Change your states and you change your life

You can now change your state in so many ways, and they're all so simple. You can change your physiology immediately just by changing your breathing. You can change your focus by deciding what to focus on, or the order of things you focus on, or how you do it. You can change your submodalities. If you've been consistently focusing on the worst that could happen, there's no excuse for continuing to do that. Start now to focus on the best.

The key in life is to have so many ways to direct your life that it becomes an art. The challenge for most people is that they have only a few ways to change their state: they overeat, over drink, oversleep, over shop, smoke, or take a drug—none of which empower us, and all of which can have disastrous and tragic consequences. The biggest problem is that many of these consequences are cumulative, so we don't even notice the danger until it's too late. That's what happened to Elvis Presley, and that, unfortunately, is also what's happening every day to so many other people. Picture an unfortunate frog in a kettle being slowly simmered to death. If he had been dropped into a fully boiling pot, the shock of the heat would have caused him to jump back out immediately—but with the heat slowly building, he never notices he's in danger until it's too late to get out. The journey toward Niagara Falls begins when you don't control your states, because if you don't control your states, you won't be able to control your behavior. If there are things you need to accomplish but you can't get motivated, realize you're not in the appropriate state. That's not an excuse, though, that's a command! It's a command to do whatever it takes to change your state, whether it's changing your physiology or your focus. At one time, I put myself in a state of being pressured to write my book; no wonder I felt it was impossible! But then I had to find a way to change my state; otherwise, you wouldn't be reading this today. I had to be in a state of creativity, a state of excitement. If you want to go on a diet, it's not going to work if you're in a fearful state, or a worried state, or a frustrated state. You've got to be in a determined state in order to succeed. Or, if you want to perform better on your job, realize that intelligence is often a factor of state. People who supposedly have limited capability will find their talent shooting through the roof if they get into a new state. I've demonstrated this many times with dyslexic people.

While dyslexia is a function of our visual faculties, it's also a function of our mental and emotional states. People who are dyslexic do not reverse letters or words every time they read something. They may do it most of the time, but they don't do it all of the time. The difference between when they're able to read clearly and when they reverse letters all comes down to state. If you change their state, you immediately change their performance. Anyone who's dyslexic or has any other state-based challenge can use these strategies to turn themselves around.

Since movement can instantly change how we feel, it makes sense for us to create lots of ways to change our state with one, singular movement in an instant. One of the things that most powerfully changed my life was something I first learned years ago. In Canada I found a man who was breaking wood karate-style. Instead of spending a year and a half to two years to learn to do it, with no martial arts training, I simply found out what he was focusing on, how he was focusing (the brightness and so on) in his head, what his beliefs were, and what his physical strategy was—how he specifically used his body to break the wood.

I practiced over and over his physical movements identically with tremendous emotional intensity, sending my brain deep sensations of certainty. And all the while, my instructor coached me on my movements. Barn! I broke through one piece of wood, then two pieces, then three pieces, then four. What had I done to accomplish this? 1)1 raised my standards and made breaking the wood a must—something I previously would have accepted as a limitation; 2) I changed my limiting belief about my ability to do this by changing my emotional state into one of certainty, and 3) I modeled an effective strategy for producing the result.

This act transformed my sense of power and certainty throughout my whole body. I began to use this same " wood breaking" sense of certainty to accomplish other things I never thought I could do, breaking through my procrastination and some of my fears easily. Over the years I continued to use and reinforce these sensations, and I began to teach them to others, even children, eleven- and twelve-year-old girls, showing them how to increase their self-esteem by giving them an experience they didn't think was possible. I eventually started using this as part of my video-based Unlimited Power seminars, conducted by my franchisees, our Personal Development Consultants around the world.

Often in 30 minutes or less they are able to help their participants to overcome their fears and learn how to break through anything that stops them in their lives. After breaking the wood, they learn to use this experience to give themselves the sense of certainty that is necessary in pursuing anything they want to achieve in life. It's always fascinating to see a huge man who thinks he can do it with just brute force get up there and miss, and then watch a woman half his size and muscular tone break through in a heartbeat because she's developed the certainty in her physiology.

" Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him."

ALDOUS HUXLEY

You've got to realize that you must take conscious control of running your own mind. You've got to do it deliberately; otherwise, you're going to be at the mercy of whatever happens around you. The first skill you must master is to be able to change your state instantly no matter what the environment, no matter how scared or frustrated you are. This is one of the foundational skills people develop in my seminars. They learn how to quickly change their state from being afraid and " knowing" they can't do something, to knowing they can do it and being able to take effective action. Developing experiences like this in which you change quickly gives you tremendous power in your life—something you can't fully appreciate until you really try it for yourself.

The second skill is that you should be able to change state consistently in any environment—maybe in an environment that used to make you uncomfortable, but in which you can now change your state time and again, conditioning yourself until you feel good no matter where you are. The third skill, of course, is to establish a set of habitual patterns of using your physiology and focus so that you consistently feel good without any conscious effort whatsoever. My definition of success is to live your

life in a way that causes you to feel tons of pleasure and very little pain—and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain. Someone who's achieved a lot but is living in emotional pain all the time, or is surrounded by people in pain all the time, isn't truly successful. The fourth goal is to enable others to change their state instantly, to change their state in any environment, and to change their state for their whole life. This is what my franchisees learn to be able to do in their seminars and in their one-on-one work with people.

So, what do you need to remember from this chapter? All that you really want in life is to change how you feel. Again, all your emotions are nothing but biochemical storms in your brain, and you are in control of them at any moment in time. You can feel ecstasy right now, or you can feel pain or depression or overwhelmed—it's all up to you. You don't need drugs or anything else to do it. There are much more effective ways and, as you learned in the chapter on beliefs, drugs can be overpowered by the chemicals you create in your own body, by changing your focus and the way you're using your physiology. These chemicals are much more powerful than virtually any outside substance.

" Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm."

RALPH WALDO EMERSON