THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS! – PART 1

Not everybody is capable of having a record month. After all, life isn’t all about having record months in your appraisal business, is it? No, I preach in this show all the time about work life balance and even balance in your business. Its not necessarily about just doing more, its about doing more of what you love, more of what moves you, more profitable work and less busy work, being more productive in less time, and ultimately living a life on purpose and having a business that resonates with your life’s purpose and life goals. Of course, if you have neither of those figured out yet, that’s where I would encourage you to focus all of your energy for a while! And if you do have those two things figured out, kudos to you! You’re likely a beacon of hope for others because those who are on purpose and on goal move differently through the world than those who aren’t. I’ll let some of you in on a little secret too, the percentage of people who are on purpose and on goal is extremely small in the grand scheme of things. Its not a justification, by the way, simply a fact that most people never figure out how to even move toward being on purpose, much less actually find what that is.

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And we already know that most people are too busy just doing life to take time to sit down and write out some goals. I have this conversation all the time where I’m talking with somebody, maybe interviewing somebody for the coaching program, and I ask, “do you have some goals for your life and business?”, and, of course, they all say yes because nobody wants to say no to that question. Then I follow up with, “would you be willing to share any of them with me?”, to which they almost always reply by saying something like, “well, I want to do this and I’d like to do that, I’d like to hit this number and hire this person…”, which is all great stuff. Then I say, “that all sounds great, if you want to shoot me your written goals, I’d be happy to take a deep dive into them and give you my thoughts on how to give them some rocket fuel or some steps on how to accomplish some of them quicker.” The reply I get 99% of the time is, “well, it will take me some time to write them all down, can I get back with you in a week or so?”

Listen friends, I get it! It takes time to sit and think. It takes energy to ponder your future. It takes effort to do something that many people just simply aren’t sure why they would even need to do some of the things we talk about on this show and coach on every day. I get it. You just have to know that those who do, or have taken the time to think, imagine, dream, ponder, sit and write, set some parameters, and then look at those things on a regular basis are doing the hard work. Those who think that they’re so busy and that gives them some sense of importance, like they’re the ones doing the real hard work and have no time for frivolous things like thinking about purpose, goals, and the future, the real hard work is in becoming still, not in being busy. Grinding it out is easy. Sitting and imagining what you want your tomorrow to be and who you want to be is grueling work, but by far the most rewarding work you can do. Of course, when I tell people that, from time to time I’ll get some questions. These are from the people who know its important but maybe don’t know how to do it, they don’t fully understand why to do it, or they want to make sure they’re doing it correctly. So what I’d like to do in this episode is go over some of the science behind the why, the what, and the how of deliberately and intentionally becoming, doing, and having all of the things you say you’d like to but maybe haven’t figured out the how. There are some key things that need to be understood about how the brain and body work in order to do this kind of extremely valuable pondering and goal setting that I teach so I’m going to go over that in this episode. I know I’ve said this before about several of the episodes on this podcast, but this may just be one of the most important 2 part episodes I do this year so you’ll want to listen to this one a bunch of times. The information I’m going to share in these episodes represents about 30 years of study for me, but not only study, lots of practice and application in my life. Coming from a martial arts and tactical applications teaching background, we are testers of theory and application. If something doesn’t work in battle, so to speak, its thrown out in favor of something that will. The same is true for me and business theory and practice. I’ll try almost anything in pursuit of more life, more profit, better service, more time, better business, higher fees, etcetera. If it doesn’t work initially, I’ll modify and retry. I’ll do this several times before scrapping the theory and the practice and move on to something else.

One of the areas I’m experienced and qualified to teach in, to some degree, is how the mind and body work. Not only did I study and learn lots about how the body moves, how it reacts to a variety of stimulus, how it responds to energy, pain, movement, bullets, punches, kicks, joint locks, and whatever else may affect the body, I also studied how the brain works and how the brain and body are connected and work together. As you might imagine, living in a zen monastery and studying meditation at a deep level gave me the inspiration, as well as the teachers, to learn everything I could about the brain and the science behind meditation, how it affects the brain and body, whats going on when you meditate, when you chant, when we talk and move, what we say to ourselves on a daily basis, how the conscious and subconscious potions of the brain work, how those affect the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, and so on. This has always been a fascinating subject for me and I was, of course, extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to make it my life’s study every day for several years while living in the Aikido and Zen school, and the study and application has never stopped. One of my deep interests and branches of study when it comes to the brain/body connection has been, what I’ll simply call ‘the science of success.’ In essence, how does what we think affect what we become, what we act on, what results we get, what we avoid doing, what we choose, and, maybe most importantly, what is possible. My introduction to this world of brain/body science has become, for me, a big part of my daily life, my studies, what I teach and coach on, and what I apply in my life and business. One of the great things about life and business, they’re both like big gymnasiums. You can choose to show up or not, you can try things out, you can build yourself up, you can sit around and talk the whole time if you choose, you can increase your capacity to do work, you can try to find hacks and shortcuts, you can make some mistakes and its not the end of the world, but it’s ultimately a place to go practice and get better. If, one day you show up and aren’t super motivated, no problem, you do what you can and you try again tomorrow. But you keep showing up and working on your game. You may have heard the metaphor that business is like war! You’ve got to annihilate the competition and take out your enemies. There are threats all around and you have to cover your flank while developing clever strategies to defeat the enemy. These are horrible metaphors, and I’ll show you why as we move through this episode. Life and business are not war, they’re both more like sport where you get to practice and then play, practice then play. You get to work on things and then try them out in the game to see what works and what doesn’t. If you screw up, you’re not dead, your team isnt dead. You make notes, you regroup, you work on strategy and skills a bit and then you deploy your new strategy and skills in the game and get feedback.

The big problem for most people is not the lack of skill, it’s the lack of understanding about how things work, how the tools each and every one of us has deep within work, how to practice, and then how to employ those tools and skills in the game of life and business. Everything begins with a thought and what most don’t realize is that the brain is primarily a record of the past. Thoughts are the language of the brain and emotions are the language of the body. Most people are living in emergency and survival mode and it’s on autopilot, they don’t even know it. This is the anxiety ridden, high stress mode of ‘gotta, gotta, gotta. Gotta get this done, gotta invoice this person, gotta pay this bill…’ This is not the state of mind or time to create, be open, learn, grow, Imagine, relax, have fun, dream…. Over 90% of what we think about on a daily basis are the same thoughts we thought the day before. The same thoughts trigger the same emotions, and the same emotions trigger the same actions. The same actions generally trigger the same results. We can ponder the future and hope for something different, but that’s where most people stop, with the wishing and hoping. Or, thoughts about the future trigger negative emotions and that eventually becomes a pattern. For most people, they have a hard time thinking beyond how they feel so their emotions tend to dictate what and how they think. When you’re constantly having your thoughts dictated to you by your emotions, you’re living in the past and letting the past control and dictate your future. Your lens of the future is going to be colored by the past so you’ll have a difficult time ever creating new emotions, thus new thoughts, and a new future. They wake up in the morning and they start thinking. Without realizing it, they start thinking about all of the things that have happened to them and have created the circumstances that they wake up into every day. They think about yesterday, their problems, the people, the events, what went on last week, what needs to be done today, the trip they have coming up next month, and all of those thoughts have a corresponding emotional charge to them based on a past experience and its corresponding hard wired emotion based on how you felt about that event, whether it really happened yet or your think it might happen in the future. You see, when something happens to us, a thought about that thing occurs and what follows every thought is an emotion about that thought. All emotions are intimately related to a prior thought. And you don’t have a thought without triggering some kind of emotion. You might be apathetic and have what feels like no emotion about something, but apathy is still has an chemical signature in the brain and body, and we call that chemical signature an emotion. Every one of your memories and thoughts has an emotion associate with it and emotions are the end product of experiences, experiences that have happened in the past-even if the past was one second ago. Your life partner says, “I love you’, and that triggers an emotion. The emotion comes after the event that just occurred. Thus, almost all of our thoughts and emotional patterns are rooted in the past.

When you have a thought about something, specific neurons are fired in the brain and they are associated and wired with that emotion. All similar events that we see and experience have similar patterns of neurons firing in our brains. The more those neurons fire, the more they get hard wired in that pattern. Once they become hardwired into that firing and wiring pattern, we call that particular thought/emotion pairing a habit. A thought occurs, a chemical reaction in the body happens, we call that chemical reaction an emotion, and the thought and emotion are linked into a firing and wiring pattern in the brain. Do it enough times and, eventually, the body knows that pattern as well, or better, than the brain does and it becomes a habit that starts to happen unconsciously. Its something we don’t have to think about anymore because it’s happening beneath our conscious awareness. At some level, our brains and bodies say, ‘this pattern feels right’, but what it really means is, ‘this pattern feel comfortable based on what I thought and what I did yesterday, and last week, and last month, and for the last 20 years.’ It becomes something for us that we call predictable. We expect it, it happens the way we expect it, then we say, ‘see, just as I expected’, and the firing and wiring pattern in the brain and body is reinforced and it becomes a habitual loop of thinking-feeling, thinking-feeling. From there, something called the Reticular Activating System takes over. That’s the part of our brains that begins to see all of the familiar and predictable patterns that we expect to see in the world based on our belief systems and unconscious patterns and habits. A belief system and habits that are based on the past programming I just mentioned: thoughts, emotions, actions, result, and then another thought, another emotion, another action, another result and this cycle continues endlessly, or until we deliberately take control of the cycle and input some new thought or emotion. We’ll talk about the RAS in a bit and how to use it to our great benefit.

Biology tends to be redundant so the nerve cells that fire together, wire together and it becomes a hard wired pattern and a familiar physio-emotional connection. Those patterns become the emotions and actions we’re the most familiar with and, thus, the easiest and most comfortable for us. Your body gets accustomed to living by the same emotions and making the same familiar decisions and taking the same familiar and comfortable actions. It might be guilt, pain, shame, blame, or disgust, but at least its familiar to you. Most human beings will almost always seek the comfortable and the familiar instead of seeking the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable situation. What they don’t realize is that, by age 20, 30, god forbid 40 and beyond, we have created so many deep thought then emotion connection patterns in the brain and body, remember, we call these habits, that we literally become addicted to the chemical reactions that occur when we fire those thought/emotion signals. When we start to have different thoughts that trigger different emotions, they’ll always be held up by our brains to the habits and patterns we’re comfortable with and tested for congruency with those patterns. We sometimes call those values. If the new thought and subsequent emotional chemical signature don’t agree with what is already there, a feeling of discomfort arises because the new thought and emotion are unfamiliar. We might still act on that new thought and uncomfortable emotion, and when we do, we are building new neural pathways that, if done enough times, will become a habit: a new chemical and neurological pattern in the brain and body that fires and wires together. Firing and wiring together enough times to work through the discomfort and unfamiliarity and, eventually we get comfortable with the new pattern and it becomes a new habit.

Think New Years resolutions. You think a thought, ‘I’m fat!’ That thought triggers an emotion, “I feel bad about myself!” You decide to take some action on it and join a gym. You start going to the gym a couple times a week and feel great! New firing and wiring patterns are happening, new chemical reactions are being cemented into a new thought/emotion pair bond, do it enough times. It becomes a habit and your body and mind develop something of an addiction to that particular chemical signature in your body. In the case of working out and eating healthy, you’ve just developed a healthy chemical addiction in the brain and body. However, what happens for 90+% of most people with their New Years resolutions is that those resolutions, and the new activities they’ve chosen to undertake, eventually bump into the addiction to the old pattern and chemical signature from the past. If they aren’t prepared for how the mind and body deal with addictions, they’ll be smashed in the face with all of the thoughts and reactions from the body to go back to the old familiar and comfortable pattern. The body and mind will create all kinds of distractions, aches and pains, ailments, thoughts and justifications about why you don’t need to keep doing this, you’re too busy, its too long of a drive, you’ve got better things to do, its to hard, and on and on it will go until you either push through and create new firing and wiring patterns, or succumb and fall back to the comfortable and familiar patterns of the past.

If you live in the familiar past, it only makes sense that you will create a very predictable future based on the results you keep getting, results created from doing things the way you’ve always done them. It’s a vicious cycle of waking up with thoughts of a familiar past, thoughts of a predictable future, predictable programming of your reticular activating system which looks for and finds things that it’s familiar with and expecting to find! The more this pattern is reinforced, the more you expect it and the more it magically happens. Of course, its not magic at all, its science! You experience it, you record it in your body and mind, you attach an emotion to it, your emotion about it creates certain patterns in your body and brain which dictate your actions, your actions reinforce your belief and your wiring of the belief, your RAS seeks out more of that familiar pattern, and then you lay down and go to sleep only to wake up the next day having similar thoughts and patterns. 40, 50, 60 years pass in essentially the same pattern of constantly reinforcing that cycle and getting very predictable results from a very familiar past. The moment you recall an event, you trigger the corresponding emotion to that event. In essence, most people are living in and from the familiar past and, since we are a pattern seeking species, we love the familiar. Even if the familiar is painful and extremely limiting, most people will choose the familiar over the unknown 99 out of 100 times. This is why its so difficult to get appraisers off their asses and into doing things that might be unfamiliar to them. Instead of saying, ‘hey, I’ve never been that great at this particular type of thing in the past, but let me try something new and develop some new skills that are unfamiliar to me’, again, 99 out of 100 people will beg for their limitations and their deficiencies, simply because they’re so familiar to them. Its like a long lost friend, even if that friend regularly beats them and makes them feel like shit!

Why does this happen? Because your body is your unconscious mind and it doesn’t know the difference between a real event that created an emotional pattern of firing and wiring, or an imagined event that has exactly the same pattern in your brain and body. When you think about the monster under the bed, your brain, emotions, body chemistry, and reactions are exactly the same as if there was a real monster under the bed. The fact that it was only a thought about an imaginary monster makes no difference to your body and the chemical reactions that are occurring and reinforcing those grooves in your brain and body. This cycle and pattern happens in the positive as well, by the way. Think about the New Years resolution example earlier or when we practice something, say, driving, it is a very conscious act for the first few months of learning and driving. After a while, the whole experience becomes wired in our brains and our bodies and we can literally drive from our garage to our destination without ever thinking a conscious thought. Its what allows you to be driving and thinking about something completely unrelated to the act of driving while you’re doing it. You can make it all the way to your office and realize that you saw nothing the whole way there because you were lost in thought. The act of driving has become unconscious and happens as the result of grooves in our neural pathways and our bodies that have been carved over hundreds and thousands of experiences of driving. Think of any pro athlete who plays their sport so well that it seems simply impossible that they can do what they do. But for them its very possible because their brain body connections and the deep grooves from years and years of reinforcing those patterns and expectations are very deep. At a certain point, based on their familiar past, they create a very predictable future of performance that they expect and, since their RAS is involved, they look for and find opportunities the average person or athlete may never see, or maybe sees it a second later. At one time, the sport was unfamiliar to the pro. But, with constant practice and imagining a particular future result, which is essentially programming that event to eventually come into existence, over time it happens, and with very predictable results. You see, it doesn’t matter if its something that is good for you or something that keeps you in familiar pattern of helplessness and poverty, it all comes from the same pattern of thoughts, emotions, actions based on those emotions, and then results, which reinforce the thoughts about that thing and, thus, trigger emotions that get programmed into a pattern and the cycle is complete.

The reason it’s difficult to get people to see how their thoughts are influencing their results is because over 95% of our thoughts are subconscious. We’re only conscious of the conscious thoughts and some people really do try to think positively about their day and their life. Unfortunately, with 95% of our programming and thoughts being subconscious and based solely on past thoughts and events, meaning we’re simply not conscious of those thoughts, it doesn’t matter if you’re constantly spouting affirmations like, “I’m thin, happy and sexy!” If, deep in your subconscious is a hard wired and familiar belief that says, “no you’re not! Your fat and you’ll always be fat because you don’t want people to get close to you. You’ve been hurt by people before and the easiest way to keep some distance is by being fat and unhappy. That way you can always just say you cant find somebody to love you because you’re fat.” You might be the kind of person who has success affirmations strew about your office and you’re always listening to, and reading stuff about rich, the successful, success topics, and advice from those who have accomplished what you seek. However, if deep in your subconscious are thoughts that say, “rich people suck!”, or “I could never have that because I don’t deserve it”, or maybe you have a program deep within that says, “my parents were bad with money, it runs in my family, I’m bad with money, I’ll just lose it if I earn it. Its fun and familiar to be miserable without success so I’ll just stick with the familiar.” When it comes time to really make some kind of change, thinking positively will do almost nothing because the body is on a slightly different operating system. Its intimately linked to our brain and our thoughts, but it takes a lot of ‘at bats’ when it comes to creating new firing and wiring patterns that will overwrite the past thinking and eventually carve new grooves in the brain that make it to the body. When the body and mind can both believe that the thing you want to be, do, and have actually exists right now, in this current moment, then the mind and body really start to live in that new world and your future isnt out there somewhere, its happening now. New neural pathways have been cut, new thought/emotion patterns have been linked, new firing and wiring patterns created, and, as a natural result, new actions, new results, new thoughts about those results which trigger new emotions, which trigger better actions, and so on. Now, the brain is no longer a record of that past but, instead, a very powerful GPS system for a more empowered and exciting future.  That’s where the understanding of all the science gets super exciting my friends! We get to decide! Everything starts with a decision and, once you decide to act, that decision is already firing and wiring new neural pathways in the brain and preparing the body for new actions.

Thank you for tuning in to part 1 of this 2 part series my friends, I truly hope I’ve been able to add some value for you with all of these episodes. If I have, I have fulfilled my calling and my passion. If I haven’t, sorry to say but that’s on you brother because this shit is great and its free! Next week we’ll be taking all of this to the next level when we talk about the reticular activating system and how to make it bring you up what you want. Please, use this information. Take it and do something with it. If you need help, reach out! If you need some coaching on any of this stuff, that’s what we do. By the way, the classes are forming now for our March Level 2 small group coaching academy so if you think its time to take your life and business to the next level, reach out and take us up on a free coaching call. All you have to do is call us, email us, go to my website and fill out some basic information so I can get in touch with you, and we’ll chat. I always try to add value to our calls and will give you some things you can do today that will bring more into your life and business than the cost of your time on the call, for sure! You literally have nothing to lose. If you’re ready to jump into one of our coaching programs, the large group, the small group, or our one on one program, you still have nothing to lose because its guaranteed. You’ll have a full 60 days to try out any of our coaching programs and if, in that time, you don’t feel you’ll get in return at least 5 times the cost, you pay absolutely nothing, no questions asked. And you can keep whatever materials, lessons, videos, and downloads you’ve gotten up to that point. No fine print, no questions asked. If its something you’ve considered, you literally have no reason not to take the next step because there is no risk. We’ve taken all the risk away by guaranteeing you will either realize a 5X return on your investment or its free. That means I’ve put the ball squarely in your court to make the decision, and we just got done talking about how just the act of deciding brings with it new neural patterns, new resources, new emotional connections, new thoughts, and you’re literally rewiring your brain for a new future. You just have to ask yourself whats stopping you. With all that said, I am off to see my own coach my friends so, until next week, I’m out…

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Part 2

Before we begin talking about what to do and the exciting future you can create with the inbuilt tools you already have, we need to talk a bit about the reticular activating system. Every second of every day we are bombarded with sensory information. Imagine every hair on your body sending information to your brain every second of the day. If your brain had to process all of that information, it would shut down very quickly from overwhelm. Although all of the information from all of those hairs is important in some regard, very little of it is important in helping us make the important decisions about immediate survival so 95-98% of the information is filtered out for the conscious part of our brain. The reticular activating system determines, to a large degree, what we pay attention to and it filters out the rest. By filters out, what I mean is that it stores it somewhere in the subconscious portion of our brains. Every sensation or experience we have ever had, and ever will have, gets stored there. Most of it is never needed or used, but its there somewhere. The RAS is always operating, night and day, and to varying degrees of success depending on the individual. At the deepest levels, the RAS is acting as a sentinel, of sorts, and on the search for threats to our survival. It’s the part of your brain that allows you to hear your name called out in a crowded room of people all having separate conversations even though you weren’t listening for your name. Much like SIRI or Amazon Alexa, its always on and hearing everything. Even though the RAS is hearing everything, we could say that we are only consciously listening when our attention is drawn to something.

In addition to being a pretty good sentinel, its also a very faithful servant. This can be both good and bad since the RAS carry’s out its orders every second of every day whether we know it or not, like it or not, or are conscious of it or not. All of the subconscious programming we’ve been talking about is in there. Remember all of those habitual patterns and records from the past that have been informing almost every one of your thoughts? The RAS is using that stored information from your past and deciding what information gets through and what doesn’t. Its deciding what information and experiences are placed in front of you for recognition and which ones aren’t, all based on your beliefs about what is important, worthwhile, and possible, and all of that based in the past and wired into your programming. This is why goal setting and visualization can be useful to us because we are deliberately and intentionally giving the RAS new instructions about what is important to us which, in turn, allows our attention to be brought to bear on all the relevant information and resources that may have otherwise remained in the background or completely out of our conscious awareness. This is the same effect as buying, say a new white or green car. You leave the dealership parking lot and suddenly notice every white or green vehicle on the road. You told your RAS that the type of car and the color are important things to pay attention to by buying it so now it sees them everywhere. You may even say, “its so weird how as soon as I bought a white Tesla, everybody’s buying white Teslas!” All the others didn’t start buying them because you did. You just started to notice them because of the new instructions to your RAS that white Teslas are important to you. They always been there, they just weren’t important to you before that.

As a side note, this is one of the big reasons why goals should always be stated in the positive instead of trying to state what you don’t want. Always tell your RAS what is important for you to recognize and which positive state, opportunity, or resource to make you significantly more aware of. Another important note about the RAS is that it is not involved with interpreting the quality or the type of sensory input. It simply takes sensory input and activates the entire cerebral cortex wit energy. Its job is to wake up the cerebral cortex and increase its level of arousal and readiness so that IT can interpret the incoming info and prepare the brain and body for appropriate action. What we can do to make the RAS work at maximum efficiency toward our success and a better tomorrow than our today is to give it explicit instructions about what to look out for in terms of opportunities and resources and, also, make it believe that it is already living in the state of being that we wish to experience.

Think about it this way: if you wake up in the morning and stub your toe, the pain from that travels through your body and creates a negative emotion. That negative emotion, one of which is simply the pain, may also be attached to a past event that says, ‘shit, its going to be a crappy day, I just know it!’ From there, the RAS goes on high alert for all of the information in your environment that reinforces that statement and belief that its going to be a crappy day. It will continue to place right in front of you, like a faithful canine bringing you dead rabbits and squirrels, all of the evidence you’ve unknowingly requested when you said, “its going to be a crappy day!” Something else negative happens and some part of you, even if it’s subconscious, says, ‘yep, there it is! Just get used to it because is gonna be like this all day!’ And, like Zoltar, the magical fortune teller machine in the movie BIG, you are magically transported into the crappy day you so accurately predicted. Although, you didn’t really predict it, you created it! So, the reasoning follows that if you can create the crappy days based on your conscious and subconscious thoughts and requests made to the RAS, you can also create the amazing ones as well! It simply takes deliberate and intentional thoughts to be programmed into the RAS through a process called goal setting, vision planning, and consciously figuring out what your current patterns and limitations are based on past programming and past events. When you can do this, you are literally becoming somebody else! Not figuratively becoming somebody else, but literally! Since the RAS, the subconscious mind, the conscious mind, our bodies, our emotions, and the chemical reactions that all of those create make up who we are to a large degree, then changing those chemical reactions, changing the environment that effects gene expression, changing the thoughts that activate what the RAS focuses on is literally rewiring who you are at the deepest level. New neural pathways are created, new chemical responses to new emotions are happening, you’re feeling as if the thing or the state of being you desire already exists and you start to live in a world that you are literally creating moment to moment. You’ve always been creating your world moment. This is an important idea to grasp! You are always creating your world! The question is simply, are you doing it deliberately and intentionally, or are you doing it subconsciously based on past programming and past events which keep you stuck in a limited and limiting pattern of excuses and rationalizations.

A new thought should lead to a new choice, a new choice should lead to a new behavior, a new behavior should lead to a new experience, a new experience should lead to a new outcome, a new outcome should lead to a new emotion. That new emotion is teaching your body chemically what your mind understands intellectually. The new emotion should inspire new and empowering thoughts that reinforce the new emotion. All of that leads to new behaviors and actions and the cycle reinforces itself. The problem with all of this for most people is that the bigger the emotional footprint of an event, the more our attention gets placed on the external cause of that event. The brain takes a snapshot and pins it to the cerebral cork board, it Imprints or embossed that neurological pattern in the brain and we call this a memory. We create long term memories from strong emotional events. The less impactful the emotion, the smaller the memory of that event and the smaller the neurological footprint that event has on our overall belief systems and behaviors.

Not sure if you knew this mind blowing fact or not, but at least 50% of what we talk about in our past aren’t even real events. They are made up, or misremembered, to support the emotional story and chemical reactions we’re comfortable with in our bodies. We are constantly reaffirming for ourselves and placing our attention on events that likely didn’t even occur they way we remembered them. But we tell ourselves this story about the event and the event becomes a wired emotional pattern that has whats called a long refractory period where we are experiencing the event emotionally over a long period of time. The bigger the emotion attached to the event, the longer the refractory period. The longer the refractory period of that emotional event, the more opportunities we create to re-remember the event in a way that it may not have actually occurred but makes us feel comfortable in the remembering and it eventually becomes familiar to us. It supports and reinforces what we choose to believe about it and the more we fire those particular neurons about the event, the more we wire the brain to always fire that way and eventually this becomes what we call a personality trait. Since your personality creates your personal reality, these traits that we’ve been firing and wiring together for sometimes decades dictate the world we see and experience on a day to day basis. The RAS determines what we give our attention to on a moment to moment basis. In order to change your personal reality, you’ve got to change your personality.

Your personality is made up of how you think, act, and feel. If you want to change your life, you must change the thing that is having the greatest effect on your reality, which is your personality. How do we do this? The very first thing is to start thinking about what you’re thinking about! Sounds funny, but its true. When you start thinking about what you’re thinking about, you can finally begin to recognize how your thoughts then create emotions and how those patterns dictate your actions, and thus, your results. Once you start thinking about what you’re thinking about and can recognize some possible connections between negative or limiting thoughts and the subsequent emotions those create, you’ll then start to see how those thought/emotion patterns trigger your RAS to be on the lookout for supporting information to make your thoughts and emotions right. When your RAS goes on a search for supporting data for your negative thoughts and emotions, or your positive ones, it will always find the support…always! For example, any of my listeners on any of the industry facebook groups and forums? Any of you read or participate in posts or comments like, ‘stupid stip of the day’, or ‘look what another idiot realtor said or did’, or how about the inevitable ‘we’re all gonna die!’ posts about how the industry is in decline and going to hell in a hand basket. A great example from a recent blog post and discussion trail is about the head of the Appraisal Foundation and his salary and retirement benefits. Its caused something of an uproar in some circles, for what reason, I don’t know. I mean, I know, its because of everything we’ve been talking about this whole time! Its based on people’s personalities creating their personal realities and what they choose to focus on. What people think, say, comment on and express publicly gives great insight into their personal reality and what their RAS brings in front of their mental windshield. When you come across those kinds of discussions, what kinds of thoughts and emotions are triggered for you? Positive ones? I’ll answer for you, the answer is no. The emotions triggered by the thoughts from those discussions is assuredly negative. Whoever made those posts has just taken your hand and dragged you into their personal world of addiction. People who are jumping into those bog pits are expressing what their RAS choose to focus on, which is based on their thinking and habitual patterns. They reinforce those patterns when they take what was first a thought, then an emotion (likely a negative one), they act on the emotion by taking physical action and picking up their phone, getting on facebook, and then making a post about something they think is stupid or egregious. Why do they do this? To share their pain with the world and gather more support for what they already believe: underwriters are stupid, AMCs suck, Realtors are idiots, I’m smarter than you, we’re all going to die, this industry sucks, etcetera. The more it’s reinforced, the more its firing and wiring in your brain and eventually you become addicted to that very familiar pattern. My friends, I cant express enough just how damaging social media has been for those who don’t understand or recognize this pattern of addiction. How do we combat this? You have to turn down the volume and put blinders on.

If you could lower the volume on any negative emotions and memories of past events and people, you’ve taken back control of your emotional strength. The thing keeping most people from achieving this is the addiction. Most people cant, and aren’t willing to, change what they think and feel because they are addicted to pain, addicted to struggle, addicted to our fears, addicted to abuse, addicted to the attention they get from others, addicted to sympathy from others, addicted to lack, addicted to not having, addicted to suffering, and addicted to the patterns of the familiar. Mostly people would rather be in pain and suffering than move toward the unfamiliar and uncomfortable, which eventually rewires the patterns in the brain and body and returns a different outcome. Most would prefer to be pulled back into their addictions to struggle, lack, attention, sympathy, and whatever else we get addicted to emotionally because it’s familiar and predictable. When you try to have better thoughts and emotions, eventually you will encounter the addicted parts of your habitual patterns and wiring and there will be struggle because, much like somebody who has a chemical addiction (which this is!), eventually the habitual patterns in the body will kick in and start appealing to the brain to just give it a little hit of what it thinks it needs and wants. The body will manifest all kinds distractions and appeals to influence the brain into going back to what it believes to be the most familiar and comfortable. What started as an attempt by you to influence the brain into a new way of being will be attacked by the body’s addiction to that old pattern and familiar chemical reaction in the body. It will literally be going into an emotional and chemical detox scenario and manifest all sorts of things to influence the brain into being its old self again. This is where most people quit. They simply cant take the pain of change and the change in chemical response to the new way of thinking. If ever there was a time to fight for something and work through discomfort and pain, this would be that time! Just on the other side of discomfort when you’re rewiring your brain and body patterns is a new positive habit that leads to new behaviors, which lead to new emotions, which lead to new actions and new responses to those actions. The cells that fire together wire together so the more you can hold these new memories of the past and the future in your subconscious mind, the more commensurate emotions you can hold onto throughout the day, the more firing and wiring is talking place! This, of course, sends new signals to the RAS to be on the lookout for more corresponding information with the new memories you’ve created (past and future) and, trust me when I say, it will be there.

Now, here’s what you need to know about how to use all of this information to your benefit. As I just mentioned, to rewire your brain and body, you have to start with identifying your patterns and addictions. If you don’t like the word addictions, sorry, I’m not going to replace the word to make you feel better because that’s exactly what it is, an addiction to a way of thinking, feeling, acting, and being and a way of staying comfortable in your patterns. Get used to the word addiction! Identify all of your patterns and addictions and never stop working on them. You have to get to the root cause of many of your behaviors and thinking patterns before any change can occur. Remember, these are all chemical patterns that have been embossed neurologically in your brain and body and have created addictions to the familiarity of those patterns. You literally have to break the addiction to wanting to suffer, to some degree, before any of your bigger life goals can be pursued and achieved. Along with identifying and examining your patterns and addictions, you’ll want to dedicate some time to every day, even if its for a mere 10 or 15 minutes, to live in the memory of a world and life that, up to this point, has only been imagined and dreamt about. You literally have to imagine the life you want and then get into the feeling of what that life would feel like. The more detailed you can make your brain believe it knows what that feeling is, the more emotional embossing is taking place. The more emotion and vision around this thing you desire or this state of being that you can imagine can be felt, the bigger the emotional footprint you’re creating and the more firing and wiring of neurons and cells is occurring. The more firing and wiring, the more chemicals being released into your body and a new imprint of this imagined world is being created within your body. Since your environment signals the gene and the genes make proteins, you are literally building a new reality in those moments. The longer you can extend those moments out into your day, the bigger the emotional and chemical footprint and the faster you are building those new neural pathways to the thing you’re imagining. When you place attention, energy, and focus on the emotions of the thing you desire, you are signaling the RAS to be on high alert for all of the things that may be connected to this thing. Just like the white teslas all over the road, you will begin to see all sorts of things that support your new memory of this new world you’re living in. The new support helps reinforce the emotion, which helps reinforce the actions you’re taking, which helps reinforce the new reality you’re building. With a change in your personality will come a change in your personality. When you change your personality, you will have no option but to see the changes in your personal reality.

The way up and out is by thinking about what we’re thinking about. In essence, becoming conscious about the unconscious. Becoming an observer of your thoughts. Its easier to distract ourselves with TV, social media, games, physical activity, and a variety of other things in order to avoid thinking about what we’re thinking about. Change really requires becoming uncomfortable to a certain degree and familiar, with the unknown, and the uncomfortable. Once you make that choice, or as we say, to decide. Once you decide, with the act of deciding comes a certain powerful energy and all of the necessary resources for the attainment of a particular result. You absolutely must start to become aware of your thoughts and subsequent emotional patterns because those are the firing and wiring patterns that give instructions to the RAS to go out and find evidence and support for those thoughts, and it always will. If you think the world is going to hell in a hand basket, just go on facebook and you’ll find the support for that belief. If you believe the Appraisal Foundation is paying people too much and, somehow, that is negatively affecting your life, you’ll find the support for it. If you think all Realtors and Loan Originators are scammers, you’ll find the evidence for it and your personality ends up being the result of those thoughts. As we’ve now said a bunch of times, your personality creates your personal reality so, if you think those things, your RAS will constantly place evidence in front of you that those things are true, your actions will be congruent with your thoughts, your results congruent with your actions, your thoughts about your results reinforcing your beliefs, and the loop is locked into your neural pathway. Let the addiction begin. If, however, you think a different thought, one that says something like, ‘maybe some realtors are idiots, but so are some appraisers, and there must be some good ones out there.’ What do you think your RAS system is going to go find for you? Its absolutely going to go find evidence of that reality and place opportunities in your way to make that belief a reality. If you think the appraisal industry is in decline and its time to run for the hills, your RAS will absolutely go find all kinds of evidence to support that belief. It will find things like facebook posts about the decline of the industry, articles about the foundation presidents salary that have nothing whatsoever to do with your prosperity. Did you make less last year because David Bunton was paid more than you feel he should’ve been paid? It didn’t affect me 1 cent. Why? Because I have a belief and an understanding that I create my own reality based on my thoughts and emotions so I guard them like Area 51. I choose what gets in and what gets sent out. I choose who gains access and who is denied entry. You must be deliberate about your thoughts and corresponding emotions my friends! Your future literally depends on it.

Most people are waiting for something from the outside world to give them an emotional signal that its now time to feel gratitude, love, ecstasy, abundance, happy, or whole. They are also unwittingly letting the outside world dictate how they should think and feel about things when they let stupid shit like Facebook posts and negative blog posts dictate how they think and feel. It’s the cause and effect model of emotion and life management. Unfortunately, its backwards. That method of living life is like trying to start a campfire by saying to the fire pit, “you start producing some heat and flames and I’ll start putting some wood on you. Until you show me that you can be a real fire, I’m not going to waste this fuel.” How silly does that sound to you? If it sounds silly to think of campfires that way, then why are you living your life waiting for and letting external events and circumstances dictate your suite of emotions? Remember, it goes thought, emotion, action, result.  Something happens that creates a thought in you, which then triggers the emotion about the thing, which makes you act a certain way and you get a familiar response or result to that action, all heavily predicated on what you expect to happen, by the way. It’s a pattern that has been deeply engrained in your body chemistry and your neurons.

We have to learn how to first generate the thought about what we think we’d like to do, be, and have before expecting it to just appear in our lives. When you generate the thought about something, an emotion will follow like clock work. Its this thought-emotion pair that you need to start deliberately taking notice of and rewiring. If you have the thought and the thought triggers a negative emotion, you’ve just been delivered good news! Its good news because you’ve just become aware of the pattern and you’ve been given the ability to start asking powerful questions to get to the bottom of the pattern. ‘Why do I have negative emotions about making more money?’ ‘Why do I have fear around finding somebody to love me?’ ‘What happened in my past that made me believe I don’t deserve to have or be anything more than what I am right now?’, ‘Why do I care what somebody else earns as a salary?’, ‘Why am I wasting valuable emotional energy focused on somebody else’s experience with a Realtor of loan officer?’ Think of this awareness as a gift! And awareness is a gift, by the way! Awareness is literally the difference between a life of struggle and a life of ease with all of the prosperity and resources one could ever ask for. Once you start becoming aware of your thoughts, the subsequent attached emotions, and how those two dictate your actions, you are breaking neurological patterns that have been built up over many years, in some cases many decades. Its this conscious and deliberate, lets call it intentional, thinking and awareness process that triggers the uncomfortable growth that leads to change. The change that follows will eventually become a new pattern of firing and wiring in your brain that eventually transcends the brain and your body takes over. We call this a habit and a benevolent addiction to that new familiar feeling. Anything less than this new feeling feels bad and uncomfortable and we should reject it and focus back on what we truly want.

There it is my friends, the most important information you will ever hear. I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that there is no more important information you could ever have than the knowledge that we creat our own reality by what we think and feel and that we get to choose it those thoughts and feelings are based on a record of the past or a memory of the future. Sounds odd to say, but its absolutely fundamental to be constantly creating memories of a future that we choose! You’re already creating your future but, for most, its based on memories from the past, 50% of which are made up. You get to choose my friends! You get to choose whether your brain and body respond from thoughts of the past or act as a powerful map to a future only limited by what you can imagine. The choice is literally yours and I just gave you all the science behind it. Its not conjecture, its not metaphysics, its not just think it and it will happen, it’s scientific information about how the brain, the body, the conscious and subconscious work, how that little servant and sentinel at the base of the hypothalamus, the RAS, goes out and finds support for your thoughts and feelings and how its all happening in every moment of every day. Become aware of what you’re choosing to focus on moment to moment because the cells that fire together wire together and patterns are being cemented all the time based on your physio-emotional programming. Take control of it! Create something new with it! Focus on the good, the prosperous, the healthy, the happy, the joyful, the exquisite, the divine, the benevolent, the abundant and your brain has no choice but to move in that direction and place in your view all of the things that correspond with those thoughts, ideas, and emotions.

Thank you for tuning in again this week my friends, I truly hope I’ve been able to add some value for you with these episodes. If I have, I have fulfilled my calling and my passion. If I haven’t, sorry to say but that’s on you brother because this shit is great and its free! Take it and do something with it. If you need help, reach out! If you need some coaching on any of this stuff, that’s what we do. By the way, the classes are forming now for our March Level 2 small group coaching academy so if you think its time to take your life and business to the next level, reach out and take us up on a free coaching call. All you have to do is call us, email us, go to my website and fill out some basic information so I can get in touch with you, and we’ll chat. I always try to add value to our calls and will give you some things you can do today that will bring more into your life and business than the cost of your time on the call, for sure! You literally have nothing to lose. If you’re ready to jump into one of our coaching programs, the large group, the small group, or our one on one program, you still have nothing to lose because its guaranteed. You’ll have a full 60 days to try out any of our coaching programs and if, in that time, you don’t feel you’ll get in return at least 5 times the cost, you pay absolutely nothing, no questions asked. And you can keep whatever materials, lessons, videos, and downloads you’ve gotten up to that point. No fine print, no questions asked. If its something you’ve considered, you literally have no reason not to take the next step because there is no risk. We’ve taken all the risk away by guaranteeing you will either realize a 5X return on your investment or its free. That means I’ve put the ball squarely in your court to make the decision, and we just got done talking about how just the act of deciding brings with it new neural patterns, new resources, new emotional connections, new thoughts, and you’re literally rewiring your brain for a new future. You just have to ask yourself whats stopping you. With all that said, I am off to see my own coach my friends so, until next week, I’m out…