Everything people do is to avoid pain or gain pleasure.
People often feel frustrated because they know they need to take action, but they can’t get themselves to do it. Reason: They keep trying to change the behavior, which is the effect, instead of dealing with the cause.
Why they dont take action: because they believe that taking action at this moment would be more painful than just putting it off.
Why is it that people can experience pain yet fail to change? Because of the emotional threshold. You need to hit a level of pain and won’t be willing to settle for anymore.
We dont believe what we hear, see. Instead, we are confident that our perceptions are accurate. You have an emotional association in your nervous system.
If we link massive pain to any behavior or emotional pattern, we will avoid indulging in it at all costs.
Intellect doesn’t drive us; the emotions we link to our thoughts truly drive us.
Learn to condition your mind, body, and emotions to link pain/pleasure to something else, and you will instantly change your behavior.
It’s not actual pain that drives us, but our fear that something will lead to pain. And it’s not absolute pleasure that goes us, but our belief- our sense of certainty- that somehow taking a specific action will lead to pleasure. Were not driven by reality but by our perception of reality. Most people focus on how to avoid pain/gain pleasure in the short term and thereby create long-term pain for themselves.
Anything that you want that’s valuable requires that you break through some short-term pain to gain long-term pleasure.
We dont move away from real pain but from what we believe will lead to pain.
BELIEF SYSTEMS
It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs about what those events mean.
Whenever something happens in your life, your brain asks two questions:
- will this mean pain/pleasure
- What must I do to avoid pain/pleasure
The answer to both is based on our generalizations that what we’ve learned could lead to pain/pleasure.
GENERALIZATIONS
Why do you believe this? Because your experience has provided enough references to create a sense of certainty that allows you to follow through.
Most of our beliefs are generalizations about our past, based on our interpretations of painful and pleasurable experiences.
Challenge:
- most of us dont consciously decide what were going to believe
- oftern our beliefs are based on misinterpretation of past experiences
- once we adopt a belief, we forget is merely an interpretation
Global Beliefs are so generalized that they dominate virtually every aspect of our lives, either negatively or positively. They are ofter phrased as is/am/are.
BELIEF
Most people treat a belief as if it’s a thing when it’s a feeling of certainty.
Its basic building block is an idea. There are many ideas you think but do not believe; whether it’s an idea or a belief will come down to the amount of certainty you feel about this phrase as you say it.
And you have some references to support this idea, some experiences in life to back it up.
It doesn’t matter which belief is true; it matters is which is most empowering. This is how humans rationalize.
What are the sources of references? Personal experiences, information from other people, or imagination. The emotional intensity we feel about any of these references will affect the strength and width of the leg. The strongest and most solid legs are formed by personal experiences that we have a lot of emotion attached to because of their level of pain/pleasure. The other factor is the number of references we have.
Our nervous system experiences something as accurate with enough emotional intensity and repetition, even if it hasn’t occurred yet.
People so often develop limiting beliefs about who they are and what they’re capable of because they haven’t succeeded in the past; they believe they won’t believe in the future. They begin to focus on being realistic out of their fear of pain.
One of the biggest challenges in anyone’s life is knowing how to interpret failures. This will shape our lives more than anything. These negative beliefs strip us of our power and destroy our ability to act: learned helplessness.
There are three specific patterns of beliefs that cause us to feel helpless and destroy anything—permanence, pervasiveness, and personal.
People who succedes never see a problem as permanent. It will pass.
They never see it as pervasive: that one problem controls their whole life.
Personal: we must see it as a challenge to modify our approach, not as a problem with ourselves.
How to change? Get your brain to associate massive pain with the old belief.
Create doubt: we got new experiences that cause us to question, interrupt our patterns of certainty.
New experiences trigger change only if they cause us to question our beliefs. Whenever we believe something, we no longer ask it in any way. If you suspect something enough, you’ll begin to doubt it.
Our beliefs have different emotional certainty and intensity levels: opinions, beliefs, and convictions.
Opinions: something we feel relatively certain about is temporary and can be changed easily.
Belief: When we begin to develop a much larger base of reference legs, this will give us an absolute sense of certainty about something.
People with beliefs have such a strong level of certainty that they are closed to new input. We have to interrupt this pattern and get them to question their references so that they can make room for a new belief.
Conviction: they do not only feel certain but get angry if someone ever questions them.
conviction: you’ll do whatever it takes
opinion: you fantasize about something, but never take action
How to master something? raise a belief to a level of conviction
How to create convictions?
- start with a basic belief
- reinforce the belief by adding new & more powerful references
- find a triggering event, or create one of your own. ask: What will it cost me if I dont?
- Take action
Challenge: many times, people have convictions based on beliefs that everybody beliefs. This is called social proof.
“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. Without thoughts, we make our world.” -Buddha.
Business negative beliefs: managing by the visible numbers: to believe that profits are made by cutting costs and increasing revenues. This is a short-term approach. But often the people who injure our company are rewarded because they produce results in the short term.
We cant get rid of a pattern without replacing it with a new one. If you change the meaning of any event in your life, you will immediately change how you feel and what you do, which will lead to changing your actions and thus transform your destiny.
Nothing in life has meaning except the meaning you give to it.
CAN CHANGE HAPPEN IN AN INSTANT?
To be able to help others change, I had to be able to change myself.
Why is it that most people think change takes so long? Many have tried again and again through will power and failed. The assumption that they then make is that important changes take a long time. In reality, it’s only difficult because most of us don’t know how to change.
2.- In our culture, we have a set of beliefs that prevent us from utilizing our own inherent abilities.
If we were going to create long-term change: realize that we can change now and were responsible for our own change.
we must have these three beliefs
1.- we must believe, something must change
2.- we must believe you will change it
3.-Believe that you can change it- you have to be the source of the change
Nothing changes until we change the sensations we link to an experience in our nervous system.
Any time you experience a significant amount of pain/pleasure, your brain immediately searches for the cause. using these criteria
1.- your brain looks for something that appears to be unique
2.- your brain looks for something that seems to be happening simultaneously
3.- your brain looks for consistency
so often, we blame the wrong cause and thereby close ourselves off from possible solutions.
HOW TO CHANGE ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE
1.- decide what you want and what’s preventing you from having it
2.- Get leverage: massive associate pain to not changing now and massive pleasure to the experience of changing now. Change is usually not a question of capability. It’s almost a question of motivation.
The problem is that change is often a should and not a must.
To change, we must create a sense of urgency that’s so intense that we’re compelled to follow through. This is called the pain threshold.
Why don’t people seek for change? You rationalize things will get better without doing anything to make it better. You are unhappy, but the fear of the unknown is a more powerful motivating force. At least you know how to deal with the pain right now.
20% of any change is knowing how, but 80% is knowing why
The most significant leverage you can create for yourself is the pain that comes from inside, not outside. Knowing that you have failed to live up to your own standards for your life is the ultimate pain.
One of the most vital forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity.
3.- interrupt the limiting pattern- sometimes people want to create 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.
Someone with secondary gains has mixed emotions about changing. They want to change, but they subconsciously believe that maintaining the old behavior or emotional pattern gives them something they couldn’t get any other way.
One of the best ways to interrupt someone’s pattern is to do things they don’t expect, things that are radically different from what they’ve experienced.
4.- Create a new empowering alternative- the failure by most people to find an alternative way of getting out of pain and into the feelings of pleasure is the primary reason most people’s attempts at change are only temporary. If you are not sure how to get out of pain, you can simply find the answers by modeling people who have turned things around for themselves.
External pressure rarely has a lasting impact.
Set up a series of short-term goals, and as you reach each one, immediately reward yourself.
Reinforcement- is responding to a behavior immediately after it occurs, while punishment and reward may occur long afterward.
Often were conditioning people negatively instead of positively.
The most powerful way to motivate people is through personal development. By helping an employee grow and expand personally, they begin to feel passionate about their jobs, and this makes them want to contribute more.
The element of a pleasant surprise is one of the most enjoyable experiences that a human can have.
Variable schedule of reinforcement- is to raise the standards slowly. If someone is always rewarded, they may become habituated and will no longer give 100%.
Fixed schedule of reinforcement- the challenge is that people learn to do the minimum necessary to receive the reward because there is no surprise.
However, if there are occasional surprises, they will put extra effort in the hope they’ll be rewarded and acknowledged. These surprises must not be predictable.
CREATE A JUMP START
If someone who seems not to have done anything right is suddenly given a reward, this can stimulate them to take on new levels and types of behavior and performance.
The most important thing to remember about conditioning is immediately reinforcing the desired behavior.
HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT
Why are most people aren’t happy? Someday, someone, somehow, something… and then ill be happy. They never discovered a trustworthy source of happiness.
1.- They didn’t know what they really wanted out of life. They distracted themselves with a variety of artificial mood alterants.
2.- They developed neurological pathways and expressways to pain and were drawn to this by their habits; they had more references to pain than pleasure.
3.- They didn’t know how to make themselves feel good. They had to turn to some outside force to help them deal with the present.
4.- They never learned how to direct the focus of their own minds consciously
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WHAT DO YOU WANT
What do I genuinely want in life? Why do I want these things? What you really want is to change how you feel. The items you wish to are the means to achieve certain feelings.
The difference between acting badly or brilliantly is not based on your ability but on the state of your mind/ body at a given moment.
Your behavior is not the result of your ability but the state you’re in at this moment.
Mentally, you’ve got to focus on what empowers you.
There are two primary ways to change your emotional state: by changing the way you use your physical body or by changing your focus.
PHYSIOLOGY: THE POWER OF MOVEMENT
Emotion is created by motion. Your body leads your emotions.
How you feel about things and the meaning of a particular experience is all dependent upon your focus.
Our ability to change the way we feel depends on changing our submodalities.
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: overeat, overdrink, oversleep, overshop, smoke, drugs. Many of these are cumulative; we don’t see the danger until it’s too late.
You’ve got to be in a determined state in order to succeed.
The first skill you must master is to be able to change your state instantly, no matter what the environment.
The second skill is that you should be able to change the state consistently in any environment.
ASK QUESTIONS
ask the right questions to get the correct answers
All these influences are a product of thinking- of the way your brain has evaluated and created meaning throughout your entire life. Response: just how do we think?
If we want to change the quality of our lives, we should change our habitual questions.
Why are some people depressed? Because of their limited states. Their pattern of focus and evaluation limits their emotional experience of life.
Many people fail to commit to a relationship simply because they keep asking questions that create doubt.
If a person isn’t doing well financially, it’s because they’re creating a great deal of fear in their life.
The challenge is that most of us are in the automatic pilot by failing to consciously control the habitual questions we ask. Try to model the habitual questions of people that you respect.
1.- questions change what we’re focusing on and how we feel
2.- questions change what we delete
3.- questions change the resources available to us
presuppositions program us to accept things that may or may not be true
our beliefs affect the questions well even consider
Change your state by asking better questions
1.- what is great about this problem
2.- what is not perfect yet
3.- what am I willing to do to make it the way I want it
4.- what am I willing to no longer do in order to make It the way I want it
5.- How can I enjoy the process while I do what is necessary to make it the way I want it
THE VOCABULARY
Most beliefs are formed by words- and can be changed by words as well
Most of us make unconscious choices in the words we use
The words you habitually choose also affect how you communicate with yourself and, therefore, what you experience
The words that we attach to our experience become our experience
culturally were shaped by our language
one of the reasons we often become like the people we spend time with is that we do adopt some of their emotional patterns by adopting some of their habitual vocabularies.
Is it possible that we don’t experience a certain emotion because we don’t have a word to represent it?
They must find a way to change the company-wide level of commitment to quality, and that the best way would be to change how their workers viewed themselves. Change their labels and job names.
By giving myself, pleasure for committing and following through, I established a new pattern.
Intensifiers: a language that automatically puts the other person into reaction; they become defensive.
Softeners: lowering the intensity of the words enables the person to respond from a position of strength.
Be very careful about accepting other people’s labels. Because once we put a label on something, we create a corresponding emotion.
If you’re in a profession where you work with people, it’s imperative that you understand the power of words to impact those around you.
METAPHOR
When you communicate or explain a concept by likening it to something else.
They are useful because you compare a concept with something you are familiar with. Otherwise, you wouldn’t understand the words because you have no references for them and it will be difficult to understand their relationship.
- 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. People can change the way they feel just by changing their metaphors.
- A whole set of rules, ideas and preconceived notions accompany any metaphor you adopt.
THE TEN EMOTIONS OF POWER
There are four basic ways in which people deal with emotion.
1.- Avoidance- most people try to avoid any situation that could lead to the emotions that they fear. This is a trap that only works in the short term because, in the long run, you will stop feeling the love, connection, and intimacy you desire the most.
2.- Denial- people try to disassociate from their feelings. They never change their focus and keep asking the same disempowering questions. Having emotion and pretending it’s not there creates more pain, is the message your emotions are trying to deliver is ignored, the feelings will intensify until you finally pay attention.
3.- Competition- People begin to pride themselves on being worse off than anyone else.
4.- Learning and using- Every emotion is like an internal compass that points you toward the actions you must take to arrive at your goals.
Action signals- the emotions you once thought were negative are a call to action. You have pain because of the way you perceive things or the procedures your use. the way you’re communicating your needs and desires to people, or the actions you’re taking.
6 STEPS TO EMOTIONAL MASTERY
1.- Identify what you’re really feeling
2.- Acknowledge and appreciate your emotions, knowing they support you
3.- Get curious about the message this emotion is offering you
4.- Get confident- In order to handle emotion, remember a time when you felt a similar emotion and realize that you’ve successfully managed it.
5.- Get certain you can handle this not only today but in the future
6.- Get excited, take action
THE 10 ACTION SIGNALS
1.-Discomfort- uncomfortable, don’t have a high amount of intensity, but they do bother us
2.- Fear- the anticipation that something that’s going to happen soon needs to be prepared for.
3.- Hurt- a sense of loss generates these feelings
4.- Anger- an important rule or standard you hold for your life has been violated by someone else.
5.- Frustration means that your brain believes you could be doing better than you currently are.
6.- Disappointment- it offers you that an expectation you have had is probably not going to happen, so change your expectations, take action, and achieve a new goal immediately.
7.- Guilt- you have violated one of your own highest standards, and make something immediately not to repeat it again
8.- Inadequacy- that you don’t presently have a level of skill necessary for the task at hand.
9.- Overload/ Overwhelm- You need to reevaluate what is most important to you in this situation.
10.- Loneliness- you need a connection with people
10 EMOTIONS OF POWER
1.- Love & warmth- all communication is either a loving response it a cry for help
2.- Appreciation and Gratitude
3.-Curiosity- if you want to cure boredom, be curious. Then nothing is a chore.
4.- Excitement and passion- This is an unbridled power to move our lives forward at a faster tempo than ever before.
5.- Determination- the difference between being stuck and being struck with the lightning power of commitment.
6.- Flexibility- the ability to change your approach
7.- Confidence- a sense of certainty
8.-Cheerfulness- enhances your self-esteem
9.- vitality- you must cultivate it in order to handle virtually any emotions that come up in your life
10.- Contribution- the secret to living is giving
CREATING A COMPELLING FUTURE
you’re not lazy; you just have impotent goals
most people’s goals are survival goals- they are caught in the trap of making a living rather than designing a life.
Your current conditions do not reflect your ultimate potential but rather the size and quality of goals you currently are focusing on. We all must discover or create a MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION.
Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible. All goal setting must be immediately followed by the development of a plan and a massive and consistent action toward its fulfillment. Most people fail because they have failed to set goals that inspire them.
There is power in the pressure of dissatisfaction in the tension of temporary discomfort. This is the kind of pain that you immediately transform into positive new actions.
This kind of pressure is EUSTRESS.
It’s not just getting a goal that matters, but the quality of life you experience along the way. If you decide to be happy now, you will automatically achieve more.
No one ever achieved a goal by being interested in its achievement; one must be committed.
Highest success= vision and never-ending persistence
too often; people never even begin to pursue a goal out of their fear that they’ll fail.
The one skill in people who have achieved their highest desires- it’s an unbelievable level of persistence. They’ll change their approach as necessary but never abandon their ultimate vision.
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.
Suspend the need to know precisely how; just discover what you truly want without doubting or questioning your capability.
1.- personal development goals
2.- career/ business/ economic goals
3.- toys/ adventure goals
4.- contribution goals
HOW TO MAKE GOALS REAL
you must condition your nervous system in advance to feel the pleasure they will surely bring
achieving goals by itself will never make us happy in the long term; it’s whom you become as you overcome the obstacles necessary to achieve the goals that can give you the deepest and most long-lasting sense of fulfillment.
What kind of person will I have to become in order to achieve what I want?
As you set your goals, immediately begin to create momentum
by taking some form of positive action toward its attainment.
Evaluating what steps you must take
to achieve your goals can be a curse unless we have already set up a new set of higher goals before we reach the first.
Realize that contribution may be the ultimate goal
A compelling future is a tool on which our souls thrive. It’s a necessity that will allow us to not only achieve but to partake of the deepest sense of joy, contribution, and growth that gives meaning to life itself.
“We first make our habits, and then our habits make us” John Dryden
Destructive mental indulgences
1.- Laziness- a lot of people know what they should do but never quite get up the energy to do it
2.- fear- the security of a mediocre present is more comfortable than the adventure of trying to be more in the future.
3.- Force of habit- we have our old emotional patterns, the deadening force of routine.
tools to improve your life
to be acutely aware of all the habitual mental patterns that hold you back; second, it will make your brain search for empowering alternatives to them. Third, it will give you an incredible jolt of confidence as you see that you can turn your life around. Fourth, it will create new habits, new standards, new expectations.
ULTIMATE INFLUENCE: YOUR MASTER SYSTEM
I am empowered to influence people for positive change and understand why they do what they do.
Master system evaluation- the force that controls the way you feel and what you do every moment of your life. This is the essence of a person.
Master system of evaluation
1.- mental and emotional state your in while you’re making an evaluation.
Make sure 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 questions we ask- in response to anything that happens in your life, your brain evaluates it by asking: what is happening?
3.- hierarchy of values- we have learned to value certain emotions more than others. The values you select will shape every decision you make in your life.
there are two types of values:1.- emotional states of pleasure were trying to move towards, and the emotional states of pain were trying to move away from.
4.- our global beliefs give us a sense of certainty about how to feel and what to expect from ourselves, life, and others.
Our rules are the belief we have about what has to happen for us to feel that our values have been met.
Our global beliefs determine our expectations and often control what was even willing to evaluate in the first place.
5.- Reference experience- they form the raw material that we use to construct our beliefs and guide our decisions.
Which references you choose will determine the meaning you take from any experience, how you feel about it, and to a certain extent, what you’ll do.
Masters are often people who just have more references than you do about what leads to success or frustration in any given situation.
Key to success: to discover some of the beliefs, values, and habitual rules of the type of man you’re pursuing. Understand their life references, which enables you to think the same way they would and anticipate their moves with uncanny precision. Understand their master system.
The emotions we feel and our actions are based on how we evaluate things. And yet, most of us haven’t set up this system of evaluation for ourselves.
LIFE VALUES: YOUR PERSONAL COMPASS
Those who know their values and live by them become the leaders of our society. If we want the deepest level of life fulfillment, we can achieve it by deciding upon what we value most in life, what our highest values are, and then committing to live by them every single day.
If you ever had a thought time making a decision about something, the reason is that you weren’t clear about what you value most within that situation.
The magnetic pull of our values controls the direction of our lives. We must get clear about what is most important in our lives and decide that we will live by these values, no matter what.
MANY PEOPLE KNOW WHAT THEY WANT TO HAVE BUT HAVE NO IDEA OF WHO THEY WANT TO BE.
People develop habitual patterns of behavior that frustrate and can eventually destroy them. These behaviors are 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.
Anything that you hold dear can be called a “value.” 2 types of values ends and means.
- money is merely a means to achieving a much deeper set of values, a set of emotions that you desire to experience on a consistent basis.
- the challenge in life is that most people arent clear on the difference between means and ends values, so they experience pain. so often people are so busy pursuing means values that they don’t achieve their true desire: ends values. TRAP: pursuing the means as if they were the end you were after.
We are moving toward values: emotional states we’ll do the most to attain. We want some emotional states more than others; we have a hierarchy of values.
Try to meet all of your values every day so that you don’t get to experience a feeling of emptiness or unhappiness.
NEGATIVE VALUES
- Rejection- anger- frustration- loneliness- depression- failure- humiliation- guilt- etc
Which value would you do the most to avoid having to feel? The answer to this will determine your behavior in almost any environment.
Shape your life, don’t let the environment do it:
1.- gain awareness of what your current values are so you understand why you do what you do.
2.- make conscious decisions about what values you want to live by in order to shape the quality of life and destiny you desire/ deserve.
What do my values need to be in order to create my ultimate destiny? In order to have the most significant impact on my life?
What values should I eliminate?
What benefit do I get by having this value in this position in my hierarchy?
In what order do my values need to be to achieve my ultimate destiny?
- instead of achieving to be happy, I began to happily achieve.
- worrying make you less resourceful.
The new list of values
health- love- intelligence- cheerfulness- honesty- passion- gratefulness- happiness- making a difference- learning/ growing- achieving- achieving- being the best- investing- contribution- creativity
RULES
Most of the time, people are dealing with the possibility that their expectations will not be met.
Each person responded according to their rules: their beliefs about what had to happen in order for them to feel good about this experience.
Sometimes they continue to give themselves the sensations of pain because their expectations have not been met.
Our experience of reality has nothing to do with reality but is interpreted through the controlling force of our beliefs—the rules about what had to happen in order for us to feel good.
The truth is that nothing has to happen in order for you to feel good. You could feel good right now. It’s your rule that says: when I hit this mark, then I’ll give myself permission to feel good.
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.
The key to our happiness: we are going to enjoy it now, no matter what happens.
The same punishment and reward system that shapes our values shapes our rules. As we develop new values, we develop beliefs about what it will take to meet those values, so new rules are added continuously.
Rules are a shortcut to our brains: the IF, THEN rule.
Other rules are cultural conditioning
A rule disempowers you when:
1.- It is impossible to meet
2.- something you cant control determines whether your rule has been met or not.
3.- it gives only a few ways to feel good and lots of ways to feel bad
- Most people are successful on the outside but lack happiness & fulfillment because of value conflicts or inappropriate rules.
- Our self-esteem is tied to our ability to feel like were in control of the events in our environment.
- There are no right- wrong rules but empower or disempower rules
- when you got upset with someone, it wasn’t because they did or didn’t do something but because they violated one of your rules.
- Personal standards: rules you don’t want to break
- high self-esteem comes from feeling like you have control over events, not that events control you.
- Create a balance between your “must” rules and your “should” rules
REFERENCES
What roles did experiences play in shaping the character, identity, and destiny of someone? they become the fabric from which many of his core beliefs and values are cut- reference experiences
The larger the number and the greater the quality of our references, the greater our potential level of choices.
- the larger the number and the greater the quality enables us to more effectively evaluate what things mean and what we can do.
- we often fail to organize our references in ways that strengthen us
- what determines which references we use is the emotional state we’re in.
- references are one of the most important elements in our decision making process, they shape what we do, how we feel, and whom we become.
- its not our references, but our interpretations of them, that determines our beliefs.
- the references that play the largest role in our life’s experiences are the ones we get reinforced for.
- our imagination is 10 times more potent than our willpower
- imagination unleashed provides us a sense of certainty and vision
- find in any experience a shred of meaning to empower you at some level
- loss is imaginary, it only changes form
- 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 unless you consciously seek them out
- leaders are readers
- limits in your life= limited references
IDENTITY: KEY TO EXPANSION
the belief you have about your IDENTITY is the ultimate filler to all your perceptions
we define ourselves by who we are and who we are not
- our sense of certainty about who we are, creates the boundaries and limits within which we live
- the kind of person other people perceive you to be, control their responses to you
- one of the strongest forces in the human organism is the need for consistency, because is tied to your ability to avoid pain and gain pleasure
- a person who believes himself to be a drug addict will return to use drugs, because he believes that is who he is, he unconsciously wont believe that he can change in the long-term, and this will control his behavior
- we all have a need for a sense of certainty, most people fear the unknown, uncertainty means the potential of pain sticking us, so you rather deal with the known pain.
- the one thing that we all count on to be is our sense of identity, is the foundation for all the understandings upon which we’ve built our lives.
- the biggest challenge for someone who says he is a drug addict, what does he change his identity to?
- we must develop new beliefs to support our new identity, and this can shift your master system
- the way we identify anyone is by their actions
- people have to justify their acts to maintain their sense of integrity
- did you consciously choose your identity or is it the events in your life, other people’s opinions and other factors
- you’ve become the labels you’ve given yourself, the way you define your identity defines your life
- having an identity that is linked to your look or exterior will give you pain later because these things will change
HOW DO YOU DEFINE YOURSELF?
by using: emotions, professions, roles, incomes, possessions, metaphors, spiritual beliefs, accomplishments, metaphors, feedback, past, even what you’re not
- look at your friends, who you believe they are is a reflection of who you believe you are
answer this with the strongest conviction
create a safe and curious state otherwise;, fear will give you the wring answer of you are. and you’ll respond
1.- A blank state
2.- Surface-level answer
most of the time, people lack clarity in this critical area of their lives
- most people have to establish competence before they feel confident, I decide to feel confident, and that provides the sense of certainty to persist until I am competent
- I am a creator of possibility, a healer, a catalyst of growth, a builder of fulfilled souls.
This post is a resume of the book “Awaken the giant within” By Tony Robbins
