Full Book Motivational Chapter Summaries of Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins

Chapter 1: Dreams of Destiny

We all have dreams. We all want to believe, deep down in our soul, that we have a gift that can make a difference, that we can touch others in a special way, and that we can make the world a better place. Yet, for many of us, those dreams have become so shrouded in the frustrations and routines of daily life that we no longer even make an effort to accomplish them. For far too many, the dream has dissipated, and with it, so has the will to shape our destinies.

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. When we focus consistently on improvement in any area, we develop unique distinctions on how to make that area better. Most people fail in life simply because they major in minor things. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.

One of life's major lessons is learning to understand what makes us do what we do. We're all here to contribute something unique. Deep within each of us lies a special gift. Each of us has a talent, a gift, our own bit of genius, just waiting to be tapped. It might be a talent for art or music. It might be a genius for selling or innovating or reaching out. On your business or your career, 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.

There are ideas and strategies in this book to help you produce specific, measurable, long-lasting changes in yourself and others. For changes to be of any true value, they've got to be lasting and consistent. We've all experienced change for a moment, only to feel let down and disappointed in the end. In fact, many people attempt change with a sense of fear and dread because, unconsciously, they believe the changes will only be temporary.

I'd like to share with you three elementary principles of change that you and I can use immediately to change our lives. These are the exact same changes that an individual must make in order to create personal change, that a company must make in order to maximize its potential, and that a country must make in order to carve out its place in the world.

Step one: Raise your standards. Anytime you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards. Think of the far-reaching consequences set in motion by men and women who raised their standards and acted in accordance with them, deciding they would tolerate no less. The same power that was available to them is available to you if you have the courage to claim it. Changing an organization, a company, a country, or a world begins with a simple step of changing yourself.

Step two: Change your limiting beliefs. Our beliefs are like unquestioned commands, telling us how things are, what's possible and what's impossible, what we can and cannot 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. Without taking control of your belief systems, you can raise your standards as much as you like, but you'll never have the conviction to back them up.

Step three: Change your strategy. In order to keep your commitment, you need the best strategies for achieving results. The best strategy in almost any case is to find a role model, someone who's already getting the results you want, and then tap into their knowledge. Learn what they're doing, what their core beliefs are, and how they think. Not only will this make you more effective, it will also save you a huge amount of time because you won't have to reinvent the wheel.

You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough; you must take action. If you will allow me the opportunity through this book, I'll be your personal coach. By utilizing the strategies your coach shares with you, you can immediately and dramatically change your performance. Together, we will concentrate on, not dabble in, the mastery of the five areas of life that I believe impact us most.

They are:

1. Emotional mastery. In this book, 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. 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. The third master lesson in this book will reveal the secrets to enable you to create quality relationships, first with yourself, then with others.

4. Financial mastery. To forge a financial destiny of abundance, you will first learn how to change what causes scarcity in your life and then how to experience on a consistent basis the values, beliefs, and emotions that are essential to experiencing wealth and holding on to it and expanding it.

5. Time mastery. The fifth master lesson in this book will teach you first how short-term evaluations can lead to long-term pain. You will learn how to make a real decision on how to manage your desire for instantaneous gratification, thus allowing your ideas, your creations, even your own potential, the time to reach full fruition. Next, you'll learn how to design the necessary maps and strategies for following up on your decision, making it a reality with the willingness to take massive action, the patience to experience lag time, and the flexibility to change your approach as often as needed.

I wrote this book to be an action guide, a textbook for increasing the quality of your life and the amount of enjoyment that you can pull from it. This book is designed to offer you the strategies that can help you to create, enjoy, and live a life you currently may only be dreaming of. Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more. So, let's begin our journey by exploring Chapter 2: Decisions, the Pathway to Power.

Chapter 2: Decisions, the Pathway to Power

As we discussed in Chapter 1, you have to set standards for what you consider to be acceptable behavior for yourself and decide what you should expect from those you care about. 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. Unfortunately, most people never do this because they're too busy making excuses.

Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse, to change any and every part of your life in an instant, if you truly decide to. You can do almost anything. I've written this book to challenge you to awaken the giant power of decision and to claim the birthright of unlimited power, radiant vitality, and joyous passion that is yours. The most exciting thing about this force, this power, is that you already possess it. In the very next moment, you can use this mighty force that lies waiting within you if you merely must have the courage to claim it.

Many people say, "Well, I'd love to make a decision like that, but I'm not sure how I could change my life." They're paralyzed by the fear that they don't know exactly how to turn their dreams into reality, and as a result, they never make the decisions that could make their lives into the masterpieces they deserve to be. I'm here to tell you that it's not important initially to know how you're going to create a result. What's important is to decide you will find a way, no matter what. 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.

Part of the problem is that for so long, most of us have used the term "decision" so loosely that it's come to describe something like a wish list. Instead of making decisions, we keep stating preferences. Making a true decision means committing to achieving a result and then cutting yourself off from any other possibility. This kind of clarity gives you power. With clarity, you can produce the results that you really want for your life.

The challenge for most of us is that we haven't made a decision in so long, we've forgotten what it feels like. So, how do we strengthen these muscles? The way to make better decisions is to make more of them, then make sure you learn from each one, including those that don't seem to work out in the short term. Realize that decision making, like any skill you focus on improving, gets better the more often you do it. The more often you make decisions, the more you'll realize that you truly are in control of your life.

Remember that repetition is the mother of skill. You see, it's not what's happening to you now, or what has happened in your past, that determines who you become. Rather, it's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.

Although you may never have even thought about it, your brain has already constructed an internal system for making decisions. This system acts like an invisible force, directing all of your thoughts, actions, and feelings, both good and bad, every moment that you live. It controls how you evaluate everything in your life, and it's largely driven by your subconscious mind. This system is comprised of five components:

1. Your core beliefs and unconscious rules.

2. Your life values.

3. Your references.

4. The habitual questions that you ask yourself.

5. The emotional states you experience in each moment.

It determines why you do what you do and why you don't do some things that you know you need to do. Throughout this book, step by step, I'll be guiding you in discovering how your master system of decision making is set up, and you'll be making simple changes to make it consistent with your desires, rather than continue to be controlled by your past conditioning.

There is one final impediment to really utilizing the power of decision: that is that we must overcome our fears of making the wrong decisions. Without a doubt, you will make wrong decisions in your life. You're going to screw up. Remember, success truly is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is often the result of bad judgment. Those seemingly bad or painful experiences are sometimes the most important.

In review, let me give you six quick keys to help you harness the power of decision, the power that shapes your experience of life every moment that you live:

1. Remember the true power of making decisions. The minute you make a new decision, you set in motion a new cause, effect, direction, and destination for your life. You literally begin to change your life the moment you make a new decision. Remember, a real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken new action. If there's no action, you haven't truly decided.

2. Realize that the hardest step in achieving anything is making a true commitment, a true decision. Carrying out your commitment is often much easier than the decision itself. So, make your decisions intelligently, but make them quickly. A critical rule I've made for myself is never to leave the scene of a decision without first taking a specific action toward its realization.

3. Make decisions often. The more decisions you make, the better you're going to become at making them. Unleash your power right now by making some decisions you've been putting off. You won't believe the energy and excitement it will create in your life.

4. Learn from your decisions. There's no way around it; at times, you're going to screw up, no matter what you do. And when the inevitable happens, instead of beating yourself into the ground, learn something. This failure may be an unbelievable gift in disguise if you use it to make better decisions in the future.

5. Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach, too. 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.

6. Enjoy making decisions. You must know that in any moment, a decision you make can change the course of your life forever. If you really want your life to be passionate, you need to live with this attitude of expectancy. Know that it's your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.

I want you to remember that everything you've read in this book is worthless. Every other book you've read, or tape you've heard, or seminar you've attended is worthless unless you decide to use it. Remember that a truly committed decision is the force that changes your life. It's a power available to you in any moment if you just decide to use it. 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...

Chapter 3: The Force That Shapes Your Life

So often, I hear people talk about changes they want to make in their lives, but they can't get themselves to follow through. They feel frustrated, overwhelmed, even angry with themselves because they know they need to take action, but they can't get themselves to do it. There is one elementary reason: they keep trying to change their behavior, which is the effect, instead of dealing with the cause behind it. 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.

What prevents you from doing whatever it takes to make your life exactly as you've imagined it? You fail to act simply because, in that moment, you associate more pain to doing what's necessary than missing the opportunity. For most people, the fear of loss is much greater than the desire for gain. The fact is, most people would work much harder to hang on to what they have than they would to take the risks necessary to get what they really want from their lives.

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. Much of our drive in life comes from our anticipating that our actions will lead to a more compelling future, that today's work will be well worth the effort, that the rewards of pleasure are near. Each day, our lives are filled with these kinds of psychic negotiations. We are constantly weighing our own proposed actions and the impact they will have upon us.

The most important lesson we learn in life is what creates pain for us and what creates pleasure. What you link pain to and what you link pleasure to shapes your destiny. One decision that has made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life is that at an early age, I began to link incredible pleasure to learning. Learning to unlock the secrets behind our actions could help me to become more healthy, to feel better physically, to connect more deeply with the people I cared about. It offered me a sense of joy and fulfillment.

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. We are the only beings on the planet who lead such rich internal lives that it's not the events that matter most to us, but rather it's how we interpret those events that will determine how we think about ourselves and how we will act in the future. But if we fail to direct our own associations to pain and pleasure, we're living no better than animals or machines, continually reacting to our environment, allowing whatever comes up next to determine the direction and quality of our lives.

Our behavior, both conscious and unconscious, has been rigged by pain and pleasure from so many sources: childhood peers, moms and dads, teachers, coaches, movie and television heroes, and the list goes on. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that what you link pain and pleasure to will shape your destiny. Though we'd like to deny it, the fact remains that what drives our behavior is instinctive reaction to pain and pleasure, not intellectual calculation. Although we'd like to believe it's our intellect that really drives us, in most cases, our emotions, the sensations that we link to our thoughts, are what truly drive us.

The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors. Any time we're in an intense emotional state, when we're feeling strong sensations of pain or pleasure, anything unique that occurs consistently will become neurologically linked. The force shaping world opinion and consumers' buying habits is also the same force that shapes all of our actions. It's up to you and me to take control of this force and decide on our own actions consciously, because if we don't direct our own thoughts, we'll fall under the influence of those who would condition us to behave in the way they desire.

Advertisers understand how to change what we link pain and pleasure to by changing the sensations we associate to their products. If we want to take control of our lives, we must learn to advertise in our own minds, and we can do this at any moment. How? 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.

The problem is that most of us base our decisions about what to do on what's going to create pain or pleasure in the short term, instead of the long term. You must put aside the passing moments of terror and temptation and focus on what's most important in the long term. Remember that it's not actual pain that drives us, but our fear that something will lead to pain. And it's not actual pleasure that drives us, but our belief, our sense of certainty, that somehow taking a certain action will lead to pleasure. We're not driven by the reality, but by our perception of reality.

Most people focus on how to avoid pain and gain pleasure in the short term, and thereby create long-term pain for themselves. Remember, anything you want that's valuable requires that you break through some short-term pain in order to gain long-term pleasure.

Let's make some changes right now. First, write down four actions that you need to take that you've been putting off. Second, under each of these actions, write down the answer to the following questions: Why haven't I taken action in the past? What pain have I linked to taking this action? Third, write down all the pleasure you've had in the past by indulging in this negative pattern. Fourth, write down what it will cost you if you don't change now. The final step is to write down all the pleasure you'll receive by taking each of these actions right now.

This chapter has shown you again and again that what we link pain to and pleasure to shapes every aspect of our lives, and that we have the power to change these associations and therefore our actions and our destinies. But in order to do this, we must understand...

Chapter 4: Belief Systems, the Power to Create and the Power to Destroy

So often, we're seduced into believing that events control our lives. 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. You see, it's never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events, how we interpret them, that shapes who we are today and who we will become tomorrow. Beliefs are what make the difference between a lifetime of joyous contribution and one of misery and devastation. Beliefs are what cause some individuals to become heroes while others lead lives of quiet desperation. 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. We need to remember that most of our beliefs are generalizations about our past, based on our interpretations of painful and pleasurable experiences. If you ever wonder why people do what they do, you need to remember that human beings are not random creatures; all of our actions are the result of our beliefs.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them, or one that can literally save their lives. We all have the capacity to create meanings that empower us, but so many of us never tap into it or even recognize it. If we don't adopt the faith that there is a reason for the unexplainable tragedies of life, then we begin to destroy our capacity to truly live.

Beliefs are not limited to impacting our emotions or actions; they can literally change our bodies in a matter of moments. We need to realize that our beliefs have the capacity to make us sick or make us healthy. Beliefs have been documented to affect our immune systems, and most importantly, beliefs can either give us the resolve to take action or weaken and destroy our drive.

Other beliefs are so generalized that they dominate virtually every aspect of our lives, either negatively or positively. I call these global beliefs. Global beliefs are the giant beliefs we have about everything in our lives: beliefs about our identities, people, work, time, money, and life itself, for that matter. As you can imagine, beliefs of this size and scope can shape and color every aspect of our lives. The good news about this is that making one change in a limiting global belief you currently hold can change virtually every aspect of your life in a moment.

Remember, 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. If we want to direct our lives, then we must take conscious control over our beliefs, and in order to do that, we first need to understand what they really are and how they are formed.

Often in life, we talk about things without having a clear idea of what they really are. Most people treat a belief as if it's a thing, when really, all it is is a feeling of certainty about something. A simple way of understanding a belief is to think about its basic building block: an idea. There are a lot of ideas you may think about, but not really believe. How do we turn an idea into a belief? Let me offer you a simple metaphor to describe the process.

If you can think of an idea as being like a tabletop with no legs, you'll have a fair representation of why an idea doesn't feel as certain as a belief. Without any legs, that tabletop won't even stand up by itself. Belief, on the other hand, has legs: references that support the idea, and life experiences are the legs that make you feel solid about the idea and cause you to begin to believe it. Once you understand this metaphor, you can begin to see how your beliefs are formed and get a hint of how you can change them as well.

The key question is whether this belief is strengthening or weakening us, empowering or disempowering us on a daily basis. Because human beings are capable of such distortion and invention, the reference legs we can use to assemble our beliefs are virtually unlimited. The downside of this is that regardless of where our references come from, we begin to accept them as real and thus no longer question them. This can have very powerful negative consequences, depending upon the beliefs we adopt. With enough emotional intensity and repetition, our nervous systems experience something as real, even if it hasn't occurred yet.

People so often develop limiting beliefs about who they are and what they're capable of. As a result, out of their fear of pain, they develop beliefs that cause them to hesitate, to not give their all. Consequently, they get limited results. 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. In psychology, there is a name for this destructive mindset: learned helplessness. When people experience enough failure at something, they perceive their efforts as futile and develop the terminal discouragement of learned helplessness. 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.

Holding these limiting beliefs is equivalent to systematically ingesting small 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.

All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs. The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief. Then, you must associate tremendous pleasure to the idea of adopting a new, empowering belief. Our beliefs have different levels of emotional certainty and intensity, and it's important to know just how intense they really are. In fact, I've classified beliefs into three categories: opinions, beliefs, and convictions.

An opinion is something we feel relatively certain about, but the certainty is only temporary because it can be changed easily. A belief, on the other hand, is formed when we begin to develop a much larger base of reference legs, and especially reference legs about which we have strong emotion. These references give us an absolute sense of certainty about something. A conviction, however, eclipses a belief primarily because of the emotional intensity a person links to an idea. A person holding a conviction does not only feel certain, but gets angry if their conviction is even questioned. This can be dangerous because any time 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.

On the positive side, convictions, by the passion they inspire in us, can be empowering because they compel us to act. Often, the best thing you can do to create mastery in any area of your life is to raise a belief to the level of conviction. One of the challenges with convictions is that they're often based on other people's enthusiasm for your beliefs. So often, people believe something because everybody else believes it. This is known in psychology as social proof. But social proof is not always accurate. Using social proof is a great way to limit your life, to make it just like everybody else's.

It's vital to examine our beliefs and their consequences to make sure that they're empowering us. It must be a constant commitment, backed up by action. 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. If every day you constantly improve your ability to enjoy your life, then you'll experience it at a level of richness most people never even dream of.

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? While you're examining these limiting beliefs, notice how your feelings change. Realize, believe, and trust that if you change the meaning of any event in your mind, you will immediately change how you feel and what you do, which will lead you to change your actions and thus transform your destiny. Changing what something means will change the decisions you make. Remember, nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning you give it. So, make sure that you consciously choose the meanings that are most in alignment with the destiny you've chosen for yourself.

Let's review what we've learned so far. We're clear that there's a power inside us that needs to be awakened. That power starts with the capability to make conscious decisions that shape our destiny. But there is one core belief that we must explore and resolve, and this belief can be found in your answer to the question...

Chapter 5: Can Change Happen in an Instant?

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.

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?

We need to remember that pain and pleasure shape all our behaviors, and that pain and pleasure can change our behaviors. Once we affect a change, we should reinforce it immediately. Then, we have to condition our nervous systems to succeed, not just once, but consistently. Remember, it's the feelings that we've been conditioned to associate in our nervous systems, our neuro-associations, that determine our emotions and our behavior. When we take control of our neuro-associations, we take control of our lives.

This chapter will show you how to condition your neuro-associations so that you are empowered to take action and produce the results you've always dreamed of. Isn't it true that we all want to change either how we feel about things or our behaviors? If a person has been through a tragedy, this person clearly will remain in pain until the sensations they link to themselves, these events, or situations are changed. Likewise, if a person overeats, drinks, smokes, or takes drugs, they have a set of behaviors that must change. The only way this can happen is by linking pain to the old behavior and pleasure to a new behavior.

This sounds so simple, but what I've found is that in order for us to be able to create true change, change that lasts, we need to develop a specific system for utilizing any techniques you and I learned to create change. What you're going to learn in the next chapter is the science that I've developed to create any change you want in your life. I call it the science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning, or NAC.

NAC is a step-by-step process that can condition your nervous system to associate pleasure to those things you want to continuously move toward and pain to those things you need to avoid in order to succeed consistently in your life without constant effort or willpower. I created NAC as a way to use any technology for change. What NAC really provides is a specific syntax, an order and sequence of ways to use any set of skills to create long-term change.

I'm sure you recall that in the first chapter, I said that one of the key components of creating long-term change is a shift in beliefs. The first belief we must have if we're going to create change quickly is that we can change. Now, again, most people in our society have unconsciously linked a lot of pain to the idea of being able to change quickly. On one hand, we desire to change quickly, and on the other, our cultural programming teaches us that to change quickly means that maybe we never even had a problem at all. We must adopt the belief that we can change in a moment. After all, if you can create a problem in a moment, you should be able to create a solution in a moment too.

You and I both know that when people finally do change, they do it in a moment, don't they? There's an instant when the change occurs. Why not make that instant now?

The second belief that you and I must have if we're going to create long-term change is that we're responsible for our own change, not anyone else. In fact, there are three specific beliefs about responsibility that a person must have if they're going to create long-term change:

First, we must believe something *must* change, not that it *should* change, not that it *could* or *ought* to, but that it absolutely *must*. It's only when something becomes a must that we begin the process of truly doing what's necessary to shift the quality of our lives.

Second, we must not only believe that things must change, but we must believe *I must change it*. We must see ourselves as the source of the change, otherwise, we'll always be looking for someone else to make the changes for us, and we'll always have someone else to blame when it doesn't work out. We must be the source of our change if our change is going to last.

Third, we have to believe *I can change it*. Without believing that it's possible for us to change, as we've already discussed in the last chapter, we stand no chance of carrying through on our desires. Without these three core beliefs, I can assure you that any change you make stands a good chance of being only temporary.

Please don't misunderstand me. It's always smart to get a great coach, an expert, a therapist, a counselor, someone who's already produced these results for many other people, to support you in taking the proper steps. But in the end, you have to be the source of your change. We can analyze our problems for years, but nothing changes until we change the sensations we link to an experience in our nervous system, and we have the capacity to do this quickly and powerfully if we understand the power of our brain.

Most of us know little about how it works, so let's briefly focus upon this unparalleled vessel of power and how we can condition it to consistently produce the results we want in our lives. Realize that your brain eagerly awaits your every command, ready to carry out anything you ask of it. In terms of its intricacy and power, the brain defies even our greatest modern computer technology. It is capable of processing up to 30 billion bits of information per second, and it boasts the equivalent of 6,000 miles of wiring and cabling. Typically, the human nervous system contains about 28 billion neurons, which are nerve cells designed to conduct impulses. Each of these neurons is a tiny, self-contained computer, capable of processing about 1 million bits of information. These neurons act independently, but they also communicate with other neurons through an amazing network of 100,000 miles of nerve fibers.

So, with all this immense power at our disposal, why can't we get ourselves to feel happy consistently? Why can't we immediately shake off depression, break through our frustration, and feel joyous every day of our lives? We can. Each of us has at our disposal the most incredible computer on the planet, but unfortunately, no one gave us an owner's manual. Most of us have no idea how our brains really work, so we attempt to think our way into a change when, in reality, our behavior is rooted in our nervous systems in the form of physical connections, neural connections, or what I call neuro-associations.

Neuroscientists study how neuro-associations occur and have discovered that neurons are constantly sending electrochemical messages back and forth across neural pathways, not unlike traffic on a busy thoroughfare. This communication is happening all at once, each idea or memory moving along its own path, while literally billions of other impulses are traveling in individual directions. Not only does this complex system allow us to enjoy the beauty of our world, but it also helps us to survive in it. Each time we experience a significant amount of pain or pleasure, our brain searches for the cause and records it in our nervous systems to enable us to make better decisions about what to do in the future. For example, without a neuro-association in your brain to remind you that sticking your hand into an open flame would burn you, you could conceivably make this mistake again and again until your hand is severely burned.

When we do something for the first time, we create a physical connection, a thin neural strand, that allows us to re-access that emotion or behavior again in the future. Each time we repeat the behavior, the connection strengthens. We add another strand to our neural connection. With enough repetitions and emotional intensity, we could add many strands simultaneously, increasing the tensile strength of this emotional or behavioral pattern until eventually, we have a trunk line to this behavior or feeling. This is when we find ourselves compelled to feel these feelings or behave in this way consistently. In other words, this connection becomes what I've already labeled a neural superhighway that will take us down an automatic and consistent route of behavior.

This neuro-association is a biological reality; it's physical. Michael Martinish of the University of California has scientifically proven that the more we indulge in any pattern of behavior, the stronger that pattern becomes. Martinish mapped the specific areas in a monkey's brain that were activated when a certain finger in the monkey's hand was touched. He then trained one monkey to use this finger predominantly in order to earn its food. When Martinish remapped the touch-activated areas in the monkey's brain, he found that the area responding to the signals from that finger additionally used had expanded in size nearly 600 percent. Now, the monkey continued the behavior even when he was no longer rewarded because the neural pathway was so strongly established.

An illustration of this in human behavior might be that of a person who no longer enjoys smoking but still feels a compulsion to do so. Why would this be the case? This person is physically wired to smoke. This explains why you may have found it difficult to create a change in your emotional patterns or behaviors in the past. You didn't merely have a habit; you had created a network of strong neuro-associations within your nervous system. We unconsciously develop these neuro-associations by allowing ourselves to indulge in emotions or behaviors on a consistent basis. Each time you indulge in the emotion of anger or the behavior of yelling at a loved one, you reinforce the neural connection and increase the likelihood that you'll do it again.

The good news is this research has also shown that when the monkey was forced to stop using this finger, the area of the brain where these neural connections were made actually began to shrink in size, and therefore, the neuro-association weakened. 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.

What the science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning offers is six steps that are specifically designed to change behavior by breaking patterns that disempower you. But first, we must understand how the brain makes a neuro-association in the first place. Anytime you experience significant amounts of pain or pleasure, your brain immediately searches for the cause. It uses the following three criteria:

1. Your brain looks for something that appears to be unique to narrow down the likely causes. The brain tries to distinguish something that is unusual to the circumstance. It seems logical that if you're having unusual feelings, there must be an unusual cause.

2. Your brain looks for something that seems to be happening simultaneously. This is known in psychology circles as the law of recency. Doesn't it make sense that what occurs in the moment, or close proximity to it, of intense pleasure or pain is probably the cause of that sensation?

3. Your brain looks for consistency. If you're feeling pain or pleasure, your brain begins to immediately notice what around you is unique and is happening simultaneously. If the element that meets these two criteria also seems to occur consistently whenever you feel this pain or pleasure, then you can be sure that your brain will determine that it is the cause.

The challenge in this, of course, is that when we feel enough pain or pleasure, we tend to generalize about consistency. I'm sure you've had someone say to you, "You always do that," after you've done something for the first time. Perhaps you've even said it yourself. Because the three criteria for forming neuro-associations are so imprecise, it is very easy to fall prey to misinterpretations and create what I call false neuro-associations. That's why we must evaluate linkages before they become a part of our unconscious decision-making process. So often, we blame the wrong cause and thereby close ourselves off from possible solutions.

Even more insidious are mixed neuro-associations, the classic source of self-sabotage. If you've ever found yourself starting to accomplish something and then destroying it, mixed neuro-associations are usually the culprit. It's a case of associating both pain and pleasure to the same situation. When you're deciding what to do, if your brain doesn't have a clear signal of what equals pain and what equals pleasure, it goes into overload and becomes confused. As a result, you lose momentum and the power to take the decisive actions that could give you what you want. When you give your brain mixed messages, you're going to get mixed results.

What happens when you get to a point where you feel that you're going to have pain no matter what you do? I call this the pain-pain barrier. Often, when this occurs, we become immobilized. We don't know what to do. Usually, we choose what we believe will be the least painful alternative. Some people, however, allow this pain to overwhelm them completely, and they experience learned helplessness.

Using the six steps of NAC will help you to interrupt these disempowering patterns. You will create alternative pathways so that you're not just wishing away an undesired behavior or overriding it in the short term, but are actually rewiring yourself to feel and behave consistent with your new empowering choices. Without changing what you link pain and pleasure to in your nervous system, no change will last.

After you read and understand the following six steps, I challenge you to choose something that you want to change in your life right now. Take action and follow through with each of the steps you're about to learn, so that you not only read the chapter, but you produce changes as the result of reading it. Let's begin to learn...

Chapter 6: How to Change Anything in Your Life: The Science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning

All of us, through the experience of life, have learned certain patterns of thinking and behaving to get ourselves out of pain and into pleasure. We all experience emotions like boredom, frustration, anger, or feeling overwhelmed, and we develop strategies for ending these feelings. Some people use shopping, some use food, some use sex, some use drugs, some use alcohol, some use yelling at their kids. They know, consciously or unconsciously, that this neural pathway will relieve their pain and take them to some level of pleasure in the moment. Whatever the strategy, if you and I are going to change it, we have to go through six simple steps, the outcome of which is to find a more direct and empowering way to get out of pain and into pleasure. These six steps of NAC will show you how to create a direct highway out of pain and into pleasure with no disempowering detours. They are:

Step one: Decide what you really want and what's preventing you from having it. Now, you'd

Be surprised how many people came to me for private therapeutic work. And when I asked them what they wanted, they'd spend 20 minutes telling me what they didn't want or what they no longer wanted to experience. We've got to remember that we get whatever we focus on in life. If we keep focusing on what we don't want, we'll have more of it.

The first step to creating any change is deciding what you do want, so that you have something to move toward. The more specific you can be about what you want, the more clarity you will have, and the more power you will command to achieve what you want more rapidly. 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.

Step 2: Get leverage. Associate massive pain to not changing now, and massive pleasure to the experience of changing now. Most people know that they really want to change, yet they just can't get themselves to do it. But change is usually not a question of capability; it's almost always a question of motivation. But the problem, as I've said, is that change is often a "should" and not a "must," or it's a "must" but it's a "must for some day." The only way we're going to make a change now is if we create a sense of urgency that's so intense that we're compelled to follow through. If we want to create change, then we have to realize that it's not a question of whether we can do it, but rather whether we will do it. Whether we will or not comes down to our level of motivation, which in turn comes down to those twin powers that shape our lives: pain and pleasure.

Every change you've accomplished in your life is the result of changing your neuro associations about what means pain and what means pleasure. One of the things that turns virtually anyone around is reaching a pain threshold. This means experiencing pain at such an intense level that you know you must change now; a point at which your brain says, "I've had it! I can't spend another day, not another moment, living or feeling this way." Leverage is absolutely crucial in creating any change, in freeing yourself from behavioral burdens like smoking, drinking, overeating, cursing, or emotional patterns like feeling depressed, worried, fearful, or inadequate. Change requires more than just establishing the knowledge that you should change; it's knowing at the deepest emotional and most basic sensory level that you must change.

If you've tried many times to make a change and you've failed to do so, this simply means that the level of pain for failing to change is not intense enough; you have not reached threshold. The ultimate leverage, 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. If we fail to act in accordance with our own view of ourselves, if our behaviors are inconsistent with our standards, with the identity we hold for ourselves, then the chasm between our actions and who we are drives us to make a change. One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity. If that doesn't create enough leverage, then focus on how it affects your loved ones, your children, and other people you care about. Many of us will do more for others than we'll do for ourselves. The key is to get lots of reasons, or better yet, strong enough reasons why the change should take place immediately, not someday in the future.

Step 3: Interrupt the limiting pattern. In order for us to consistently feel a certain way, we develop characteristic patterns of thinking, focusing on the same images and ideas, asking ourselves the same questions. The challenge is that most people want a new result but continue to act in the same way. I once heard it said that the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. The resources you need to change anything in your life are within you right now. It's just that you have a set of neuro associations that habitually cause you to not fully utilize your capability. What you must do is reorganize your neural pathways so that they consistently guide you in the direction of your desires rather than your frustrations and fears.

To get new results in our lives, we can't just know what we want and get leverage on ourselves. We can be highly motivated to change, but if we keep doing the same things, running the same inappropriate patterns, our lives are not going to change, and we will experience more and more pain and frustration. If you and I run the same old pattern, we're going to get the same old results. Sometimes people want to create a change because a behavior or emotional pattern creates pain for them, but they may also derive benefit from the very thing they're trying to change. You can do everything right, but if secondary gain is too strong, you will find yourself going back to the old ways. Someone with secondary gain has mixed emotions about changing; they say they want to change, but often they subconsciously believe that maintaining the old behavior or emotional pattern gives them something they couldn't get any other way.

One of the key distinctions to interrupting a pattern is that you must do it in the moment the pattern is recurring. We need to scramble it beyond recognition, find a new pattern, and condition it again and again until it becomes our consistent approach. A simple way of breaking a pattern is by scrambling the sensations we link to our memories. The only reason we're upset is that we're representing things in a certain way in our minds. Try this right now by doing the following: Think of a situation that makes you feel sad, frustrated, or angry. Now take the following steps:

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

2. Take that same experience and turn it into a cartoon. Sit up in your chair with a big silly grin on your face, breathing fully, and run the image backward as fast as you can so that you can see everything happening in reverse. Let the movie run backward in very fast motion. Then run it forward again in even faster motion. Now change the colors of the images so that everybody's faces are rainbow-colored. If there's someone in particular who upsets you, cause their ears to grow very large like Mickey Mouse's and their nose to grow like Pinocchio's. Do this at least a dozen times back and forth, sideways, scratching the record of your imagery with tremendous speed and humor. Create some music in your mind as you do this; maybe it's your favorite song, or maybe some type of cartoon music. Link these weird sounds to the old image that used to upset you. The heat of this whole process is the speed at which you play back the imagery and the level of humor and exaggeration you can link to it.

3. Now think about the situation that was bothering you and notice how you feel now. If done effectively, you'll easily have broken the pattern so many times you'll find it difficult or impossible to get back into those negative feelings. As simplistic as it seems, effectively scrambling a situation will work in most cases, even where trauma has been involved. Why does it work? Because all of our feelings are based on the images we focus on in our minds and the sounds and sensations we link to those specific images. As we change the images and sounds, we change how we feel. Conditioning this again and again makes it difficult to get back into the old pattern.

Step 4: Create a new empowering alternative. This fourth step is absolutely critical to establishing long-term change. In fact, the failure by most people to find an alternative way of getting out of pain and into the feelings of pleasure is the major reason most people's attempts at change are only temporary. Many people get to the point where they have to change, where change is a must, because they link so much pain to their old pattern and they link pleasure to the idea of changing. They even interrupt their patterns, but after that, they have nothing to replace the old pattern. Remember, all of your neurological patterns are designed to help you get out of pain and into pleasure. These patterns are well-established, and while they may have negative side effects, if you've learned that a habit can get you out of pain, you'll go back to it again and again since you've found no better way to get the feelings you desire.

If you've been following each one of these steps, you've gotten clear about what you wanted and what was preventing you from getting it. You've gotten leverage on yourself. You've interrupted the pattern, and now you need to fill the gap with a new set of choices that will give you the same pleasurable feelings without the negative side effects. You must come up with a new way, or a lot of new ways, to replace whatever benefits you used to get from the old behavior. The benefits of the old feelings or behaviors must be preserved by the new behaviors or feelings while eliminating the side effects.

If you're not sure how to get yourself out of pain and to feel pleasure as a replacement to your smoking, drinking, worrying, or other undesirable emotion or behavior, you can simply find the answers by modeling people who have turned things around for themselves. Often, if we just break our old patterns enough, our brains will automatically search for a replacement pattern to give us the feelings we desire. This is why people who finally break the pattern of smoking sometimes gain weight; their brains look for a new way to create the same kinds of pleasurable feelings, and now they eat mass quantities of food to get them. The key, then, is for us to consciously choose the new behaviors or feelings with which we're going to replace the old ones.

Step 5: Condition the new pattern until it's consistent. Conditioning is the way to make sure that a change you create is consistent and lasts long-term. The simplest way to condition something is simply to rehearse it again and again until a neurological pathway is created. If you find an empowering alternative, imagine doing it until you see that it can get you out of pain and into pleasure quickly. Your brain will begin to associate this as a new way of producing this result on a consistent basis. If you don't do this, you'll go back to the old pattern. If you rehearse the new empowering alternative again and again with tremendous emotional intensity, you'll carve out a pathway, and with even more repetition and emotion, it will become a highway to this new way of achieving results, and it will become a part of your habitual behavior. Remember, your brain can't tell the difference between something you vividly imagine and something you actually experience.

Conditioning ensures that you automatically travel along the new route. If you spot one of the off-ramps you used to take all the time, now you just speed past them. In fact, they'll actually become difficult to take. Knowing the fundamentals of conditioning enables us to take control of those forces and create the destiny of our choice. We can live like animals manipulated by circumstances and those around us, or we can learn from these laws, using them to maximize our fullest potential. The first organizing principle of any type of success: conditioning is the power of reinforcement. You and I must know that in order to get ourselves to consistently produce any behavior or emotion, we must create a conditioned pattern. All patterns are the result of reinforcement. Specifically, the key to creating consistency in our emotions and behaviors is conditioning. Any pattern of emotion or behavior that is continually reinforced will become an automatic and conditioned response. Anything we fail to reinforce will eventually dissipate.

We can reinforce our own behavior or someone else's through positive reinforcement, that is, every time we produce the behavior we want, we give a reward. That reward can be praise, a gift, a new freedom, etc. Or we can use negative reinforcement. This might be a frown, a loud noise, or even physical punishment. It's crucial for us to understand that reinforcement is not the same as punishment and reward. Reinforcement is responding to a behavior immediately after it occurs, while punishment and reward may occur long afterward. Appropriate timing is absolutely critical to effective conditioning because we always want to link the sensations of reinforcement in the pattern that is occurring. This is the only way to truly change our behaviors and emotions long-term. We must train our brains to do the things that are effective, not intellectually, but neurologically.

The challenge, of course, is that most of us don't realize that we're all conditioning each other and shaping each other's behaviors constantly. Often, we're conditioning people negatively instead of positively. When you're beginning to establish a new behavior or a new emotional pattern, it's very important that you reinforce yourself or anyone else you're trying to establish these new patterns for. In the beginning, every time you perform the desired behavior, you need to give yourself acknowledgment, pleasurable reinforcement of a type that you truly will appreciate and enjoy. However, if you reinforce the behavior every time thereafter, eventually your rewards will no longer be effective or appreciated. What at one time was a unique and enjoyable surprise will become an expected norm. The most important thing to remember about conditioning, however, is to reinforce the desired behavior immediately. Conditioning is critical; this is how we produce consistent results. Once again, remember that any pattern of emotional behavior that is reinforced or rewarded on a consistent basis will become conditioned and automatic. Any pattern that we fail to reinforce will eventually dissipate.

Step 6: Test it. Let's review what you've accomplished. You've decided upon the new pattern of emotion or behavior that you desire. You've gotten leverage on yourself to change it. You've interrupted the old pattern. You've found a new alternative and you've conditioned it until it's consistent. The only step left is to test it to make sure that it's going to work in the future. One of the ways of doing this that's taught in neuro-linguistic programming is future pacing. This means that you imagine the situation that used to frustrate you and notice if, in fact, it still makes you feel frustrated or if your new pattern of feeling fascinated has replaced it. By imagining the same stimuli that used to trigger your old emotion or behavior and noting that you do feel certain that your new empowering alternative is automatic, you will know that this new pattern will work for you in the future.

If all you do is the first three steps of NLP, that may be enough to create tremendous change. Once you've decided what you want, gained leverage, and interrupted the pattern, life often provides you with new ways of looking at things. And if the leverage is strong enough, you'll be compelled to find a new pattern and condition it. And you can pretty much count on the world to give you the test. Now you have the knack of change. The key is to use it, but you won't unless you know what you're using it for. You've got to know what you truly desire.

You must find Chapter 7: How to Get What You Really Want. Take a moment and ask yourself what you truly want in life. Do you want a loving marriage? The respect of your children? Do you want plenty of money, fast cars, a thriving business, a house on the hill? Whatever it is you desire or crave, perhaps you should ask yourself, "Why do I want these things?" Don't you want fast cars, for example, because you really desire the feelings of accomplishment and prestige you think they would bring? Why do you want a great family life? Is it because you think it will give you feelings of love, intimacy, connection, or warmth? Do you want to save the world because of the feelings of contribution and making a difference you believe this will give you? If so, isn't it true that what you really want is simply to change the way you feel?

What it all comes down to is the fact that you want these things or results because you see them as a means to achieving certain feelings, emotions, or states that you desire. When somebody kisses you, what makes you feel good in that moment? Is it wet tissue touching wet tissue that really triggers the feeling? Of course not. If that's true, kissing your dog would turn you on. All of our emotions are nothing but a flurry of biochemical storms in our brains, and we can spark them at any moment. But first, we must learn how to take control of them consciously instead of living in reaction. Most of our emotional responses are learned responses to the environment. We've deliberately modeled some of them and stumbled across others. Simply being aware of these factors is the foundation for understanding the power of state.

Without a doubt, everything you and I do, we do to avoid pain or gain pleasure. But we can instantly change what we believe will lead to pain or pleasure by redirecting our focus and changing our mental, emotional, and physiological states. 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. The difference between acting badly or brilliantly is not based on your ability but on the state of your mind and/or body at any given moment. If you continually submerge yourself in negative states, you'll never fulfill the promise of excellence. However, if you know the secret of accessing your most resourceful states, you can literally work wonders.

The state that you're in at any given moment determines your perceptions of reality, unless your decisions and behavior. In other words, your behavior is not the result of your ability but of the state that you're in at the moment. So how can we change our own emotional states? Think of your states as operating a lot like a TV set. In order to have bright, vivid color with incredible sound, you need to plug in and turn on. Turning on your physiology is like giving the TV the electricity it needs to operate. If you don't have the juice, you'll have no picture, no sound, just a blank screen. Similarly, if you don't turn on by using your entire body, in other words, your physiology, you may indeed find yourself unable to spell "house." Have you ever woken up and stumbled around, not able to think clearly or function until you moved around enough to get your blood flowing? Once the static has cleared, you're turned on, and the ideas begin to flow. If you're in the wrong state, you're not going to get any reception, even if you've got the right ideas.

Of course, once you're plugged in, you've got to be tuned to the right channel to get what you really want. Mentally, you've got to focus on what empowers you. Whatever you focus on, whatever you tune into, you will feel more intensely. So if you don't like what you're doing, maybe it's time to change the channel. There are unlimited sensations, unlimited ways of looking at virtually anything in life. All of the sensations that you want are available all of the time, and all you've got to do is to tune into the right channel.

There are two primary ways to change your emotional state: by changing the way you use your physical body or by changing your focus. One of the most powerful distinctions that I've made in the last 10 years of my life is simply this: emotion is created by motion. Everything that we feel is the result of how we use our bodies. Even the smallest changes in our facial expressions or our gestures will shift the way that we're feeling in any moment, and therefore the way we evaluate our lives, the way we think, and the way we act. Every emotion you ever feel has a specific physiology linked to it: posture, breathing patterns, movements, facial expressions. 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. If you repeatedly use your body in weak ways, if you drop your shoulders on a regular basis, if you walk around like you're tired, you will feel tired. Your body leads your emotions. The emotional state you're in then begins to affect your body, and it becomes a sort of endless loop. What are some things you can do immediately to change your state and therefore how you feel and how you perform? Take deep breaths in through your nose and exhale strongly through your mouth. Put a huge grin on your face and smile. If you really want to change your life, commit for the next seven days to spending one minute, five times a day, grinning from ear to ear in the mirror. This will feel incredibly stupid, but remember, by this physical act, you will be constantly triggering this part of your brain and creating a neurological pathway to pleasure that will become habitual.

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. If you wanted to, couldn't you get depressed at a moment's notice? You bet you could, just by focusing on something in your past that was horrible. We all have some experience in our past that's pretty bad, don't we? If you focus on it enough, and you picture it and think about it, pretty soon you'll start to feel it.

Have you ever gone to an awful movie? Would you go back to that awful movie hundreds of times? Of course not. Why? Because it wouldn't feel good to do this. Then why would you go back to the awful movies in your head on a regular basis? If you wanted to feel like you were in ecstasy right now, could you? You could do this just as easily. Could you focus on or remember a time when you were in absolute total ecstasy? Could you focus on how your body felt? Could you remember it with such vivid detail that you are fully associated to those feelings again? You bet you could. Or you could focus on things you're ecstatic about in your life right now, on what you feel is great in your life. You could also focus on things that haven't happened yet and feel good about them in advance.

The truth is that very few things are absolute. Usually, how you feel about things and the meaning of a particular experience is all dependent upon your focus. Is this not true reality? Because it's one view; it's only one perception of the way things really are. Think of the power of our focus as being a camera lens. The camera lens shows only the picture and angle of what you are focused on. Because of that, photographs you take can easily distort reality, presenting only a small portion of the big picture. Suppose you went to a party with your camera and you sat in one corner, focused on a group of people who were arguing. How would that party be represented? It would be pictured as an unpleasant, frustrating party where no one had a good time and everyone was fighting. And it's important for us to remember that how we represent things in our minds will determine how we feel.

But what if you were to focus your camera on another end of the room where people were laughing and telling jokes and having a great time? It would be shown to have been the best party of all, with everyone getting along famously. Focus determines whether you perceive your reality as good or bad, whether you feel happy or sad. A fantastic metaphor for the power of focus is racing cars. A real passion for me. In a race car, you cannot allow your focus to wander, even for a moment, from your outcome. Your attention can't be limited to where you are, neither can it be stuck in the past or fixed too far in the future, while remaining fully aware of where you are. You have to be anticipating what's about to happen in the near future. The number one fundamental they teach in driving is: focus on where you want to go, not on what you fear.

One thing that's useful to know about all of this: when you change your focus, often you don't immediately change direction. 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 a problem, 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. Questions are such a powerful tool for changing your life. I've reserved the next chapter to talk exclusively about them. 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.

Our experience of the world is created by gathering information through the use of our five senses. However, each of us tends to develop a favorite mode of focus or a modality, as it is often called. Some people are more impacted, for example, by what they see; their visual system tends to be more dominant. For others, sounds are the trigger for the greatest of life's experiences, while for still others, feelings are the foundation. Even within each of these modes of experience, though, there are specific elements of pictures, sounds, or other sensations that can be changed in order to increase or decrease the intensity of our experience. These foundational ingredients are called submodalities. You can radically raise or lower your intensity of feeling about anything by manipulating submodalities. They affect how you feel about virtually anything, whether you feel joy, frustration, wonder, or despair. Understanding them enables you to not only change how you feel about any experience in your life but to change what it means to you, and that's what you can do about it.

One image I've found very useful is to think of submodalities as the grocery store UPC barcodes: those clusters of little black lines that have replaced price tags in just about every supermarket. The codes look insignificant, yet when pulled across the checkout scanner, they tell the computer what the item is, how much it costs, how its sale affects the inventory, and so on. Submodalities work the same way. When pulled across the scanner of the computer we call the brain, they tell the brain what this thing is, how to feel about it, and what to do. Our ability to change the way we feel depends upon our ability to change our submodalities. We must learn to take control of the various elements with which we represent experiences and change them in ways that support our outcomes. Remember, how you feel about things is instantly changed by a shift in submodalities.

Knowing the large part that submodalities play in your experience of reality is crucial in meeting challenges. The key in life is to have so many ways to direct your life that it becomes an art. The challenge for most people is that they have only a few ways to change their state. They overeat, overdrink, oversleep, overshop, smoke, or take a drug, none of which empower us, and all of which can have disastrous and tragic consequences. The biggest problem is that many of these consequences are cumulative, so we don't even notice the danger until it's too late. 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. The second skill is that you should be able to change state consistently in any environment, maybe in an environment that used to make you uncomfortable, but in which you can now change your state time and again, conditioning yourself until you feel good no matter where you are. The third skill is to establish a set of habitual patterns of using your physiology and focus so that you consistently feel good without any conscious effort whatsoever. My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel tons of pleasure and very little pain, and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain. 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. The fourth goal is to enable others to change their state instantly, to change their state in any environment, and to change their state for their whole life.

The whole key here is to create a huge list of ways to make yourself feel good so you don't need to turn to those other ways that are destructive. If you link pain to the destructive habits and more and more pleasure to these new empowering ones, you'll find that most of them are accessible most of the time. Develop a plan for pleasure for each and every day. Don't just randomly hope that pleasure will somehow show up. Set yourself up for ecstasy. What we're talking about again is conditioning your nervous system, your body, and your mental focus so that it searches constantly to see how everything in your life benefits you. Just remember that if you continue to have a limiting emotional pattern, it's because you are using your body in a habitual way or are continuing to focus in a certain disempowering way. If it's your focus that needs to be shifted, there is one incredible tool that can change it instantly. You must know that Chapter 8: Questions Are the Answer.

This entire book and my life's work is the result of my asking questions about what makes us all do what we do and how we can produce change more quickly and easily than it has been done before. Questions are the primary way that we learn virtually anything. In fact, the entire Socratic method, a way of teaching that dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, is based upon the teacher doing nothing but asking questions, directing the student's focus, and getting them to come up with their own answers. When I realized the incredible power of questions to shape our thoughts and literally our every response to our experiences, I went on a quest for questions. I not only wanted to know what questions we were asking as a society, but I also wanted to discover the questions that made a difference in people's lives. I asked people in my seminars, in airplanes, in meetings; I asked everyone I met, from CEOs in high rises to homeless people on the street, trying to discover the questions that created their experience of day-to-day life.

I realized that the main difference between the people who seem to be successful 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. 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. Questions set off a processional effect that has an impact beyond our imagination. Questioning our limitations is what will tear down the walls in life, in business, in relationships, between countries.

I'm here to tell you that the difference between people is the difference in the questions they ask consistently. Some people are depressed on a regular basis. Why? As we revealed in the last chapter, part of the problem is their limited states. They conduct their lives with limited movements and hamstrung physiology, but more importantly, they focus on things that make them feel overloaded and overwhelmed. Their pattern of focus and evaluation seriously limits their emotional experience of life. Could this person change how they feel in a moment? You bet, just by changing mental focus. So what's the quickest way to change focus? Simply by asking a new question. When people are depressed, it is more than likely due to asking themselves disempowering questions on a regular basis. Questions like, "What's the use? Why even try? Since things never seem to work out anyway." 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. Think of the questions you habitually ask yourself in the area of finances. Invariably, if a person isn't doing well financially, it's because they're creating a great deal of fear in their life; fear that keeps them from investing or mastering their finances in the first place. They ask questions like, "What toys do I want right now?" instead of, "What plan do I need in order to achieve my ultimate financial goals?" The questions you ask will determine where you focus, how you think, how you feel, and what you do. If we want to change our finances, we've got to hold ourselves to higher standards, change our beliefs about what's possible, and develop a better strategy. One of the things that I've noticed in modeling some of today's financial giants is that they consistently ask different questions than the masses; questions that often run counter to even the most widely accepted financial wisdom. Remember, it's not only the questions you ask but the questions you fail to ask that shape your destiny.

If there's one thing I've learned in seeking out the core beliefs and strategies of today's leading minds, it's that superior evaluations create a superior life. We all have the capacity to evaluate life at a level that produces outstanding results. What do you think of when you hear the word "genius"? If you're like me, what immediately comes to mind is a picture of Albert Einstein. But how did Einstein move beyond his failed high school education into the realm of truly great thinkers? Undoubtedly, it was because he asked supremely formulated questions. The powerful distinctions that Einstein made resulted from a series of questions. Were they simple? Yes. Were they powerful? Absolutely. What power could you unleash by asking some equally simple but powerful questions?

Questions are undeniably a magic tool that allows the genie in our minds to meet our wishes. They are the wake-up call to our giant capacities. They allow us to achieve our desires, if only we present them in the form of a specific and well-thought-out request. A genuine quality of life comes from consistent quality questions. Remember, your brain, like the genie, will give you whatever you ask of it, so be careful what you ask for. Whatever you look for, you'll find. So with all this power between our ears, why aren't more people happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise? Why are so many frustrated, feeling like there are no answers in their lives? One answer is that when they ask questions, they lack the certainty that causes the answers to come to them. And most importantly, they fail to consciously ask empowering questions of themselves. They run rough shot over this critical process with no forethought or sensitivity to the power they are abusing or failing to ignite by their lack of faith.

To change your life for the better, you must change your habitual questions. Remember, the patterns of questions you consistently ask will create either renovation or enjoyment, indignation or inspiration, misery or magic. Ask the questions that will uplift your spirit and push you along the path of human excellence.

Questions accomplish three specific things:

1. Questions immediately change what we're focusing on and therefore how we feel. If you keep asking questions like, "How come I'm so depressed?" or "Why doesn't anybody like me?" 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 unresourceful 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. You will come up with authentic reasons for feeling better, and as you focus on them, your emotional state will immediately follow suit. There's a big difference between an affirmation and a question. When you say to yourself, "I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy," this might cause you to feel happy if you produce enough emotional intensity, change your physiology, and therefore your state. But in reality, you can make affirmations all day long and not really change how you feel. What will really change the way you feel is asking, "What am I happy about now? What could I be happy about if I wanted to be? How would that make me feel?" If you keep asking questions like this, you'll come up with real references that will make you begin to focus on reasons that do in fact exist for you to feel happy. You'll feel certain that you're happy, instead of just pumping you up. Questions provide you with actual reasons to feel the emotion.

You and I can change how we feel in an instant just by changing our focus. Most of us don't realize the power of memory management. Isn't it true that you have treasured moments in your life that if all you did was focus on them and think about them, you'd immediately feel wonderful again? In this moment, now, questions are the guide to those moments. If you ask yourself questions like, "What are my most treasured memories?" or "What's really great in my life right now?" and you can seriously consider the question, you'll start thinking of experiences that make you feel absolutely phenomenal, and in that phenomenal emotional state, you'll not only feel better but you'll be able to contribute more to those around you. The challenge, as you may have guessed, is that most of us are on automatic pilot. By failing to consciously control the habitual questions we ask, we severely limit our emotional range and thus our ability to utilize the resources at hand. The solution, as we covered in chapter 6: the first step is to become aware of what you want and discover your old limiting pattern. Get leverage: ask yourself, "If I don't change this, what is the ultimate price? What will this cost me in the long run? And how will my whole life be transformed if I did this right now?" Interrupt the pattern. If you've ever felt pain, then been distracted and not felt it, you know how effective this is. Create a new empowering alternative with a set of better questions, and then condition them by rehearsing them until they become a consistent part of your life.

2. Questions change what we delete. Human beings are marvelous deletion creatures. You and I have so many millions of things going on around us that we can focus on right now, from the blood flowing through our ears to the wind that may be brushing against our arms. However, we can consciously focus on only a small number of things simultaneously. Unconsciously, the mind can do all sorts of things, but consciously, we're limited in terms of the number of things we can focus on simultaneously. So the brain spends a good deal of its time trying to prioritize what to pay attention to, and more importantly, what not to pay attention to, or what to delete. If you're feeling really sad, there is only one reason: it's because you're deleting all the reasons you could be feeling good. And if you're feeling good, it's because you're deleting all the bad things you could be focusing on. So when you ask someone a question, you change what they're focusing on and what they're deleting. Questions are the laser of human consciousness; they concentrate our focus and determine what we feel and do. So if you're angry, one of the best things you could ask yourself is, "How can I learn from this problem so that this never happens again?" This is an example of a quality question in that it will lead you from your current challenge to finding resources that can keep you from having this pain in the future. Until you ask this question, you're deleting the possibility that this problem is really an opportunity.

Questions have the power to affect our beliefs and thus what we consider possible or impossible. As we learned in chapter 4, asking penetrating questions can weaken the reference legs of disempowering beliefs, enabling us to dismantle them and replace them with more empowering ones. But did you realize that the specific words we select and the very order of the words that we use in a question can cause us to not even consider certain things while taking others for granted? This is known as the power of presupposition, something of which you should be very aware. 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. Don't fall into the trap of accepting someone else's or your own disempowering presuppositions. Find references to back up new beliefs that empower you.

3. Questions change the resources available to us 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. Learning to consciously control the questions you ask will take you further to achieving your ultimate destiny than almost anything I know. Often, our resources are limited only by the questions we ask ourselves. One important thing to remember is that our beliefs affect the questions we'll even consider. Many people would never have asked the question, "How can I turn things around?" simply because everyone around them had told them it was impossible. Be careful not to ask limited questions, or you'll receive limited answers. The only thing that limits your questions is your belief about what's possible. A core belief that has shaped my personal and professional destiny is that if I continue to ask any question, I will receive an answer. All we need to do is to create a better question, and we'll get a better answer. A metaphor I sometimes use is that life is just a Jeopardy game; all the answers are there, all you have to do is come up with the right questions to win. The key, then, is to develop a pattern of consistent questions that empower you.

You and I both know that no matter what we're involved with in our lives, there are going to be times when we come up against these things we call problems: the roadblocks to personal and professional progress. Every person, no matter what station of life they've achieved, has to deal with these special gifts. The question is not whether you're going to have problems, but how you're going to deal with them when they come up. We all need a systematic way to deal with challenges. So realizing the power of questions to immediately change my state and give me access to resources and solutions, I began to interview people and ask them how they got themselves out of problems. I found out that there are certain questions that seem to be somewhat consistent. Here is a list of the five questions I use for any type of problem that comes up, and I can tell you that these have absolutely changed the quality of my life. If you choose to use them, they can do the same for you as well:

1. What is great about this problem?

2. What is not perfect yet?

3. What am I willing to do to make it the way I want it?

4. What am I willing to no longer do in order to make it the way I want it?

5. How can I enjoy the process while I do what is necessary to make it the way I want it?

By having the list of these five questions in front of you on a regular basis, you have a pattern of how to deal with problems that will instantly change your focus and give you access to the resources you need. Every morning when we wake up, we ask ourselves questions. When the alarm goes...

Off what question do you ask yourself? Is it, "How come I have to get up right now?" "What if I hit the snooze alarm just one more time?" What if every day you consciously started asking a pattern of questions that would put you in the right frame of mind and that caused you to remember how grateful, happy, and excited you are? What kind of day do you think you'd have with those positive emotional states as your filter? Obviously, it would affect how you feel about virtually everything.

Some of the most important questions we'll ask in our lives are: "What is my life really about?" "What am I really committed to?" "Why am I here?" and "Who am I?" These are incredibly powerful questions, but if you wait to get the perfect answer, you're going to be in deep trouble. Often, the first emotional, gut-level response you get to any question is the one you should trust and act upon.

This is the final point I want to make with you. 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.

So, let me ask you a question: If there was one action that you could take immediately to instantly change the quality of your emotions and feelings each and every day of your life, would you want to know about it? Then go on, quickly, to chapter 9.

The Vocabulary of Ultimate Success

Words. They've been used to make us laugh and cry. They can wound or heal. They offer us hope or devastation. With words, we can make our noblest intentions felt and our deepest desires known. Throughout human history, our greatest leaders and thinkers have used the power of words to transform our emotions, to enlist us in their causes, and to shape the course of destiny.

Words cannot only create emotions; they create actions, and from our actions flow the results of our lives. Most beliefs are formed by words, and they can be changed by words as well. Many of us are well aware of the powerful part that words have played in our history, of the power that great speakers have to move us, but few of us are aware of our own power to use these same words to move ourselves emotionally, to challenge, embolden, and strengthen our spirits, to move ourselves to action, to see greater richness from this gift we call life.

An effective selection of words to describe the experience of our lives can heighten our most empowering emotions. A poor selection of words can devastate us just as surely and just as swiftly. Most of us make unconscious choices in the words that we use. We sleepwalk our way through the maze of possibilities available to us. Realize now the power that your words command if you simply choose them wisely.

Most of us don't realize that the words you habitually choose also affect how you communicate with yourself and, therefore, what you experience. We can instantly change any emotional experience simply by choosing new words to describe to ourselves what we're feeling. However, if we fail to master words and if we allow their selection to be determined strictly by unconscious habit, we may be denigrating our entire experience of life. If you describe a magnificent experience as being "pretty good," the rich texture of it will be smoothed and made flat by your limited use of vocabulary.

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. Most people are not challenged by the size of the vocabulary they consciously understand, but rather by the words they choose to use. Many times, we use words as shortcuts, but often these shortcuts short-change us emotionally. To consciously control our lives, we need to consciously evaluate and improve our consistent vocabulary to make sure that it is pulling us in the direction we desire instead of that which we wish to avoid.

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"? Using emotionally charged words can magically transform your own state or someone else's 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.

If we want to change our lives and shape our destiny, we need to consciously select the words we're going to use, and we need to constantly strive to expand our level of choice. Words are the fabric from which all questions are cut. As we noted in the last chapter, by changing one word in a question, we can instantly change the answer we'll get. For the quality of our lives, transformational vocabulary can allow us to intensify or diminish any emotional state, positive or negative. This means it gives us the power to take the most negative feelings in our lives and lower their intensity to the point where they no longer bother us, and take the most positive experiences and move them to even greater heights of pleasure and empowerment.

Once you understand the power of words, you become highly sensitized not only to those you use but to those that people around you use as well. What would your life be like if you could take all the negative emotions you ever felt and lower their intensity so they didn't impact you as powerfully, so you were always in charge? What would your life be like if you could take the most positive emotions and intensify them, thereby taking your life to a higher level? You can do both of these in a heartbeat.

It's difficult to overestimate the impact our transformational vocabulary has on ourselves and on others. We need to remember the value of using what I call " Softeners" and "Intensifiers." They give us a greater degree of precision in our dealings with others, whether it's a romantic relationship, a business negotiation, or all the possible scenarios in between. We've got to be precise in the words we use because they carry meaning not only to ourselves about our own experience but also to others. If you don't like the results you're getting in your communication with others, take a closer look at the words you're using and become more selective.

By the same token, is it always to our advantage to lower the intensity of our negative emotions? The answer is no. Sometimes we need to get ourselves into an angry state in order to create enough leverage to make a change. All human emotions have their place, as we'll talk about in chapter 11. However, we want to make certain that we do not access our most negative and intense states to start with. I'm not asking you to live a life where you don't have any negative sensations or emotions. There are places where they can be very important. We'll talk about one of them in the next chapter. Realize that our goal is to consistently feel less pain in our lives and more pleasure.

Now is your chance. Take control. Notice the words you habitually use and replace them with ones that empower you, raising or lowering the emotional intensity as appropriate. Start today. Set this processional effect in motion. Make your commitment. Follow through and know what the power of this simple tool, in and of itself, will accomplish without using anything else.

Next, let's take a look at something that's equally fun and equally simple in empowering you to manage your emotions consistently. Together, let's blaze a trail of possibility with chapter 10.

The Power of Life Metaphors

In the last chapter, we talked about the power of words to shape our lives and direct our destinies. Now, let's look at certain words that carry even more meaning and emotional intensity: metaphors. Throughout human history, symbols have been employed to trigger emotional response and shape men's behavior. Many things serve as symbols: images, sounds, objects, actions, and, of course, words.

What is a metaphor? Whenever we explain or communicate a concept by likening it to something else, we are using a metaphor. The two things may bear little actual resemblance to each other, but our familiarity with one allows us to gain an understanding of the other. Metaphors are symbols, and as such, they can create emotional intensity even more quickly and completely than the traditional words we use. Metaphors can transform us instantly.

As human beings, we constantly think and speak in metaphors. Often, people speak of being "caught between a rock and a hard place." They feel like they're "in the dark" or that they're "struggling to keep their head above water." Do you think you might be a little bit more stressed if you thought about dealing with your challenge in terms of struggling to keep your head above water rather than climbing the ladder of success? Would you feel differently about taking a test if you talked about "sailing through it" rather than "flailing"? Would your perception and experience of time change if you talked about time "crawling" rather than "flying"? You bet it would.

One of the primary ways we learn is through metaphors. Learning is the process of making new associations in our minds, creating new meanings, and metaphors are ideally suited for this. When we don't understand something, a metaphor provides a way of seeing how what we don't understand is like something we do understand. Metaphors can empower us by expanding and enriching our experience of life. Unfortunately, if we're not careful, when we adopt a metaphor, we instantaneously also adopt many limiting beliefs that come with it.

The same day I made the distinctions that led to the creation of the technology of transformational vocabulary, I discovered the value of what I call "Global Metaphors." Different people have different Global Metaphors. For some people, life is a competition. That might be fun, but it could also mean that there are other people you have to beat, that there could be only one winner. For some people, life is a game. How might that color your perceptions? Life might be fun. What a concept! It might be somewhat competitive. It might be a chance for you to play and enjoy yourself a lot more. It all depends on what beliefs you attach to the word "game." But with that one metaphor, again, you have a set of filters that is going to affect the way you think and the way you feel.

As you and I already know, everything we do is based on the state we're in, and our state is determined by our physiology and the way we represent things in our minds. If you are feeling really bad about something, take a quick look at the metaphors you're using to describe how you are feeling, or why you are not progressing, or what is getting in the way. Often, you're using a metaphor that intensifies your negative feelings. When people are experiencing difficulties, they frequently say things like, "I feel like the weight of the world is on my back," or "There's this wall in front of me, and I just can't break through."

But disempowering metaphors can be changed just as quickly as they were created. You choose to represent the metaphor as being real; you can change the metaphor just as quickly. The moment you represent things differently in your mind, in that moment, you'll instantly change the way you feel. Often, people talk about how they feel "stuck" in a situation. You're never stuck. You may be a little frustrated. You may not have clear answers, but you're not stuck. The minute you represent the situation to yourself as being stuck, that's exactly how you'll feel.

We must be very careful about the metaphors we allow ourselves to use. Be careful of the metaphors that other people offer you as well. We must take charge of our metaphors, not just to avoid the problem metaphors, but so that we can adopt the empowering metaphors as well. Once you become sensitized to the metaphors you and other people use, making a change is very easy. All you need to do is ask yourself, "Is this what I really mean? Is this really the way it is, or is this metaphor inaccurate?" Remember, anytime you use the words "I feel like" or "this is like," the word "like" is often a trigger for the use of a metaphor.

A whole set of rules, ideas, and preconceived notions accompany any metaphor you adopt. All metaphors carry benefits in some context and limitations in others. As I've become more sensitized to metaphors, what I've begun to believe is that having only one metaphor is a great way to limit your life. If we want to expand our lives, we should expand the metaphors we use to describe what our life is, or what our relationships are, or even who we are as human beings.

Just realize that changing one Global Metaphor can instantly transform the way you look at your entire life. 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.

Metaphors don't just affect us as individuals; they affect our community and our world as well. The metaphors we adopt culturally can shape our perceptions and our actions or lack of action. Being aware of the vast power contained in metaphors includes knowing how to use them in an appropriate context. The challenge is that a lot of people have metaphors that help them in their professions but create challenges at home. One of the best examples of an inappropriate metaphor is a man who was so dissociated that his wife and children didn't feel any connection with him at all. They resented the way he never expressed his true feelings and the fact that he always seemed to be directing them. Do you know what his profession was? He was an air traffic controller. On the job, he had to remain detached. Even if there was an emergency, he had to keep his voice absolutely calm so as not to alarm the pilots he was directing. That disassociated attitude worked well in the control tower, but it didn't work at home.

Be careful not to carry the metaphors that are appropriate in one context, like the environment in which you work, into an incompatible context, like how you relate to your family or friends. Metaphors can change the meaning you associate to anything. Change what you link pain and pleasure to and transform your life as effectively as they transform your language. Select them carefully. Select them intelligently. Select them so they will deepen and enrich your experience of life and that of the people you care about.

I invite you to allow the radiance of your new metaphors to sweep you off your feet and make you feel like you're floating on air until you arrive at Cloud Nine. While you're on top of the world, you can look down on Easy Street and be tickled pink, knowing that the amount of joy you're feeling in this moment is only the tip of the iceberg. Take control of your metaphors now and create a new world for yourself—a world of possibility, of richness, of wonder, and of joy.

Once you've mastered the creative art of crafting metaphors, transforming vocabulary, and asking empowering questions, you are ready to harness chapter 11.

The 10 Emotions of Power

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, or we assume that emotions arise in response to what others do or say to us. Out of their need to avoid feeling certain emotions, people will often go to great or even ridiculous lengths. They'll turn to drugs, alcohol, overeating, gambling. They'll lapse into debilitating depression. In order to avoid hurting a loved one or being hurt by a loved one, they'll suppress all emotions, end up as emotional androids, and ultimately destroy all the feelings of connection that got them together in the first place, thus devastating the ones they love most.

I believe there are four basic ways in which people deal with painful emotions:

1. **Avoidance.** We all want to avoid painful emotions. As a result, most people try to avoid any situation that could lead to the emotions that they fear. Or worse, some people try not to feel any emotions at all. 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. And ultimately, you can't avoid feeling. A much more powerful approach is to learn to find the hidden positive meaning in those things you once thought were negative emotions.

2. **Denial.** A second approach to dealing with emotion is the denial strategy. People often try to disassociate from their feelings by saying, "It doesn't feel that bad." Meanwhile, they keep stoking the fire within themselves 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? If the message or 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.

3. **Competition.** Many people stop fighting their painful emotions and decide to fully indulge in them. Rather than learn the positive message their emotion is trying to give them, they intensify it and make it even worse than it is. It literally becomes part of their identity, a way of being unique. They begin to pride themselves on being worse off than anyone else. As you can imagine, this is one of the deadliest traps of all. This approach must be avoided at all costs because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the person ends up having an investment in feeling bad on a regular basis, and then they are truly trapped.

A much more powerful and healthy approach to dealing with the emotions that we think are painful is to realize that they serve a positive purpose, and that is:

4. **Learning and Using.** If you want to make your life really work, you must make your emotions work for you. You can't run from them. 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.

Many therapeutic disciplines begin with the mistaken presupposition that emotions are our enemies or that our emotional well-being is rooted in our past. The truth is that you and I can go from crying to laughing in a heartbeat if the pattern of our mental focus and physiology is merely interrupted strongly enough. If you're constantly looking for the reasons why your past is hamstrung your present or why you're so screwed up, then your brain will comply by providing references to back up your request and generate the appropriate negative emotions.

The only way to effectively use your emotions is to understand that they all serve you. You must learn from your emotions and use them to create the results you want for a greater quality of life. The emotions you once thought of as negative are merely a call to action. In fact, instead of calling them negative emotions, from now on, in this chapter, let's call them "action signals." Once you're familiar with each signal and its message, your emotions become not your enemy, but your ally. They become your friend, your mentor, your coach. They guide you through life's most soaring highs and its most demoralizing lows.

Learning to use these signals frees you from your fears and allows you to experience all the richness of which we humans are capable. To get to this point, then, you must change your Global beliefs about what emotions are. They are action signals trying to guide you to the promise of a greater quality of life. If you merely react to your emotions through an avoidance pattern, then you'll miss out on the invaluable message they have to offer you. If you continue to miss the message and fail to handle the emotions when they first turn up, they'll grow into full-blown crises.

All our emotions are important and valuable in the proper amounts, timing, and context. 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 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. You don't have to wait for anything or anyone. 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.

Think of your mind, your emotions, and your spirit as the ultimate garden. The way to ensure a bountiful, nourishing harvest is to plant seeds like love, warmth, and appreciation instead of seeds like disappointment, anger, and fear. Begin to think of those action signals as weeds in your garden. A weed is a call to action, isn't it? It says, "You've got to do something. You've got to pull this out to make room for better, healthier plants to grow." Keep cultivating the kinds of plants you want and pull the weeds as soon as you notice them.

Let me offer you 10 emotional seeds you can plant in your garden. If you nurture these seeds by focusing on feeling what you want to feel every day, you will hold yourself to a standard of greatness. These seeds create a life that flourishes and fulfills its highest potential. Let's explore them now and realize that each of these emotions represents an antidote to any of the negative emotions you may have been feeling previously.

1. **Love and Warmth.** The consistent expression of love seems to be able to melt almost any negative emotion it comes in contact with. If someone is angry with you, you can easily remain loving with them by adopting a core belief such as this marvelous one from the book *A Course in Miracles*: "All communication is either a loving response or a cry for help." If someone comes to you in a state of hurt or anger, and you consistently respond to them with love and warmth, eventually their state will change, and their intensity will melt away.

2. **Appreciation and Gratitude.** I believe that all of the most powerful emotions are some expression of love, each directed in different ways. For me, appreciation and gratitude are two of the most spiritual emotions. Actively expressing through thought and action my appreciation and love for all the gifts that life has given me, that people have given me, that experience has given me. Living in this emotional state will enhance your life more than almost anything I know of. Cultivating this is cultivating life. Live with an attitude of gratitude.

3. **Curiosity.** If you really want to grow in your life, learn to be as curious as a child. Children know how to wonder; that's why they're so endearing. If you want to cure boredom, be curious. If you're curious, nothing is a chore. Cultivate curiosity, and life becomes an unending study of joy.

4. **Excitement and Passion.** Excitement and passion can add juice to anything. Passion can turn any challenge into a tremendous opportunity. Passion is unbridled power to move our lives forward at a faster tempo than ever before. To paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli: "Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions." How do we get passion? The same way we get love, warmth, appreciation, gratefulness, and curiosity: we decide to feel it. Use your physiology: speak more rapidly, visualize images more rapidly, move your body in the direction you want to go.

5. **Determination.** All of the above emotions are invaluable, but there is one that you must have if you're going to create lasting value in this world. It will dictate how you deal with upsets and challenges, with disappointment and disillusionment. Determination means the difference between being stuck and being struck with the lightning power of commitment. If you want to get yourself to lose weight, make those business calls, or follow through on anything, pushing yourself won't do it. Putting yourself in a state of determination will. All your actions will spring from that source, and you'll just automatically do whatever it takes to accomplish your aim. Acting with determination means making a congruent, committed decision where you've cut off any other possibility. With determination, you can accomplish anything; without it, you're doomed to frustration and disappointment. Our willingness to do whatever it takes to act in spite of fear is the basis of courage, and courage is the foundation from which determination is born.

6. **Flexibility.** If there's one seed to plant that will guarantee success, it's the ability to change your approach. In fact, all those action signals—those things you used to call negative emotions—are just messages to be more flexible. Choosing to be flexible is choosing to be happy. Throughout your life, there will be times when there are things you will not be able to control, and your ability to be flexible in your rules, the meaning you attach to things, and your actions will determine your long-term success or failure, not to mention your level of personal joy. If you cultivate all of the above emotions, then you'll surely develop:

7. **Confidence.** Unshakable confidence is the sense of certainty we all want. The only way you can consistently experience confidence, even in environments and situations you've never previously encountered, is through the power of faith. Imagine and feel certain about the emotions you deserve to have now, rather than wait for them to spontaneously appear someday in the far distant future. When you're confident, you're willing to experiment, to put yourself on the line. One way to develop faith and confidence is simply to practice using it. So, practice confidence by using it consistently, and you'll be amazed at the dividends it reaps in every area of your life. Another emotion you'll automatically experience once you've succeeded in cultivating all the above is:

8. **Cheerfulness.** Cheerfulness enhances your self-esteem, makes life more fun, and makes the people around you feel happier as well. Cheerfulness has the power to eliminate the feelings of fear, hurt, anger, frustration, disappointment, depression, guilt, and inadequacy from your life. You've achieved cheerfulness the day you realize that no matter what's happening around you, being anything other than cheerful will not make it better. Being cheerful does not mean that you're Pollyanna or that you look at the world through rose-colored glasses and refuse to acknowledge challenges. Being cheerful means you're incredibly intelligent because you know that if you live life in a state of pleasure, one that's so intense that you transmit a sense of joy to those around you, you can have the impact to meet virtually any challenge that comes your way. Cultivate cheerfulness, and you won't need so many of those painful action signals to get your attention. Make it easy for yourself to feel cheerful by planting the seed of:

9. **Vitality.** Handling this area is critical. If you don't take care of your physical body, it's more difficult to be able to enjoy these emotions. Make sure that physical vitality is available. Remember that all emotions are directed through your body. If you're feeling out of sorts emotionally, you need to look at the basics. Learning to breathe properly is the most important avenue toward good health. Another critical element to physical vitality is ensuring that you have an abundant level of nerve energy. Realize that day to day, you're expending nerve energy through your actions, and as obvious as it sounds, you do need to make sure that you rest and recharge. Six to seven hours has been found to be optimum for most people. Contrary to popular belief, sitting still doesn't preserve energy. The truth is, that's usually when you feel most tired. The human nervous system needs to move to have energy. As you move, oxygen flows through your system, and that physical level of health creates the emotional sense of vitality that can help you to deal with virtually any negative challenge you could have in your life. So, realize that a sense of vitality is a critical emotion to cultivate in order to handle virtually any emotions that come up in your life. Once your garden is filled with these powerful emotions, then you can share your bounty through:

10. **Contribution.** There's no richer emotion I know of in life than the sense that who you are as a person, something you've said or done, has added to more than just your own life, that somehow it has enhanced life's experience for someone you care about, or maybe someone you don't even know. Each day, we should cultivate that sense of contribution by focusing not only on ourselves but on others as well. Don't fall into the trap of trying to contribute to others at your own expense. Playing the martyr won't give you a true sense of contribution. But if you can consistently give to yourself and others on a measurable scale that allows you to know that your life has mattered, you'll have a sense of connection with people and a sense of pride and self-esteem that no amount of money, accomplishments, fame, or acknowledgment could ever give. A sense of contribution makes all of life worthwhile.

Imagine what a better world it would be if all of us cultivated a sense of contribution. Plant these emotions daily and watch your whole life grow with a vitality that you've never dreamed of before. What I hope you'll take from this chapter is an appreciation of all your emotions and a sense of excitement that they're all providing you with a chance to learn something, to make your life better, literally at a moment's notice. Never again do you need to feel that painful emotions are your enemies; they're all here to serve you as a signal that some kind of change is needed. As you refine your ability to use these action signals, you'll start handling them up front when they are small, rather than waiting until they turn into full-blown crises.

Over the next couple of weeks, focus on enjoying the process of learning from all of your emotions. You can experience the whole kaleidoscope at any moment you choose. Don't be afraid. Ride the roller coaster. Experience the joy, passion, and thrill of all the emotions, and know that you're in control. It's your life, your emotions, your destiny.

One thing I have found is that although someone may know how to do something, they might still not apply what they know. What we really need is a reason to use the power of our decisions, to change our beliefs, to get leverage on ourselves, and interrupt our patterns, to ask better questions, and sensitize ourselves to our vocabulary and metaphors. In order to be motivated on a consistent basis, we need to develop chapter 12.

The Magnificent Obsession: Creating a Compelling Future

Many people know what they should do in life, but they never do it. The reason is that they're lacking the drive that only a compelling future can provide. This chapter is your opportunity to let go and dream at the highest level, to brainstorm out the wildest possibilities, and in so doing, to possibly discover something that will really push your life to the next level. Now is the time for you to grab hold of this powerful force within you. Once you decide to awaken this giant, you'll be unstoppable in creating mental, emotional, physical, financial, and spiritual abundance beyond your wildest fantasies. Whether your dreams materialize instantly or take shape gradually over time, know that the only limit to what you can have in your life is the size of your imagination and the level of your commitment to making it real.

When we first set large goals, they may seem impossible to achieve, but the most important key to goal setting is to find a goal big enough to inspire you, something that will cause you to unleash your power. The way I usually know I've set the right goal is when it seems impossible, but at the same time, it's giving me a sense of crazed excitement just to think about the possibility of achieving it. In order to truly find that inspiration and achieve those impossible goals, we must suspend our belief systems about what we're capable of achieving.

The problem, as I've stressed in virtually every chapter so far, is that we are unconscious in our use of these resources. Most people's goals are to pay their lousy bills, to get by, to survive, to make it through the day. In short, they are caught up in the trap of making a living rather than designing a life. Do you think these goals will give you the power to tap the vast reserve of power within you? Hardly. You and I must remember that our goals affect us. Whatever they are, if we don't consciously plant the seeds we want in the gardens of our minds, we'll end up with weeds. Weeds are automatic; you don't have to work to get them.

If we want to discover the unlimited possibilities within us, we must find a goal big enough and grand enough to challenge us, to push beyond our limits, and discover our true potential. Remember that your current conditions do not reflect your ultimate potential, but rather the size and quality of goals upon which you currently are focusing. We all must discover or create a Magnificent Obsession.

You might be thinking right now, "Well, this all sounds so inspirational, but surely just setting a goal doesn't make it happen." I couldn't agree with you more. All goal setting must be immediately followed by both the development of a plan and massive and consistent action toward its fulfillment. The process of setting goals works a lot like your eyesight: the closer you get to your destination, the greater clarity you gain, not only on the goal itself but the details of everything around it.

When you set a goal, you've acknowledged the need that all human beings have for constant, never-ending improvement. There is power in the pressure of dissatisfaction, in the tension of temporary discomfort. This is the kind of pain you want in your life—the kind of pain that you immediately transform into positive new actions. This kind of pressure is known as eustress, as opposed to distress. Eustress can be a driving, positive force that pushes you forward to constantly increase the quality of your life for yourself and all those you have the privilege to touch. Many people try to avoid pressure, yet the absence of any tension or pressure usually creates a sense of boredom and the lackluster experience of life that so many people complain about. In truth, when we feel excited, we feel a sense of pressure or tension within ourselves. However, the level of stress is not overwhelming, but rather stimulating. By learning to utilize pressure and make it your friend instead of your foe, you can truly hone it into a tool that assists you in living life to the fullest. Besides, we need to remember that our stress level is self-induced, so let's induce it intelligently.

One of the simplest ways you can use pressure as your ally is to enlist the people you respect as you commit to achieve your goals. By publicly declaring that you'll do whatever it takes to achieve your deepest and truest desires, you will find it more difficult to stray from your path. When frustration or challenge set in, often when you become tired or uncertain and you begin to feel like things aren't working out, memories of your public announcement may keep you going, or your friends will assist you by holding you to a higher standard. You may find this a useful tool to help you continue on the road even when it gets a little bumpy.

Many people go through life putting off their joy and happiness. To them, goal setting means that someday, after they achieve something, only then will they be able to enjoy life to the fullest. 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 where 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.

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. Too often, people never even begin to pursue a goal out of their fear that they'll fail, or worse, they start pursuing a goal, then give up too soon. They may have been on track to achieve what they want, but they fail to maintain the patience needed 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. I believe that in each case, these individuals have learned to use a mechanism in their brains known as the Reticular Activating System, or RAS. It sounds complex, and undoubtedly the actual process is, but the function of your RAS is simple and profound: it determines what you will notice and what you will pay attention to. It is the screening device of your mind. Remember that your conscious mind can focus only on a limited number of elements at any one time, so your brain expends a lot of effort deciding what not to pay attention to. There are countless stimuli bombarding you right now, but your brain deletes most of it and focuses on what you believe is important. Its mechanism for achieving this is the RAS. Your RAS is directly responsible for how much of reality you consciously experience.

Have you ever bought a new outfit or car and then suddenly noticed it everywhere you looked? Why was that? Didn't they exist before? Yes, of course, they did, but you're noticing them now because your purchase of this item was a clear demonstration to your RAS that anything related to this object is now significant and needs to be noted. You have an immediate and heightened awareness of something that actually has always been around you. 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. Therefore, it's not crucial to understand exactly how you'll achieve your goals when you first set them. Trust that your RAS will point out what you need to know along the way. Remember, if you get inspired enough, the power you'll unleash from within will find a way to manifest your desire.

The most important distinction that I made about goals years ago was that if I had a big enough "why" to do something, a strong enough set of reasons, I could always figure out how to achieve it. Goals alone can inspire, but knowing the deepest reasons why you want them in the first place can provide you with a long-lasting drive and motivation necessary to persist and achieve. This continuous focus will create a neural pathway between where you are and where you want to go. Because of this intense conditioning, you'll find yourself feeling a sense of absolute certainty that you'll achieve your desires, and this certainty will translate into a quality of action that ensures your success. Your confidence will allow you to attract the appropriate coaches and role models who will guide you in taking the most effective actions to produce results quickly, rather than the traditional trial-and-error method that can take decades or more.

Often, as we pursue our goals, we fail to realize their true impact on the environment around us. We think that achieving our goal is the end, but if we had a greater understanding, we'd realize that often in the pursuit of our goals, we set in motion processional effects that have consequences even more far-reaching than we ever intended. Goals are a means to an end, not the ultimate purpose of our lives. They are simply a tool to concentrate our focus and move us in a direction. The only reason we really pursue goals is to cause ourselves to expand and grow. Achieving goals by themselves will never make us happy in the long term. It's who you become as you overcome the obstacles necessary to achieve your goals that can give you the deepest and most long-lasting sense of fulfillment.

So, maybe the key question you and I need to ask is, "What kind of person will I have to become in order to achieve all that I want?" This may be the most important question that you can ask yourself, for its answer will determine the direction you need to head personally. Certainly, you'll have to take action to achieve those goals, but what qualities will you need to have as a person in order to turn this invisible set of commitments into your visible reality?

As I emphasized in Chapter 2, a true decision is one that you act upon, and one that you act upon now. The most powerful way to continue this momentum is to take immediate action. As soon as you finish this chapter, I can promise you that 10 days of small actions in the direction of your goals will begin to create a chain of habits that will ensure your long-term success.

An additional distinction that's critical for long-term success is that achieving our goals can be a curse unless we have already set up a new set of higher goals before we reach the first. As soon as you find yourself about to achieve a goal, you need to make sure that you design the next set of goals immediately. Otherwise, you'll experience something we all need to avoid: "outrunning our dream." How many times have we read about people who achieve their ultimate life goals only to say, "Is that all there is?"

So, how do people achieve their heart's desire and still feel the excitement and passion that come from aiming toward a goal? As they approach what they've pursued for so long, they immediately establish a new set of compelling goals. This guarantees a smooth transition from completion to new inspiration and a continued commitment to growth. Without that commitment, we'll do what's necessary to feel satisfied but never venture outside our comfort zones. That's when we lose our drive, we lose our desire to expand, and we begin to stagnate. Often, people die emotional and spiritual deaths long before they ever leave their physical bodies.

The way to break out of this trap is to realize that contribution may be the ultimate goal. Finding a way to help others can inspire us for a lifetime. There is always a place in the world for those who are willing to give of their time, energy, capital, creativity, and commitment. 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.

So, let's turn to the next chapter, and let me share with you a way to break up any obstacles that would stop you by taking on chapter 13.

The 10-Day Metal Challenge

In order to take our lives to the next level, 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. One of the biggest challenges I see in both individuals and corporations is that they resist change. Their greatest ally justifying their actions by pointing out that their current behavior is what got them to the level of success that they now enjoy. This is absolutely true, and in reality, a new level of thinking is now required in order to experience a new level of personal and professional success. To do this, we must once and for all breakthrough the barriers of our fear and take control of the focus of our minds. Our old patterns of allowing our minds to be enslaved by the problems of the moment must be broken once and for all. In their place, we must establish the lifelong commitment to focus on the solutions and to enjoy the process.

Throughout this book, you've learned a wealth of powerful tools and strategies to make your life richer, fuller, more joyous, and exciting. But if you just read this book and fail to use it, it's like buying a powerful new computer and never taking it out of the box, or buying

A Ferrari and then letting it sit out in your driveway collecting dust and grime. So let me offer you a simple plan for interrupting your old patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. A way that can help you condition these new empowering alternatives and make them absolutely consistent.

In truth, life is a balance. If we allow ourselves to become the kind of people who refuse to see the weeds that are taking root in our gardens, our delusions will destroy us. Equally destructive, however, is what happens to those people who, out of fear, constantly imagine the garden overgrown and choked with intractable 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 be coming 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. And unless you want to live in reaction to the world every time problems occur, you need to remember that they're actually an important part of life. They keep you vigorous, they keep you strong, they keep you vigilant in noticing what needs to be done to keep the garden of your life healthy and rich.

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? Simply remember the steps of knack you learned in chapter 6.

1. You need to decide what you want. If you really want to feel a sense of passion, joy, and control over your life, which obviously you must, or you wouldn't be reading this now, then you know what you want.

2. You've got to get leverage on yourself. If you read this whole book and don't establish any new patterns, wouldn't it be an unbelievable waste of time? In contrast, how will you feel as you truly use what you've learned to take immediate control of your mind, body, emotions, finances, and relationships? Let your desire to avoid pain and induce massive pleasure drive you to make the changes necessary to take your life to the next level.

Now, in order to accomplish this, you must:

3. Interrupt the limiting pattern. The best way I know to do this is to simply go on a mental diet. That is, take a set period of time and take conscious control of all your thoughts. A mental diet is an opportunity to eliminate the negative and destructive patterns of thinking and feeling that inevitably come from living life in an emotionally reactionary and mentally undisciplined fashion. Here's your opportunity now to really apply all the new disciplines you've learned in the previous chapters. My challenge to you is simply this: For the next 10 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 10 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 non-productive, fearful, worrisome, or destructive thinking.

In essence, if you decide to accept my 10-day challenge, it means that you've committed to putting yourself and keeping yourself in a passionately positive state, no matter what happens. For example, if someone does something that you believe is destructive or even hateful toward you, and you begin to find yourself becoming angry, you must immediately change your emotional state, regardless of the situation. During these 10 consecutive days, 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. Every great successful person I know shares the capacity to remain centered, clear, and powerful in the midst of emotional storms. If you decide that you're going to take on my 10-day challenge, and I sense you will since you've made it this far in the book, then realize that for the next 10 days, you're going to spend 100% of your time on solutions and no time on problems.

There are four simple yet important rules to this 10-day challenge. So, if you're going to take it on, remember the following:

Rule 1: In the next 10 consecutive days, refuse to dwell on any unresourceful thoughts or feelings. Refuse to indulge in any disempowering questions or revitalizing 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?" Remember, by asking a question like "What's not perfect yet?" you're presupposing that things will be perfect. This will change your state. 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 10 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 10 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 10 days over. The goal of this program is 10 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.

You may ask, "How long can I focus on the negative before it's considered dwelling?" To me, one minute of continual focus on what's wrong is dwelling. One minute is more than enough time for us to be able to catch ourselves and create a change. Our whole goal is to catch the monster while it's little. If I were you, though, I'd give myself up to a maximum of two minutes to notice the challenge and begin to change your state. Two minutes is certainly enough time to identify that you're in a negative state. If you allow yourself to go as long as five minutes or more, you'll find the mental challenge won't accomplish its task; instead, you'll just learn to venture emotions more quickly. The goal is to knock things out before you ever get in a negative emotional state in the first place.

By committing and following through on this mental challenge, you'll be giving yourself a break from limiting habits and flexing the muscles of empowerment. You'll be sending your brain a new message, commanding new results. You will be demanding empowering emotions, enriching thoughts, inspiring questions. By setting a higher standard for what thoughts you'll allow your mind to dwell on, you'll begin to notice the garbage and destructive patterns you used to blindly or lazily accept from yourself, and as a result, you'll find it difficult to ever go back to the old ways again.

A word of caution: Don't begin this 10-day commitment unless and until you are certain that you are going to live by it for the full length of time. If you don't start out with a sense of commitment, you certainly won't make it through the 10 days. This is not a challenge for the weak at heart.

Let's face it, we all have our indulgences in life. If you're overweight, your indulgences may be chocolate fudge sundaes or double cheese pizza. When you diet, you say to yourself, "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 10 days, you will not allow yourself a single one of these destructive mental indulgences.

What stands in the way of just deciding to banish them? Three things, really. One is laziness. A lot of people know what they should do but never quite get up the energy to do it. Many know their lives could be something more, yet they're sitting in front of the tube, eating junk food, depriving their minds and bodies of the fuel they need to spark new growth. The second obstacle is fear. All too often, the security of a mediocre present is more comfortable than the adventure of trying to be more in the future. So many people get to the end of their lives wondering what could have been. Don't let this happen to you. The third challenge is force of habit. We have our old emotional patterns, the deadening force of routine. Like a plane on automatic pilot, our brain dredges up the same old response as it always has. This exercise is a way to get beyond all three and produce lasting changes with benefits that can multiply over time.

This is your opportunity to make a true commitment. The truth is that once you experience life in this mentally vital and alive way, going backward disgusts you. But if you ever find yourself getting off track, you have the tools to immediately put yourself back on the high road again. Remember, only you can make this 10-day mental challenge work. Only you can make the commitment to really follow through. So realize that this chapter is my personal challenge to you. It's an opportunity and an invitation to demand more from yourself than other people would ever expect and to reap the rewards that come from this commitment. It's a time to put in practice what you've learned, but it's also a time to decide whether you're willing to make the commitment to make some simple yet powerful improvements in your life.

At this point, you've learned the fundamental tools for shaping your life by making decisions. But now, let's study the master system that's controlling every decision you make throughout your life. Understanding the basis of your own personal philosophy is accomplished by chapter 14, "Ultimate Influence: Your Master System." Understanding the master system that directs all human behavior is as much a science as our chemistry and physics, governed by predictable laws and patterns of action and reaction. You can think of your own master system, the five components that determine how you evaluate everything that happens in your life, as a kind of periodic table detailing the elements of human behavior. Just as all physical matter breaks down to the same basic units, so does the process of human behavior. To one who knows what to look for, it's the combination and structure that makes each of us unique.

Bombarded as we are with the countless things that happen to us every day, most of us don't even realize that we have a personal philosophy, much less the power it has to direct our evaluations of what things mean to us. Understanding the master system of others allows you to immediately get to the essence of a person, whether it's your spouse, your child, your boss, or business partner, even the people you meet every day. The key to understanding people is to understand their master system so you can appreciate their individual systematic way of reasoning. 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, you and I need to remember that different things are important to different people, and they'll evaluate what's happening differently based upon their perspective and conditioning. If someone is doing better than we are in any area of life, it's simply because they have a better way of evaluating what things mean and what they should do about it. The goal, then, is to be able to evaluate everything in your life in a way that consistently guides you to make choices that create the results you desire. The challenge is, seldom do we take control of what seems like a complex process, but I've developed ways to simplify it so that we can take the helm and begin steering our own evaluation procedures and, therefore, our destinies.

Here is a brief overview of the five elements of evaluation, some of which you already know, and the rest of which we'll be covering in the following chapters:

1. The first element that affects all of your evaluations is the mental and emotional state you're in while you're making an evaluation. When you're in a fearful, vulnerable state, the crunching of footsteps outside your window in the night, along with a creak of a door opening, will feel and mean something totally different than if you're in a state of excitement or positive anticipation. Whether you quiver under the sheets or leap out and run to the door with open arms is the result of the evaluations you make about the meaning of these sounds. One major key to making superior evaluations, then, is to make certain that when we're making decisions about what things mean and what to do, we're in an extremely resourceful state of mind and emotion rather than in a survival mode.

2. The second building block of our master system is the questions we ask. Questions create the initial form of our evaluations. Remember, in response to anything that happens in your life, your brain evaluates it by asking: What is happening? What does this situation mean? Does it mean pain or pleasure? What can I do now to avoid, reduce, or eliminate pain or gain some pleasure? Your habitual questions play a major role in this process.

3. The third element that affects your evaluations is your hierarchy of values. Each of us, throughout our lives, has learned to value certain emotions more than others. We all want to feel good (i.e., pleasure) and avoid feeling bad (i.e., pain). But our life's experience has taught each of us a unique coding system for what equals pain and what equals pleasure. This can be found in the guidance system of our values. For example, one person may have learned to link pleasure to the idea of feeling secure, while someone else may have linked pain to the same idea because their family's obsession with security caused them never to experience a sense of freedom. Can you see how this values conflict might cause a person to feel frustrated or immobilized? The values you select will shape every decision you make in your life.

4. The fourth element that makes up your master system is beliefs. Our global beliefs give us a sense of certainty about how to feel and what to expect from ourselves, from life, and from people. Our rules are the beliefs we have about what has to happen for us to feel that our values have been met. For example, some people believe, "If you love me, then you never raise your voice." This rule will cause this person to evaluate a raised voice as evidence that there is no love in the relationship. This may have no basis in fact, but the rule will dominate the evaluation and, therefore, that person's perceptions and experience of what's true. Our global beliefs determine our expectations and often control what we're even willing to evaluate in the first place. Together, the force of these beliefs determines when we give ourselves an experience of pain or pleasure, and they are a core element in every evaluation we'll ever make.

5. The Fifth Element of your master system is the reference experiences you can access from the giant filing cabinet you call your brain. These references form the raw material that we use to construct our beliefs and guide our decisions. Without a doubt, references shape our beliefs and values. Additionally, references offer us the potential for mastery. Yet, regardless of our experience or lack thereof, we have unlimited ways to organize our references into beliefs and rules that either empower or disempower us. Each day, you and I have the opportunity to take in new references that can help us to bolster our beliefs, refine our values, ask new questions, access the states that propel us in the direction we want to go, and truly shape our destinies for the better.

So, instead of just conditioning yourself to feel differently about eliminating the fearful behaviors, you can adopt a new global belief that says, "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. If you truly adopt this belief, not intellectually, but emotionally, where you feel it with absolute certainty, can you see how that would eliminate not only your fear but also your feelings of anger, or frustration, or inadequacy? Or we could change your values and make your highest value one of contributing. You'd find yourself permeated with a sense of joy and connection that you may never have had before in other areas of your life.

The focus of the second section of the book is how to create these global changes, where a single shift in one of the five elements of the master system will powerfully affect the way you think, feel, and behave in multiple areas of your life simultaneously. The emotions we feel and the actions we take are based on how we evaluate things, and yet most of us have not set up this system of evaluation for ourselves. People literally change the way they think and the way they feel about their lives in a matter of moments because they take control of the portion of their brain that controls their experience of life. The changes end up being emotional and even physical, as the brain sets new priorities for what's most important.

As we study these five elements of the master system, there's one other theme we need to bear in mind. It's certainly possible to overevaluate. Human beings love to analyze things to death. There is a point, however, when we've got to stop evaluating and take action. Sometimes evaluating too many details can cause us to feel overloaded or overwhelmed. One of the things we'll learn here is to put many minor steps together into one big chunk, one giant step that the minute you take it, you'll get the result that you want. In this section, we're going to analyze our evaluation system, put it together in a way that makes sense, and then start using it instead of deliberating about it.

As you continue through the next few chapters, realize that you have an opportunity to create leverage on yourself that will produce changes you may never have thought possible before. So let's cut right to the chase. I'll be coaching you on revealing what your present evaluation system is and setting up a new master system that is consistently empowering. You already know the power of state and questions, so let's proceed to the third area of evaluations.

Let's look at chapter 15, "Life Values: Your Personal Compass." Values guide our every decision and, therefore, our destiny. Those who know their values and live by them become the leaders of our society. They are exemplified by outstanding individuals throughout our nation, from the boardroom to the classroom. If we want the deepest level of life fulfillment, we can achieve it in only one way: by deciding upon what we value most in life, what our highest values are, and then committing to live by them every single day. Unfortunately, this action is far too rare in today's society. Too often, people have no clear idea of what's important to them. If you and I are not clear about what's most important in our lives, what we truly stand for, then how can we ever expect to lay the foundation for a sense of self-esteem, much less have the capacity to make effective decisions?

If you've ever found yourself in a situation where you had a tough time making a decision about something, the reason is that you weren't clear about what you value most within that situation. We 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. 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.

We need to realize that the direction of our lives is controlled by the magnetic pull of our values. They are the force in front of us, consistently leading us to make decisions that create the direction and ultimate destination of our lives. This is true not only for us as individuals but also for the companies, organizations, and the nation of which we're a part. The fact is, within our own nation, there are constant shifts going on within the values of the culture as a whole. While there are certain foundational values, significant emotional events can create shifts in individuals and, therefore, in the companies, organizations, and countries that they make up.

In our personal and professional lives, as well as on the global front, 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. This consistency must occur regardless of whether the environment rewards us for living by our standards or not. We must live by our principles even when it rains on our parade, even if no one gives us the support we need. 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. They are creating your life path by guiding you to make certain decisions and take certain actions consistently. Not using your internal compass intelligently results in frustration, disappointment, lack of fulfillment, and a nagging sense that life could be more if only somehow something were different. On the other hand, there's an unbelievable power in living your values: a sense of certainty, an inner peace, a total congruency that few people ever experience. The only way we can ever feel happy and fulfilled in the long term is to live in accordance with our true values. If we don't, we're sure to experience intense pain.

So often, people develop habitual patterns of behavior that frustrate or could potentially destroy them. What's the real problem here? These behaviors are really the result of frustration, anger, and emptiness that people feel because they don't have a sense of fulfillment in their lives. They're trying to distract themselves from those empty feelings by filling the gap with the behavior that produces a quick fix change of state. This behavior becomes a pattern, and people often focus on changing the behavior itself rather than dealing with the cause. The consolation is that whenever we do live by our highest standards, whenever we fulfill and meet our values, we feel immense joy.

While it's absolutely true that you and I are constantly motivated to move toward pleasurable emotional states, it's also true that we value some emotions more than others. Obviously, there are some emotional states that you'll do more to achieve than others. In truth, we all have a hierarchy of values. The hierarchy of your values is controlling the way you make decisions in each moment. Once you know what your values are, you can clearly understand why you head in the directions that you do on a consistent basis. Also, by seeing the hierarchy of your values, you can see why sometimes you have difficulty making decisions or why there may be conflicts in your life. Knowing your own values helps you to get more clarity as to why you do what you do and how you can live more consistently.

But knowing the values of others is equally important. Knowing a person's values gives you a fix on their compass and allows you to have insight into their decision-making. Knowing your own hierarchy is also absolutely critical because your top values are those that are going to bring you the most happiness. What you really want to do is set it up so that you're meeting all of your values every day.

We must remember that any time we make a decision about what to do, our brain first evaluates whether that action can possibly lead to either pleasurable or painful states. Your brain is constantly juggling or weighing your alternatives to see what the impact may be based upon your value hierarchy. The relative levels of pain we associate with certain emotions will affect all of our decisions. So often, I see people who take huge strides forward only to mysteriously pull back at the last minute, or they'll say or do things that sabotage the very personal, emotional, or physical success they're pursuing. Invariably, the reason is that they have a major values conflict. Part of their brain is saying, "Go for it," while the other part is saying, "If you do, you're going to get too much pain." So they take two steps forward and one step back. We've all seen people in the public eye who've experienced the pain of values conflicts. But rather than be judgmental, we need to realize that each of us has values conflicts within ourselves. Why? Simply because we never set the system up for ourselves. We've allowed our environment to shape us, but we can begin to change this now.

How? Simply by taking two steps:

Step 1: Gain awareness of what your current values are so you understand why you do what you do. What are the emotional states you are moving toward, and what are the states you are moving away from? By reviewing these side by side, you'll be able to have an understanding of the force that's creating your present and future.

Step 2: Then, make conscious decisions about what values you want to live by in order to shape the quality of life and destiny you truly desire and deserve. If you're willing to take the bull by the horns, you have an opportunity to redirect your destiny. Ask yourself a new question: "What do my values need to be in order to achieve the destiny I desire and deserve?" Brainstorm out a list, put them in order, see which values you might get rid of, and which values you might add in order to create the quality of life you truly want.

So, what have you accomplished by creating your new list of values? Isn't it just a bunch of words on a piece of paper? The answer is yes, if you don't condition yourself to use them as your new compass. If you do, however, they become the solid foundation of every decision you will make. Nothing in life can match the fulfillment of knowing you've done what you truly believe is the right thing. Give yourself the gift of taking hold of this force that shapes your destiny. You can have a great system of values that gives your life a magnificent direction, but still feel unhappy unless you understand the power of chapter 16, "Rules."

If you're not happy, here's why. Our experience of this reality had nothing to do with reality, but was interpreted through the controlling force of our beliefs, specifically the rules we had about what had to happen in order for us to feel good. I call these specific beliefs that determine when we get pain and when we get pleasure "rules." Failure to understand their power can destroy any possibility for lifelong happiness, and a full understanding and utilization of them can transform your life as much as anything we've covered in this entire book.

Let me ask you a question before we go any further: What has to happen in order for you to feel good? Do you have to have someone hug you, kiss you, make love to you, tell you how much they respect and appreciate you? Must you make a million dollars? Do you have to drive the right car, go to the right parties, be known by the right people? What really has to happen in order for you to feel good? The truth is that nothing has to happen in order for you to feel good. You could feel good right now for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Think about it: If you make a million dollars, the million dollars doesn't give you any pleasure. It's your rule that says, "When I hit this mark, then I'll give myself permission to feel good." In that moment, when you decide to feel good, you send a message to your brain to change your responses and 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.

In the last chapter, you began to design for yourself a hierarchy of values to refine and define the direction of your life. You need to understand that whether or not you feel like you're achieving your values is totally dependent upon your rules: your beliefs about what has to happen for you to feel successful or happy or experience love. You can decide to make happiness a priority, but if your rule for happiness is that everything must go just as you planned, I guarantee you're not going to experience this value on a consistent basis. Life is a variable event, so our rules must be organized in ways that allow us to adapt, grow, and enjoy it.

It's critical for us to understand these unconscious beliefs that control when we give ourselves pain and when we give ourselves pleasure. We all have different rules and standards that govern not only the way we feel about the things that happen in our lives but how we'll behave and respond to a given situation. Ultimately, what we do and who we become is dependent upon the direction that our values have taken us, but equally, or possibly even more importantly, what will determine our emotions and behaviors is our beliefs about what is good and what is bad, what we should do and what we must do. These precise standards and criteria are what I've labeled rules.

Rules are the trigger for any pain or pleasure you feel in your nervous system at any moment. It's as if we have a miniature court system set up within our brains. Our personal rules are the ultimate judge and jury. They determine whether or not a certain value is met, whether we'll feel good or bad, whether we'll give ourselves pain or pleasure. Everything in our lives, from work to play, is presided over by this judge and jury system. Our rules are controlling our responses every moment we're alive.

Like so many other elements of the master system that directs our lives, our rules have resulted from a dizzying collage of influences to which we've been exposed. The same punishment and reward system that shapes our values shapes our rules. In fact, as we develop new values, we also develop beliefs about what it will take to have those values met. So rules are added continuously, and with the addition of more rules, we often tend to distort, generalize, and delete. Our past rules are the rules that guide your life today. Still appropriate for who you've become, or have you clung to rules that helped you in the past but hurt you in the present? Have you clung to any inappropriate rules from your childhood?

Rules are a shortcut for our brains. They help us to have a sense of certainty about the consequences of our actions, thus they enable us to make lightning-quick decisions as to what things mean and what we should do about them. We want to develop rules that move us to take action, that cause us to feel joy, that cause us to follow through, not rules that stop us short.

In the last chapter, we devoted a great deal of time to setting up values, but as I've already stated, if you don't make the rules achievable, you'll never feel like those values are being met. If any of us made our ability to feel love dependent on everyone accepting our views, we wouldn't feel love very often, would we? There are just too many people with different ideas and beliefs, and therefore too many ways for us to feel bad. All we have to do to make our lives work is set up a system of evaluating that includes rules that are achievable, that make it easy to feel good and hard to feel bad, that constantly pull us in the direction we want to go.

Certainly, it's useful to have some rules that give us pain. We need to have limits. We need to have some kind of pressure that drives us. Once we design our values, we must decide what evidence we need to have before we give ourselves pleasure. We need to design rules that will move us in the direction of our values, that will clearly be achievable using criteria we can control personally, so that we're ringing the bell instead of waiting for the outside world to do it.

In sociology, there's a concept known as ethnocentricity, which means we begin to believe that the rules, values, and beliefs of our culture are the only ones that are valid. This is an extremely limiting mindset. Every person around you has different rules and values than you do, and theirs are no better or worse than your own. If you want to take control of your life, if you want to do well in business, if you want to be able to impact your children, if you want to be close to your spouse, then make sure you discover the rules they have for a relationship up front and communicate yours as well. Don't expect people to live by your rules if you don't clearly communicate what they are, and don't expect people to live by your rules if you're not willing to compromise and live by some of theirs.

It's so important to communicate your rules for any situation in life, whether it's love, friendship, or business. By the way, even if you clarify all the rules in advance, can misunderstanding still occur? You bet. Sometimes you'll forget to communicate one of your rules, or you may not even consciously know what some of your rules are. That's why ongoing communication is so important. Never assume when it comes to rules; communicate.

We have a hierarchy of rules, just as we do values. There are certain rules that to break them would give us such intense pain that we don't even consider the possibility we will rarely, if ever, break them. I call these rules "threshold rules." Conversely, we have some rules that we don't want to break. I call these "personal standards." If we do break them, we don't feel good about it, but depending upon the reasons we're willing to break them in the short term. The difference between these two rules is often phrased with the words "must" and "should." We have certain things that we must do, certain things that we must not do, certain things that we must never do, and certain things that we must always do. The "must" and the "must never" rules are threshold rules. The "should" and "should never" rules are personal standard rules. All of them give a structure to our lives.

Remember, we all need some structure. Some people have no clear rules for when they're successful. Rules can provide the contextual environment for us to create added value. Rules can motivate us to follow through. They can cause us to grow and expand. Your goal is simply to create a balance between your "must" rules and your "should" rules and to utilize both types of rules in the appropriate context. One thing is sure: if you don't know the rules, you're guaranteed to lose because you're bound to violate them sooner or later. But if you understand people's rules, you can predict their behavior, you can truly meet their needs, and thus enrich the quality of your relationships. Remember, the most empowering rule is to enjoy yourself, no matter what happens.

In the past few chapters, we've nearly completed learning about the five elements of the master system. We know the importance of state, the way questions direct our focus and evaluations, and the power of values and rules to shape our lives. Now, let's discover the fabric from which all these elements are cut: chapter 17, "References: The Fabric of Life."

References: The Fifth Element of a person's master system really provide the essence or the building blocks for our beliefs, rules, and values. They are the clay from which our master system is molded. References are all the experiences of your life that you've recorded within your nervous system: everything you've ever seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. Some references are picked up consciously, others unconsciously. Some result from experiences you've had yourself, others consist of information you've heard from others. And all your references, like all human experience, become somewhat distorted, deleted, and generalized as you record them within your nervous system. In fact, you also have references for things that have never happened. Anything you've ever imagined in your mind is also stored in your brain as a memory.

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. 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. All of these reference experiences act as table legs to support the idea or tabletop that you are intelligent.

The key is to expand the references that are available within your life. Consciously seek out experiences that expand your sense of who you are and what you're capable of, as well as organize your references in empowering ways. Think of your references, both those you consider to be good and bad, as a giant bolt of fabric woven from your experiences. With the other elements of your master system—your state, questions, values, and beliefs—you cut a pattern from this fabric that enables you to make decisions about what to do with your life. You have an inexhaustible supply of references that can be designed any way you wish, and each day you're adding to the supply.

One important measure of a person's intelligence is the way in which they use their fabric of references. Do you craft a curtain to hide behind, or do you fashion a magic carpet that will carry you to unequal heights? 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. Sometimes we lose perspective that good and bad are merely based upon our references.

References are not limited to your actual experience. Your imagination itself is a source of references. We need to remember that our imagination is ten times more potent than our willpower. Imagination unleashed provides us a sense of certainty and vision that goes far beyond the limitations of the past. Remember, don't drive into the past using your rearview mirror as a guide. You want to learn from your past, not live in it. Focus on the things that empower you.

You are not even limited to your own personal experiences as references. You can borrow the references of other people. Early in my life, I chose to focus on those who had made it, those who had succeeded and contributed and were impacting people's lives in a major way. I did so by reading biographies of successful people and learned that regardless of their background or conditions, when they held on to their sense of certainty and consistently contributed, success eventually came. I used their references as my own, forming the core belief that I could truly shape my own destiny. Read books, view movies, listen to audiobooks, go to seminars, talk with people, and get new ideas. All references have power, and you never know which one could change your entire life.

One of the finest beliefs I developed years ago that helped me to enjoy all of my life experience was the idea that there are no bad experiences. That no matter what I go through in life, whether it's a challenging experience or a pleasurable one, every experience provides me something of value if I look for it. If I pull just one idea or one distinction from an experience, then it expands me.

While some references enable you and give you a higher vision, others show you a side of life you'd rather not experience. But these are the sorts of references that can be used to help you keep your life in balance. They provide a new level of contrast. No matter how bad you think things are in your life, it's good to remember that someone else has it worse. We can also use new references to motivate ourselves if we start becoming complacent. While it's true that no matter how bad things are for you, someone else is going through something worse, it's also true that no matter how well things are going for you, someone else is doing even better. Just when you think your skill has reached the highest level, you find there's someone else who's achieved even greater heights, and that's one of the beauties of life: it drives us to constantly expand and grow.

The power of having new references to raise our standards for ourselves is immense. Whether it's studying the teachings of a great spiritual leader who, in spite of abuse by others, continues to give love, or seeing those who've succeeded financially and noticing what's truly possible, using contrasting references is one of the most powerful ways to change our perceptions and our feelings. Could it be possible that what seemed like the worst days in our lives are actually the most powerful in terms of the lessons we can choose to learn from them?

Limited references create a limited life. If you want to expand your life, you must expand your references by pursuing ideas and experiences that wouldn't be a part of your life if you didn't consciously seek them out. Remember, rarely does a good idea interrupt you; you must actively seek it. Empowering ideas and experiences must be pursued. Each day that we live, we're taking in new information, ideas, concepts, experiences, and sensations. We need to consciously stand guard at the doors of our minds to make sure that whatever we're allowing to enter will cause our lives to be enriched, that the experiences we pursue will add to our stockpile of possibility. We can always use whatever life has to offer in an empowering way, but we have to do it proactively.

The most powerful way to have a great understanding of life and people, to give ourselves the greatest level of choice, is to expose ourselves to as many different types of references as possible. If you want to expand your life, go for it. Pursue some experiences that you've never had before. I assure you, it will change your life forever. Maybe it's time to immerse yourself in another culture and see the world through others' eyes. Maybe it's time to visit Fiji and celebrate an acava ceremony with the locals, or take part in a ride-along program at your local police department where you sit in the back seat of a patrol car and see your community through an officer's eyes. Remember, if we want to understand and appreciate people, one of the most powerful ways is to share some of their references. Whole worlds open up with the addition of just one new reference.

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. It's the moments of our lives that shape us. It's up to us to pursue and create the moments that will lift us and not limit us. So now, get off the bench and step into the game of life. Let your imagination run wild with the possibilities of all those things you could explore and experience, and begin immediately. What new experience could you pursue today that would expand your life? What kind of person will you become? Take action and enjoy exploring the possibilities.

Let's discover the profound change that comes from chapter 18, "Identity: The Key to Expansion." 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. We all will act consistently with our views of who we truly are, whether that view is accurate or not. The reason is that one of the strongest forces in the human organism is the need for consistency. We all have a need for a sense of certainty. Most people have tremendous fear of the unknown. Uncertainty implies the potential of having pain strike us, and we'd rather deal with the pain we already know about than deal with the pain of the unknown.

Thus, living in an ever-changing world, one in which we are constantly surrounded by the flux of new relationships, redefine job roles, changing environments, and a steady stream of new information, the one thing that we all count on to be constant is our sense of identity. If we begin to question who we are, then there is no foundation for all of the understandings upon which we've built our lives. If you don't know who you are, then how can you decide what to do? How can you formulate values, adopt beliefs, or establish rules? How can you judge whether something is good, bad, or indifferent?

As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identity. In fact, one shift in identity can cause a shift of your entire Master System. Shifting, changing, or expanding identity can produce the most profound and rapid improvements in the quality of your life. If you've repeatedly attempted to make a particular change in your life, only to continually fall short, invariably the challenges that you are trying to create a behavioral or emotional shift that was inconsistent with your belief about who you are.

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.

People who act inconsistently with who they believe they are set the stage for the societal cliché of an identity crisis. When the crisis hits, they are immediately disoriented, questioning their previous convictions. Their whole world is turned upside down, and they experience an intense fear of pain. This is what happens to so many people having a midlife crisis. Often, these people identify themselves as being young, and some environmental stimulant turning a certain age, comments from friends, graying hair, causes them to dread their approaching years and the new, less desirable identity that they expect to experience with it.

Thus, in a desperate effort to maintain their identity, they do things to prove they're still young: buy fast cars, change their hairstyles, divorce their spouses, change jobs. It doesn't take a crisis for most of us to understand that we can change our behavior, but the prospect of changing our identity seems threatening or impossible to most. Breaking away from our core beliefs about who we are gives us the most intense pain.

What does all of this really mean? This can all seem very esoteric unless we start to actually define ourselves. So, take a moment to identify who you are. Who are you? It's very important when you are answering this question to be in the right state. You need to feel relaxed, safe, and curious. If you have any distractions, you're not going to get the answers you need. Take a nice deep breath in. Relax. The breath out. Let your mind be curious, not fearful, not concerned, not looking for perfection or for anything in particular. Just ask yourself, "Who am I?" Write down the answer, and then ask it again. Each time you ask it, write down whatever surfaces and keep probing deeper and deeper. Continue to ask until you find the description of yourself that you have the strongest conviction about.

How do you define yourself? What is the essence of who you are? What metaphors do you use to describe yourself? What roles do you play? There are so many ways in which we define ourselves. We may describe ourselves as our emotions, our professions, our titles, our incomes, our roles, our behaviors, our possessions, our metaphors, our feedback, our spiritual beliefs, our looks, our accomplishments, our past, and even what we're not.

The identity that our friends and peers of tends to affect us as well. Take a good look at your friends. Who you believe they are is often a reflection of who you believe you are. If your friends are very loving and sensitive, there's a great chance that you see yourself in a similar vein. The time frame you use to define your identity is very powerful as well. Do you look to your past, your present, or the future to define who you truly are?

Even after completing this exercise, you'll want to continue to refine your identity, expand it, or create better rules for it. We live in a dynamic world where our identities must continually expand in order to enjoy a greater quality of life. You need to become aware of things that may influence your identity. Notice whether they are empowering or disempowering you, and take control of the whole process. Otherwise, you become a prisoner of your own past.

You and I need to expand our view of who we are. We need to make certain that the labels we put upon ourselves are not limits, but enhancements that we add to all that's already good within us. For whatever you and I begin to identify with, we will become. This is the power of belief. The next time you catch yourself saying, "I could never do that," or "That's just not me," take a moment to consider the impact of what you're saying. Have you limited your concept of self?

Begin to ask yourself, "What more can I be? What more will I be? Who am I becoming now?" Think about your values and commit to yourself that regardless of the environment, "I will consistently act as a person who is already achieving my goals. I will breathe this way. I will move this way. I will respond to people this way. I will treat people with the kind of dignity, respect, compassion, and love that this person would." If we decide to think, feel, and act as the kind of person we want to be, we will become that person. We won't just be behaving like that person; we will be that person.

You are now at a crossroads. This is your opportunity to make the most important decision you will ever make. Forget your past. Who are you now? Who have you decided you really are now? Don't think about who you have been. Who are you now? Who have you decided to become? Make this decision consciously. Make it carefully. Make it powerfully.

As we now leave our study of the Master System, just remember this: you don't have to make all of the changes we've talked about here in order to transform the quality of your life. If you change any one of the five areas of the system, your whole life will change. A change in your habitual questions alone will change your focus and change your life. Making shifts in your values hierarchies will immediately change the direction of your life. Cultivating powerful, resourceful states in your physiology will change the way you think and the way you feel. This alone could change your identity. So could changing some of your global beliefs. Pursuing additional references will provide the raw materials for assembling a new experience of who you are. And certainly, deciding to expand your identity could transform virtually everything.

I know that you'll want to return to these pages again and again throughout your life as you begin to reinvent yourself and define who you truly want to be now versus who you've been in the past. Be playful. Have fun. Discover the adventure that comes with an ever-expanding sense that who you were is something more each and every day that you're alive.

Now, let's have some fun by beginning a seven-day challenge where each day I'll give you a brief exercise to use what you've been learning and give you an opportunity to start reaping the rewards of some of the strategies and tools to which you've been exposed. Let's begin with Chapter 19: Emotional Destiny – The Only True Success.

**Day One: Your Outcome**

Take control of your consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life. There is no true success without emotional success. Yet, of the more than 3,000 emotions that we have words to describe, the average person experiences only about a dozen different ones in the course of an average week. We must remember that this does not reflect our emotional capacity, but rather the limitations of our present patterns of focus and physiology.

Throughout this book, we've continually studied the mastery of emotion, and you've developed a broad spectrum of tools to powerfully and rapidly change any emotion you desire. You now realize that changing how you feel is the motivation behind virtually all of your behaviors. Thus, it's time that you develop a proactive plan for dealing with the negative emotional patterns that you habitually experience. It's equally important to give yourself the gift of expanding the amount and quality of time that you spend in positive emotional states.

The arsenal of skills you have for changing your emotional states includes: physiology, focus, questions, submodalities, transformational vocabulary, metaphors, neuro-associative conditioning, beliefs, compelling future, values, rules, references, identity. The purpose of today's exercise is simply to make you aware of your present emotional patterns and get you to utilize as many of the above-listed skills as necessary to guarantee that you shape your own emotional destiny daily.

**Today's Assignment:**

1. Write down all the emotions that you experience in an average week.

2. List the events or situations you use to trigger these emotions.

3. Come up with an antidote for each negative emotion and employ one of the appropriate tools for responding to the action signal. Do you need to change the words you use to describe this experience? Do you need to change what you believe about this emotional state? Do you need to ask yourself a new question? Be sure to consistently focus on solutions instead of problems. Commit throughout this day to replacing the old, limiting emotion with a new, empowering emotion and condition this new pattern until it's consistent. With our emotions well in hand, we'll begin tomorrow to master our Chapter 20: Physical Destiny – Prison of Pain or Palace of Pleasure.

**Day Two: Your Outcome**

Just as you've learned to condition your nervous system to produce the behaviors that will give you the results you want, the physical destiny you experience depends on how you condition your metabolism and muscles to produce the levels of energy and fitness you desire. Most people think that fitness implies health, but the truth is that they don't necessarily go hand in hand. It's ideal to have both health and fitness, but by putting health first, you will always enjoy tremendous benefits in your life. If you achieve fitness at the expense of health, you may not live long enough to enjoy your spectacular physique.

The failure of most individuals to grasp the difference between fitness and health is what causes them to experience the frustration of working out religiously and still having the same 5 to 10 pounds stubbornly clinging to their midsection. Worse than that is the plight of those who make exercise the centerpiece of their lives and believe that their actions are making them healthier, yet each and every day they are pushing themselves one step further toward fatigue, disease, and emotional upheaval. Understanding the simple yet profound distinctions can change not only how you look but also your level of energy, the quality of your life, and ultimately the physical destiny you set in motion.

The biggest difference between health and fitness comes down to understanding the distinction between aerobic and anaerobic exercise, between endurance and power. Aerobic means literally "with oxygen" and refers to moderate exercise sustained over a period of time. Your aerobic system is your system for endurance and encompasses the heart, lungs, blood vessels, and aerobic muscles. If you activate your aerobic system with proper diet and exercise, you burn fat as your primary fuel. On the other hand, anaerobic means literally "without oxygen" and refers to exercises that produce short bursts of power. Anaerobic exercise burns glycogen as its primary fuel while causing the body to store fat.

Genetics plays a part in your body's ability to burn fat, and in fact, some people are born with a highly aerobic system already in place. These are the people we envy who seemingly can eat anything and not gain an ounce. Most types of exercise can be either aerobic or anaerobic; the level of intensity determines whether you are using your aerobic or anaerobic system. Walking, jogging, running, biking, swimming, dancing, etc., can provide either benefit. Lower heart rates make these activities aerobic, and higher heart rates make them anaerobic. Usually, tennis, racquetball, basketball, and similar sports are anaerobic.

Most Americans today have a lifestyle that causes them to live in a constantly anaerobic state, inundated with stress and demands, compounding it with the way they choose to exercise. As a result, they train their metabolism to continuously be anaerobic, i.e., burn glycogen as a primary source of energy. When levels of glycogen become excessively low, the anaerobically trained metabolism turns to blood sugar as its secondary source of fuel. This immediately disrupts your level of health and vitality, as your anaerobic demands rob your body of blood sugar you could be using for other tasks. You immediately begin to feel the negative effects since your nervous system demands the use of two-thirds of your blood sugar. The deficit created by anaerobic exercise can cause neuromuscular problems like headaches or disorientation.

Here is a list of some telltale symptoms directly related to excessive anaerobic training of your metabolism: fatigue, recurrent exercise injuries, low blood sugar patterns, depression and anxiety, fat metabolism problems, premenstrual syndrome, or circulation problems and stiff joints. We live in a society that is anaerobic, excessive, and aerobic deficient, and it's negatively impacting the quality of health across the nation.

In modern industrialized society, people become less physically active. Only a few decades ago, most people accomplished their daily chores in a physical way. Today, though, we have designed active demands for our bodies to replace the inactivity that our day-to-day life no longer creates. This forced activity we call exercise. Unfortunately, many people with positive intentions, including skilled athletes, are becoming less healthy with exercise. Out of our drive to produce the greatest results in the shortest period of time, most of us create an improper balance between health and fitness and suffer the consequences.

By creating an aerobic base, you'll create a tremendous amount of energy and endurance. Remember, by expanding your aerobic capacity, you're expanding your body's ability to deliver oxygen, the source of energy and health, to every organ and system of the body. The key is to train your metabolism to consistently operate in an aerobic fashion. Your body won't burn fat unless you specifically train it to do so. Thus, if you want to lose the persistent layer of fat around your midsection, you must train your body to burn fat, not sugar.

One of the biggest benefits of aerobic exercise is that it prevents the clogging of arteries that leads to heart disease, the top cause of death in the United States, responsible for killing one out of every two people. Probably the most important element to one's health is oxygen. Every day, we breathe approximately 2,500 gallons of air in order to supply our tissues with oxygen. Without it, cells become weakened and die. There are about 75 trillion cells in your body, and they provide you with adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the basic energy for everything that your body does, whether it's breathing, dreaming, eating, or exercising. In order to survive, cells must have oxygen in order to burn glucose and create ATP for continued growth. The point is that you don't want to deplete oxygen during exercise.

If you want to know whether you've moved beyond aerobic into anaerobic, here's a simple test: When you're exercising, can you talk, or are you too winded? Your breathing should be steady and audible, but not labored. What does it feel like when you're working out? If you're exercising aerobically, it should be pleasurable, though tiring. If you're exercising anaerobically, you definitely feel pushed. On a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being minimum exertion and 10 being the most intense, what's your score? If you've exceeded seven, then you've gone beyond aerobic into anaerobic. Ideally, you'll evaluate yourself between six and seven.

Tapping your aerobic capacity requires a very specific form of training. First, it's advisable to wear a heart rate monitor, then warm up gradually to reach your optimum aerobic training zone. Second, exercise within your aerobic training zone for at least 20 minutes, ideally working up to 30 to 45 minutes. Third, take 12 to 15 minutes to cool down appropriately by walking or some other form of mild movement. Your warm-up will accomplish at least two things: One, you will be gradually mobilizing the fatty acids stored throughout your body to your bloodstream so that you can use your fat instead of your vital blood sugar. This is critical. If you don't warm up, you may exercise aerobically (i.e., with oxygen in the cells) but not burn the fat. During warm-up, you should count your heart rate at 50% of the maximum, using the standard method of calculation. Two, you will prevent cramping. This warm-up period should take about 15 minutes. This allows your body to gradually distribute blood to those areas that need it rather than immediately diverting it from vital organs. A critical distinction to make sure that your workouts build health and fitness without injuring your system.

People are often reluctant to commit to a workout because they link too much pain to it, either physical pain or the pain of not having enough time. But if you just give it a try, you'll make two pleasant discoveries: One, you'll love working out this way because it produces pleasure and no pain. Two, you'll experience a level of physical vitality you've never felt before. We all deserve the physical vitality that can transform the quality of our lives. Your physical destiny is intimately related to your mental, emotional, financial, and relationship destinies. In fact, it will determine whether you have a destiny at all.

**Today's Assignment:**

1. Make the distinction between fitness and health. You've done this already.

2. Decide to become healthy. I hope you've done this already, too.

3. Know where you are. Are you currently exercising aerobically or anaerobically? Are you burning fat or glycogen? Either visit somebody who can test you or answer the following questions: Do you wake up in the morning feeling tired? Do you feel famished after working out? Do you experience wild mood swings after working out? Does that same layer of fat hang in there despite your most diligent efforts? Do you feel aches and pains after exercising? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you're exercising anaerobically.

4. Purchase a portable heart rate monitor. They cost in the range of twenty dollars to one hundred dollars. It's one of the best investments you'll ever make.

5. Develop a plan. Condition your metabolism to burn fat and produce consistent levels of energy by beginning a 10-day program of aerobic exercise according to the guidelines I outlined above. Begin immediately.

6. Part of your 10-day challenge, if you want to extend it, is to read the chapter "Energy: The Fuel of Excellence" in my first book, *Unlimited Power*.

7. Decide to make exercise part of your identity. It is only through a long-term, lifelong commitment to exercise that we can truly reap the rewards that life has to offer us.

Now, let's hold ourselves to a higher standard by increasing the quality of our Chapter 21: Relationship Destiny – The Place to Share and Care.

**Day Three: Your Outcome**

Measurably enhance the quality of your personal relationships and deepen your emotional connection with the people you care about most by reviewing the six fundamentals of successful relationships. Success is worthless if we don't have someone to share it with. Indeed, our most desired human emotion is that of connection with other souls. Throughout this book, we've talked consistently about the impact of relationships on shaping character, values, beliefs, and the quality of our lives. Specifically, today's exercise is designed simply to remind you of six key points that are valuable to any relationship. Let's briefly review them before I give you your assignment for today.

1. If you don't know the values and rules of the people with whom you share a relationship, you should prepare for pain. People can love each other, but if, for whatever reason, they consistently break the rules of someone they care about, there are going to be upsets and stress in this relationship. Remember, every upset you've ever had with another human being has been a rules upset, and when people become intimately involved, it's inevitable that some of their rules will clash. By knowing a person's rules, you can head off these challenges in advance.

2. Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something. They're trying to find someone who's going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give and not a place that you go to take.

3. Like anything else in life, in order for a relationship to be nurtured, there are certain things to look for and to look out for. There are certain warning signals within your relationship that can flag you that you need to tackle a problem immediately before it gets out of hand. In her book *How to Make Love All the Time*, my friend Dr. Barbara DeAngelis identifies four pernicious phases that can kill a relationship. By identifying them, we can immediately intervene and eliminate problems before they balloon into destructive patterns that threaten the relationship itself.

* **Stage One: Resistance.** The first phase of challenges in a relationship is when you begin to feel resistance. Virtually anyone who's ever been in a relationship has had times when they felt resistance towards something their partner said or did. Resistance occurs when you take exception or feel annoyed or a bit separate from this person. Maybe at a party, they tell a joke that bothers you, and you wish they hadn't. The challenge, of course, is that most people don't communicate when they're feeling a sense of resistance, and as a result, this emotion continues to grow until it becomes...

* **Stage Two: Resentment.** If resistance is not handled, it grows into resentment. Now you're not just annoyed; you're angry with your partner. You begin to separate yourself from them and erect an emotional barrier. Resentment destroys the emotion of intimacy, and this is a destructive pattern within a relationship that, if unchecked, will only gain speed. If it is not transformed or communicated, it turns into...

* **Stage Three: Rejection.** This is the point when you have so much resentment built up that you find yourself looking for ways to make your partner wrong, to verbally or non-verbally attack them. In this phase, you begin to see everything they do as irritating or annoying. It's here that not only emotional separation occurs but also physical separation as well. If rejection is allowed to continue to lessen our pain, we move to...

* **Stage Four: Repression.** When you are tired of coping with the anger that comes with the rejection phase, you try to reduce your pain by creating emotional numbness. You avoid feeling any pain, but you also avoid passion and excitement. This is the most dangerous phase of a relationship because this is the point at which lovers become roommates. No one else knows the couple has any problems because they never fight, but there's no relationship left.

What's the key to preventing these four R's? The answer is simple: communicate clearly, up front. Make sure your rules are known and can be met to avoid blowing things out of proportion. Use transformational vocabulary. Talk in terms of preferences instead of saying, "I can't stand it when you do that," say, "I'd prefer it if you did this instead." Develop pattern interrupts to prevent the type of argument where you can't even remember what it's about anymore, only that you've got to win.

4. Make your relationships one of the highest priorities in your life, otherwise, they will take a back seat to any or all of the other things that are more urgent that happen during your day. Gradually, the level of emotional intensity and passion will drift away. We don't want to lose the power of our relationship simply because we got caught up in the law of familiarity or we let neglect habituate us to the intense excitement and passion we have for a person.

5. One of the most important patterns that Becky and I discovered early that is critical to making our relationship last is to focus each day on making it better rather than focusing on what might happen if it ended. We must remember that whatever we focus on will experience. If we constantly focus on our fear of a relationship being over, we'll begin to do things unconsciously to sabotage it so that we can extract ourselves before we get too entwined and true pain results. A corollary to this principle is that if you want your relationship to last, never, never, ever threaten the relationship itself. In other words, don't ever say, "If you do that, then I'm leaving." Just making this statement alone creates the possibility. It also induces a destabilizing fear in both partners. Every couple that I've ever interviewed with a lasting relationship has made it their rule, no matter how angry or hurt they felt, never to question whether or not the relationship would last and never to threaten to leave it. You want to focus on where you want to go in a relationship, not on what you fear.

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

**Today's Assignment:**

1. Take the time today to talk with your significant other and find out what's most important to each of you in your relationship. What are your highest values in a relationship together, and what has to happen for you to feel like those values are being fulfilled?

2. Decide that it's more important for you to be in love than to be right. If you should ever find yourself in the position of insisting that you're right, break your own pattern. Stop immediately and come back to the discussion later when you're in a better state to resolve your conflicts.

3. Develop a pattern interrupt that you both agree to use when things become most heated. In this way, no matter how mad you are, for at least a moment, you can smile and let go of the upset. To make it easier for both of you, use the most bizarre or humorous pattern interrupt you can devise. Make it a private joke that can serve as your personal anchor.

4. When you feel resistance, communicate it with softeners such as, "I know it's only my idiosyncrasy, but when you do that, it makes me a tad peckish."

5. Plan regular date nights together, preferably once a week or at the minimum, two times a month. Take turns surprising your partner and dreaming up the most romantic and fun things to do.

6. Make sure you get a good 182nd wet kiss every day. These are your only assignments for today. Act upon them and enjoy them. I can promise you the rewards are immeasurable.

To make sure that we commit to constant and never-ending improvement on a daily basis, let's develop an enjoyable plan by creating your Chapter 22: Financial Destiny – Small Steps to a Small or Large Fortune.

**Day Four: Your Outcome**

Take control of your financial future by learning the five foundational elements for establishing wealth. Money. It's one of the most emotionally charged issues of our lives. Most people are willing to give up things that are much more valuable than money in order to get more of it. They'll push themselves far beyond their past limitations, give up time with their family and friends, or even destroy their health. Money is a potent source associated with both pain and pleasure within our society.

Some people try to deal with money by pretending it doesn't matter, but financial pressure is something that affects us all every day of our lives. For some people, money holds mystery; for others, it is the source of desire, pride, envy, and even contempt. Which is it, really? Is it the maker of dreams or the root of all evil? Is it a tool or a weapon? A source of freedom, power, security, or merely a means to an end?

You and I know intellectually that money is merely a medium of exchange. It allows us to simplify the process of creating, transferring, and sharing value within a society. Many people make the mistake of thinking that all the challenges in their lives would dissipate if they just had enough money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Earning more money in and of itself rarely frees people. It's equally ridiculous to tell yourself that greater financial freedom and mastery of your finances would not offer you greater opportunities to expand, share, and create value for yourself and others.

So, why do so many people fail to achieve financial abundance in a nation where economic opportunity surrounds us? We live in a country where people can create net worths in the hundreds of millions, starting with a little idea for a computer that they first built in their garage. What is it that keeps us from getting wealth in the first place? How can it be that 95% of the American population by age 65, after a lifetime of work, cannot support themselves without help from government or family?

Let's begin by remembering the power that our beliefs have to control our behaviors. The most common reason most people do not become financially successful is that they have mixed associations to what it would take to have more money, as well as what it would mean to have excess money. As you learned in Chapter 5, your brain knows what to do only when it has a clear association about what it needs to avoid and what it needs to move toward. When it comes to money, we often send mixed signals, and so we get mixed results.

We tell ourselves that money will provide us freedom, a chance to give to those we love, a chance to do all those things we've always dreamed about, a chance to free up our time. Yet simultaneously, we may believe that in order to accumulate an abundance of money, we'd have to work so much harder and spend so much more time that we'd probably be too old and tired to enjoy it. Or we may believe that if we have excess money, we won't be spiritual, or will be judged, or someone will swindle us out of it anyway, so why even try?

These negative associations are not limited to ourselves. Some people resent anyone who is doing well financially, and often they assume that if someone has made a lot of money, he or she must have done something to take advantage of others. If you find yourself resenting someone who is wealthy, what message does that send your brain? It's probably something like, "Having excess money is bad." If you harbor these feelings for others, you're subconsciously teaching your mind that for you to do well would make you a bad person. By resenting others' success, you condition yourself to avoid the very financial abundance that you need and desire.

The second most common reason why so many people never master money is simply that they think it's too complex. They want an expert to handle it for them. While it's very valuable to get expert coaching, we all must be trained to understand the consequences of our financial decisions. If you exclusively depend upon someone else, no matter how competent they are, you'll always have them to blame for what occurs. But if you take responsibility for understanding your finances, you can begin to direct your own destiny. Everything in this book is based upon the idea that we have the power to understand how our minds, bodies, and emotions work, and because of this, we have the capacity to exert a great deal of control over our destinies. Our financial world is no different. We must understand it and not limit ourselves by beliefs about the complexity of finances. Once you understand the fundamentals, mastering money is a fairly simple matter.

So, the first task I would give you in taking control of your financial world is to utilize the neuro-associative conditioning technology to condition yourself for financial success. Become clearly associated with all the great things you could do for your family and the peace of mind you'd feel if you had true economic abundance.

The third major belief that keeps people from succeeding financially and creates tremendous stress is the concept of scarcity. Most people believe they live in a world where everything is limited. There's only so much available land, so much oil, so many quality homes, so many opportunities, so much time. With this philosophy of life, in order for you to win, somebody else has to lose. It's a zero-sum game. A good friend of mine is economist Paul Pulzer. A Wharton business school graduate, Paul says the true wealth comes from the ability to practice what he calls "economic alchemy," which is the ability to take something that has very little value and convert it into something of significantly greater value. Those who are wealthy today are truly modern-day alchemists. They have learned to transform something common into something precious and have reaped the economic rewards that come with this transformation. When you think about it, doesn't the magnificent processing speed of a computer really reduce down to dirt after all? Silicon comes from sand. Those who've taken ideas, mere thoughts, and turned them into products and services are certainly practicing alchemy. All wealth begins in the mind.

Let's review the five fundamental lessons for creating lasting wealth and then I'll immediately put you to work on beginning to take control of your financial destiny.

1. **The first key is the ability to earn more income than ever before.** The ability to create wealth. The key to wealth is to be more valuable. If you have more skills, more ability, more intelligence, specialized knowledge, a capacity to do things few others can do, or if you just think creatively and contribute on a massive scale, you can earn more than you ever thought possible. The single most important and potent way to expand your income is to devise a way to consistently add real value to people's lives, and you will prosper. The lesson is simple: you don't have to be an entrepreneur to add more value, but what you must do every day is to continually expand your knowledge, your skill, and your ability to give more. This is why self-education is so critical. If you want to earn more money where you are today, one of the simplest ways to do so is to ask yourself: How can I be worth more to this company? How can I help it to achieve more in less time? How could I add a tremendous amount of value to it? Are there some ways that I could help cut costs and increase quality? What new system could I develop? What new technology could I use that would allow the company to produce its products and services more effectively? If we can help people to do more with less, then we truly are empowering others, and we will be empowered economically as well, as long as we put ourselves in a position to do so.

2. **The second key is to maintain your wealth.** There's only one way to maintain your wealth, and that is simply this: spend less than you earn and invest the difference. Without question, it is the only way to secure wealth over the long term. What never ceases to amaze me is to see that no matter how much money people earn, they seem to find a way to spend it. People from even the highest earning categories are often broke. To maintain your wealth, you must take control of your spending. Be intelligent. Spend less than you earn, and you will maintain your wealth. Now, many people know this. We've all heard about the virtues of saving a minimum of 10% and investing it, but very few people do it. And interestingly enough, very few people are wealthy. To ensure that you'll be able to maintain your wealth is to have 10% taken out of your paycheck and invested before you even see it.

3. **The third key is to increase your wealth.** Most people have heard about the exponential power of compounding, but very few understand it. Compounding allows you to put yourself in a position where your money goes to work for you. Most of us work our entire lives to fuel the machines of our lifestyles. Those who succeed financially are those who set aside a certain percentage of their money, invest it, and continue to reinvest their profits until they produce a source of income that is large enough to provide for all their needs without ever having to work again. The pace at which you achieve your financial independence is in direct proportion to your willingness to reinvest, not spend, the profits of your past investments. The most important thing you'll ever do in your financial life is to decide to truly understand the various types of investments and what their potential risks and returns are. Without a clear-cut investment plan, you will eventually fail financially.

4. **The fourth key is to protect your wealth.** So many people who have wealth are equally or more insecure today with an abundance of money than they were when they had none. People often feel less secure when they think they have more to lose. Why? It's because they know that in any moment, someone could sue them for completely unfair or unjust reasons and decimate their assets. Knowing that the wealth that they've spent years of intense work to create could be claimed by people who have no right to it understandably makes most people feel edgy. This philosophy of protecting your assets is not one of trying to avoid your legitimate debts, but simply to protect yourself from frivolous attacks. One common misperception is that asset protection involves mystery and deceit. Your assets do not need to be hidden; just protected. Just know that there are many things you can do to make changes in this area.

5. **The fifth key is to enjoy your wealth.** So many people have gone through the first four stages. They've figured out how to earn wealth by adding real value. They've discovered how to maintain it by spending less than they were earning. They've mastered the art of investing and are experiencing the benefits of compounded interest, and they now know how to protect their assets. But they're still not happy. They feel empty. The reason is that they have not yet realized that money is not the end; it's only a means. You and I must make sure that we find a way to share its positive impact with the people we care about, or the money will have no value. When you discover ways to contribute that are proportionate to your income, you will tap into one of the greatest joys in life.

Let me simply say this to you in closing: Changing your beliefs and mastering your finances can be an incredibly rewarding experience in personal development. Commit yourself now to begin the process.

**Today's Assignment:**

1. Take a look at your beliefs. See if there are any that are out of alignment and change them with neuro-associative conditioning.

2. Institute a process for adding more value in your place of employment on a major scale. Whether you're paid for it or not, add 10 times more value than you do currently and prepare for the professional effects of your actions.

3. Commit to save a minimum of 10% and have it deducted from your check and invested in your plan portfolio.

4. Get some good coaching. Whether you contact our Financial Destiny Group professionals or your own local financial coach, make certain that whoever works with you helps you to develop a detailed financial plan that you understand. Pick up some great financial books. There are many that can teach you how to make intelligent, informed investment decisions.

5. If you're concerned about your assets being under attack, take action to develop an asset protection plan.

6. Create a small jackpot to start the process of linking pleasure to financial success. Who could you do something special for? What could you do for yourself as reinforcement for getting started today?

Now, you're ready to Chapter 23: Be Impeccable – Your Code of Conduct.

**Day Five: Your Outcome**

Is it possible to have great values, to have all your rules aligned to support them, to be asking yourself the right questions, and not to be living your values in the moment? If you're being honest with yourself, you know the answer is yes. All of us, at one time or another, have let events control us instead of controlling our states or our decisions as to what those events mean. We need a clear-cut way to ensure that we consistently live the values to which we've committed ourselves and a way of measuring whether or not we're actually achieving that value on a daily basis.

I remember reading a story from Ben Franklin's autobiography in a beat-up hotel room in Milwaukee. I was on an intense schedule, facing the prospect of doing several radio and television talk shows, a book signing, and a free guest event. The night before meeting all these obligations, I decided, "Okay, you're here, so make the best of it. At least you can feed your mind." I had very recently come up with the idea of values and their hierarchies, and I had created what I thought was a great list of values for myself, one that I felt good about living. But as I reflected upon Ben's list of virtues, I told myself, "Yes, you have love as a value, but are you being loving right now? Contribution is one of your top values, but are you contributing in this moment?" And the answer was no. I had great values, but I wasn't measuring whether or not I was truly living them on a moment-to-moment basis. I knew I was a loving person, but as I looked back, I saw a lot of moments when I wasn't being loving.

I sat down and asked myself, "What states would I be in if I were my highest and best? What states will I commit to being every single day, no matter what, regardless of the environment, regardless of whatever challenges break loose around me? I will be these states." At least once every day, the states to which I committed myself included being friendly, happy, loving, outgoing, playful, powerful, generous, outrageous, passionate, and fun. Some of these states were the same as my values, and some of them weren't, but I knew that if I truly lived each of these states every day, I would be living my values continually.

As you can imagine, it was a pretty exciting process. The next day, as I appeared on the radio and TV talk shows, I deliberately put myself into these states. I was happy, loving, powerful, funny, and I felt that what I said and it made a contribution not only to my hosts but to the people who were listening and watching. Then I went down to the local shopping mall for a book signing. When I got there, the manager approached me with a distressed expression and said, "There's a slight problem, Mr. Robbins. The announcement that you're going to be here signing books is coming out in tomorrow's paper."

Now, if this had happened before I'd read about Ben Franklin's list, I might have reacted in a rather unique way. But with my new list in mind, I thought, "I'm committed to living in these states no matter what. What a great test to see if I'm truly living my personal code every day." So I walked over to the book signing table and looked around. Nobody was there. Only a few people were strolling through the mall. How could I create excitement where none seemed to exist? The first thing that popped into my mind was outrageousness. After all, one of the states on my list was to be outrageous. So I picked up a copy of my book, *Unlimited Power*, and started reading it, making all kinds of interesting noises: "Ooh! Ah! Wow! Is that true?" Soon, a woman walked by who was attracted by my enthusiasm for what clearly had to be a brilliant book and stopped to see what I was reading. I raved to her about this incredible book and pointed out all of the best stories and techniques. Someone else stopped to see what all the hubbub was about. Then a few other folks joined us, and within around 20 minutes, about 25 to 30 people were crowding around me to hear about the great book. I had found. Finally, I said, "And you know the best thing of all? I happen to be a good friend of the author." The first woman's eyes lit up. "Really?" I held up the book jacket with my picture on the back and said, "Look familiar?" She gasped and laughed, and so did all the other people. I sat down and started signing books. That afternoon turned out to be a terrific success, and all of us had fun.

Instead of letting events control my actions and perceptions, I had consciously chosen to live by what I now call my code of conduct. I also had the tremendous sense of satisfaction of knowing that by living in these states, by being who I truly am, I was meeting my values in the moment.

**Today's Assignment:**

1. Make a list of the states you are committed to experiencing every day in order to live in accordance with your highest principles and values. Make sure the list is long enough to give your life the richness.

And variety you deserve, yet short enough that you can truly be in these states every day. Most people find that anywhere from 7 to 10 is optimum. What states would you like to be in on a consistent basis? Happy, dynamic, friendly, connected, grateful, passionate? Some of these states might be the same as some of your moving toward values, and some of them might be things that you feel will lead you toward living your values every day.

Two: After you have compiled your list, write a sentence next to each one describing how you will know you are doing it. In other words, your rules for these states. For example, "I am being cheerful when I smile at people." "I am being outrageous when I do something totally unexpected and fun." "I am being grateful when I remember all the good things I have in my life."

Three: Make the commitment to yourself to genuinely experience each of these states at least once a day. You might want to write your code of conduct on a piece of paper and put it somewhere you will see it often. Every now and then during the course of the day, take a look at your list and ask yourself, "Which of these states have I already experienced today? Which of them haven't I had yet? And how am I going to accomplish it by the end of the day?" If you truly commit to your code of conduct, imagine how incredible you will feel. You'll no longer be controlled by events. You'll know that no matter what happens around you, you can maintain your sense of yourself and live up to the vision you've created.

There is a tremendous pride that comes with holding yourself to a higher standard and knowing that each day you alone will determine how you feel, that you will conduct yourself only at the highest level. Wayne Dyer recently shared a great metaphor with me relating to how people blame the way they behave on the pressure they're feeling. He said, "Pressure doesn't create negative behavior. Think of yourself as an orange. If an orange is squeezed, if all this pressure is being applied from the outside, what happens? Juice comes out, right? But the only thing that comes out when the pressure is applied is what's already inside the orange." I believe that you decide what's on the inside by holding yourself to a higher standard. So when the pressure's on, what's going to come out is the good stuff. After all, you cannot always count on easy sailing. Remember, it's who you are every day. The small actions, as well as the most grandiose, that build your character and form your identity.

One of the most important actions you can take is to learn too.

Chapter 24: Master Your Time in Your Life. Day Six: Your Outcome: Learn how to use time to your advantage rather than allowing it to rule your levels of satisfaction and stress. If you've ever felt stress, and who hasn't, chances are excellent that it's because you felt you just didn't have enough time to do what you wanted to at the level of quality to which you are committed. In this stressed and overloaded state, your effectiveness is rapidly diminished. The solution is simple: Take control of the time frame you're focusing upon. If the present is stressful, then become more resourceful in dealing with your challenges by focusing on the future and the successful completion or resolution of the tasks before you. This new focus will instantly change your state and give you the very resources you need to turn things around in the present.

So often we forget that time is a mental construct, that it is completely relative, and that our experience of time is almost exclusively the result of our mental focus. Our beliefs also filter our perception of time. For some people, regardless of the situation, 20 minutes is a lifetime. For others, a long time is a century. Can you imagine how these people walk differently, talk differently, look at their goals differently, and how stressed they might be if they were trying to deal with one another while operating out of completely different frames of reference? This is why time mastery is a life skill. The ability to flex your experience of time is the ability to shape your experience of life.

For today's exercises, let's briefly review and apply three time-saving tips:

One: The ability to distort time. After you've mastered the ability to change time frames by changing your focus, you're ready to move on to the second major skill of time mastery, and that is the ability to distort time so that a moment feels like an hour or an hour like a minute. Haven't you noticed that when you become totally engrossed in something, you lose track of time? Why? Because you no longer focus upon it. You make fewer measurements of it. You're focused on something enjoyable, and therefore time passes more rapidly. Remember that you're in control. Direct your focus and consciously choose how to measure your time. If you are constantly checking your watch, then time seems to crawl. Again, your experience of time is controlled by your focus.

Two: A matter of importance. Perhaps the most critical distinction of all is an understanding of how urgency and importance control your decisions about what to do with your time, and therefore your level of personal fulfillment. Have you ever worked your tail off, completed every single thing on your to-do list, but at the end of the day still felt unfulfilled? That's because you did everything that was urgent and demanded your attention in the moment, but you didn't do what was important – the things that would make a difference long term. Conversely, have you ever had days when you got only a few things done, but at the end felt that this was a day that had really mattered? These are the days when you focused on what's important rather than what urgently needed your attention. The only way to truly master your time is to organize your schedule each day to spend the majority of it doing things that are important rather than urgent.

Three: Save yourself years. The most powerful way I've learned to compress time is to learn through other people's experience. We can never truly master time as long as our primary strategy for learning and mastering our world is based upon trial and error. Modeling those who've already succeeded can save you years of pain. This is why I'm a voracious reader and a committed student of tapes and seminars. I've always seen these experiences as necessities, not accessories, and they have given me the wisdom of decades of experience and the success that results from it. I challenge you to learn from other people's experiences as often as you can and to utilize whatever you learn.

Today's assignment:

One: Throughout this day, begin to explore changing time frames. Whenever you're feeling the pressures of the present, stop and think about the future in ways that are empowering. For example, think of goals that compel you and become fully associated to them. Visualize the image, listen to it, step into it, and notice how it feels. Put yourself back into the midst of a treasured memory: your first kiss, the birth of your child, a special moment with a friend. The more you develop your capability to quickly change time frames, the greater your level of freedom and the range of emotions you will be able to create within yourself at a moment's notice. Do this enough until you truly know you can use this change in focus to instantly change your state.

Two: Learn to deliberately distort time. For something that normally seems to take a long time to complete, add another component that will not only speed up your perception of time but allow you to accomplish two things at once. For example, when I'm running, I'll don a pair of headphones and listen to my favorite music, or I'll watch the news or make phone calls while I'm on my StairMaster. This means I'll never have an excuse not to exercise or not to do what's important.

Three: Write a to-do list that prioritizes according to importance instead of urgency. Instead of writing down zillions of things to do and feeling like a failure at the end of the day, focus on what's most important for you to accomplish. If you do this, I can promise you that you'll feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. For your experience, of course, we must always take time too.

Chapter 25: Rest and Play. Even God took one day off. Day Seven: Your Outcome: Achieve some balance. You've worked hard and you've played hard. Take a day off to have some fun. Be spontaneous. Be outrageous. Do something that takes you outside yourself. What would create the most excitement for you?

Today's assignment: Either plan something fun and stick to it, or do something on the spur of the moment. Whatever it is, enjoy it. Tomorrow, you'll be ready to explore.

Chapter 26: The Ultimate Challenge. What One Person Can Do. So many people feel powerless and insignificant when it comes to social issues and world events, thinking that even if they did everything right in their own personal lives, their welfare would still be at the mercy of the actions of others. They feel beset by the proliferation of gang warfare and violent crime, perplexed by massive government deficits, saddened by homelessness and illiteracy, and overwhelmed by global warming and the relentless extinction of the other species who live on this planet. Such people fall into the mindset of thinking, "Even if I get my own life and the lives of my family in order, what good will it do? Someone not in a position of power could accidentally push the button and blow us all up anyway."

This kind of belief system fosters the feeling of being out of control and impotent to create change at any significant level, and naturally leads to the learned helplessness typified by the phrase, "Why even try?" Nothing could be more crippling to a person's ability to take action than learned helplessness. It is the primary obstacle that prevents us from changing our lives or taking action to help other people change theirs.

If you've come this far in the book, you know without a doubt my central message: You have the power right now to control how you think, how you feel, and what you do. Perhaps for the first time, you were empowered to take control of the master system that has unconsciously guided you until this point. With the strategies and distinctions you've gained from reading and doing the exercises in this book, you have awakened to the conviction that you are truly the master of your fate, the director of your destiny.

Together, we've discovered the giant power that shapes destiny: decision. And that our decisions about what to focus on, what things mean, and what to do are the decisions that will determine the quality of our present and future. Now, it's time to address the power of joint decisions to shape the destiny of our community, our country, and our world. What will determine the quality of life for generations to come will be the collective decisions we make today about how to deal with current challenges. By fixating on everything that's not working, we limit our focus to effects and we neglect the causes of these problems. We fail to recognize that it is the small decisions you and I make every day that create our destinies.

Remember that all decisions are followed by consequences. If we make our decisions unconsciously, that is, let other people or other factors in our environment do the thinking for us, and act without at least anticipating the potential effects, then we may be unwittingly perpetuating the problems we dread most. Probably the most pervasive false belief most of us harbor is the fallacy that only some superhuman act would have the power to turn our problems around. Nothing could be further from the truth. Life is cumulative. Whatever results we're experiencing in our lives are the accumulation of a host of small decisions we've made as individuals, as a family, as a community, as a society, and as a species. The success or failure of our lives is usually not the result of one cataclysmic event or earth-shaking decision, although sometimes it may look that way. Rather, success or failure is determined by the decisions we make and the actions we take every day.

So many people want to avoid any hint of a problem or challenge, yet surmounting difficulty is the crucible that forms character. Many people don't discover their heroic nature until a major difficulty or life-threatening situation occurs and they must rise to the occasion because there is no other choice. The next time you find yourself in a tough spot, decide to make a difference in that situation and take action, no matter how small it seems at the time. Who knows what consequences you will set in motion?

Identify yourself as a hero so that you can act as one. How do I define a hero? A hero is a person who courageously contributes under even the most trying circumstances. A hero is an individual who acts unselfishly and who demands more from himself or herself than others would expect. A hero is a man or woman who defies adversity by doing what he or she believes is right in spite of fear. A hero is anyone who aims to contribute, anyone who is willing to set an example, anyone who lives by the truth of his or her convictions. A hero develops strategies to assure their outcome and persists until it becomes a reality. Changing their approach is necessary in understanding the importance of small actions consistently taken. A hero is not someone who is perfect, because none of us is perfect.

Many people today seem to shy away from the very idea of being a hero, perhaps avoiding the responsibility they feel it would entail. Besides, aren't such aspirations egotistical? Today, we live in a society where we not only overlook potential heroes but we denigrate the ones we have with morbid fascination. We scrutinize their private lives, digging for some flaw in their armor, and eventually, we find it or fabricate one. If we held the great heroes of our past to the same unbending criteria by which we judge our present-day heroes, we wouldn't have any heroes. We all make mistakes, but that doesn't invalidate the contributions we make in the course of our lives.

There are so many ways that you and I could contribute. We don't need to wait until we have a grandiose master plan to make a difference. We can have impact in a moment, in doing the smallest things, making what often seem like insignificant decisions. It's true that most of our heroes are hidden behind what seem like small acts done consistently. Just being prepared can make all the difference. For example, how would you feel if someone had a heart attack in your presence, but you were CPR certified and knew what to do? What if your concerted efforts to keep their blood circulating, despite the apparent absence of any signs of life, actually resulted in saving a life? I can promise you one thing: the feeling of contribution you would get from that experience would give you a greater sense of fulfillment and joy than anything you've ever felt in your life, greater than any acknowledgment anyone could possibly give you, greater than any amount of money you could possibly earn, greater than any achievement you could possibly have.

There are so many simple ways to make a difference. We don't have to go out and save somebody's life, but maybe getting them to smile is saving their life, or at least getting them to enjoy the life that they already have. Why are so many people afraid to take such small steps to help others? One of the most common reasons is that they are just embarrassed to be doing something they're uncertain about. They're afraid of being rejected or appearing foolish. But you know what? If you want to play the game and win, you've got to play full out. You've got to be willing to feel stupid, and you've got to be willing to try things that might not work. And if they don't work, be willing to change your approach. Otherwise, how could you innovate? How could you grow? How could you discover who you really are?

I believe that in the deepest part of ourselves, we all want to do what we believe is right, to go beyond ourselves, to commit our energy, time, emotion, and capital to a larger cause. We must meet our moral and spiritual needs, even if it brings us pain in the short term. We respond not just to our psychological needs, but to our moral imperative to do more and be more than anyone could expect. Nothing gives us a greater sense of personal satisfaction than contribution. Giving unselfishly is the foundation of fulfillment.

Once you've mastered the elements of this book, your ability to deal with your own challenges becomes a minor focus. What used to be difficult becomes easy. At this point, you'll find yourself redirecting your energies from concentrating primarily on yourself to improving what's happening in your family, your community, and possibly the world around you. The only way to do so with a lasting sense of fulfillment is through unselfish contribution. So don't look for heroes; be one. However, make balance your watchword. Strive for balance rather than perfection. Most people live in a black and white world where they think that they're either a volunteer with no life of their own, or just a materialistic, achievement-oriented person who doesn't care to make a difference. Don't fall into this trap. Life is a balance between giving and receiving, between taking care of yourself and taking care of others. Yes, give some of your time, capital, and energy to those who truly need it, but also be willing to give to yourself, and do so with joy, not with guilt. You don't have to take the weight of the world on your shoulders. More people would contribute if they realized that they didn't have to give anything up to do so. So do a little, and know that it can mean a lot. If everyone did this, fewer people would have to do so much, and more people would be helped.

Take the time now to set up your master system so that the game of life is winnable. Let your humanity, your caring for yourself and others, be the guiding principle of your life. But don't treat life so seriously that you lose the power of spontaneity, the pleasure that comes from being silly and being a kid.

Finally, as I leave you now, I just want to tell you how much I respect and appreciate you as a person. While we may not have met face to face, we've certainly touched hearts. You've offered me a great gift in allowing me to share parts of my life and my skills with you, and my sincere hope is that some of what we've shared here has moved you in a special way. If you'll now use some of these strategies to increase the quality of your life, then I'll feel very lucky indeed. I hope you'll stay in touch with me. I hope you'll write to me, or that we'll have the privilege of meeting personally in a seminar, at a foundation function, or by a chance crossing of our paths. Please be sure to introduce yourself. I look forward to meeting you and hearing the story of your life's success. Till then, remember to expect miracles, because you are one. Be a bearer of the light and a force for good. I now pass the torch on to you. Share your gifts, share your passion, and may God bless you.

If you'd like to assist in creating positive changes in the lives of youth, seniors, the hungry, homeless, and the imprisoned population, please visit the TonyRobbinsFoundation.org to learn how you can help. Link in the description below.

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