CONDITIONING YOURSELF TO SUCCEED

by Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina

Sometimes you may encounter situations where you know what you should be doing, but you find yourself having a tough time getting yourself to do it. Or perhaps you’re able to get started on a task, but you just can’t seem to maintain the momentum to see it through to the end. If this kind of problem continues for too long, you’re bound to start to seeing a detrimental effect on your overall confidence level. You may begin thinking you have a motivation problem, as if maybe you just don’t want to succeed badly enough.

One solution to this problem is conditioning, which comes in two primary forms: thought conditioning and behavioral conditioning. Thought conditioning focuses on controlling what you think. This is a cognitive model of success, where you rely on the assumption that if you think the right thoughts, you’ll take the right actions, and thereby get the results you want. Examples of thought conditioning include speaking or reading positive affirmations, visualizing a positive outcome, transformational vocabulary (choosing positive words to describe your situation as opposed to negative words, as in, “I’m having a fantastic day”), and certain forms of meditation. And in many situations, thought conditioning is very effective, particularly when problematic thoughts are the root of the problem, such as a negative attitude causing you to rub people the wrong way.

Behavioral conditioning comes from a behavioral model of success. This model assumes that if you take the correct actions, you’ll achieve the results you want, regardless of what your thoughts are. Behavioral conditioning focuses on forming new habits of action with little concern for what you think. Many behaviorists believe that if you take the right actions, the right thoughts will follow anyway. Examples of behavioral conditioning include setting your alarm clock to wake you up each morning, giving yourself a tangible reward for working an extra couple hours, or punishment for inappropriate actions.

I have used both forms of conditioning with great success. Years ago, I used mostly thought conditioning. Today, however, I find that a combination of thought conditioning along with behavioral conditioning is more effective for me and a lot faster. One of the problems with just relying on thought conditioning is that if you fail to take the right actions quickly, then your behavior can de-condition the very thoughts you’re trying to adopt. For example, if you’re trying to quit smoking, and you focus on thinking that you’re a nonsmoker and do some daily affirmations to that effect, but you keep lighting up in the meantime, then you’re sending mixed messages, and you’ll most likely slip back into the previous thought patterns and habits. Your continued behavior is an affirmation too. But if you can manage to physically stop lighting up, even while you’re thinking you’re still a smoker, that behavior will tend to induce thoughts of being a nonsmoker. Behavioral conditioning works best when merely changing your behavior (regardless of how you think) is enough to guarantee a result. For example, if you stop making impulse purchases, you will save money, regardless of what you think about it. When you combine behavioral conditioning with thought conditioning the results are exponential!

I do need to say that I agree with the behaviorists that motivation follows action. When you get yourself to take action, even when you aren’t initially motivated to do so, you will find that your motivation automatically increases. Having a productive day can be very motivating. This is a huge part of the principle behind The 90 Day Transformation Challenge that I facilitate.

The basic idea behind behavioral conditioning is control and substitution. Figure out what actions you need to take to get the results you want (i.e. how you need to behave). Then condition yourself to take those actions. You’re always behaving some way — so make sure your behavior will give you the results you want. If you find you aren’t behaving in a manner that’s congruent with your goals, then take control of the situation and substitute the correct behavior for the incorrect one. For many goals it’s enough for you to simply put in the time — just investing enough time gets you 80% of the way there.

For example, this morning I could have slept in until 8am (Ok, that’s early for some people), had a leisurely breakfast, and binge watched Netflix. And that would have yielded a result of … pretty much nothing. I’d be no closer to my goals. It wouldn’t even be that exciting or fun either… just lazy.

But today I got up at 6am, went straight to my computer, spent 2 hours doing my morning rituals which includes meditation, exercise, reading 14 pages of a document I created that lays out my goals, who I need to be to achieve them, incantations, my values and rules that allow me to feel successful and fulfilled, as well as my identity statement and other reinforcing statements to help me maintain my focus on who I choose to be. Then I had a quick breakfast while discussing plans for the day with my assistant, spent another hour doing reading and watching course materials to continue expanding my mind and skill sets, wrote an article, had 3 calls with clients and then started this 2nd article for the day. So on a Monday morning, I completed eight solid hours of productive work that moves me closer to my goals. And it wasn’t difficult. I simply substituted this kind of morning for the lazy morning. Consequently, I feel energized instead of tired. And I still have 3 more hours of calls on my schedule for the day!

The problem is that most people unknowingly condition behaviors that will guarantee mediocre results. Look back on your behavior over this past month. Have your results been congruent with your actions? If you spend the next month behaving differently, will it change your results? Where do you see incongruencies between the results you want and your current habits of behavior? What changes would you like to make?

In the next entry, I’ll explain exactly how to use behavioral conditioning to break bad habits and form new habits. And it doesn’t involve willpower.

May 15, 2019

by Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable. – Helen Keller

In our day-to-day lives, the virtue of courage doesn’t receive much attention. Courage is a quality that we usually equate to soldiers, firefighters, and activists. Security seems to be what matters most to people today. Perhaps you were taught to avoid being too bold or too brave. You were told things like, “It’s too dangerous. Don’t take unnecessary risks. Don’t draw attention to yourself in public. Follow family traditions. Don’t talk to strangers. Keep an eye out for suspicious people. Stay safe.”

But a side effect of overemphasizing the importance of personal security in your life is that it can cause you to live reactively. Instead of setting your own goals, making plans to achieve them, and going after them with intensity and passion, you play it safe. You keep working at the stable job, even though it doesn’t fulfill you. You remain in the unsatisfying relationship, even though you feel dead inside compared to the passion you once had. Who are you to think that you can buck the system? Accept your lot in life, and make the best of it. Go with the flow, and don’t rock the boat. Your only hope is that the flow of life will pull you in a favorable direction.

No doubt there exist real dangers in life you must avoid. But there’s a huge difference between recklessness and courage. I’m not referring to the heroic courage required to risk your life to save someone from a burning building. By courage I mean the ability to face down those imaginary fears and reclaim the far more powerful life that you’ve denied yourself. Fear of failure. Fear of rejection. Fear of going broke. Fear of being alone. Fear of humiliation. Fear of public speaking. Fear of being ostracized by family and friends. Fear of physical discomfort. Fear of regret. Fear of success.

How many of these fears are holding you back? How would you live if you had no fear at all? You’d still have your intelligence and common sense to safely navigate around any real dangers, but without feeling the emotion of fear, would you be more willing to take risks, especially when the worst case wouldn’t actually hurt you at all? Would you speak up more often about things that matter to you, talk to more strangers, ask for more sales, dive headlong into those ambitious projects you’ve been dreaming about? What if you even learned to enjoy the things you currently fear? What kind of difference would that make in your life?

Have you previously convinced yourself that you aren’t really afraid of anything… that there are always good and logical reasons why you don’t do certain things? It would be rude to introduce yourself to a stranger. You shouldn’t attempt public speaking because you don’t have anything to say. Asking for a raise would be improper because you’re supposed to wait until the next formal review. These are just rationalizations though – think about how your life would change if you could confidently and courageously do these things with no fear at all.

What Is Courage?

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. – Ambrose Redmoon

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. – Mark Twain

Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway. – John Wayne

I like these definitions of courage, which all suggest that courage is the ability to get yourself to take action in spite of fear. The word courage comes from the Latin cor, which means “heart.” But true courage is more a matter of intellect than of feeling. It requires using the uniquely human part of your brain (the neocortex) to demand control over the emotional limbic brain you share in common with other mammals. Your limbic brain signals danger, but your neocortex reasons that the danger isn’t real, so you simply feel the fear and take action anyway. The more you learn to act in spite of fear, the more human you become. The more you follow the fear, the more you live like a lower mammal. So the question, “Are you a man or a mouse?” is consistent with human neurology.

Courageous people are still afraid, but they don’t let the fear paralyze them. People who lack courage will give into fear more often than not, which actually has the long-term effect of strengthening the fear. When you avoid facing a fear and then feel relieved that you escaped it, this acts as a psychological reward that reinforces the mouse-like avoidance behavior, making you even more likely to avoid facing the fear in the future. So the more you avoid asking someone out on a date, the more paralyzed you’ll feel about taking such actions in the future. You are literally conditioning yourself to become more timid and mouse-like.

This type of “avoidance behavior” leads to a kind of paralyzation in the long run. As you get older, you reinforce your fear reactions to the point where it’s hard to even imagine yourself standing up to your fears. You begin taking your fears for granted; they become real to you. You create this imaginary wall around yourself that insulates you from all these fears: a stable but unhappy marriage, a job that doesn’t require you to take risks, an income that keeps you comfortable. Then you rationalize your behavior: You have a family to support and can’t take risks, you’re too old to shift careers, you can’t lose weight because you have “fat” genes. Five years… ten years… twenty years soon pass, and you realize that your life hasn’t changed all that much. You’ve settled down. All that’s really left now is to live out the remainder of your life as contently as possible and then be lowered into the ground, where you’ll finally achieve total safety and security.

But there’s something else going on behind the scenes, isn’t there? There’s that tiny voice in the back of your mind reminding you that this isn’t the kind of life you wanted to live. It wants more, much more. It wants you to become far wealthier, to have an outstanding relationship, to get your body in peak physical condition, to learn new skills, to travel the world, to have lots of wonderful friends, to help people in need, to make a meaningful difference. That voice tells you that settling into a job where you sell widgets the rest of your life just won’t cut it. That voice gnaws at you when you catch a glance of your oversized belly in the mirror or get winded going up a flight of stairs. It shares its disappointment when it recognizes what’s become of your family. It tells you that the reason you have trouble motivating yourself is that you aren’t doing what you really ought to be doing with your life… because you’re afraid. And if you refuse to listen, it will still be there, nagging you about your mediocre results until you die, full of regrets for what might have been.

So how do you respond to this annoying voice that won’t shut up? What do you do when confronted by that gut feeling that something just isn’t right in your life? What’s your favorite way to silence it? Maybe you drown it out by watching TV, listening to the radio, working long hours at an unfulfilling job, or consuming alcohol and caffeine and sugar.

But whenever you do this, you lower your level of consciousness. You move closer towards an instinctive animal and away from becoming a fully conscious human being. You react to life instead of proactively going after your goals. You fall into a state of learned helplessness, where you begin to believe that your goals are no longer possible or practical for you. You become more and more like a mouse, even trying to convince yourself that life as a mouse might not be so bad after all, since everyone around you seems to be OK with it. You surround yourself with your fellow mice, and on the rare occasions that you encounter a fully conscious human being, it scares the hell out of you to remember how much of your own courage has been lost.

Raise Your Consciousness

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. – Anais Nin

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace. – Amelia Earhart

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt

The way out of this vicious cycle is to summon your courage and confront that inner voice. Find a place where you can be alone with pen and paper (or computer and keyboard). Listen to that voice, and face up to what it’s telling you, no matter how difficult it is to hear. (The voice is just an one method your unconscious uses to communicate with you – you may not hear words at all; instead you may see what you should be doing or simply feel it emotionally. But I’ll continue to refer to the voice for the sake of this example.) This voice may tell you that your marriage has been dead for ten years, and you’re refusing to face it because you’re afraid of divorce. It may tell you that you’re afraid that if you start your own business, you’ll probably fail, and that’s why you’re staying at a job that doesn’t challenge you to grow. It may tell you that you’ve given up trying to lose weight because you’ve failed at it so many times, and you’re addicted to food. It may tell you that the friends you’re hanging out with now are incongruent with the person you want to be, and that you need to leave that group behind and build a new one. It may tell you that you always wanted to be an actor or writer, but you settled for a sales job because it seemed more safe and secure. It may tell you that you always wanted to help people in need, but you aren’t doing it in the way or at the level you should. It may tell you that you’re wasting your talents.

Take a moment and do your best to reduce that voice to just a single word or two. What is it telling you to do? Leave. Quit. Speak. Write. Dance. Act. Exercise. Sell. Switch. Move on. Let go. Ask. Learn. Forgive. Whatever you get from this, write it down. Perhaps you even have different words for each area of your life.

Next you have to take the difficult step of consciously acknowledging that this is what you really want now. It’s OK if you don’t think it’s possible for you. It’s OK if you don’t see how you could ever have it. But admit that you want it. You lower your consciousness when you deny it. When you look at your overweight body, admit that you really want to be fit and healthy. When you light up that next cigarette, admit that you want to be a nonsmoker. When you meet the potential mate of your dreams, resist the temptation to deny that you’d love to be in a relationship with that person. When you meet a person who seems to be at total peace with herself, allow yourself to admit that you crave that level of inner peace too. Get yourself out of denial. Move instead to a place where you admit, “I really do want this, but I just don’t feel I currently have the ability to get it.” It’s perfectly OK to want something that you don’t think you can have. And you’re almost certainly wrong in concluding that you can’t have it. But first, stop lying to yourself and pretending you don’t really want it.

Move From Fear to Action, Even if You Expect to Fail

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them. – Orison Swett Marden

Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air. – John Quincy Adams

Now that you’ve acknowledged some things you’ve been afraid to face, how do you feel? You probably still feel paralyzed against taking action. That’s okay. While diving right in and confronting a fear head-on can be very effective, that may require more courage than you feel you can summon right now.

The most important point I want you to learn from this article is that real courage is a mental skill, not an emotional one. Neurologically it means using the thinking neocortex part of your brain to override the emotional limbic impulses. In other words, you use your human intelligence, logic, and independent will to overcome the limitations you’ve inherited as an emotional mammal.

Now this may make logical sense, but it’s far easier said than done. You may logically know you’re in no real danger if you get up on a stage and speak in front of 1000 people, but your fear kicks in anyway, and the imaginary threat prevents you from volunteering for anything like this. Or you may know you’re in a dead end job, but you can’t seem to bring yourself to say the words, “I quit.”

Courage, however, doesn’t require that you take drastic action in these situations. Courage is a learned mental skill that you must condition, the same way that weight training strengthens your muscles. You wouldn’t go into a gym for the first time and try to lift 300 pounds, so don’t think that to be courageous you must tackle your most paralyzing fear right away.

There are two methods I will suggest for building courage. The first approach is similar to progressive weight training. Start with weights you can lift but which are challenging for you, and then progressively train up to heavier and heavier weights as you grow stronger. So tackle your smallest fears first, and progressively train up to bigger and bigger fears. Training yourself to lift 300 pounds isn’t so hard if you’ve already lifted 290. Similarly, speaking in front of an audience of 1000 people isn’t so tough once you’ve already spoken to 900.

So grab a piece of paper right now, and write down one of your fears that you’d like to overcome. Then number from one to ten, and write out ten variations of this fear, with number one being the least anxiety-producing and number ten being the most anxiety-producing. This is your fear hierarchy. For example, if you’re afraid of asking someone out on a date, then number one on your list might be going out to a public place and smiling at someone you find attractive (very mild fear). Number two might be smiling at ten attractive strangers in a single day. Number ten might be asking out your ideal date in front of all your mutual friends, when you’re almost certain you’ll be turned down flat and everyone in the room will laugh (extreme fear). Now start by setting a goal to complete number one on your list. Once you’ve had that success (and success in this case simply means taking action, regardless of the outcome), then move on to number two, and so on, until you’re ready to tackle number ten or you just don’t feel the fear is limiting you anymore. You may need to adjust the items on your list to make them practical for you to actually experience. And if you ever feel the next step is too big, then break it down into additional gradients. If you can lift 290 pounds but not 300, then try 295 or even 291. Take this process as gradually as you need to, do it in a way that the next step is a mild challenge for you but one you feel fairly confident you can complete. And feel free to repeat a past step multiple times if you find it helpful to prepare you for the next step. Pace yourself.

By following this progressive training process, you’ll accomplish two things. You’ll cease reinforcing the fear/avoidance response that you exhibited in the past. And you’ll condition yourself to act more courageously in future situations. So your feelings of fear will diminish at the same time that your expression of courage grows. Neurologically you’ll be weakening the limbic control over your actions while strengthening the neocortical control, gradually moving from unconscious mouse-like to conscious human-like behavior.

The second approach to building courage is to acquire additional knowledge and skill within the domain of your fear. Confronting fears head-on can be helpful, but if your fear is largely due to ignorance and lack of skill, then you can usually reduce or eliminate the fear with information and training. For example, if you’re afraid to quit your job and start your own business, even though you’d absolutely love to be in business for yourself, then start reading books and taking classes on how to start your own business. Spend an afternoon at your local library researching the subject, or do the research online. Join the local Chamber of Commerce and any relevant trade organizations in your field. Attend conferences. Build connections. Enlist the help of a mentor. Build your skill to the point where you start to feel confident that you could actually succeed, and this knowledge will help you act more boldly and courageously when you’re ready. This method is especially effective when a large part of your fear is due to the unknown. Often just reading a book or two on the subject will be enough to dispel the fear so that you’re able to take action.

These two methods are my personal favorites, but there are many additional ways to condition yourself to overcome fear, including neuro associative programming, neuro-linguistic programming, cognitive therapy, and self-confrontation. You can research them via an online search engine if you wish to learn such methods and increase the number of fear-busting tools in your arsenal. Most of these can be easily self-administered.

The exact process you use to build courage isn’t important. What’s important is that you consciously do it. Just as your muscles will atrophy if you don’t regularly stress them, your courage will atrophy if you don’t consistently challenge yourself to face your fears. In the absence of this kind of conscious conditioning, you’ll automatically become weak in both body and mind. If you aren’t regularly exercising your courage, then you are strengthening your fear by default; there is no middle ground. Just as your muscles automatically atrophy from lack of use, so your courage will automatically decay in the absence of conscious conditioning.

Now this may sound overly gloomy, so here’s a positive way to look at it. Heavy weights can be a physical burden, but they are helpful tools to build strong muscles. You would not look at a 45-pound dumbbell and say, “Why must you be so heavy?” It is what it is. Heaviness is your thought, not an intrinsic property of the dumbbell itself. Similarly, do not look at the things you fear and say, “Why must you be so scary?” Fear is your reaction to, not a property of, the object of your anxiety.

Fear is not your enemy. It is an advisor pointing you to the areas where you need to grow. So when you encounter a new fear within yourself, celebrate it as an opportunity for growth, just as you would celebrate reaching a new personal best with strength training.

Catch a Glimpse of Your Own Greatness

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. – Erica Jong

The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is. – John Lancaster Spalding

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

So now what do you do with your newly developed courage? Where will it lead you? The answer is that it will allow you to lead a far more fulfilling and meaningful life. You will truly begin living as a daring human being instead of a timid mouse. You will uncover and develop your greatest talents. You will begin living far more consciously and deliberately than you ever have before. Instead of reacting to events, you will proactively design your own events.

Courage is something you can only truly experience alone. It is a private victory, not a public one. Summoning the courage to listen to your innermost desires is not a group activity and does not result from building a consensus with others. Kahlil Gibran writes in The Prophet, “The vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.” The purpose of your existence is yours alone to discover. No one on earth has lived through the exact same experiences you have, and no one thinks the exact same thoughts you do.

On the one hand, this can be a lonely realization. Whether you live alone or enjoy the deepest intimacy with a loving partner, deep down you must still face the reality that your life is yours alone to live. You can choose to temporarily yield control of your life to others, whether it be to a company, a spouse, or simply to the pressures of daily living, but you can never give away your personal responsibility for the results. Whether you assume direct and conscious control over your life or merely react to events as they happen to you, you and you alone must bear the consequences.

If you commit to following the path of courage, you will ultimately be forced to confront what is perhaps the greatest fear of all – that you are far more powerful and capable than you initially realized, that your ultimate potential is far greater than anything you’ve experienced in your past, and that with this power comes tremendous responsibility. You may not be able to solve all the problems of this planet, but if you ever do commit yourself 100% to the fulfillment of your true potential, you can significantly impact the lives of many people, and that impact will ripple into the future for generations to come.

What is the difference between you and one of those legendary historical figures who did have that level of impact? You both had many of the same fears. You both were born with talents in some areas and weaknesses in others. The only thing stopping you is fear, and the only thing that will get you past it is courage. What you do with your life isn’t up to your parents, your boss, or your spouse. It’s up to you and you alone.

Catching a glimpse of your own greatness can be one of the most unsettling experiences imaginable. And even more disturbing is the awareness of the tremendous challenges that are ahead of you if you accept it. Living consciously is not an easy path, but it is a uniquely human experience, and it requires making the committed decision to permanently let go of that mouse within you. Going after your greatest and most ambitious dreams and experiencing failure and disappointment, intentionally running up against your most humbling human limitations instead of living with a comfortable padding of potential – these fears are common to us all.

The first few times you encounter such fears, you may quickly default back to the imaginary security of life as a mouse. But if you keep exercising your courage, you will eventually mature to the point where you can openly accept the challenges and responsibilities of life as a fully conscious human being. Continuing to live as a mouse will simply hold no more interest for you. You will acknowledge within the deepest recesses of your being, I have awakened to this incredible potential within me, and I accept what that will require of me. Whatever it costs me, whatever I must sacrifice to follow this path, bring it on. I’m ready. Even though you will still experience fear, you will recognize it for the illusion it is, and you will know how to use your human courage to face it down, so much so that fear will no longer have the power to stop you.

Embrace the Daring Adventure

Before you embark on any path ask the question, does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it and then you must choose another path. The trouble is that nobody asks the question. And when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart the path is ready to kill him. – Carlos Castaneda

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? – Kahlil Gibran

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. – Dale Carnegie

As you develop a sense of your true purpose in life, you may begin to feel an uneasy disconnect between your current life situation and the one you envision moving towards. These two worlds may seem so different to you that you cannot mentally conceive of how to build a bridge between them. How can you balance the practical reality of taking care of your third-dimensional obligations like earning money to pay your bills and taxes, pleasing your boss, raising your family, and maintaining social relationships with people who can’t even relate to what you’re experiencing vs. the new vision of yourself you desperately want to move towards? A whole host of new fears may crop up related to this seemingly impossible shift. How will you support yourself? What will become of your relationships? Are you just deluding yourself?

The best advice I can give you here is to forget about trying to build a bridge. Focus instead on beginning the process of manifesting the new vision of yourself from scratch, as if it were a totally separate thread in your life. If this creates a temporary incongruence in your life, just do it anyway. For example, suppose you currently work as a divorce attorney, but your courage tells you that you must eventually abandon this type of adversarial work. You envision yourself passionately teaching couples how to heal their broken relationships. But you can’t even begin to imagine being a trial lawyer who speaks about healthy relationships, and on top of that problem, you can’t imagine any way that you could make a decent living in this new career, at least not quickly. There’s just too much of a disconnect between this new vision and practical reality. So instead of trying to bridge this gap, just begin building your new vision completely from scratch in whatever time you have, even if it’s only an hour or two each week. Keep doing your regular work as an attorney, but in your spare time, start posting anonymously on relationship message boards to give couples advice on how to heal their relationships. Use the oratory skills you developed as an attorney to begin speaking to small groups about healing relationships. Perhaps create a new web site, and start writing and posting articles about your new passion. You don’t have to hide the fact that you’re an attorney, but don’t worry about bridging these two worlds. Live in paradox. Just start developing the new you, and allow the old one to continue in parallel for a while.

What will happen is that you’ll develop skill in your new undertaking, and you’ll eventually be able to support yourself from it, even if you can’t see how to do it right away. You may not be able to see a way to support yourself in your new vision right now, and that’s fine. Just begin it anyway, doing it for free, without any concern of how to turn it into a new full-time career. Patiently wait for clarity; you will eventually find a way to make it work. Then when the time is right, you’ll be able to peacefully let go of the old career and focus all your energy on the new one. At some point you’ll be able to commit fully to your new self. Your passion for your new work will eventually overwhelm your fear of letting go of your old source of stability. So instead of trying to transform your old career into your new one, just start the process of building your new one, and let your old one gradually fade. Even if you can only invest an hour a week in your new undertaking, you will probably discover that this hour is more fulfilling to you than all the other hours put together, and that passion will drive you to find a way to gradually grow this presence until it fills up most of your days. The most important thing is to begin now by introducing your new vision of yourself to your daily life, even if you can only initially do so in a small way.

No matter how difficult it may seem, make the choice to live consciously. Do not succumb to that half-conscious realm of fear-based thinking, filling your life with distractions to avoid facing what you really feel drawn to in those silent spaces between your thoughts. Either exercise your muscle of courage and progressively build the strength to face your deepest, darkest fears to live as the powerful being you truly are, or admit that your fears are too much for you, and embrace life as a mouse. But make this choice consciously and with full awareness of its consequences. If you are going to allow fear to win the battle for your life, then proclaim it the victor and forfeit the game. If you simply avoid living consciously and courageously, then that is equivalent to giving up on life itself, where your continued existence becomes little more than a waiting period before physical death – a life of existing as opposed to a daring adventure.

Will you allow yourself to die without embracing the daring adventure your life is meant to be? You may go broke. You may experience failure and rejection repeatedly. You may endure multiple dysfunctional relationships. But these are all milestones along the path of a life lived courageously. They are your private victories, carving a deeper space within you to be filled with an abundance of joy, happiness, and fulfillment. So go ahead and feel the fear. Then summon the courage to follow your dreams anyway. That kind of strength is undefeatable.

THE BEST ADVICE TO FOLLOW

by Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina Article 4

Over the years I have really enjoyed attending educational seminars, workshops and networking events. It’s not just about the presenter and the topic of the event. Often it’s about the individuals I meet, the relationships that are developed and the conversations had in the hallways, over coffee or on the phone that develop after the event itself. I attend these events because I want to surround myself with likeminded people, but also I make sure to choose events where I will surround myself with people who are further along than I am at the moment.

I can’t tell you how many times I have spent an extra 30 minutes or even a couple of hours and performed some surgical brain-picking, getting loads of outstanding advice and ideas in empty hotel ballrooms or convention center parking lots after an event. It’s one of the greatest opportunities to be able to hang out with people who have more than 10 times my level of experience and knowledge in some specific area. Learning from these people is a major shortcut to success in any endeavor.

I used this same approach when I decided I wanted to make a full-time living from coaching back in 1999. At the time I was making only about $1,000/month from doing coaching part time for another company, but I needed to be making a minimum of 10x that amount to leave my full time position DJing in NYC if I was going to sustain my lifestyle at the time. So I started attending events and signing up for courses where I identified people who seemed to be making at least $50-100K per year from selling coaching. Then I proceeded to pick their brains as much as possible, mostly by engaging in email dialogs.

But I also realized if nobody knows who you are, then you’re not going to get much good advice from successful people. So I became part of the board of directors of an organization that promoted events for personal and professional development and helped them found a 501c3 non-profit. Before long I was vice-president of the organization and soon after that president. I ended up having more influence, people began to know who I was and that created even more opportunities to spend time with successful people. I also started leading other meetings and speaking in front of small organizations and I built a reputation as a contributor, not a leech. If you are looking to gain knowledge from someone, it has to be a game of “pith and catch”. You can’t just pick people’s brains if you don’t give them a piece of yours in return. But as my knowledge and influence grew, the net result was that I could very easily solicit advice from people whose coaching income was 10x higher than mine and more.

I just kept going from there, soon hitting six figures a year in my coaching business, always identifying people who were already making my target level of income. But I also applied the same principle in my other businesses and other areas of my life. If I wanted to learn about health, I learned from the best. If I wanted to learn about speaking and selling from the stage, I learned from the best. If I wanted to learn about any specific subject, I sought out and learned from the best.

A big mistake people make when trying to increase their success in some area is that they’ll ask advice from people who aren’t getting the right results. For example, let’s say you’re making $60K per year right now, and you want to be earning twice that amount. Most people will seek advice from all their friends who are making $50-90K per year. And they’ll get lots of advice. But it will be essentially worthless. It’s far better to talk for 15 minutes to a person who’s making $150K per year than it is to spend a full day seeking advice from people who aren’t at that level yet. This might sound like an exaggeration or cold, but I honestly don’t believe it is. I’d rather get answers to just one or two questions from someone who’s far more successful than me in some area than to chat all day with people who are roughly at my own level.

One strange paradox is that advice from people who are at your level often sounds very good and sensible. But it’s often bad advice because although it “sounds good”, it may be a far more difficult path to success, and often it just won’t work at all. On the other hand, advice from people who are far ahead of you will often initially sound bad or reckless, but if you actually apply it with a bit of faith, it often works wonderfully. And the reason is… because that is the path they already walked to success. They’re not sharing what they “think” will work. They KNOW it works!

Here’s a simple example:

When I started a training company in mid-1999, I wanted to build it up fast. So I asked advice from a number of people on how to do this. People who were making $3,000 or less per month doing small seminars almost invariably gave me ideas about ways I could improve the program itself. So they focused on the “product” and on essentially creating more work. But one person I asked who was earning around $10K per month told me to stop that and spend 80% of my work time just marketing the product I had for the next several months. He said to market it every single day — and learn more about marketing every single day. I took his advice because he was already getting the results I wanted, and I knew he was being sincere. So for the next six months I did little else but learn marketing and do marketing. And it worked. It didn’t feel right at first to spend so little time working on the program, but I couldn’t complain about the monthly increases in cash and clients.

If I had followed the advice of my peers, I understand now that I would have only gotten minimal results, even though their advice sounded good to me at the time. Focusing on the product would have been the wrong strategy — I would have invested a lot of time and energy and gotten very little out of it. Focusing on marketing was harder for me, and it wasn’t initially the kind of answer I wanted to hear because I wasn’t yet too skilled in that area, but it was the thing for me to focus on in order to achieve the level of success I wanted.

When many people start a new business, they’re likely to miss the importance of marketing. It’s not at all obvious just how important marketing is, especially if you’re in love with developing new products or services. The product is important, but without enough time and energy spent on marketing, hardly anyone will know about your product. Jay Abraham says that marketing is the single greatest way to gain leverage when you want to increase your sales. Now having over 33 years under my belt as an entrepreneur and 21 years as a business consultant I can tell you with absolute certainty he’s right. I’ve failed in business and I have succeeded. And the key difference has been in marketing.

Unless your product or service has serious flaws, you can often get much greater leverage from a full day, week, or month invested in marketing than you can in tweaking and improving the product/service itself. The fact that this is fairly unintuitive may help to explain why so many new businesses fail or plateau.

But going a little deeper, I think there are other reasons people fail to seek advice from those that are doing much better than they are in some area. For one, there may be a degree of intimidation. The only thing I can suggest in that situation is to go ahead… feel intimidated and ask anyway.

But an even deeper issue may be that people don’t want to hear the kind of advice that will make them face their own fears and weaknesses. For example, if you aren’t good at marketing or don’t like marketing, then hearing someone say that this is the key to greater success may not be what you want to hear. So it’s easier to listen to people who tell you to tweak your product or service, especially if that’s already your strength. But if you take that easier approach, you’ll always be denied greater results. After a few years of that, you’ll feel like you’re stuck on a treadmill, doing all this work that just doesn’t get you anywhere. You’ll have gotten a lot done, but it just won’t produce very strong bottom-line results. And the reason this happens is often that you’re unconsciously modeling people who are stagnating too.

Seeking and applying advice from those who are already getting the results you want sounds like common sense. Yet actually doing this consistently is anything but common. So why not choose to be uncommon if it will get you to where you want?

WRITING AS A WAY TO SOLVE PROBLEMS

by Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina

One the most powerful personal development tools is simply to sit down and write or keep a personal journal.

I’ve been keeping a combination of paper journals, computer journals, audio and video diaries since 1989.

What do I do with these documents and recordings? Although many people use journals or diaries to keep a record of life events, I don’t normally bother with those types of entries, and I rarely even go back and review past entries. For me it’s primarily a problem solving tool, a way to think through complex decisions until I reach the point of clarity. I average about 5-10 journal entries a month, and I usually begin a new entry by asking a question or addressing a problem I want to solve. Then I proceed to explore the options of potential solutions to the problem. And I make sure to use these 3 filters when I start. 1) Every idea is a great idea 2) No idea is a bad idea and 3) Just because an idea didn’t work in the past does not mean that it may not work now. I’m just capturing options at this point.

Sometimes the problems may be very simple, such as “What topic should I select for my next presentation (or article)?” But other times I explore much broader subjects, like “Where do I want to be in 2020, and what do I need to start/stop doing now in order to get there?” Sometimes I’ll just brainstorm possible solutions, while other times I’ll write about a problem from different angles to understand it more fully. For example, I might ask myself, “How would Albert Einstein solve this problem? Leonardo da Vinci? Elon Musk? Captain Picard?” Or I might ask myself, “What’s actually good about this? Is there an option where I might avoid even needing to solve this problem? Is it really a problem at all? What would the optimal solution to this problem have to look like?”

I find these kinds of exercises extremely valuable. When I work at solving a problem just using the thoughts inside my head, I often find success with simple problems, but thinking things through often fails to solve the more complicated problems. Either I won’t find a satisfactory solution at all, or I won’t create a clear understanding of the problem that will allow me to feel good about the solutions I do come up with. Other times I’ll find a solution that I feel good about in that moment, but after I’ve slept on it and looked at it with a fresh set of eyes the next day, it doesn’t seem quite so intelligent anymore. So instead of thinking things through in my head, I tackle those big, complex problems by writing them through or recording them on audio or video.

Thinking can often become circular, and our brains have a tendency to delete information, distort our perceptions and generalize data. Example: we’re always looking to simplify things by classifying them according to patterns. A situation happens and we immediately ask ourselves, “What does this mean? What should I do?” and we search our memory banks looking for similar situations and patterns. In doing so, we delete, distort and generalize the data to find matches in our past and the patterns that are “similar”. However, sometimes it’s more important to consider the raw facts of a specific problem without trying to prematurely pattern-match it to a previous problem we’ve already experienced or solved. For example, if you run your own business and experience a temporary sales drop, which happens to be a problem you experienced and overcame once before, you may still need to consider the possibility that this sales drop has a unique cause and is in actuality in no way similar to the previous experience. Therefore it cannot be overcome by re-applying the previous solution.

By exploring problems on paper or recording them, I avoid circular thinking, and it’s also easier to identify gaps in the possible solutions that have yet to be considered. Once I’ve captured my thoughts about a problem from a particular angle, I can put that part to rest and move on to exploring the next part, and knowing that I have already captured my earlier thoughts makes it easy to consider the problem from a larger number of different perspectives to leave me feeling confident that I understand it fully enough to make an informed decision. So essentially, journaling allows me to overcome some of my brain’s functional limitations. Similar to a computer, I’m expanding the working memory that’s available in my mind for solving problems.

Some problems, by their very nature, are just too big to fully understand in our thoughts alone. We can only focus our conscious minds directly on a small part of any given problem. We are limited by our 6 senses as to what we can perceive from our specific vantage point.

Look, it’s no secret that our brains are extremely powerful, but our conscious minds are still very limited in their ability to hold onto multiple simultaneous thoughts. For example, you can close your eyes and visualize a sunset, but can you visualize that sunset from one hundred different angles all at the same time and select the one with the most breathtaking view?

Even a question as simple as, “What should I have to eat?” is enough to run us up against our mental limits. To truly make the best possible decision, we would have to consider all possible foods we might eat, prioritizing their taste, texture, nutritional value, cost, convenience, etc. Now for a fairly simple decision like this one, we might again “generalize” and consider just three or four options and then pick the one that seems best to us in the moment. But what if we’re faced with a much more significant decision with far-reaching consequences, where it’s much more important to feel confident that our choice is at least close to optimal?

Life is full of these kinds of choices. Should I make this investment? What career should I choose? Should I start my own business? What is the best diet choice for me? Where should I live? Should I get a divorce or remain in an unhappy marriage? These are all major life-changing decisions. You can certainly choose to make them haphazardly and with limited thought, but you’ll be the one who has to live with the consequences. If you fail to put in the effort to apply the full potential of your intellect to making the best possible choices when the stakes are so high, then what does that say about the value you place on your own life?

Look, even journaling or recording your thoughts can’t overcome all of the major limitations of our conscious minds allowing us to systematically consider every solution when there are potentially millions of possibilities. But capturing these things and thinking them through is at least a step in the right direction. We will still end up delegating a major part of our decision-making to our subconscious minds, to our intuition, and to our emotions. But the more of this process we can pull into our conscious minds by using the tools we’ve mentioned, or even better, working with a trusted advisor who can ask us quality questions and get us to see the problem from even more angles, the more clarity and focus we gain in knowing that our decisions are the right ones.

In the long run, by continually exercising the mental discipline to make more conscious decisions, we will reap the rewards of more consistent and greater results.

April 5, 2019

By Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina

What comes to mind when you hear the words “Optimal Thinking”? Here’s the concept of optimal thinking in a nutshell. Suboptimal thinking is when you ask questions like, “What’s a good/great way to do X?” or “How can I solve Y?” Optimal thinking is when you change the question slightly and ask, “What’s the best way to do X?” or “How can I solve Y in the best way possible?” It may seem like a subtle and unimportant difference, but when you start applying this rule to your life, I think you’ll see some interesting results as I have.

The reason is because your brain operates very much like a computer. When you give the computer a “command” it executes what you have specifically told it to do with that command. Meaning, if you click on an icon for a file that you want to open, the computer follows a path to that file, connects it with the software that is associated to that file and opens the file for you. Now, let’s say you have a file that you created called “Budget” and you have one that you recently revised and you called it “New Budget”. And the shortcut that you have on your desktop says Budget. When you click on that icon your computer doesn’t say to itself, “You know, Willard recently updated to a new budget so I’ll grab him that one instead.” No, it retrieves exactly what you asked it to.

Your brain operates in exactly the same way. Your brain, as we have heard many times, is the most powerful supercomputer on the planet. But it still functions in a very specific way. It only does what you tell it to. It only focuses on what you tell it to focus on. And it only retrieves the specific information that you ask it to retrieve. It doesn’t take your directions or questions as it searches all the limitless possibilities for answer and say, “Maybe what they really meant was X”. Even though X may have been the better option.

A simple shift can make a huge difference in the results of your query.

For example, when planning your next day, you might ask yourself (perhaps subconsciously and nonverbally), “What’s a good way to schedule my time tomorrow?” And by answering that question, you’ll come up with a pretty decent schedule for yourself. But it’s most likely a suboptimal schedule. What if, instead you asked yourself, “What’s the best way to schedule my time tomorrow?” Now you’ve asked a slightly different question, but you’re focused on not looking for a “good” solution, but the optimal solution — the best instead of just good or even great.

Sometimes you don’t immediately know the best solution to a problem. So to help you identify it, what you can do is ask, “What will the best solution look like?” And then you begin listing attributes and constraints that your optimal solution will need to exhibit. This helps you narrow your list of alternatives. If you know a specific attribute of the optimal solution, then you can reject all possible solutions that lack that attribute.

Going back to the example of the best possible scheduling of your day, you might list some of these attributes: wake up early, exercise, work at least 8 solid hours, eat healthy meals, spend time with family, do something fun and rewarding in the evening, stretch myself in some way, get email inbox completely emptied, read for an hour, etc. Then you can work backwards from these subgoals to piece together your optimal schedule.

Keep in mind that the best solution always takes into account the resources you have available. If a possible solution is impractical, then it certainly isn’t optimal. So if the best way to schedule your day would require a supercomputer and six hours of planning time, then that solution is far from being the best. You might want to include your primary constraints in your original question, such as, “What’s the best way to schedule my time tomorrow in 20 minutes or less?”

In my experience the most beneficial aspect of optimal thinking is that it helps you raise your standards. Instead of settling for suboptimal solutions and mediocre results, you commit to doing your best, yet in a way that’s practical and which considers the reality of your situation. Often when you ask yourself, “What’s the best …,” you’ll find your mind zooming towards a very different kind of solution than you would if you asked suboptimal questions.

Here are some sample optimal thinking questions to get your mind moving in that direction:

• What’s the best use of my time right now?
• What’s the best way for me to exercise regularly (when, what, how)?
• What’s the best way to get myself out of debt?
• What’s the best way for me to make an extra $10,000 as quickly as possible?
• What’s the best school for my child to attend?
• What’s the best place for me to live?
• What’s the best way to reply to this email? (use this one repeatedly to purge that clogged inbox)
• What’s the best way for me to improve my social life?
• What’s the best book I should read next?
• What’s the best new blog I should be reading regularly and tell everyone I know about?

Want to make these questions even more optimized? Refine the question.

• What’s the best use of my time right now that gets me closer to the life I desire?
• What’s the best way for me to exercise regularly (when, what, how) and get the best results quickly?
• What’s the best way to get myself out of debt and create more financial certainty?
• What’s the best way for me to make an extra $10,000 as quickly as possible and do it without additional stress?
• What’s the best school for my child to attend that prepares them for… ?
• What’s the best place for me to live and (fill in the blank)?

Getting the idea?

It is a truism… Ask and you shall receive. So why not learn to ask for the best!

By Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina

For almost 30 years now I have been on a mission to understand myself and the core of human behavior. Why have I done the things I have done. Good and bad. What drove my actions and more importantly, how could I change what I was doing to become more of who I knew I could be versus the life I was living.

I’ve read books, listened to audios, gone through home study courses, attended live trainings and worked one on one with coaches and mentors. And what I have found is that most of the ideas I have learned are timeless and even if they were written hundreds of years ago, they still apply today. At the core, there is a “secret” and it is simply six words: We become what we think about.

This certainly isn’t a new idea. It has been heralded by every great teacher throughout history. From spiritual teachings like Buddha “We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think.” and the Bible “As someone thinks within himself, so he is.” -Proverbs 23:7 to thought leaders like Napoleon Hill who wrote several books about it including “Think and Grow Rich” and the current teachings of Tony Robbins. This list could go on and on.

This idea is simple, yet profound. It would be hard to argue that our thoughts control our actions and that our actions (largely) control our results. If you think about getting a cup of coffee and decide to follow through on that thought, your body follows suit, and pretty soon you acquire the results of getting a cup of coffee either by making some or going to a coffee shop and making a purchase. The enjoyment of having that cup of coffee, the aroma, the taste, the caffeine buzz all begins with a thought.

Sounds simple when we break it down, but what people often fail to realize is that we have the ability, even more, the responsibility to consciously choose our thoughts. Instead of just letting our brains randomly cycle through the same thoughts over and over. We have to power to start choosing to spend time thinking about different things. And if we do that consistently, we’ll shift our actions in new directions and thereby achieve new results.

Thoughts are like seeds. If you want different results in life, you have to figure out which seeds to plant and which to nurture that are capable of growing those results and which aren’t. Once you have chosen which seeds (thoughts) to nurture, you need to consciously fill your mind with the correct thoughts and weed out the incorrect thoughts.

For example, being that I have worked with business owners for the past 21 years, if you want to start your own business, I can tell you which thoughts are the right seeds and which are the wrong ones. Among the wrong seeds, you’ll find the following thoughts:

• Starting my own business is very risky. I have a family to support.
• There’s a good chance I’ll fail.
• I may lose everything and go broke.
• I don’t have enough money yet.
• I have no idea how to start my own business.
• I’ve got a safe, secure job. Why would I want to mess that up?
• I’m not ready to start my own business just yet. Maybe next year.

Note that I’m not saying that these thoughts are “wrong”… just that they’re the wrong seeds if the desired result is starting your own business. In other words, the result of starting your own business isn’t going to grow if these are the seeds you planted in the soil of your mind. But these are the right seeds if you don’t want to start your own business; with these seeds you will grow the tree of being a lifelong employee. And there’s nothing at all wrong with that if it’s what you want. On the other hand, if you’re an employee right now and would like to start your own business, but your predominant thoughts  when you think about starting a business are similar to those above, then you have a problem. Those mental seeds will never grow a business. If you do not transform your thinking, you’ll never run your own business, just as if you plant pumpkin seeds, you’ll never grow an oak tree.

So what kinds of thoughts are the right seeds for starting your own business? Here are some:

• Of course it’s a risk, but I believe in myself, and whatever obstacles come my way, I’ll overcome them.
• I’d rather spend my life working hard to build my own business than to build someone else’s. If I’m going to build a business, it might as well be my own.
• The freedom of being my own boss is extremely appealing to me. I’ll get to decide how to spend my time every minute of every day.
• I can only get so far income-wise as an employee. If I ever want to have financial freedom, I need to go into business for myself.

Now even though thoughts like those might be the right seeds for starting your own business, that doesn’t mean that planting those seeds is all that you need to grow the whole plant. Just as plants need water and sunshine, it takes a lot of hard work, resources and flexibility to build a business. But the right thoughts are the foundation. I also want to share that I am just using the starting of a new business as one example. I could have just as easily used quitting smoking, getting sober, losing weight, getting married, etc.

The main point I’m making is that if you find yourself in a position where you want new results in your life (i.e. something other than what you’re currently experiencing), then the first step is to examine your dominant thoughts to see if they’re the right seeds to grow the results you want. The odds are extremely high that if you’re not making progress, then you’re probably thinking the wrong thoughts and need to replace them with new ones. For example, you won’t run in the NYC Marathon by thinking thoughts like, “Running a marathon is hard.”

A key concept to understand here is that shifting your thoughts begins as a conscious and deliberate activity. You don’t just say to yourself, “Ok, I’ll think about starting my own business. Sounds good. Next….” You have to be a lot more proactive than that. You may need to set aside an hour or so to be totally alone, sit down with pen and paper, figure out the correct thoughts/seeds you need to be thinking, and then consciously ram those new thoughts into your head, over and over again until they become dominant over the old thoughts. And if you’re wanting to make a big transformation, then this is something you’ll need to do every single day.

Or you could sit down with someone skilled at helping identify belief systems and allow them to help you see what thoughts may be preventing you from taking action. And if they are true students of human behavior and practitioners of a neuroscience like Neuro Associative Programming (NAP) or Neuro Linguistic Programming, they can work with you to make deep and profound transformations in those thoughts quickly.

If you attempt to do it on your own as described above, you may find it very difficult at first. When you start thinking new thoughts, the most common reaction, at least at first, is that you’ll feel a great deal of doubt about them. As an example, if you were to start thinking about running your own business, your initial images probably won’t seem too positive. You may begin to find yourself thinking about quitting your job and things like the negative reaction you’ll get from coworkers or the office politics you have to deal with on a daily basis. All of a sudden you realize you’re back to thinking the wrong thoughts again. That’s normal.

If that happens, use your imagination to push past the doubt or fear and keep working on it. See that new reality working out beautifully, hear what you would say to yourself and what others would say to you when you succeed, close your eyes and imagine how it would feel to have accomplished your transformation… even if you have no idea how it could possibly work in the real world.

More than likely it’s going to be a little challenging to imagine all this in the beginning, but it will get easier over time. After about 2-3 weeks you’ll begin to truly believe these new thoughts. And that’s when you’ll feel the urge to start taking action. Ifin the beginning, you still have doubts that get in the way of you taking action…That’s fine — it’s important to plant the seed of belief first. Be patient with yourself, and let your imagination guide you. Even Albert Einstein knew the power of belief and thought when he said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

If you’d like to know more about how to change those beliefs with the power of a top level coach using neurosciences like NAP and NLP, reach out to me directly.