Let's make some changes right now

First, write down four actions that you need to take that you've been putting off. Maybe you need to lose some weight. Maybe you need to stop smoking. Maybe you need to communicate with someone you've had a falling out with, or reconnect with someone who's important to you.

Second, under each of these actions, write down the answer to the following questions: Why haven't I taken action? In the past, what pain have I linked to taking this action? Answering these questions will help you understand that what has held you back is that you've associated greater pain to taking the action than to not taking it. Be honest with yourself. If you're thinking, " I have no pain associated to it, " think a little harder. Maybe the pain is simple: maybe it's the pain of taking time out of your busy schedule.

Third, write down all the pleasure you've had in the past by indulging in this negative pattern. For example, if you think you should lose some weight, why have you continued to eat whole pans of brownies and bulk-size bags of chips, and to guzzle twelve-packs of soda pop? You're avoiding the pain of depriving yourself, yes, and at the same time you're really doing this because it makes you feel good right now. It gives you pleasure! Instant pleasure! No one wants to give up these feelings! In order to create a change that will last, we need to find a new way to get the same pleasure without any negative consequences. Identifying the pleasure you've been getting will help you know what your target is.

Fourth, write down what it will cost you if you don't change now. What will happen if you don't stop eating so much sugar and fat? If you don't stop smoking? If you don't make that phone call that you know you need to make? If you don't start consistently working out each day? Be honest with yourself. What's it going to cost you over the next two, three, four, five years? What's it going to cost you emotionally? What's it going to cost you in terms of your self-image? What will it cost you in your physical energy level? What will it cost you in your feelings of self-esteem? What will it cost you financially? What will it cost you in your relationships with the people you care about most? How does that make you feel? Don't just say, " It will cost me money" or " I will be fat." That's not enough. You've got to remember that what drives us is our emotions. So get associated and use pain as your friend, one that can drive you to a new level of success.

The final step is to write down all the pleasure you'll receive by taking each of these actions right now. Make a huge list that will drive you emotionally, that will really get you excited: " I'll gain the feeling of really being in control of my life, of knowing that I'm in charge. I'll gain a new level of self-confidence. I'll gain physical vitality and health. I'll be able to strengthen all my relationships. I'll develop more willpower which I could use in every other area of my life. My life will be better in all these ways, now. Over the next two, three, four, five years. By taking this action, I will live my dream." Envision all the positive impacts both in the present and in the long term.

I encourage you to take the time now to complete this exercise, and to take advantage of the great momentum you've been building up as you've moved through this book. Carpe diem! Seize the day! There's no time like the present. But if you can't wait another second before pressing on to the next chapter, then by all means, do so. Just be sure to come back to this exercise later and demonstrate to yourself the control you have over the twin powers of pain and pleasure.

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

BELIEF SYSTEMS:

THE POWER TO

CREATE

AND THE POWER

TO DESTROY

" Under all that we think, lives all we believe,

like the ultimate veil of our spirits."

—ANTONIO MACHADO

He was bitter and cruel, an alcoholic and drug addict who almost killed himself several times. Today he serves a life sentence in prison for the murder of a liquor store cashier who " got in his way." He has two sons, born a mere eleven months apart, one of whom grew up to be " just like Dad": a drug addict who lived by stealing and threatening others until he, too, was put in jail for attempted murder. His brother, however, is a different story: a man who's raising three kids, enjoys his marriage, and appears to be truly happy. As regional manager for a major national concern, he finds his work both challenging and rewarding. He's physically fit, and has no alcohol or drug addictions! How could these two young men have turned out so differently, having grown up in virtually the same environment? Both were asked privately, unbeknownst to the other, " Why has your life turned out this way? " Surprisingly, they both provided the exact same answer: " What else could I have become, having

grown up with a father like that? " So often we're seduced into believing that events control our lives and that our environment has shaped who we are today. No greater lie was ever told. It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean. Two men are shot down in Vietnam and imprisoned in the infamous Hoa Lo prison. They are isolated, chained to cement slabs, and continuously beaten with rusty shackles and tortured for information. Yet although these men are receiving the same abuse, they form radically different beliefs about their experience. One man decides that his life is over, and in order to avoid any additional pain, commits suicide. The other pulls from these brutalizing events a deeper belief in himself, his fellow man, and his Creator than he's ever had before. Captain Gerald Coffee uses his experience of this to remind people all over the world of the power of the human spirit to overcome virtually any level of pain, any challenge, or any problem.

Two women turn seventy years old, yet each takes a different meaning from the event. One " knows" that her life is coming to an end. To her, seven decades of living mean that her body must be breaking down and she'd better start winding up her affairs. The other woman decides that what a person is capable of at any age depends upon her belief, and sets a higher standard for herself. She decides that mountain climbing might be a good sport to begin at the age of seventy. For the next twenty five

years she devotes herself to this new adventure in mastery, scaling some of the highest peaks in the world, until today, in her nineties, Hulda Crooks has become the oldest woman to ascend Mount Fuji.

You see, it's never the environment; it's never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events—how we interpret them—that shapes who we are today and who we'll become tomorrow.

Beliefs are what make the difference between a lifetime of joyous contribution and one of misery and devastation. Beliefs are what separate a Mozart from a Manson. Beliefs are what cause some individuals to become heroes, while others " lead lives of quiet desperation." What are our beliefs designed for? They're the guiding force to tell us what will lead to pain and what will lead to pleasure. Whenever something happens in your life, your brain asks two questions: 1) Will this mean pain or pleasure? 2) What must I do now to avoid pain and/or gain pleasure? The answers to these two questions are based on our beliefs, and our beliefs are driven by our generalizations about what we've

learned could lead to pain and pleasure. These generalizations guide all of our actions and thus the direction and quality of our lives. Generalizations can be very useful; they are simply the identification

of similar patterns. For example, what allows you to open a door?. You look down at a handle and, although you've never seen this specific one before, you can generally feel certain that this door will open if you turn the handle right or left, if you push or pull it. Why do you believe this? Simply, your experience of doors has provided enough references to create a sense of certainty that allows you to follow through. Without this sense of certainty, we would virtually be unable to leave the house, drive our cars, use a telephone, or do any one of the dozens of things we do in a day. Generalizations simplify our lives and allow us to function. Unfortunately, generalizations in more complex areas of our lives can oversimplify and sometimes create limiting beliefs. Maybe you've failed to follow through on various endeavors a few times in your life, and based on that, you developed a belief that you are incompetent. Once you believe this is true, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You may say, " Why even try if I'm not going to follow through anyway? " Or perhaps you've made a few poor decisions in business or in relationships, and have interpreted that to mean you will always " sabotage" yourself. Or

maybe in school you didn't learn as quickly as you thought other kids did, and rather than considering the idea that you had a different learning strategy, you may have decided that you were " learning-disabled." On another level, isn't racial prejudice fueled by a wholesale generalization about an entire group of people? The challenge with all these beliefs is that they become limitations for future decisions about who you are and what you're capable of. We need to remember that most of our beliefs are generalizations about our past, based on our interpretations of painful and pleasurable experiences. The challenge is threefold: 1) most of us do not consciously decide what we're going to believe; 2) often our beliefs are based on misinterpretation of past experiences; and 3) once we adopt a belief, we forget it's merely an interpretation. We begin to treat our beliefs as if they're realities, as if they are gospel. In fact, we rarely, if ever, question our long-held beliefs. If you ever wonder why people do what they do, again, you need to remember that human beings are not random creatures: all of our actions are the result of our beliefs. Whatever we do, it is out of our conscious or unconscious beliefs about what will lead to pleasure or away from pain. If you want to create long-term and consistent changes in your behaviors, you must change the beliefs that are holding you back.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally[10] save their lives. Some people have taken the pain of their past and said, " Because of this, I will help others. Because I was raped[11], no one else will be harmed again." Or, " Because I lost my son or daughter, I will make a difference in the world." It's not something they wanted to believe, but rather, adopting this type of belief was a necessity for them to be able to pick up the pieces and move on to live empowering lives. We all have the capacity to create meanings that empower us, but so many of us never tap into it, or even recognize it. If we don't adopt the faith that there is a reason for the unexplainable tragedies of life, then we begin to destroy our capacity to truly live. The need to be able to create a meaning out of life's most painful experiences was observed by psychiatrist Viktor Franki as he and other Holocaust victims survived the horrors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Franki noted that those special few who were able to make it through this " hell on earth" shared one thing in common: they were able to endure and transform their experience by finding an

empowering meaning for their pain. They developed the belief that because they suffered and survived, they would be able to tell the story and make certain that no human being would ever suffer this way again. Beliefs are not limited to impacting our emotions or actions. They can literally change our bodies in a matter of moments. I had the pleasure of interviewing Yale professor and best-selling author Dr. Bernie Siegel. As we began to speak about the power of belief, Bernie shared with me some

of the research he'd done on people with Multiple Personality Disorders. Incredibly, the potency of these people's beliefs that they had become a different person resulted in an unquestioned command to their nervous system to make measurable changes in their biochemistry. The result? Their bodies would literally transform before the researchers' eyes and begin to reflect a new identity at a moment's notice. Studies document such remarkable occurrences as patients' eye color actually changing as

their personality changes, or physical marks disappearing and reappearing! Even diseases such as diabetes or high blood pressure come and go depending on the person's belief as to which personality they're manifesting. Beliefs even have the capacity to override the impact of drugs on the body. While most people believe that drugs heal, studies in the new science of psychoneuroimmunology (the mind-body relationship) have begun to bear out what many others have suspected for centuries: our beliefs about the illness and its treatment play as significant a role, maybe an even more significant role, than the treatment itself. Dr. Henry Beecher from Harvard University has done extensive research that clearly demonstrates that we often give credit to a drug, when in reality it's the patient's belief that makes the difference. One demonstration of this was a groundbreaking experiment in which 100 medical students were asked to participate in testing two new drugs. One was described to them as a super-stimulant in a red capsule, the other as a super-tranquilizer in a blue capsule. Unbeknownst to the students, the contents of the capsules had been switched: the red capsule was actually a barbiturate, and the blue capsule was actually an amphetamine. Yet half of the students developed physical reactions that went along with their expectations—exactly the opposite of the chemical reaction the drugs should have produced in their bodies! These students were not just given placebos; they were given actual drugs. But their beliefs overrode the chemical impact of the drug on their bodies. As Dr. Beecher later stated, a drug's usefulness " is a direct result of not only the chemical properties of the drug, but also the patient's belief in the usefulness and effectiveness of the drug."

" Drugs are not always necessary, [but] belief in recovery always is."

-ORMAN COUSINS

I had the privilege of knowing Norman Cousins for almost seven years, and I was fortunate enough to have the last taped interview with him just one month before he passed on. In that interview, he shared a story about how strongly our beliefs affect our physical bodies. At a football game in Monterey Park, a Los Angeles suburb, several people experienced the symptoms of food poisoning. The examining physician deduced that the cause was a certain soft drink from the dispensing machines because all of his patients had purchased some prior to becoming ill. An announcement was made over the loudspeaker requesting that no one patronize[12] the dispensing machine, saying some people had become ill and describing the symptoms. Pandemonium immediately broke out in the stands as

people retched and fainted in droves. Even a few people who had not even gone near the machine became ill! Ambulances from local hospitals did a booming business that day, as they drove back and forth to the stadium, transporting multitudes of stricken fans. When it was discovered that the dispensing machine was not the culprit[13], people immediately and " miraculously" recovered. We need to realize that our beliefs have the capacity to make us sick or make us healthy in a moment. Beliefs have been documented to affect our immune systems. And most importantly, beliefs can either give us the resolve to take action, or weaken and destroy our drive. In this moment beliefs are shaping how you respond to what you've just read and what you're going to do with what you're learning in this book. Sometimes we develop beliefs that create limitations or strengths within a very specific context; for instance, how we feel about our ability to sing or dance, fix a car, or do calculus. Other beliefs are so generalized that they dominate virtually every aspect of our lives, either negatively or positively. I call these global beliefs. Global beliefs are the giant beliefs we have about everything in our lives: beliefs about our identities, people, work, time, money, and life itself, for that matter. These giant generalizations are often phrased as is/am/are: " Life is..." " I am..." " People are..." As you can imagine, beliefs of this size and scope can shape and color every aspect of our lives. The good news about this is that making one change in a limiting global belief you currently hold can change virtually every aspect of your life in a moment! Remember: Once accepted, our beliefs become unquestioned commands to our nervous systems, and they have the power to expand or destroy the possibilities of our present and future.

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

WHAT IS A BELIEF?

What is a belief, anyway? Often in life we talk about things without having a clear idea of what they really are. Most people treat a belief as if it's a thing, when really all it is is a feeling of certainty about something. If you say you believe that you're intelligent, all you're really saying is, " I feel certain that I'm intelligent." That sense of certainty allows you to tap into resources that allow you to produce intelligent results. We all have the answers inside of us for virtually anything—or at least we have access to the answers we need through others. But often our lack of belief, our lack of certainty, causes us not to be able to use the capacity that resides within us.

A simple way of understanding a belief is to think about its basic building block: an idea. There are a lot of ideas you may think about but not really believe. Let's take, for example, the idea that you're sexy. Stop for a second and say to yourself, " I'm sexy." Now, whether it's an idea or a belief will come down to the amount of certainty you feel about this phrase as you say it. If you think, " Well, I'm not really sexy, " what you're really saying is, " I don't feel very certain that I'm sexy."

How do we turn an idea into a belief? Let me offer you a simple metaphor to describe the process. If you can think of an idea as being like a tabletop with no legs, you'll have a fair representation of why an idea doesn't feel as certain as a belief. Without any legs, that tabletop won't even stand up by itself. Belief, on the other hand, has legs. If you really believe, " I'm sexy, " how do you know you're sexy? Isn't it true that you have some references to support the idea—some experiences in life to back it up? Those are the legs that make your tabletop solid, that make your belief certain.

What are some of the reference experiences you've had? Maybe men and women have told you that you're sexy. Or maybe you look at yourself in the mirror, compare your image to that of those whom other people consider sexy, and say, " Hey, I look like them! " Or maybe strangers on the street call out and wave[14] to you. All these experiences mean nothing until you organize them under the idea that you're sexy. As you do this, the legs make you feel solid about the idea and cause you to begin to

believe it. Your idea feels certain and is now a belief.

Once you understand this metaphor, you can begin to see how your beliefs are formed, and get a hint of how you can change them as well. First, though, it's important to note that we can develop beliefs about anything if we just find enough legs—enough reference experiences—to build it up. Think about it. Isn't it true that you have enough experiences in your life, or know enough other people who have gone through tough times with other human beings, that if you really wanted to you could easily develop the belief that people are rotten and, given half a chance, would take advantage of you? Maybe you don't want to believe this, and we've already discussed that it would be disempowering, but don't you have experiences that could back up this idea and make you feel certain about it if you wanted to? Isn't it also true that you have experiences in life—references—to back up the idea that if you really care about people and treat them well, they are basically good and will want to help you too?

The question is: which one of these beliefs is the true belief? The answer is that it doesn't matter which one is true. What matters is which one is most empowering. We all can find someone to back up our belief and make us feel more solid about it. This is how human beings are able to rationalize. The key question, again, is whether this belief is strengthening or weakening us, empowering or disempowering us on a daily basis. So what are the possible sources of references in our lives? Certainly, we can pull from our personal experiences. Sometimes we gather references through information we get from other people, or from books, tapes, movies, and so on. And sometimes we form references based solely on our imagination. The emotional intensity we feel about any of these

references will definitely affect the strength and width of the leg. The strongest and most solid legs are formed by personal experiences that we have a lot of emotion attached to because they were painful or pleasurable experiences. The other factor is the number of references we have—obviously, the more reference experiences supporting an idea, the stronger your belief will be in it.

Do your references have to be accurate in order for you to be willing to use them? No, they can be real or imaginary, accurate or inaccurate—even our own personal experiences, as solidly as we feel about them, are distorted by our own personal perspective.

Because human beings are capable of such distortion and invention, the reference legs we can use to assemble our beliefs are virtually unlimited. The downside of this is that, regardless of where our references come from, we begin to accept them as real and thus no longer question them! This can have very powerful negative consequences depending upon the beliefs we adopt. By the same token, we have the ability to use imagined references to propel us in the direction of our dreams. People

can succeed if they imagine something vividly enough just as easily as if they had the actual experiences. That's because our brains can't tell the difference between something we've vividly imagined and something we've actually experienced. With enough emotional intensity and repetition, our nervous systems experience something as real, even if it hasn't occurred yet. Every great achiever I've ever interviewed has had the ability to get themselves to feel certain they could succeed, even though no one before them had ever accomplished it. They've been able to create references where no references existed and achieve what seemed to be impossible.

Anyone who uses a computer is likely to recognize the name " Microsoft." What most people don't realize is that Bill Gates, the co-founder of that company, was not just some genius who got lucky, but a person who put himself on the line with no references to back up his belief. When he found out that an Albuquerque company was developing something called a " personal computer" that needed BASIC software, he called them up and promised to deliver it, even though he had no such thing at the time. Once he had committed himself, he had to find a way. His ability to create a sense of certainty was his real genius. Many people were just as intelligent as he was, but he used his certainty to be able to tap into his resources, and within a few weeks he and a partner had written a language that made the personal computer a reality. By putting himself on the line and finding a way. Bill Gates set in motion that day a series of events that would change the way people do business, and became a billionaire by the time he was thirty years old. Certainty carries power!

Do you know the story of the four-minute mile? For thousands of years, people held the belief that it was impossible for a human being to run the mile in less than four minutes. But in 1954, Roger Bannister broke this imposing[15] belief barrier. He got himself to achieve the " impossible" not merely by physical practice but by constantly rehearsing[16] the event in his mind, breaking through the four-minute barrier so many times with so much emotional intensity that he created vivid references that became an unquestioned command to his nervous system to produce the result. Many people don't realize, though, that the greatest aspect of his breakthrough was what it did for others. It had seemed no one would ever be able to break a four-minute mile, yet within one year of Roger's breaking the barrier, 37 other runners also broke it. His experience provided them with references strong enough to create a sense of certainty that they, too, could " do the impossible." And the year after that, 300 other runners did the same thing!

" The belief that becomes truth for me... is that which allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of putting my virtues into action."

ANDRE GIDE

People so often develop limiting beliefs about who they are and what they're capable of. Because they haven't succeeded in the past, they believe they won't be able to succeed in the future. As a result, out of their fear of pain, they begin to constantly focus on being " realistic." Most people who constantly say, " Let's be realistic, " are really just living in fear, deathly afraid of being disappointed again. Out of that fear, they develop beliefs that cause them to hesitate, to not give their all—consequently

they get limited results. Great leaders are rarely " realistic." They are intelligent, and they are accurate, but they are not realistic by other people's standards. What is realistic for one person, though, is totally different from what is realistic for another person, based upon their references. Gandhi believed he could gain autonomy for India without violently opposing Great Britain—something that had never been done before. He wasn't being realistic, but he certainly proved to be accurate. By the same token, it certainly wasn't realistic for a man to believe he could give the world happiness by building a theme park in the middle of an orange grove and charging people not only for the rides, but even to get in! At the time, there was no such park in the world. Yet Walt Disney had a sense of certainty like few people who have ever lived, and his optimism transformed his circumstances.

If you're going to make an error in life, err on the side of overestimating your capabilities (obviously, as long as it doesn't jeopardize your life). By the way, this is something that's hard to do, since the human capacity is so much greater than most of us would ever dream. In fact many studies have focused on the differences between people who are depressed and people who are extremely optimistic. After attempting to learn a new skill, the pessimists are always more accurate about how they did, while the optimists see their behavior as being more effective than it actually was. Yet this unrealistic evaluation of their own performance is the secret of their future success. Invariably[17] the optimists eventually[18] end up mastering the skill while the pessimists fail. Why? Optimists are those, who, despite having no references for success, or even references of failure, manage to ignore those references, leaving unassembled such cognitive tabletops as " I failed" or " I can't succeed." Instead, optimists produce faith references, summoning[19] forth their imagination to picture themselves doing something different next time and succeeding. It is this special ability, this unique focus, which allows them to persist until eventually they gain the distinctions that put them over the top. The reason success eludes[20] most people is that they have insufficient references of succeeding in the past. But an optimist operates with beliefs such as, " The past doesn't equal the future. " All great leaders, all people who have achieved success in any area of life, know the power of continuously, pursuing their vision, even if all the details of how to achieve it aren't yet; available. If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible.

" Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art, as of life."

JOSEPH CONRAD

One of the biggest challenges in anyone's life is knowing how to interpret " failures." How we deal with life's " defeats" and what we determine is the cause will shape our destinies. We need to remember that how we deal with adversity and challenges will shape our lives more than almost anything else. Sometimes we get so many references of pain and failure that we begin to assemble those into a belief that nothing we do can make things better. Some people begin to feel that things are pointless, that they're helpless or worthless, or that no matter what they try they'll lose anyway. These are a set of beliefs that must never be indulged in if we ever expect to succeed and achieve in our lives. These beliefs strip us of our personal power and destroy our ability to act. In psychology, there is a name for this destructive mindset: learned helplessness. When people experience enough failure at something—and you'd be surprised how few times this is for some people—they perceive their efforts as futile and develop the terminal discouragement of learned helplessness.

Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania has done intensive research on what creates learned helplessness. In his book Learned Optimism he reports on three specific patterns of beliefs that cause us to feel helpless and can destroy virtually every aspect of our lives. He calls these three categories permanence, pervasiveness, and personal. Many of our country's greatest achievers have succeeded in spite of running into huge problems and barriers. The difference between them and those who give up revolves around their beliefs about the permanence, or lack thereof, of their problems. Achievers rarely, if ever, see a problem as permanent, while those who fail see even the smallest problems as permanent. Once you adopt the belief that there's nothing you can do to change something, simply because nothing you've done up until now has changed it, you start to take a pernicious poison into your system. Eight years ago, when I had hit rock bottom and despaired of ever turning things around, I thought my problems were permanent. That was the closest thing to emotional death I've ever experienced. I learned to link so much pain to holding that belief that I was able to destroy it, and I've never indulged in it again. You must do the same. If you ever hear yourself or anyone you care about starting to express the belief that a problem is permanent, it's time to immediately shake that person loose. No matter what happens in your life, you've got to be able to believe, " This, too, shall pass, " and that if you keep persisting, you'll find a way.

The second difference between winners and losers, those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic, is their beliefs about the pervasiveness of problems. An achiever never sees a problem as being pervasive, that is, that one problem controls their whole life. They always see it as, " Well, it's just a little challenge with my eating pattern." They don't see it as, " I'm the problem. Because I overeat, my whole life is destroyed." Conversely, those who are pessimistic—those who have learned helplessness—have developed a belief that because they screwed up in one area, they are a screw-up! They believe that because they have financial challenges, their whole life is now destroyed: their kids won't be taken care of, their spouses will leave them, and so on. Pretty soon they generalize that things are out of control and feel completely helpless. Imagine the impact of permanence and pervasiveness together! The solution to both permanence and pervasiveness is to see something you can take control of in your life, and begin to take action in that direction. As you do this, some of these limiting beliefs will disappear. The final category of belief, which Seligman calls personal, I refer to as the problem being personal. If we don't see a failure as a challenge to modify our approach, but rather as a problem with ourselves, as a personality defect, we will immediately feel overwhelmed. After all, how do you change your entire life? Isn't that more difficult than just changing your actions in a particular area? Be wary of adopting the belief of the problem being personal. How inspired can you get by beating yourself up?

Holding these limiting beliefs is equivalent to systematically ingesting minute doses of arsenic that, over time, build up to a fatal dose. While we don't die immediately, we start dying emotionally the moment we partake of them. So we have to avoid them at all costs. Remember, as long as you believe something, your brain operates on automatic pilot, filtering any input from the environment and searching for references to validate your belief, regardless of what it is.

" It is the mind that maketh good of ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor."

EDMUND SPENSER