You must daily have the courage to risk making mistakes, risk failure, risk being humiliated. A step in the wrong direction is better than staying “on the spot” all your life.

-Maxwell Maltz

There are some activities and jobs in which people must fail every day in order to succeed. Think of the insurance salesman who is turned down 9 times in a row, just to have one success. Or the skateboarder who must fail at performing a new trick many times before he is able to perform it successfully one time. We can learn a lot from these extreme failing individuals- they seem to view failure as a temporary setback, or a learning experience.

Learning from Extreme Failing: Skateboarders

As a high school student, I loved skateboarding. The nature of skateboarding involves a lot of failing- my skater friends allowed themselves to fail much more often than I did, and in doing so, they became great. I’ve pulled together some footage from my high school skateboarding days to give you a visual of extreme failing:

What if a skateboarder fell one too many times, and thought of his failure as a defeat, wallowing in its permanence and pervasiveness? What if he decided he wouldn’t try the same trick again, for months? I can tell you that he wouldn’t get very far in skateboarding with that mindset. To be successful at skateboarding, you must pick yourself up after a failure and immediately start trying again. You must look at a failure as a challenge, or a temporary setback to achieving your goal.

The Extreme Failing Mindset Can be Applied to Any Type of Setback

The extreme failing mindset isn’t just for insurance salesmen and skateboarders- it can help anyone overcome a setback in their life. One example would be if you recently broke up with someone- If you tell yourself “This is only temporary, I will find someone else”, you will be on your way to a fast recovery. But if tell yourself “This person meant everything to me, I’ll never find someone else like them”, you are setting yourself up for depression and pain.

Similarly, if you recently lost your job, and explain it to yourself as “I lost my job because I am lazy and incompetent- no other employer will want to hire me”, you most likely won’t recover and get a new job for a while- the negative mindset will be self-fulfilling. By contrast, if you tell yourself “The economy is not doing well right now so my employer had to make some cutbacks- I tried my best, and now I will find a new job even better than the last”, you will be on your way to finding a great new job.

Three Dimensions of Explaining Setbacks to Yourself

Based on years of research from psychologist Martin Seligman (explained in his book Learned Optimism), there are three dimensions of explaining setbacks to yourself: Permanence, Pervasiveness, and Personalization. On each dimension, you can explain a setback with either the extreme failing (optimist) mindset, or the pessimist mindset:

Permanence: Do you believe the cause of the bad event is permanent or temporary? Extreme failing individuals believe the bad event is temporary.

Breaking up example: Tell yourself “I will find someone else”

Pervasiveness: Do you believe the cause of the bad event is universal, or specific? Extreme failing individuals believe the cause of a bad event is specific.

Breaking up example: Tell yourself “My relationship was only one part of my life”

Personalization: Do you believe the cause of the bad event is your fault (internalize), or other people’s fault (externalized)? Extreme failing individuals believe the bad event is external to themselves.

Breaking up example: Tell yourself “My ex was not the right person for me”

Do You Have the Extreme Failing Mindset? Take the Test

How do you perceive failures in your own life? Take the test to find out how well you handle setbacks, and how much of an extreme failing individual (optimist) you are.

Taking Responsibility

A comment was recently posted by Brandon (see below), with concerns over how the Martin Seligman’s optimism test, and the Personalization dimension of explanatory style. The test seems to encourage us to not take responsibility, and instead blame external events/people. Here is a quote from Dr. Seligman’s book to help answer Brandon’s concern:

I am unwilling to advocate any strategy that further erodes responsibility. I don’t believe people should change their beliefs from internal to external wholesale. Nevertheless, there is one condition under which this usually should be done: depression . . . We want people to change, and we know they will not change if they do not assume responsibility. If we want people to change, internality is not as crucial as the permanence dimension is. If you believe the cause of your mess is permanent, you will not act to change it. If, however, you believe the cause is temporary, you can act to change it. If we want people to be responsible for what they do, then yes, we want them to have an internal style. More important, people must have a temporary style for bad events- they must believe that whatever the cause of the bad event, it can be changed.

According to Seligman, we should use the external explanation only in situations where we are at risk for depression. Additionally, the Permanence dimension (temporary/permanent) is the key to change, not  Personalization (internal/external).

photo credit: I Love Trees

What does it benefit to man if he gains the entire world, but loses himself?

-Jesus Christ

Social programming is the set of instructions each of us learned to fit in with society. Our family members, school teachers, and peer groups were all part of the socialization process. The long-term affect of this socialization is that we seek external approval and external goals in our lives. If we are to take control of our consciousness and pursue our own goals, we must learn to break free from social programming:

Caught in a treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands. In a complex society, many powerful groups are involved in socializing, sometimes to seemingly contradictory goals . . . Schools, churches, and banks try to turn us into responsible citizens willing to work hard and save . . . merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers to spend our earnings on products that will produce the most profits for them . . . gamblers, pimps, and drug dealers . . . promise rewards for easy dissipation- provided we pay. The messages are very different, but their outcome is essentially the same: they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes.

-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

Society tries bribing us at every opportunity. People who submit completely to social programming, and mistakenly believe that their happiness is obtained only by achieving external goals, are “rat racers” who never enjoy the present moments of life.

Do you constantly delay gratification to the future? Are you always looking to others for approval, and setting external goals? If so, your social programming is being used against you:

Ways Your Social Programming Can Be Used Against You

Money- “I want to be rich”

• Falsely believing that you will be happy when you make more money
• Becoming a workaholic to make more money

Status- “I want to be popular”

• Falsely believing that “once I obtain status, people will like and respect me”
• Trying to “keep up with the Joneses”
• Becoming popular with lots of people, but not building close relationships with individuals

Approval- “I want to be liked”

• Working at a job you hate to pay for your family’s high consumption
• Pursuing a career path that Mom or Dad told you to go after
• Not speaking up at work when you have a good idea, for fear of getting shot down

Power- “I want to dominate”

• Using others only as a means to achieve your goals
• Trying to one-up others, dominate conversations
• Pinpoint other people’s weaknesses and failures

How to Break Free from Social Programming

The key to breaking free from social programming is not to eliminate all external goals. Instead, it is to create goals that are meaningful to you personally, and then enjoy the day to day process of realizing those goals. Here are some tips for breaking free-

1) Choose your own values, principles, and goals

To assume responsibility for choosing our values, principles, and goals, relying solely upon our own reason and understanding- to honor our internal signals to that extent- is to practice the ultimate form of intellectual independence, the one most difficult for the overwhelming majority of human beings and for which their upbringing has least prepared them.

-Nathaniel Branden, Honoring the Self

It’s easy to adopt external goals that society gives you- after all, those are the goals you were programmed to adopt. It’s more difficult to create your own set of values- this requires intellectual independence and aloneness from society.

2) Follow your own vision

You follow your own vision by moving forward with your own personally selected goals, and not letting any external circumstances circumvent who you are. Following your own vision can leave you feeling alone in the world, and requires courage. But the more you are able to become independent and think for yourself, the higher your own self-esteem will be.

3) Accept your aloneness

You must accept your aloneness in order to truly be free of social programming:

We can learn from one another, but we cannot share the act of being conscious or of thinking. We can share the results- namely, our thoughts and perceptions- but consciousness, awareness, thinking, reasoning is, ultimately, an individual, solitary process, not a social one. And many people dread independent thought and judgment precisely because of this factor of inescapable aloneness; it makes them aware of their own separateness as living entities; it makes them aware of the responsibility they must bear for their own existence.

-Nathaniel Branden, Honoring the Self

4) Be honest with yourself

Here is a poem which emphasizes being honest with yourself:

The Guy in the Glass

When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf,
And the world makes you King for a day,
Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,
And see what that guy has to say.

For it isn’t your Father, or Mother, or Wife,
Who judgement upon you must pass.
The feller whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the guy staring back from the glass.

He’s the feller to please, never mind all the rest,
For he’s with you clear up to the end,
And you’ve passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the guy in the glass is your friend.

You may be like Jack Horner and “chisel” a plum,
And think you’re a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look him straight in the eye.

You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
If you’ve cheated the guy in the glass.

-Dale Wimbrow

Note: The word pelf in the first line means “wealth.”

Breaking Free is a Life-Long Process

Your genes instruct you on what feels good and bad, and society bribes you on how to expend your energy. To take control of your consciousness, you must be fully aware of social and genetic programming, and make yourself independent of it as much as possible. By taking control of your consciousness, and following your own vision, you will become better at thinking for yourself and more independent of others.

Breaking free is a life-long process, not a one-time effort. But I promise you, based on my own personal experience- the quality of your own life will improve drastically when you begin the process of breaking free.

Part of the Breaking Free Series

photo credit: Arbitrium

Genetic programming is the set of instructions each of us was born with. It gives us instinctual drives such as fight-or-flight that are meant to motivate us toward activities which ensure our survival. In modern day society, if we are to take control of our consciousness and pursue our own goals, we must learn to break free from genetic programming:

Submission to genetic programming can become quite disastrous, because it leaves us helpless. A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. Instead of deciding how to act in terms of personal goals, he has to surrender to the things that his body has been programmed (or misprogrammed) to do. One must particularly achieve control over instinctual drives to achieve a healthy independence of society, for as long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

People who submit completely to their genetic programming, and mistakenly believe that anything which feels good equates to happiness, live by the maxim “seek pleasure and avoid pain.” They are constantly trying to fill their genetic drives in the present, while ignoring the long-term consequences. They are also easier targets for societal organizations that take advantage of an individual’s instinctual drives.

Do you respond predictably to what instinctually makes you feels good and bad? Are you constantly seeking pleasure and avoiding pain? If so, your genetic programming is being used against you:

Ways Your Genetic Programming Can Be Used Against You

Fight-or-Flight- “React to perceived threats”

• Getting stuck in “survival mode” due to excessive stress at work
• Having an argument with your spouse, resulting in stress

Food- “It tastes good”

• Overeating
• Using food as a form of self-medication due to being unhappy with your life

Sex- “It feels good”

• Constantly being preoccupied with sex, distracting you from your personal goals
• Using pornography, strip clubs, or prostitution as a form of self-medication due to being unhappy with your life

Drugs and Alcohol- “It feels good”

• Needing alcohol to let loose and have fun at social events
• Using drugs as a form of self-medication due to being unhappy with your life
• Getting your fix by frequenting bars, liquor stores, or drug dealers

How to Break Free from Genetic Programming

If you cannot resist what feels good, tastes good, or control the way you react to perceived threats, you are not free to direct your consciousness towards the path you choose. You are living your life without taking conscious control of it. But there are some easy habits you can adopt to change the way you respond to genetic programming-

1) Use mental rehearsal to practice taking control of your consciousness

Spend 20-30 minutes a day mentally rehearsing situations in which instinctual drive is taking control- this is when you are reacting to things that taste good, feel good, or responding to perceived threats. In your mind’s eye, take conscious control of the situation, and respond in a positive manner.

For example, if you tend to overeat during meals, mentally rehearse yourself at a restaurant, eating a reasonable portion of food, and leaving the rest, or getting a to-go box. But don’t stop there- mentally rehearse every possible situation in which you need to take control. Visualize yourself responding positively to all sorts of possible scenarios, such as friends bringing snacks to work, or going to a buffet restaurant. You are practicing your self control, the same way a sports player would practice before a game.

You may start to think your time is being wasted, but give this a try for at least a week and you will be surprised. This is because you are tricking your mind- you will begin to notice that it will be easier for you to take control of yourself when the actual situation occurs. Your brain cannot actually tell the difference between mental rehearsal and reality. Keep this up for 21 days and you’ll find yourself much closer towards having complete control of your genetic programming.

2) Create a mantra to use whenever you lose control

Repeat a phrase to yourself every time your genetic programming would typically take control. For example, if you normally get stressed out when you have a lot on your plate at work, you can use the mantra “I’ll handle it.” Then, whenever you feel your muscles get tense and feel yourself slipping into survival mode, repeat the mantra to yourself “I’ll handle it.” Like mental rehearsal, this is a way of tricking your mind. On a subconscious level, your mind will believe your mantra, and you will distract yourself from the typical stress response.

3) Stay in control by staying accountable to yourself and close friends/family members

Find a way to track your progress, such as a daily log showing how many times you took conscious control over your genetic programming. After a month of progress, reward yourself in some way. For example, if you made progress by no longer using alcohol to self-medicate for a month, reward yourself with a nice dinner (note: if you are an alcoholic, I recommend you begin attending AA meetings as a support group).

Tell close friends and family members about your goal of taking control. Make sure you only tell those friends and family members which have been supportive of your personal growth in the past. Otherwise, instead of keeping you accountable, they may hold you back. After you’ve told your supportive friends/family members, ask for their help in keeping you accountable.

Breaking Free is a Life-Long Process

Your genes instruct you on what feels good and bad, and society bribes you on how to expend your energy. To take control of your consciousness, you must be fully aware of social and genetic programming, and make yourself independent of it as much as possible. By taking control of your consciousness, and resisting instinctual drives, you will be free to direct your energy towards the path you choose.

Breaking free is a life-long process, not a one-time effort. But I promise you, based on my own personal experience- the quality of your own life will improve drastically when you begin the process of breaking free.

Part of the Breaking Free Series

photo credit: beckita115

You have many preconceived notions about what you want from life. These include survival needs programmed by your genes- food, sex, and fight-or-flight. These also include desires programmed by your society- to be well liked, rich, and attractive. If you embrace these needs and desires, you may be lucky and be the perfect fit for your time and place in history. But what if you aren’t so lucky? And whether or not you are lucky, is embracing these needs and desires the best use of your energy?

You must learn to break free from social and genetic programming in order to truly take control of your consciousness and follow your own vision. This two-part series covers-

Breaking Free from Genetic Programming

Breaking Free from Social Programming

photo credit: johnmuk

Breaking bad habits requires learning how to get out of autopilot mode

What is autopilot mode? One way to describe it would be your morning routine- You get up, brush your teeth, shower, and get dressed, all without thinking about it. This is good, because you wouldn’t want to have to consciously think through repetitive tasks. But the problem is when bad habits and behaviors become automatic. For example, if you made a habit of waking up each day in a bad mood and thinking negative thoughts, this could have a negative impact on the rest of your day.

How Autopilot Mode is initiated

A growing body of research suggests that as little as 5 percent of our behaviors are made consciously. This means that as much as 95 percent of what we do occurs in autopilot mode- meaning that most skills and behaviors you learn eventually becomes automatic habits. For example, when learning to ride a bike, you tried pushing the pedals, but you couldn’t stay balanced, so you fell down. If you decided not to give up and repeated practice, you eventually improved your balance. One day, bike riding became an automatic habit for you- you didn’t even have to think about it any more.

This is beneficial for learning new skills and positive habits, but what about negative mindsets and bad habits? What if you repeated being impatient with friends and family members, until it became automatic? To break this bad habit, you would need to learn how to get out of autopilot mode:

How to Break Bad Habits by getting out of Autopilot Mode

With practice, whenever you revert back to your old self, you can detect this and interrupt the program.

-Joe Dispenza, Evolve Your Brain

1) Create an Anti-Bad-Habit Habit

Every time you feel yourself falling into a habitual negative mindset or bad habit:

1) Focus on a word or phrase that has a positive meaning to you. Words like “one,” “love”, “peace”, or “evolve” work well.

2) If you find your mind has wandered, or you notice any intrusive thoughts entering your mind, simply disregard them and return your focus to your word or phrase.

After repetition, you will create an anti-negative-habit habit. Just don’t angrily yell your phrase like Frank does in Seinfeld episode Serenity Now, otherwise you might create a habit just as bad as your original one!

Example of using this method correctly: Tim has a bad habit of being impatient when interacting with peers at work, family members, and the cashier after waiting in line at the store- he creates a positive habit of saying to himself “kindness matters.” This makes him consciously aware of how he wants to behave in the situation, and is then able to break his bad habit.

2) Mentally rehearse your day without the bad habit

See yourself in your imagination taking positive, intelligent action toward solving a problem or reaching a goal. See yourself reacting to threats, not by running away or evading them, but by meeting them, dealing with them, and grappling with them in an aggressive and intelligent manner.

-Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics

For 20-30 minutes each morning, go somewhere quiet, close your eyes, and in your mind, go through your day. Think of all the times throughout your day that you typically act out the bad habit or behavior. Now instead of acting that same behavior, choose an alternate, more positive behavior, and mentally rehearse that behavior.

After doing this mental rehearsal for several days, you will notice that you start acting on that mental image, and molding your reality to match it. This is because your brain cannot actually tell the difference between mental rehearsal and reality. Professional athletes use this same trick to mentally practice and improve their game.

4) Closely examine your friendships

Are you friends reinforcing your bad habit, or are they supportive of you breaking it? You need to closely examine your friendships and determine if they are enabling you to continue this negative behavior, or helping you break it. If they continue to enable/reinforce you to continue your bad habit, it may be time to re-think your friendships. You should consider how truly dedicated you are about breaking your bad habit, and what sacrifices you may have to make along the way.

5) Focus energy on a positive habit that will replace the bad habit, versus the bad habit you are trying to resist

Read my post on creating consistent daily habits. Use the tips there to apply toward the positive habit you are introducing into your life. Specifically:

• You must practice the new positive habit, breaking your bad habit, each day consistently for the first 21 days
• You must be accountable to yourself
• You must accept yourself

6) Initiate your change in small increments

If nothing succeeds like success, it is equally true that nothing fails like excess. Because change requires moving beyond our comfort zone, it is best initiated in small and manageable increments.

-Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement

If you are trying to break a highly-addictive bad habit such as smoking, quitting cold turkey is often setting yourself up for failure- incremental change is the way to succeed. Make a plan to smoke less cigarettes during your first week, with the longer-term goal of quitting.

photo credit: FrancoisRoche

Important: Please read How Does The Law of Attraction Explain The Holocaust? for my updated mindset regarding The Law of Attraction.

Napoleon Hill

Thought, backed by strong desire, has the tendency to transmute itself into its physical equivalent.

-Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

The Law of Attraction explains that you attract into your life whatever you think about. With the recent popularity of The Secret, and resurgence of books such as Think and Grow Rich, there has been a lot of new attention focused on The Law of Attraction. Science has also started providing new evidence to support The Law of Attraction- neurologists have found that simply thinking changes the brain. Recent books, such as Evolve Your Brain, explain the science behind The Law of Attraction in great detail:

The more we think the same thoughts, which produce the same chemicals, causing the body to have the same feelings, the more we become physically modified by our thoughts.

-Joe Dispenza, Evolve Your Brain

Unfortunately, the popularity of the Law of Attraction has also made available a lot of new material on the subject that is either 1) dumbed down for the masses, or 2) inaccurate. Clay Collins wrote and excellent post about this. The inaccurate information about the Law of Attraction leads to frustration when people try to manifest their intention and fail. In my own experience in manifesting my intentions, I’ve found three failures/mistakes that inhibited “the secret” from working:

3 Ways to Fail at Manifesting Your Intention

1) Not accepting your present reality

So long as we cannot accept what we are at any moment, we cannot change. Put yourself on the side of reality versus trying to fight reality.

-Nathaniel Branden, Honoring the Self

Before you can even begin to manifest your intention using the Law of Attraction, you must first accept your current reality, your current emotions, and your current life in its entirety. When you have a perfect vision of what you want to manifest in your life, but don’t accept your present, that is a recipe for disaster. You must fully accept and validate yourself and all of your emotions, with the goal of achieving your vision.

2) Basing your intention on a false belief

If you are basing your intention on a false belief, such as believing that more money will make you significantly happier, you will fail at manifesting. You may enjoy imagining how happy you will be after manifesting on your completely unrealistic, false belief. But your imagination is as far as the manifestation will go if it is based on a false belief.

3) No energy/emotion in what you are trying to manifest

Steve Pavlina wrote a great article about this, which explains, “Great content + no energy = an intention that won’t manifest anything but frustration.” For example, if you recite or meditate on your intention each day, but have no emotion attached to it, you won’t see results.

This also ties in with the #2 way of failing to manifest (basing your intention on a false belief), because if you are trying to manifest an intention based on a false belief, there’s only so much energy/emotion you will put into manifesting before you realize you are fooling yourself.

When you hear the word invest, you might think of stocks, bonds and real estate. But the topic of this post is investing in yourself. How do you invest in yourself? You do this every time you choose to channel your time, money and energy into an endeavor that will make you a more successful, knowledgeable person in the long-run.

You have probably heard the financial advice telling you to “stop buying Starbucks every day, and instead, put that money into savings”, and over time, especially if you start young, the compound interest will make you rich. There is a similar effect when you decide to invest in yourself, for example “instead of watching television for 30 minutes per evening, put that time and energy into yourself.” This may not make you rich, but the effect it will have on your long-term success is significant. You could call this the effect of compound success:

The results of Investing in Yourself versus Stagnation are significant over time

When investing in yourself, you are always devoting a combination of time, energy and money. It is important to not focus so much on the monetary side of investing in yourself (ex. Cost of meeting with a personal trainer), and instead think about the positive long-term benefits this will have on your life:

.

These are just examples- think for a moment about what investments you could be making in yourself. What are the long-term benefits you would receive? Can you see how you would be more successful in the long run?

Tips for Investing in Yourself

1) Invest your Time and Energy before your Money

When I am considering making an investment in myself that will cost money, I always make sure I am fully committed beforehand. For example, before I started meeting with a personal trainer, I committed to working out six times per week for a month. This way, I had already built the habit of exercising, so the likelihood increased that my financial investment would be worthwhile.

2) Don’t try to do too much

When we try to do too much, we compromise our potential for growth, both in terms of happiness as well as quantifiable success. Quantity of good things affects quality.

-Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier

Write out a list of all the investments in yourself you would like to make, and then prioritize the list by long-term benefits. Focus on the investments with the most long-term potential.

3) After deciding on an Investment in yourself, write down the circumstances in which you will quit

Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.

-Seth Godin, The Dip

Instead of deciding to quit when you are in the middle of your new endeavor, decide under what circumstances you will quit before you start. Then put all your energy into the investment. This will ensure that if you do quit, you are quitting for the right reasons. Read my post on quitting for specific examples of how to use strategic quitting for success.