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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...

 Train yourself to jump out of bed immediately, with no hesitation, and start your day with movement. PHASE 1: Move and Breathe (5 Minutes)   Keep your shoes beside the bed, and hit the ground running! Get up each day and physically move, going outside and starting with a walk to warm up your body and wake up your metabolism. Take several diaphragmatic breaths in the ratio: inhale for one count, hold for four counts and exhale for two counts. Then, for the first five minutes of your walk, practice the pattern of “breathwalking.” Inhale four times through your nose, exhale four times through your mouth and repeat continuously. PHASE 2: Get Grateful and Visualize (10 Minutes) Think about everything you’re grateful for. Start with yourself, and include your family, friends, business associates and special moments in your life. Visualize everything you want in your life as if you have already achieved it and you are grateful for it. Your brain can’t tell the difference between som...

Anything in life you want, you only want because of the feeling you think obtaining it will give you. But the truth is that you could have that feeling right now—simply by changing the following three patterns: 1. Your Physiology  - Emotion is created by motion. Whatever you’re feeling right now is related to how you’re using your body.  2. Your Focus and Beliefs -  Whatever you focus on is what you’re going to feel whether it is true or not. 3. Your Language  Questions:  Thinking is nothing more than mentally asking and answering a series of questions. Eliminate any habitual questions that do not serve you (e.g., “What’s wrong with me?”).   Words: If you want to change your life, pay attention to the words you repeat to yourself. Certain words can change the way you feel: I think you’re mistaken vs. I think you’re wrong vs. I think you’re lying. Incantations: When you repeat a phrase with enough emotional intensity, you start to believe it. Utilize t...

The Key to Personal Transformation and Results There are two forces controlling every decision in our lives: Remember, we’ll further explore the dynamics of Blueprint later in Session Three of Inner Strength, but today we’ll focus on the impact of state. Hour of Power is designed to help you create rituals to condition empowering emotional states. Gaining the ultimate edge in life means experiencing the primary emotions you want regardless of life’s events, not just attaining a life that works out every way you want it to. Sometimes, life rains on your parade, but you can control what it means to you. And when you control what it means to you, you have the edge, the ultimate advantage.  To make that happen, you must recapture what’s missing—time for yourself, time to heal mentally and emotionally so that consistent space facilitates a shift in your habitual thoughts and feelings. You don’t want to wait to attain a goal you’ve been looking to reach for a long time before you start f...

When we are unhappy and our Life Conditions do not match our Blueprint, we have three choices as to how we’re going to handle the challenge: First Choice: Blame The first choice people have is to assign blame, and there are three things you can blame: a) Event . There’s a story, something that happened, behind why things are the way they are. However accurate the story may be, blaming an event is convenient because it helps preserve an identity designed to shield us from our true fears: fear of failure and fear of not being loved or accepted. b) Others . “I’m in this situation because this person …” Similarly, the story may be true, but it’s convenient and gives you comfort in the moment. “There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s this other person. There’s nothing I need to change.”  c) Yourself . Most people think that this is being responsible, but blaming yourself will not make it better. There’s a difference between responsibility and beating yourself up—between “Here’s a pattern th...

 There are two forces that influence every decision we make: 1. State Ultimately, we want to feel states of empowerment, like confidence, certainty or adeptness, that will positively impact the quality of our decisions most of the time. Few people are in empowered states all of the time. But even “negative” states of emotion—frustration, anger, envy—can sometimes be useful to propel us to make changes. Being conscious of our moment-to-moment state gives us better control over how we feel, hence control over the quality of decisions we end up making. 2. Blueprint Our Blueprint is our Model of the World—a specific set of beliefs about how we’re supposed to be, how life’s supposed to be or how other people are supposed to treat us, which determines what we’re even willing to consider doing or not doing. In short, our Blueprint will have a massive impact on the decisions we make both in the short term and in the long term because it colors how we look at our lives  Blueprint: A B...

There are three decisions you’re making every moment of your life, either consciously or unconsciously. Developing the capacity to make the changes you want to make in life depends on your ability to become conscious of the decisions that you’re making all of the time. First Decision: What Are You Going to Focus On? Every moment of your life you have to decide what you’re going to focus on. If you don’t consciously choose where to point the lens, your brain just goes into the habit of what it usually focuses on. Most people focus on what they’re afraid of, and whatever you focus on, you feel. So if you keep focusing on what you fear, you bring it to life. As you think about it, it becomes alive inside of you. On the other hand, if you focus on the potential in an event or situation, then opportunities begin to present themselves. Second Decision: What Does This Mean? The minute you focus on something, your mind has to come up with a meaning for it. From an evolutionary standpoint, the ...

 Achievement  — going from where you are to where you want to be—requires a plan, a specific strategy. You can achieve anything you desire simply by following certain laws. Whether you want to improve your financial outlook, enhance your relationships or sculpt your body into fantastic shape, following a set of scientific principles will guarantee results. Fulfillment means experiencing tremendous joy in the process—so you feel not only the excitement of the pursuit but the enthusiasm and gratitude for the little things in life along the way. If you’re going to feel happy, alive, excited and passionate about life, you must understand that these lessons go hand in hand. Consider the very famous—although they achieve the heights of success, some never feel fulfilled despite the money, accolades and more. Remember, success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. The Power of Decision Can you think about the areas in your life where you feel most fulfilled, be it your relati...