.”

Denial

People often try to disassociate from their feelings by saying, “It doesn’t feel that bad.” Meanwhile, they keep stoking the fire within themselves by thinking about how horrible things are, or how someone has taken advantage of them, or how they do everything right but things still turn out wrong, and why does this always happen to them?

They never change their focus or physiology, and they keep asking the same disempowering questions. Experiencing an emotion and trying to pretend it’s not there only creates more pain.

Once again, ignoring the messages that your emotions are trying to give you will not make things better. If the message your emotions are trying to deliver is ignored, the emotions simply increase their amperage; they intensify until you finally pay attention. Trying to deny your emotions is not the solution. Instead, understand and use them.”

Competition

Yeah? Look at how bad I’ve got it!

“This approach must be avoided at all costs, because it becomes a selffulfilling prophecy where the person ends up having an investment in feeling bad on a regular basis—and then they are truly trapped.”

Learning and Using

“If you want to make your life really work, you must make your emotions work for you. You can’t run from them; you can’t tune them out; you can’t trivialize them or delude yourself about what they mean. Nor can you just allow them to run your life. Emotions, even those that seem painful in the short term, are truly like an internal compass that points you toward the actions you must take to arrive at your goals. Without knowing how to use this compass, you’ll be forever at the mercy of any psychic tempest that blows your way.”

• Your emotions job is to serve you.
• The emotions you once thought of as negative are merely a call to action.
• They’re not negative emotions. Instead, let’s call them Action Signals. “Realize that the emotions you are feeling at this very moment are a gift, a guideline, a support system, a call to action. If you suppress your emotions and try to drive them out of your life, or if you magnify them and allow them to take over everything, then you’re squandering one of life’s most precious resources.”

“So what is the source of emotions? You are the source of all your emotions; you are the one who creates them. So many people feel that they have to wait for certain experiences in order to feel the emotions they desire. For instance, they don’t give themselves permission to feel loved or happy or confident unless a particular set of expectations is met. I’m here to tell you that you can feel any way you choose at any moment in time.”

“We’re always waiting for the right person or right situation to come along before we feel good. But who determines whether this is the right person or situation? When you do feel good, who’s making you feel good? You are! But you simply have a rule that says you have to wait until A, B, and C occur before you allow yourself to feel good. Why wait? Why not set up a rule that says that whenever you hear a train whistle, you’ll automatically feel great? The good news is that the train whistle is probably more consistent and predictable than the people you’re hoping will show up to make you feel good!”

“You don’t need any special reason to feel good—you can just decide to feel good right now, simply because you’re alive, simply because you want to.”

“So if you’re the source of all your emotions, why don’t you feel good all the time? Again, it’s because your so-called negative emotions are giving you a message. What is the message of these Action Signals? They’re telling you that what you’re currently doing is not working, that the reason you have pain is either the way you’re perceiving things or the procedures you’re using: specifically, the way you’re communicating your needs and desires to people, or the actions you’re taking.”

“ Maybe this Action Signal of feeling hurt is trying to tell you that you need to change your way of communicating so you don’t feel hurt again in the future. Feeling depressed is another call to action, telling you that you need to change your perception that the problems you’re dealing with are permanent or out of control.”

Six Steps to Emotional Mastery

If you feel bad about something…

1. Identify what you’re really feeling: try and use better vocabulary, or explain it to yourself more eloquently. Try to use transformational vocabulary to use more positive words. “Realize that a feeling of hurt or a feeling of loss is not as intense as the feeling of anger. Just in taking a moment to identify what you’re really feeling, and beginning to question your emotions, you may be able to lower the emotional intensity you’re experiencing, and therefore deal with the situation much more quickly and easily.”
2. Acknowledge and appreciate your emotions, knowing that they support you. “You never want to make your emotions wrong. The idea that anything you feel is “wrong” is a great way to destroy honest communication with yourself as well as with others.”

Cultivate the feeling of appreciation for all emotions.

1. Get Curious about the Message This Emotion Is Offering You “Getting curious helps you master your emotion, solve the challenge, and prevent the same problem from occurring in the future.”
2. What do I really want to feel?
3. “What would I have to believe in order to feel the way I’ve been feeling?
4. What am I willing to do to create a solution and handle this right now?
5. What can I learn from this?”
6. Get confident that you can handle it. “The quickest, simplest, and most powerful way I know to handle any emotion is to remember a time when you felt a similar emotion and realize that you’ve successfully handled this emotion before.”
7. Get Certain you can handle this not only today, but in the future as well. Play it out in your head. What’s it like when you make it work? Act it out in your head. How do you feel afterwards?
8. Get excited and take action. “Express yourself by using what you rehearsed internally to create a change in your perceptions or your actions. Remember that the new distinctions you’ve just made will change the way you feel not only today, but how you deal with this emotion in the future.”

The Ten Action Signals

Discomfort

The message: “Boredom, impatience, unease, distress, or mild embarrassment are all sending you a message that something is not quite right. Maybe the way you’re perceiving things is off, or the actions you’re taking are not producing the results you want.”

Solution: 1) change your state (become positive), 2) clarify what you want to do, and 3) refine your actions.

Remember: our brains can make things come off to be much worse than they actually are.

Fear

The message: something that’s going to happen needs to be prepared for.

Solution: Review what you were feeling fearful about and evaluate what you must do to prepare yourself mentally. Figure out what actions you need to take to deal with the situation in the best possible way.

Hurt

The message: feelings of hurt are usually generated by a sense of loss. The message the hurt signal gives us is that we have an expectation that has not been met. Like a loss of intimacy, a loss of trust.

Solution:

1. Realize that in reality you may not have lost anything. Maybe what you need to lose is the false perception that this person is trying to wound or hurt you. Maybe they really don’t realize the impact of their actions on your life.
2. Secondly, take a moment and reevaluate the situation. Ask yourself, “Is there really loss here? Or am I judging this situation too soon, or too harshly?”
3. A third solution that can help you get out of a sense of hurt is to elegantly and appropriately communicate your feeling of loss to the person involved. “The other day when X-Y-Z happened, I misinterpreted that to mean that you didn’t care, and I have a sense of loss. Can you clarify for me what really happened?” Remember: if hurt is not dealt with, it often becomes amplified and turns into anger.

Anger

The message: The message of anger is that an important rule or standard that you hold for your life has been violated by someone else, or maybe even by you.

The Solution:

1. Realize you might have mis-interpreted the situation completely. Maybe they broke your rules because they don’t know what your rules are yet.
2. Even though they broke your rules, your rules are not necessarily the “right” rules
3. Ask yourself a more empowering question like “In the long run, is it true that this person really cares about me?” Interrupt the anger by asking yourself, “What can I learn from this? How can I communicate the importance of these standards I hold for myself to this person in a way that causes them to want to help me, and not violate my standards again in the future? ### Frustration

The message: “The message of frustration is an exciting signal. It means that your brain believes you could be doing better than you currently are.”

The solution:

1. Realize that frustration is your friend, and brainstorm new ways to get a result. How can you flex your approach?
2. Get some input on how to deal with the situation. Find a role model, someone who has found a way to get what you want.
3. Get fascinated by what you can learn that could help you handle this challenge not only today, but in the future, in a way that consumes very little time or energy and actually creates joy.” ### Disappointment

The message: “The message disappointment offers you is that an expectation you have had—a goal you were really going for—is probably not going to happen, so it’s time to change your expectations to make them more appropriate for this situation and take action to set and achieve a new goal immediately.”

The solution:

1. Immediately figure out something you can learn from this situation that could help you in the future to achieve the very thing you were after in the first place.
2. Set a new goal, something that will be even more inspiring, and something you can make immediate progress toward.
3. Realize that you may be judging too soon. Often the things you’re disappointed about are only temporary challenges, very much like in the story of Billy Joel in Chapter 2. As I’ve said, you and I need to remember that God’s delays are not God’s denials. You may just be in what I call “lag time.” People often set themselves up for disappointment by having completely unrealistic expectations. If you go out today and plant a seed, you can’t go back tomorrow and expect to see a tree. “
4. A fourth major solution to dealing with disappointment is to realize that a situation isn’t over yet, and develop more patience. Completely reevaluate what you truly want, and begin to develop an even more effective plan for achieving it.
5. The most powerful antidote to the emotion of disappointment is cultivating an attitude of positive expectancy about what will happen in the future, regardless of what has occurred in the past.” ### GUILT

The message:

“Guilt tells you that you have violated one of your own highest standards, and that you must do something immediately to ensure that you’re not going to violate that standard again in the future.”

The Solution:

1. Acknowledge that you have, in fact, violated a critical standard you hold for yourself.
2. Absolutely commit yourself to making sure this behavior will never happen again in the future. Rehearse in your mind how, if you could live it again, you could deal with the same situation you feel guilty about in a way that is consistent with your own highest personal standards.” ### INADEQUACY

“The message is that you don’t presently have a level of skill necessary for the task at hand. It’s telling you that you need more information, understanding, strategies, tools or confidence.”

Solution

1. Simply ask yourself, “Is this really an appropriate emotion for me to feel in this situation? Am I really inadequate, or do I have to change the way I’m perceiving things?” Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that in order to feel adequate, you have to go out on the dance floor and outdo Michael Jackson. This is probably an inappropriate perception. If your feeling is justified, the message of inadequacy is that you need to find a way to do something better than you’ve done it before.
2. Whenever you feel inadequate, appreciate the encouragement to improve. Remind yourself that you’re not “perfect,” and that you don’t need to be. With this realization, you can begin to feel adequate the moment you decide to commit yourself to CANI!™—constant and never-ending improvement in this area.
3. Find a role model—someone who’s effective in the area in which you feel inadequate—and get some coaching from them. Just the process of deciding to master this area of your life and making even the smallest amount of progress will turn a person who’s inadequate into a person who’s learning. This emotion is critical, because when someone feels inadequate, they tend to fall into the trap of learned helplessness, and they begin to see the problem as being a permanent one with themselves. There’s no greater lie you could tell yourself. You’re not inadequate. You may be untrained or unskilled in a particular area, but you’re not inadequate. The capability for greatness in anything is within you even now. ### OVERLOAD OR OVERWHELM

The message:

The message of being overwhelmed is that you need to reevaluate what’s most important to you in this situation.

The Solution:

1. Decide, out of all the things you’re dealing with in your life, what the absolute, most important thing is for you to focus on.
2. Now write down all the things that are most important for you to accomplish and put them in an order of priority. Just putting them down on paper will allow you to begin to feel a sense of control over what’s going on.
3. Tackle the first thing on your list, and continue to take action until you’ve mastered it.”
4. When you feel that it’s appropriate to start letting go of an overwhelming emotion like grief, start focusing on what you can control and realize that there must be some empowering meaning to it all, even though you can’t comprehend it yet.
5. Our self-esteem is often tied to our ability to control our environments. When we create an environment inside our minds that has too many intense and simultaneous demands upon us, of course we’ll feel overloaded. But we also have the power to change this by focusing on what we can control and dealing with it a step at a time. ### LONELINESS

The message:

The message of loneliness is that you need a connection with people.

The Solution:

1. The solution to loneliness is to realize that you can reach out and make a connection immediately and end the loneliness. There are caring people everywhere.
2. Identify what kind of connection you do need. Do you need an intimate connection? Maybe you just need some basic friendship, or someone to listen to you or to laugh or talk with. You simply have to identify what your true needs are.
3. Remind yourself that what’s great about being lonely is that it means, “I really care about people, and I love to be with them. I need to find out what kind of connection I need with somebody right now, and then take an action immediately to make that happen.”
4. Then, take immediate action to reach out and connect with someone.” ## The 10 Emotions of Power
5. Love and Warmth
6. Appreciation and Gratitude
7. Curiosity
8. Excitement and Passion
9. Determination
10. Flexibility
11. Confidence
12. Cheerfulness
13. Vitality
14. Contribution # The Magnificent Obsession - Creating a Compelling Future

It’s not that you are a motivated / demotivated person - it’s about your relationship with your own goals. You must discover or create a magnificent obsession.

“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible—the foundation for all success in life.”

“All goal setting must be immediately followed by both the development of a plan, and massive and consistent action toward its fulfillment.”

Eustress vs. Distress

“It’s not just getting a goal that matters, but the quality of life you experience along the way.”

“The truth is that if we decide to be happy now, we’ll automatically achieve more. While goals provide a magnificent direction and a way to focus, we must constantly strive to live each day to its fullest, squeezing all the joy we can out of each moment. Instead of measuring your success and failure in life by your ability to achieve an individualized and specific goal, remember that the direction we’re heading is more important than individual results. If we continue to head in the right direction, we may not only achieve the goals we’re pursuing but a lot more!”

“To put it in his words, the “mouse” had “become a lion.” How’s that for a metaphor?”

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

“I believe that life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life’s greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending commitment to act until they achieve. This level of resolve can move mountains, but it must be constant and consistent. As simplistic as this may sound, it is still the common denominator separating those who live their dreams from those who live in regret.”

Listen to Personal Power program.

“Because they’re not getting immediate feedback, they give up far too soon. If there’s any one skill that I’ve seen in champions—people who have really achieved their highest desires—it’s an unbelievable level of persistence. They’ll change their approach as necessary, but they won’t abandon their ultimate vision.”

“This shift in mental posture aligns you more precisely with your goals. Once you decide that something is a priority, you give it tremendous emotional intensity, and by continually focusing on it, any resource that supports its attainment will eventually become clear.”

“But I had been willing to suspend judgment for a short period of time in order to make it work.”

“what would I want for my life if I knew I could have it any way I wanted it? What would I go for if I knew I could not fail?”

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

“The most important lesson in this chapter is that a compelling future creates a dynamic sense of growth. Without this, we’re only half alive. A compelling future is not an accessory, but a necessity. It allows us not only to achieve, but to partake of the deep sense of joy, contribution, and growth that gives meaning to life itself.”

13. The Ten-Day Mental Challenge

“The mark of a champion is consistency—and true consistency is established by our habits.”

“In order to take our lives to the next level, however, we must realize that the same pattern of thinking that has gotten us to where we are will not get us to where we want to go. A new level of thinking is now required in order to experience a new level of personal and professional success.”

Everybody has weeds.

“We don’t have to feel negative about weeds. They’re part of life. We need to see them, acknowledge them, focus on the solution, and immediately do whatever it takes to eliminate their influence from our lives. Pretending they’re not there won’t make things better; neither will becoming inflamed with anger by their presence nor devastated by fear. Their continual attempt to be part of your garden is a fact of life. Simply remove them. And do it in an emotional state of playfulness or joy while you’re getting the job done; otherwise you’ll spend the rest of your life being upset, because I can promise you one thing: there will be more “weeds” that continue to come up.”

“We need to practice this same approach in weeding the gardens of our minds. We have to be able to notice when we start to have a negative pattern—not beat ourselves up about it, and not dwell on it—but simply break the patterns as quickly as we discover them, and replace them with the new seeds of mental, emotional, physical, financial, spiritual, and professional success. How do we break these patterns when they show up?”

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

“It sounds easy, doesn’t it? And I’m sure it could be. But those who begin it are frequently surprised to discover how often their brains are engaged in nonproductive, fearful, worrisome, or destructive thinking.

Why would we continually indulge in mental and emotional patterns that create unnecessary stress in our lives? The answer is simple: we actually think it helps! Many people live in a state of worry. In order to accomplish this state, they continually focus and dwell on the worst possible scenario. Why would they do this? Because they believe it will get them to do something—to take action. But the truth of the matter is that worry usually puts a person in an extremely unresourceful emotional state. It doesn’t usually empower us to take action, but rather, it tends to cause us to become overwhelmed with frustration or fear.”

• Change your emotional state, not by getting rid of the negative thoughts, but rather, by focusing on a solution. Commit to this and you commit to asking better questions like “What do I need to do right now to make this better?” Or you could change your state by changing the vocabulary you use to describe the sensations you’re feeling: from “worried” to “a little bit concerned.”

Some resourceful questions:

1. What is great about this situation and what’s not yet perfect? “Remember, our goal is not to ignore the problems of life, but to put ourselves in better mental and emotional states where we can not only come up with solutions, but act upon them. Those people who focus on what they can’t control are continually disempowered.”

“Every great, successful person I know shares the capacity to remain centered, clear and powerful in the midst of emotional “storms.” How do they accomplish this? Most of them have a fundamental rule: In life, never spend more than 10 percent of your time on the problem, and spend at least 90 percent of your time on the solution. Most important, don’t sweat the small stuff… and remember, it’s all small stuff!”

TEN DAY CHALLENGE

Rule 1.

In the next ten consecutive days, refuse to dwell on any un-resourceful thoughts or feelings. Refuse to indulge in any disempowering questions or devitalizing vocabulary or metaphors.

Rule 2.

When you catch yourself beginning to focus on the negative—and you certainly will—you are to immediately use the techniques you’ve learned to redirect your focus toward a better emotional state.

Specifically, use the Problem-Solving Questions as your first line of attack; for example:

“What’s great about this? What’s not perfect yet?” It doesn’t ignore the problem, but it keeps you in the right state while you identify what needs to be changed.”

In addition, set yourself up for success each morning for the next ten days by asking yourself the Morning Power Questions. You can do them before you get out of bed or while you’re in the shower, but make sure you do them right away. This will focus you in the direction of establishing empowering mental and emotional patterns each day as you awake. In the evening, use the Evening Power Questions, or any questions you believe will put you in a great state before you drop off to sleep.

Rule 3

For the next ten consecutive days, make certain that your whole focus in life is on solutions and not on problems. The minute you see a possible challenge, immediately focus on what the solution could be.”

Rule 4

If you backslide—that is, if you catch yourself indulging in or dwelling on an unresourceful thought or feeling—don’t beat yourself up. There’s no problem with this as long as you change immediately. However, if you continue to dwell on unresourceful thoughts or feelings for any measurable length of time, you must wait until the following morning and start the ten days over. The goal of this program is ten consecutive days without holding or dwelling on a negative thought. This starting-over process must happen no matter how many days in a row you’ve already accomplished the task. Dwelling = over 120 seconds of dwelling on the problem.

“We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.”

—JOHN DRYDEN”

“You will be demanding empowering emotions, enriching thoughts, inspiring questions.”

“Enough is enough. This is where I draw the line.”

You hold yourself to a higher standard and enjoy the self-esteem that comes with that single, small, disciplined act.

But we all have our mental indulgences, too. Some people feel sorry for themselves. Some get angry in a way that subverts their own best interests. Some of us fail to focus on the things that need attention.

My challenge to you is to decide that for ten days, you will not allow yourself a single one of these destructive mental indulgences.”

what holds people back?

• Laziness
• Fear - all too often, the security of a mediocre present ism ore comfortable than the adventure of trying to be more in the future.
• Habit. Momentum in a negative direction. # TAKING CONTROL OF THE MASTER SYSTEM

14. Ultimate Influence: Your Master System

People are not their behaviors. Understand people’s master systems.

“We all have a system or procedure that we go through in order to determine what things mean to us and what we need to do about them in virtually any situation in life.”

My ability to evaluate the true value of an investment, despite the vagaries of short-term market fluctuations.

“Mr. Market is there to serve you, not to guide you. It is his pocketbook, not his wisdom, that you will find useful. If he shows up someday in a particularly foolish mood, you are free to either ignore him, or take advantage of him, but it will be disastrous if you fall under his influence. Indeed, if you aren’t certain that you understand and can value your business far better than Mr. Market, you don’t belong in the game.”

“If someone is doing better than we are in any area of life, it’s simply because they have a better way of evaluating what things mean and what they should do about it. We must never forget that the impact of our evaluations goes far beyond hockey or finances. How you evaluate what you’re going to eat each night may determine the length and quality of your life. Poor evaluations of how to raise your kids can create the potential for lifelong pain. Failure to understand someone else’s evaluation procedures can destroy a beautiful and loving relationship.”

The five components of the master system:

1. The mental and emotional state you’re in while you’re making an evaluation.
2. The questions we ask. If you ask questions that are negatively framed, you will get negative answers.
3. Our values. Move toward / move away from values.
4. Our beliefs - This may have no basis in fact, but the rule will dominate the evaluation and therefore that person’s perceptions and experience of what’s true.
5. Reference experiences. “Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.”

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW”

Look at your past experiences as effects of decisions that you and others made.

You can change things either: in a context, or you can change your global beliefs.

“I am the source of all my emotions. Nothing and no one can change how I feel except me. If I find myself in reaction to anything, I can change it in a moment.”

“Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.”

—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES”

Most importantly, we then have them design what their Master System needs to be in order for them to achieve their ultimate purpose in life. How can they organize themselves so they can be effortlessly pulled in the direction of their desires rather than be pulled apart by a sense of conflicting values, beliefs, or rules?

15. Life values: your personal compass

“Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by

those who dared believe that something inside of

them was superior to circumstance.”

—BRUCE BARTON”

Ross Perot - took EDSC from a thousand-dollar investment into an enterprise worth billions.

“A man’s character is his guardian divinity.”

—HERACLITUS”

Stand and Deliver

“We must remember that all decision making comes down to values clarification.”

When you know what’s most important to you, making a decision is quite simple. Most people, though, are unclear about what’s most important in their lives, and thus decision making becomes a form of internal torture. This is not true for those who’ve clearly defined the highest principles of their lives.

It wasn’t tough for Ross Perot to know what to do. His values dictated it. They acted as his personal compass to guide him through a situation fraught with peril. Recently, Escalante left the Los Angeles school system that he’d been working in to move to northern California. Why? He could no longer be a part of an organization where he believed there were no standards for a teacher’s performance.”

“Who are the most universally admired and respected people in our culture? Aren’t they those who have a solid grasp of their own values, people who not only profess their standards, but live by them? We all respect people who take a stand for what they believe, even if we don’t concur with their ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong. There is power in individuals who congruently lead lives where their philosophies and actions are one.”

“Most often we recognize this unique state of the human condition as an individual with integrity. Culturally, these people have come in many forms, from the John Waynes and Ross Perots, to the Bob Hopes and Jerry Lewises, to the Martin Sheens and Ralph Naders, to the Norman Cousinses and Walter Cronkites. The fact of the matter is that those we perceive to be congruent in their values have a tremendous capacity to have an influence within our culture.”

Just because someone like Ralph Nader isn’t successful politically, that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with his values. We don’t know what he is after, but perhaps he’s not after what we think he’s after. Maybe he needed to change his approach?

We must get clear about what is most important in our lives and decide that we will live by these values, no matter what happens.

“The only way for us to have long-term happiness is to live by our highest ideals, to consistently act in accordance with what we believe our life is truly about.”

But we can’t do this if we don’t clearly know what our values are! This is the biggest tragedy in most people’s lives: many people know what they want to have, but have no idea of who they want to be. Getting “things” simply will not fulfill you. Only living and doing what you believe is “the right thing” will give you that sense of inner strength that we all deserve.

Remember that your values—whatever they are—are the compass that is guiding you to your ultimate destiny.

If you don’t know your true values, prepare for pain.

“Anytime you have difficulty making an important decision, you can be sure that it’s the result of being unclear about your values.”

Values: Ends and Means.

If I asked you, “What does family give you?,” you might say, “Love, security, happiness.” What you truly value—the ends you’re after—are love, security, and happiness.

Similarly, with money, I could ask you, “What does money really mean to you? What does it give you?” You might say, “Freedom, impact, the ability to contribute, a sense of security.” Again, you see, money is merely a means to achieving a much deeper set of values, a set of emotions that you desire to experience on a consistent basis in your life.”

It can be painful when you confuse ends and means values.

“So often people are too busy pursuing means values that they don’t achieve their true desire: their ends values. The ends values are those that will fulfill you, make your life rich and rewarding. One of the biggest challenges I see is that people keep setting goals without knowing what they truly value in life, and therefore they end up achieving their goals and saying, “Is this all there is?”

“Be more concerned with your character than your

reputation, because your character is what you really

are, while your reputation is merely what others

think you are.”

—JOHN WOODEN”

“I began to notice her wandering about in a series of very unresourceful emotional states. She would cry at the drop of a hat, and began to complain about things on a consistent basis. This was totally unlike Jolie. The final straw was that the whole family was preparing to go to Hawaii for our three-week Certification program—everyone except Jolie, who had to stay home in order to continue to work at Disneyland.”

Avoiding pain is a value.

Avoiding confrontation is a value.

The relative levels of pain we associate with certain emotions will affect all of our decisions.

What are some of the emotions that are most important for you to avoid experiencing on a consistent basis?

The source of self-sabotage is a values conflict.

“Now let’s look at the dynamics created by your values hierarchy. If you selected success, for example, as your top moving-toward value, and rejection as your top moving-away-from value, do you see any possible challenges that this hierarchy might create in your life? I’m here to tell you that a person who’s trying to achieve the pleasure of success without ever experiencing the pain of rejection will never succeed long term. In fact, this person will sabotage himself before he ever truly succeeds on a major scale.”

Learn about Gary Hart.

Understanding your own values.

What is most important to me in life?

Legacy

Growth

Power

Love

Freedom

Intelligence

Contribution

Achievement / Accomplishment

Health

Creativity

Happiness

We are not our values. We are much more than our values.

What do my values need to be to create my ultimate destiny?

My values right now are helping me, but what else do I need to add?

If you decide to be hay first, instead of achieving to be happy, you begin to happily achieve.

Also, decide what will prevent you from getting/achieving what you want and what you might need to eliminate.

“Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the

outward and the inward man be at one.”

—SOCRATES”

Does freedom have to be one of your values? Do you need more of it?

What are our values? What do you choose to live by?

16. Rules: If you’re not happy, here’s why.

What has to happen in order for you to feel good?

The truth is: nothing has to happen for you to feel good.

“You can feel good for no reason whatsoever. Think about it. If you make a million dollars, the million dollars doesn’t give you any pleasure. It’s your rule that says, “When I hit this mark, then I’ll give myself permission to feel good.” In that moment, when you decide to feel good, you send a message to your brain to change your responses in the muscles of your face, chest, and body, to change your breathing, and to change the biochemistry within your nervous system that causes you to feel the sensations you call pleasure.”

“as long as we structure our lives in a way where our happiness is dependent upon something we cannot control, then we will experience pain.”

“Are the rules that guide your life today still appropriate for who you’ve become?”

Think about the muddled desk. Why is it so easy for things to become muddled? Because you only allow one way for things to be perfect.

“Most of us have created numerous ways to feel bad, and only a few ways to truly feel good.”

The unhappy CEO - I am not successful because:

• Has to be making $3M (but he doesn’t right now - only 1.5M)
• Has to have 8% BF - currently at 9%
• Has to never get frustrated at any of his five kids. Will he ever be successful?

“Like the CEO who wasn’t meeting his own rules, you could be winning and feel like you’re losing because the scorecard you’re using is unfair.”

“The truth is that you don’t have to have ridiculously difficult rules to keep your drive! If a person makes their rules too intense, too painful, pretty soon they’ll begin to realize that no matter what they do, they can’t win, and they begin to experience learned helplessness. We certainly want to use the power of goals, the allure of a compelling future, to pull ourselves forward, but we must make sure that at the bottom of it all we have rules to allow us to be happy anytime we want.”

What rules do you have that are unwinnable?

“What rules do you have that are equally unwinnable? For some people, in order to feel like they’re in control in any context, they have to know what’s going to happen in advance of its occurrence. For others, in order to feel like they’re confident in some area, they have to have experience in doing it. If this were my rule for confidence, I couldn’t accomplish most of what I’ve done in my life! Most of my success has come from my ability to get myself to feel certain I could achieve something, even though I had no references for it. My rule for confidence is, “If I decide to be confident, then I’ll feel that way toward anything, and my confidence will help me succeed.”

Competence is another interesting rule. Some people’s rule for competence is, “If I’ve done something perfectly over a period of years, then I’m competent.” Other people’s rule is, “If I’ve done it effectively once, then I’m competent.” And for others, competence is, “If I’ve done anything like it, then I know I can master this as well, and therefore I’m competent.

Do you see the impact these kinds of rules would have on your confidence, your happiness, your sense of control, the quality of your actions, and your life?”

Is a rule disempowering?

1. It’s impossible to meet
2. A rule is disempowering if something that you can’t control determines whether your rule has been met or not.”
3. “A rule is disempowering if it gives you only a few ways to feel good and lots of ways to feel bad.” “At the base of every emotional upset you’ve ever had with another human being is a rules upset.”

“So if you ever feel angry or upset with someone, remember, it’s your rules that are upsetting you, not their behavior.”

“Don’t expect people to live by your rules if you don’t clearly communicate what they are.”

Must rules vs. should rules.

17. References: The Fabric of Life

“The larger the number and greater the quality of our references, the greater our potential level of choices. A larger number and greater quality of references enables us to more effectively evaluate what things mean and what we can do.”

“Once again, it’s not our references, but our interpretations of them, the way we organize them—that clearly determine our beliefs.”

“Many of these references are organized to support beliefs and, as you learned in Chapter 4, a belief is nothing but a feeling of certainty about what something means. If you believe you are intelligent, it’s because you have activated certain references to support that feeling of certainty. Maybe you’ve had the experience of successfully tackling mental challenges, such as acing a test or running a business well. All of these reference experiences act as “table legs” to support the idea, or “table-top,” that you are intelligent.”

“You have an inexhaustible supply of references that can be designed any way you wish. And each day, you’re adding to this supply. One important measure of a person’s intelligence is the way in which they use their fabric of references.”

“Let me ask you again, How do you use your references? Do you consciously interpret them in ways that empower you, in ways that support the achievement of your goals? Or does your brain automatically latch on to individual experiences where you’re not supported, and develop beliefs like “Everybody’s out to get me,” or “Every time I try anything, I get knocked down,” or “I don’t deserve to be loved”?

The way we use our references will determine how we feel, because whether something is good or bad is all based on what you’re comparing it to.”

“Imagination unleashed provides us a sense of certainty and vision that goes far beyond the limitations of the past.”

“You want to learn from your past, not live in it—focus on the things that empower you.”

“Limited references create a limited life. If you want to expand your life, you must expand your references by pursuing ideas and experiences that wouldn’t be a part of your life if you didn’t consciously seek them out.”

“Remember, any limits that you have in your life are probably just the result of limited references. Expand your references, and you’ll immediately expand your life.”

18. Identity: The Key to Expansion

People will do anything if their identity shifts.

Some global beliefs:

• Beliefs you have about people in general
• Scarcity and abundance: is there enough time, money, energy, spirit, love? You’ll constantly live fearing that you don’t have enough. “What exactly is identity? It is simply the beliefs that we use to define our own individuality, what makes us unique—good, bad, or indifferent—from other individuals.”

And our sense of certainty about who we are creates the boundaries and limits within which we live.

“Time and again, researchers have shown that students’ capabilities are powerfully impacted by the identities they develop for themselves as the result of teachers’ belief in their level of intelligence.”

“The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have

left their presence.”

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON”

A person who believes they have developed a drug addiction can clearly change. It will be difficult, but a change can be made, and it can last. Conversely, a person who believes himself to be a drug addict will usually return to the use of drugs even after weeks or months of abstinence. Why? It’s because he believes that this is who he is. He doesn’t have a drug addiction; he is a drug addict. Remember from Chapter 4 that once a person has a conviction about anything, he will ignore and even defend against any evidence that’s contrary to his belief. Unconsciously, this person will not believe that he can change long-term, and this will control his behavior.”

We act with consistency so that other people like us and can rely on us.

“When this person develops the conviction that he is absolutely clean, that he’s now a “Christian,” “Muslim,” “Jew,” or “Buddhist,” or now that he’s a “leader”—or anything else other than a “drug addict”—that’s when his behavior changes. As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identity.”

“If you’ve repeatedly attempted to make a particular change in your life, only to continually fall short, invariably the challenge is that you were trying to create a behavioral or emotional shift that was inconsistent with your belief about who you are. Shifting, changing, or expanding identity can produce the most profound and rapid improvements in the quality of your life.”

“Their view of themselves as donors became a reflection of who they were. There is no more potent leverage in shaping human behavior than identity.

You might ask, “Isn’t my identity limited by my experience?” No, it’s limited by your interpretation of your experience. Your identity is nothing but the decisions you’ve made about who you are, what you’ve decided to fuse yourself with. You become the labels you’ve given yourself. The way you define your identity defines your life.”

“Valjean has to deal with the priest’s actions. Why would he believe in him? Why didn’t he send him away in chains? The priest told him that he was his brother, that Valjean no longer belonged to evil, that he was an honest man and a child of God. This massive pattern interrupt changes Valjean’s identity. He tears up his prison papers, moves to another city, and assumes a new identity. As he does, all of his behaviors change. He becomes a leader and helps those in his community.”

Identity and Les Miserables:

“His supreme agony was the disappearance of certainty,

and he felt himself uprooted… Oh! what a frightful

thing! The man projectile, no longer knowing his road,

and recoiling!”

—VICTOR HUGO, LES MISÉRABLES”