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 Seven Strategies Used by Winners 1. They decide the purpose of the game.  2. They have fewer rules about how to be happy.  3. Their rules are consistent.  4. They give themselves pleasure whenever they win.  5. They give themselves short bursts of pain if they violate their sense of purpose in life.  6. They know that everybody has different rules. Their relationships succeed because they try to understand the other person’s rules.  7. They don’t take life too seriously.  Lose a Dream and Find Your Destiny No matter what happens, you must find an empowering meaning. Ask yourself, “How can I use this?” Often in life, when you look back on your worst situations, they turn out to be your best—if you are willing to trust that they happened for a reason. Look for the benefits, and you will find them. Don’t wait for that glorious moment when you save someone’s life. Start saving a life today by enjoying the one you have. Find your purpose in something ...

  How Will You Know Your Life’s Purpose? When You Decide What It Is!  •According to the Massachusetts Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the most important risk factor in dying of your first heart attack is job dissatisfaction. Make sure you have a deeper meaning for your life than “I’m on that grindstone again!”  • Victor Frankl, a Nazi concentration camp survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, found his purpose in his future. He vowed that somehow he would survive, share his story and make sure that nothing like the Holocaust could ever happen again.  • Near the end of his life, actor Michael Landon discovered a profound truth. In reminding people to live life to the fullest, every minute of every day, he developed a compelling purpose for his final days.  Your Purpose in Life Is Up to You Are you being efficient or effective? Being efficient means doing things right. Being effective means doing the right things. Why Some People Don’t Win th...

  Finding Your Real Inner Drive Everything on earth has a purpose—and that includes you! Your purpose in life provides you with an inner drive that, once you tap into it, can give you immense fulfillment and unlimited joy. Your Purpose in Life • does not change  • is eternal  • is available to you each and every moment Three Decisions Shape Your Life Everything you do has a consequence. What ultimately shapes your life, though, are the decisions you make. You can have the life you deserve, where all your consequences are positive ones. How? By making these three decisions: 1. Decide what to focus on  What you focus on determines how you think, feel, contribute. Choose an empowering focus in every situation. 2. Decide what things mean Meaning is something you determine. You cannot control events, but you can control what events mean to you. 3. Decide what you will do when something happens Remember, God’s delays are not God’s denials . . . unless you give up. Discover...

  Why People Fail to Become Wealthy: 12 Financial Traps to Avoid 1. They never define what wealth means to them.  2. They make wealth a moving target.  3. They define wealth in ways that make it impossible to achieve.  4. They never even start.  5. They never make wealth an absolute must.  6. They don’t have a realistic plan.  7. They fail to follow through.  8. They make “experts” responsible for their decisions.  9. When faced with major challenges, they give up.  10. They fail to conduct life as if it was a business.  11. They allow other people’s emotions to affect the implementation of their plan.  12. They never get quality coaching. How to Be Wealthy Right Now This part is easy! Just do the exact opposite of the 12 financial traps: 1. Define what wealth means to you, exactly what will it take for you to feel wealthy.  2. Lock that definition firmly in place. Don’t keep raising the bar.  3. Make sure your defini...

  The Value of Stocks • Long-term dependability Since World War II, the best investment through time has been the stock market, delivering a 12% rate of compounded return for nearly 50 years.  • Short-term flexibility Buying and selling stocks is fast and easy. It’s much faster, for example, than selling a piece of real estate. Sir John Templeton’s Strategy: “Three Bucket” Asset Allocation Decide what percentage of your income to invest, and allocate it into each of the following areas in a proportion that meets your needs and satisfies your risk tolerance. By determining your asset allocation in advance and sticking to your plan, you’ll avoid the temptation of spur-of-the-moment decisions. 1. Security Bucket   This bucket is for low-risk investments such as fixed income (treasury bills, corporate bonds, money market accounts) and equity (insurance policies, your home). The growth rate on these investments seems slow at first but compounds over time. What goes into this b...

  The Power of Compounding Obtaining the financial freedom and abundance you deserve is easy. The secret to getting beyond scarcity is to start beyond it by feeling a sense of abundance right now and living your life as if you already were financially independent. 1. Make it a must  Give yourself a compelling future that makes it impossible for you to fail. My must for financial independence was the birth of my son and my desire to give him an extraordinary quality of life. 2. Get hungry  Stop blaming everyone else. Set your goals, make them a must and commit to making the necessary changes now. 3. Add value to other people’s lives  Remember, your income is in direct proportion to your contribution. 4. Don’t be a victim of the “tall poppy syndrome”  Other people may want to chop you down to their size, but don’t let that happen! The Power of Compounding Compounding occurs when you invest money and allow it to continuously reinvest itself. With this strategy, yo...

  Mastering Your Emotions Six Steps to Mastering Your Emotions  How do most people handle their emotions? They avoid them endure them or use them to compete with other people. There’s a fourth way, a better way, and you can do it in six simple steps —learn from your emotions and utilize them 1. Identify the emotion and appreciate the message: • It’s saying you have to change something. 2. Clarify: • What is this emotion trying to tell me? What message is it offering?  • Do I need to change my perception (the meaning) or my procedures (my communication or my behavior)? 3. Get curious and ask questions: • How do I really want to feel? As soon as you identify what you want to feel, you’re moving in the direction you want to go.  • What would I have to believe in order to feel that way now?  • What am I willing to do to make it the way I want it?  • What’s great about this, or what can I learn from this? 4. Get confident: • Recall a specific time when you felt ...

 Your Call to Action Frustration, anger, resentment, depression—compare these emotions to joy, passion, contentment, excitement and ecstasy! Our lives are defined by the emotions we feel on a daily basis. What we do is not based on our ability, our talent or our skills it’s based on how we feel. Most of us live our lives in reaction to our environment. Our emotions are like the ocean—some days they’re a brewing storm; other days they’re as calm as they can be. Emotions are signals calling us to action . Often, the emotions that seem the most painful may be telling us we need to make changes. If we heed these signals, we can utilize them to change the quality of our experience and our lives immediately.  Where do emotions come from? Whether we give ourselves positive, negative or neutral feelings is determined by the rules we have and the meanings or interpretations we attach to events in our lives. What we feel is based not on our experience but on our interpretation of the ex...

  Everything in life shifts when you put yourself back in balance. Take control of your body with this simple three-step challenge. For the next 10 days: STEP 1 : Cleanse your system  STEP 2 : Interrupt destructive patterns that don’t serve you  STEP 3 : Provide your body with its vital needs Never leave the site of setting a goal without doing something toward its attainment. If you’re ready to take your life to the highest level of energy possible, make sure you follow these steps and do something right now Destructive Pattern                                    Example: I often get angry. Pattern Interrupts When I begin to feel angry, I will take five deep breaths and list at least three things I’m grateful for in my life.

 The Key to a Strong, Healthy and Vital Life Relationships, finances, emotions, your career . . . none of these matter if you don’t have your health. To avoid ending up as “the richest person in the graveyard,” make your health an absolute priority. Don’t let anyone convince you to give this responsibility to “experts.” You must be your own authority. Model people who not only have studied the subject but have consistently used it to achieve the results you desire. With a few simple changes, you can give yourself the gifts of explosive energy, improved immune function and weight loss. The Truth about Germs and Illness Ten people can be exposed to the same germ, but not all of them become ill. Why? Because germs are not the source of disease. Contact with a specific germ is not an absolute guarantee of contracting disease. Several other factors are involved: • The amount of stress or emotion in your life  • Your genetic tendencies  • The things you do to keep your body in ...

The first step in finding and attracting your ideal mate is defining what you want in that person. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, your ideal mate could walk right by you and you might not even notice him or her! By clarifying precisely what you want and reviewing your list each day, you will literally program your unconscious to help you find your ideal person. EXERCISE: Design Your Ideal Mate The Ideal Mate Describe your ideal mate’s traits, habits, qualities, appearance—everything you can think of that would be important to you.  The Mate from Hell If you have a hard time coming up with your “wish list,” start by defining “the mate from hell.” Write about the person you couldn’t stand to be with. What traits would they have? What qualities could you not stand? Attract Your Ideal Mate EXERCISE: Design Your Ideal Mate (continued) What Kind of Person Would You Have to Be to Attract Such a Mate? You need to become the kind of person you would like to find. Describe the va...

The quality of your relationships is in direct proportion to the amount of yourself you are able to share. Sharing produces a synergy where one plus one equals more than two. • Go to a relationship to give, not to get.   Measuring and remembering who gives more is a surefire way to kill a relationship. When driven by rules instead of love, relationships begin to die. • Keep your rules to a minimum. Too many rules can destroy a relationship. Upsets occur easily when you have too many ways to feel bad. • Help your partner meet his or her needs. Although we go about meeting them in different ways, we all have the same six needs. Passionate relationships occur when both partners feel that their needs are met. • Understand the importance of awareness and acceptance. Be aware that all human beings share the same two primary fears: that they are not enough and that they won’t be loved. Primary fears are triggered anytime you feel like you’re not being seen as significant enough or you f...

Passion, Connection and Love There are two universal laws of life: anything that doesn’t grow dies, and anything that fails to contribute is eliminated. These laws hold true for everything in life, especially for relationships. Extraordinary relationships—not merely good or excellent, but truly legendary ones—are those in which the participants continually grow and contribute to themselves, the relationship and each other. The Purpose of Relationships Relationships exist to magnify the human experience . Which emotions are you magnifying– negative ones or positive ones?  

 Happy, vibrant, successful people think and behave in certain ways. So do miserable and unfulfilled people. In other words, there are patterns of success and patterns of failure. The good news is, success leaves clues! The Pressure Cooker  There’s one more reason people don’t change—they get into a “pressure cooker.” People climb into the pressure cooker again and again! How can you avoid it? The 7 Steps of Conscious Change STEP 1: Get Disturbed  • Be honest with yourself. Don’t use softeners or rationalizations; don’t compare yourself with others to make yourself feel better.  • Get associated to the problem. If necessary, make it worse than it is to get yourself to take action. If you’re not disturbed, you’re not going to change.  • Surround yourself with people who have what you want. Seeing them will disturb you, and either you’ll run back to your old friends to make yourself feel better or you’ll join a new peer group. If you want to be good at tennis, pla...

   The Power of a Results-Focused Life We live in a world where there are more demands placed on us now than at any other time in human history. We try to fill so many roles: ultimate father, ultimate mother, great lover, best friend to the world, community activist, spiritual being and total athlete. Some of us manage to cross off everything on our to-do lists—yet still feel unhappy and unfulfilled, as if we have no freedom, we have no life, we have no time. Oh, if only we had more time! But what is time? Time is nothing but a feeling. If you want more time, you simply need to manage your feelings. Haven’t you had periods in your life when time flew, when you had no stress, when everything seemed to flow effortlessly? And haven’t you also had moments when time stood still, when every second was an eternity? It isn’t time that causes stress; it’s the feelings we generate about the subject of time. What you focus on determines how you feel, and the questions you ask yourself co...

 All of us have the same problems because we all have the same 6 human needs. These needs are paradoxical—they seem to be in conflict with one another. Serious problems can arise when we choose destructive tools or vehicles to try to satisfy these needs. Instead, we can choose to establish new patterns of fulfilling our needs that will move us rapidly toward life mastery. All human beings have the need for: 1. Certainty -  For most people, certainty equals survival. We all need a sense of certainty that the roof will hold above our heads, that the floor will hold beneath our feet and that we can avoid pain and gain pleasure. How do we meet the need for certainty? Some people try to achieve it by reaching for things that make them certain they can be comfortable: food, drugs, alcohol or cigarettes. Others find it by submersing themselves in their work or by trying to control everything around them—their environment or other people. These are usually Class 3 experiences (th...

 All of us as human beings have different desires, but we are all driven by the same set of needs. Understanding the 6 Human Needs can allow you to turn on your driving force, discover all you’re capable of and become truly fulfilled on a consistent basis. The Four Classes of Experience 1. We usually think of a Class 1 experience as a “peak life experience.” A Class 1 experience:  • feels good   • is good for you   • is good for others   • serves the greater good 2. Most people want to avoid Class 2 experiences, but mastering them brings us the most joy, growth and fulfillment. A Class 2 experience:   • does not feel good   • is good for you   • is good for others   • serves the greater good 3. Nonproductive Class 3 experiences provide immediate pleasure but eventually destroy our quality of life and give us ultimate pain. Drinking or eating to excess could fit into this category. A Class 3 experience: • fee...

Goals give you the ability to create your future in advance. They can make you grow, expand, develop your success and transform your life. If you already know some of your goals or you’ve done a goal-setting workshop in the past, here is a chance to do it again even more effectively. Compelling goals contain two key components:  1. Identify your goals: What do you want? Something magical happens when you take generalized impulses of desire and start defining them more precisely. 2. Identify your purpose: Why do you want it? What will it give you? Reasons come first; answers come second. When you get a big enough reason to accomplish something, you can figure out how to do it.

  To change your life, you must change your neuro-associations. Three things must be in place for you to make these changes and count on them to last. They are the three fundamentals of NAC: 1. Get leverage on yourself To do this, three levels of responsibility are necessary—you must decide the following: A. Something must change.  B. I must change it.  C. I can change it.  2. Interrupt your current pattern of association You must scramble the old pattern of thinking and feeling. This is best done by using something unusual, such as making a radical change in what you say or how you move your body. 3. Condition a new empowering association Install a new choice, and reinforce it until it is conditioned. Any thought, emotion or behavior that is consistently reinforced will become a habit (a conditioned pattern).   Link pleasure to your new choice. Reward yourself emotionally for even small progress, and you will find yourself developing new patterns quickly.

 Specifically, what drives our lives is our neuro-associations—whatever pleasure or pain we associate or “link” to a situation in our nervous system is going to determine our behavior. If we want to change our lives, we must change our neuro-associations: Your neuro-associations control your level of motivation. Every single action you take has an effect on your destiny. If we study destiny, we find everything in life has four parts: 1. Everything we think or do is a cause set in motion. 2. Every one of our thoughts and actions is going to have an effect or result in our lives. 3. Our results begin to “stack up” to take our lives in a particular direction. 4. For every direction, there is an ultimate destination or destiny. It’s important for you now to begin to answer two questions: What is your ultimate destiny? What do you want your life to be about? While few people know precisely how their lives will turn out, we can certainly decide in advance the kind of person we want to be...

 Use pain and pleasure instead of letting pain and pleasure use you! To take control of your life, you must take control of the force of decision. The power to change anything in your life is born the moment you make a real decision—which by definition is something that causes you to take immediate action. Take the following steps now.

 Ultimately, everything we do in our lives is driven by our fundamental need to avoid pain and our desire to gain pleasure; both are biologically driven and constitute a controlling force in our lives. We will do far more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. Pain is the greater motivator in the short term. To get what you want in your life, you have to figure out what stops you. Whenever you procrastinate, it’s because you think that taking action would be more painful than doing nothing or not taking action. Conversely, sometimes if you procrastinate for too long, it reverses on you! For example, if you keep putting something off (like a term paper or your taxes), you may get to a point the night before it’s due where you start to think that not doing it will be more painful than doing it. And then all night long, you experience the pain of getting the job done. You must learn to control the motivating forces of pain and pleasure. How can you use this understanding? At any...

 Success Leaves Clues To save time and energy, use role models to accelerate the pace of your success:3 1. Find someone who’s already getting the results you want.  2. Find out what that person is doing.  3. Do the same things, and you’ll get the same results. It’s impossible to fail as long as you learn something from what you do! Never leave the site of setting a goal or making a decision without taking some action toward its attainment. That’s how you create momentum and start to tap into the real driving force within you.

 Making decisions and using your Personal Power, which is your ability to take consistent action, change your life. This power is already within you and just needs to be awakened by igniting your desire and by showing yourself some simple systematic strategies on how to get greater results on a daily basis. If you’re dissatisfied with some area of your life right now, instead of getting frustrated, get exited. Because until you get dissatisfied, you won’t do anything to really take your life to another level. No matter what’s happened in your past or how many times you’ve tried and failed, none of that matters because each moment is a fresh new opportunity. The biggest trap that keeps people from taking action is fear: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of rejection, fear of pain, fear of the unknown. The only way to deal with fear is to face it. Look it in the eye, and take action in spite of it. It’s not what we can do in life that makes the difference. It’s what we will do. ...

when Life Conditions equal your Blueprint, then there will be happiness.   when Life Conditions are not equal to your Blueprint, then there will be unhappiness. We also know that when we experience unhappiness, we have two real choices: change our Life Conditions, or change our Blueprint. But sometimes that sense of unhappiness becomes so internalized that it feels like there’s nothing you can do to change anything. That’s when unhappiness reaches a peak and turns into suffering. Psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., defined suffering as a form of learned helplessness. When you feel helpless—especially if you don’t normally think of yourself as a helpless person—that feeling intensifies the suffering. The truth is there are no victims—there are only volunteers. However, the feeling of suffering comes from three aspects: 1. You think the problem is permanent . No problem is permanent. No matter how big the problem is, no matter how intense it seems, it’s going to have an en...

 We judge whether or not we’re being punished or rewarded by life’s events based on our needs, beliefs and habitual emotions. The mind has to decipher: Is this the end or is this the beginning? Should I be angry about this situation, or should I be excited? Unlocking the three forces that are moving you through life unconsciously, and redirecting these influences consciously, could change your life dramatically, eliminate pain, avoid unnecessary difficulties and give you more joy than you can imagine. 1. The Driving Force: The 6 Human Needs Although we all have different Blueprints, different beliefs about different things, and can respond with different emotions to the same event, one thing we have in common is that we all have the same 6 Human Needs. To review briefly from Personal Power, the 6 Human Needs are: 1. Certainty: to be comfortable, avoid pain and have some level of consistency.  2. Uncertainty: we need variety and change to feel alive.  3. Significance: the...

  A senior monk and a junior monk were traveling together. At one point, they came to a river with a strong current. As the monks were preparing to cross the river, they saw a very young and beautiful woman also attempting to cross. The young woman asked if they could help her cross to the other side. The two monks glanced at one another because they had taken vows not to touch a woman. Then, without a word, the  o lder monk picked up the woman, carried her across the river, placed her gently on the other side, and carried on his journey. The younger monk couldn’t believe what had just happened. After rejoining his companion, he was speechless, and an hour passed without a word between them. Two more hours passed, then three, finally the younger monk could contain himself any longer, and blurted out “As monks, we are not permitted a woman, how could you then carry that woman on your shoulders?” The older monk looked at him and replied, “Brother, I set her down on the other sid...

 In the first session of Inner Strength, we discussed how the parent of action is our decisions. However, our decisions are controlled moment to moment by our state and by our Blueprint. In Session 2 of Inner Strength, you learned how to get into the habit of evaluating your Triad and conditioning yourself to experience the emotions you want, maximizing an empowering state, hence empowering yourself to make better decisions and gain further control over the quality of your life. what ultimately controls your thoughts, feelings and emotions: your Blueprint . Blueprint: A Deeper Look  When any stimulus in life happens, how do you know if it’s good or bad? How do you know if you should be angry or excited? How do you know if somebody just insulted you or teased you? When anything occurs, our minds have to decide how to respond. Whether we realize it or not, we’re constantly feeding our minds a detailed outline for why we do the things we do. There are people who have endured incr...