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I re-read the first three articles in the series before beginning this fourth chapter, which led me to a realization that I was potentially missing out one of the most important points. Based on observation of people who struggle in life, this sticking point is something critical to eliminate early on, otherwise you’re going to hit a brick wall every time you look to make changes.

My intention is to complete this series with an insight that is literally the key to not only having whatever you want in your life, but also making the entire planet a better place, but before I do that, we need to get one roadblock out of the way. Let’s do that now…

We’ve laid a framework that can lead you to realizing positive changes in your life, which is based on the following five core principles -

1. Those who truly excel in life do so by repeating processes over and over again, resulting in a compounding effect that can eventually take you to amazing places. A “success ladder” is available to achieve almost anything in life, so if you’re prepared to go through steps and repeat something often enough to get good at it, you can have or be almost anything you want.
2. Your awareness – how you interpret everything around you – is what governs your ability to get things done. How you see the world impacts how you think about the world, which impacts how you feel, and thus how you interact with the world. Your interpretation can help you or hinder you, and this is regardless of what is true – the choice is entirely up to you. You decide your truth, so choose to see the world in a way that is beneficial for making the changes you want in your life.
3. Some things are out of your control and you’re not always going to get what you expect. You must master the art of continuous improvement, regardless of conditions. You’re human, so you’re going to feel emotions that have the potential to derail your progress, but only if you let them. It’s necessary to keep taking steps towards change, even when you don’t feel like it.
4. There’s always a smart choice you can make, given a set of conditions, but unfortunately most people do what other people do, which often is NOT the smart choice. Don’t let social conditioning, peer pressure or accepted practice govern your choices, instead, assess what you personally have to work with, and make the best decisions from where you are coming from and where you want to go.
5. Follow the success patterns of other people – the smart decisions other people made who presently have what you are now seeking are there to be modeled any time you want. Don’t follow anything blindly, but don’t go in blind either. There is so much information available to learn almost anything, so use these resources to help you discern the smart choices for you.

Beware Your Own Ignorance

These five principles can take you far, but there’s an insidious force that has a nasty habit of derailing people before they adopt and practice these ideas, which I label “Ignorance“.

 

Ignorance can come in many shapes and forms and is pervasive in our current society. Almost everyone “suffers” from it in some way.

The problem with ignorance is that it creates a rigid belief structure that stops certain ideas even having a chance. If you’re stubborn, and you believe certain things must be a certain way, or you’ve learned a certain way of looking at the world that you refuse to change, then you’ve locked yourself into a box.

Some people, even if their own framework is flexible, suffer from the ignorance of people around them, which can include your immediate family and friends, or more wide reaching social structures, political and religious systems and cultural norms. These structures impact you if you choose to partake in them (you could always become a hermit and live in a cave).

You have a choice in how you interpret everything, so even if you are forced to adhere to a rule or system you don’t think is right, you can choose how you respond to it. This is why people locked into a life sentence in jail can still find happiness, yet those who have abundant freedom can still find a way to be miserable.

I’m sure you know what it is like when you’re talking to a friend in a bad relationship, or a job that’s not right for them, or they have a habit they refuse to quit like smoking, yet no matter how hard you try and make them realize what they are doing is not beneficial, it just doesn’t get through. This is frustrating because of course you want what is best for the people around you, but ultimately you can’t make decisions for other people.

The problem becomes especially pronounced when you don’t share a basic framework, ideology or world view that is compatible with the person you are communicating with. If you’re talking about something that is blue, but your friend is wearing red-tinted glasses, you have no possibility of “making” them see what you can see. They need to take off the glasses first – or try putting on another pair of glasses – which is something they have to decide to do for themselves.

It’s not your responsibility to change anyone, however you do have control over your own reality, and becoming aware of your ignorance is the first step to eliminate it. Some form of rigid thought process or belief system is holding you back right now, and you’re not even aware of it. This impacts how you make decisions and what actions you take, so until you deal with your own ignorance, you’re going to struggle to change.

Take Off Your Glasses

The first step you can take immediately is to start watching to see if you are wearing any “glasses” that are stopping you from making change.

Being open minded is great, but what I’m talking about here goes much deeper than that. You might consider yourself open minded already, but if you monitor your own reactions to what other people say, or what happens around you, you will see that even you have knee-jerk responses to situations, or behavior patterns that are entrenched in your lifestyle and impact your choices in ways you don’t currently see.

We’re all a product of our upbringing, cultural story, personality type and previous experiences. We interpret the world through our own lens that is constructed of all these things.

• If you believe that only bad people get rich, that will stop you from ever becoming rich yourself because you believe you have to be dishonest to get there.
• If you believe that people should treat you a certain way then you get upset when they don’t and immediately write them off as not worth knowing.
• If a good life is marriage, children and owning your home, but you’re single, broke and childless on your 35th birthday, then you must be a failure.

There are countless expectations like this that impact how we think and act in life, some of which we can see, some that we blindly follow every day without realizing.

Most people I know, myself included, make initial impression judgments based on things like how a person looks and what clothes they wear. Even though I’m open minded, I can’t help but make a judgment on some level, that’s what humans who are driven by egos do.

The key is to realize you are making judgments constantly, become aware of that, then drop them if they are hindering your progress or causing you to suffer. It takes work because you’re trying to unlearn patterns of behavior and thoughts you’ve likely continued for years, possibly your entire adult life.

Be careful not to fool yourself either. It’s easy to say something to the people around you based on what everyone expects because of social standards. No one expects you to be racist, so saying you’re not is expected behavior, but if the conversation in your head is actually racist, then you’re just lying to yourself.

This doesn’t have to be about something as severe as racism either. If you watch your thoughts you might be surprised at how often you tell yourself things you don’t really want to believe simply because of habit or conditioning. Changing what’s going on outside starts with reconstructing what’s going on inside you.

There Is No Such Thing As Truth

At this point in our discussion it’s important that I introduce an idea that might take you a little while to fully come to terms with. You might think you “get” this – I did at first – but then realized I really didn’t fully understand the implications of this concept.

It is something I have struggled to fully integrate into my life, but once you do, it can dramatically change how you perceive the world and all the people in it. Let’s take a look at this concept now, and in the next article in this series we will dig a little deeper. Here we go…

Truth, is only truth in your mind.

No one else on this planet shares what you consider true because no one else can be in your body at the same time as you, at least from the perspective of the individual (we will look at universal “oneness” later).

What you determine is true is based on what your senses interpret. The data from your body is sent to your mind, which determines how you perceive something. From there you use language to label what you have perceived, to make it possible to communicate with other people and categorize what is around you.

A red apple is a color that collectively we have agreed is red, however it’s only true because we’ve learned what the red label represents. Although I know what red looks like to me, I can never really know what red looks like to you. It’s safe to assume that most of us see it in a very similar way since we use our eyes – and we all have eyes that are constructed in a similar manner – but we can never be 100% certain what another person sees, it is impossible without becoming part of their consciousness.

Given the limitations of physical existence and our system of labels for language, it’s absolutely critical that you never attach yourself to an interpretation of truth. If you become attached to it, then you will start to emotionally identify it as your point of view and feel a need to impose it on other people, or defend it when others disagree. If your desire to make the world be something is so strong that you find yourself suffering as a result, you need to let go.

The awareness of just letting things go and pass through you, can be a wonderfully liberating realization. When you decide that what other people think about you, or how they see the world, or what they do, is not your responsibility, you enjoy an immense sense of relief. Deciding that it’s not your job to control the universe, but to flow with it, will make your life significantly easier.

Your only responsibility is to determine what you consider the truth – your truth – and act on that in each and every moment. If your truth is dynamic – not rigid – and you understand you are simply choosing to see things in a way that creates power in your life in that moment, then you’re doing the best you can.

Challenge Your Reality

Once you start monitoring and adjusting your own interpretation and you start to dissolve your judgments, something interesting will start to occur. You will get curious.

The great thing about opening your eyes to other colors is that suddenly the world doesn’t seem nearly as black and white as it used to. The more structures you have in your life, the more liberated you will feel as you break them down.

With this new sense of freedom you will desire more stimulus. Everything in the world will become more interesting because you won’t be focused so much on trying to make everything and everyone around you fit into “boxes”. The boxes of course, don’t exist, they are just mental constructs you’ve created to help you feel safe. When you drop the need to “feel safe”, let your ego go, the world and the people in it, don’t seem nearly as scary.

You will still have problems of course, but given your focus will be less on conformity and more about experience, you will gain an ability to solve problems with much less friction – in fact it will become a lot of fun.

• Instead of being so depressed because you can’t find a boyfriend or girlfriend, you will relish the challenge of meeting new people and breaking down your previous belief structures about your romantic life and what it means to be single.
• Instead of struggling with how hard it is to make money, you will look for more powerful ways to earn a living. Your eyes and mind will be open to doing things like starting a business and quitting the “secure” job you’ve previously stuck to because that’s just what everyone does and it feels safer.
• You will reassess what exactly it means to “be rich”. Money will have a completely new meaning to you.
• Instead of suffering the behavior of certain people in your life you will realize that you simply don’t need them and it’s okay to not be friends with everyone.

The fear of being lonely or “losing someone” will never impact who you decide to associate with. You will naturally gravitate to and draw in people when you need them. People who don’t empower your life will drop away. You will make the decision to not participate in the “drama” of interpersonal relationships, which so many people in the world today are addicted to.

Once you let go and expand your universe, suddenly the vastness and potential – including all the amazing people you could surround yourself with – will inspire you to make new friends and build a social structure that reinforces the changes you want to make in your life.

In short, you will stop acting in fear because of your narrow viewpoint and start acting with a sense of wonder and possibility because you can see the world is much more dynamic than it used to be. Instead of being trapped into a box, you will see that the world is too large for you to ever understand completely, so will seek to challenge your reality without being encumbered by what other people think or standards of behavior you used to adhere to.

Can Your Problems Magically Change Overnight?

One area where people suffer from ignorance is how you create problems when they don’t really exist. Or, using our new understanding of what is truth, you might choose to see a situation as a problem, where alternative interpretations could see the situation as an opportunity.

No matter how bad a situation is, you always have the choice to see it as something beneficial.

If we take what most people on this planet would consider a pretty bad situation – you’re stricken down with a disease that is going to kill you – even this can be interpreted as something positive. You’re going to die, that means you’re going to find out what it means to be no longer in your body and find out what happens next. This, for a curious person, could be the most exciting adventure ever experienced in life.

Here’s something you have to accept – death is an experience you’re going to go through, so you can suffer this fact, or frame it as something you face with courage, curiosity and a sense of fluidity – you will surrender to it, rather than fight it. The choice is up to you.

If we look at less finite “problems” in life, things like not having enough money, or not having a romantic partner, or wanting to lose weight, or move to a better city, or find a new social circle, or stop feeling depressed, or to quit smoking, or start waking up earlier, or buy a car, or stop being afraid to fly in airplanes, or fall pregnant, or leave your marriage, or become famous, or pretty much any change whatsoever you want to make in your life, the same rules apply.

Every situation above can be looked at as something you are “suffering” from, with the frame of what you stand to lose or what you will never have. Or these things can be completely re-framed as opportunities for new experiences, or as a challenge to find an alternative solution, or even as a point of self-reflection to figure out exactly why you want something so much, or why you fear losing something so much, etc.

Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is in constant flux and the only reason you choose to feel or do something in any given moment is because you choose to, nothing is making you do it. The situation you are in is not the reason you feel as you do, it’s merely a set of circumstances you are choosing to react to in a certain way. If you can’t see a good way to interpret something and a “way out”, then you’re simply addicted to being a certain way – you’re too ignorant of your own behavior and mindset to change. It’s entirely your fault.

Ouch.

That could hurt a little, but I hope you see it as more liberating than painful.

Accepting Change

When I face problems in my life I have benefited from reminding myself of one of life’s constants -

Change is permanent.

I love the dichotomy in that statement. I could have said that change is constant, which is is, but there’s something compelling when you realize the only thing that will never change is change itself.

The practical implication of this understanding further enhances the importance of how you interpret every single moment and thought in your life. Everything is going to change, the situation that you are suffering from right now will not last forever.

Death ensures this. You won’t be lonely forever because you’re going to die. You won’t be married forever because you’re going to die. You won’t be sick forever because you’re going to die. You won’t be young, beautiful, rich, poor, hungry, full, tired, bored, frustrated, angry, bitter, happy, sad, relaxed, excited, joyful, retired, employed, or anything forever, because you are going to die.

Yah, morbid I know. This realization could be about as depressing as it gets, but again – that’s a choice you’re most welcome to make if you like.

I recommend instead that you see death as the greatest reason to always interpret life in a powerful and positive manner, unless of course, you enjoy suffering.

Any problem you have right now doesn’t exist and will disappear, I promise you this with a 100% guarantee. It will change – and to relax a little after all that talk of death, many of the changes you want in life will occur while you are alive. You don’t have to die to rid yourself of your problems, you can do it right now.

Practical Problem Solving

Problem solving begins with first understanding what your problem is really about. I hope, by reading this article to this point, you understand that your problems aren’t really as severe as they are, or really aren’t problems at all.

If you have previously focused energy on what you don’t have and don’t like, it’s time to change that to focusing on what you are doing to make the change you want happen.

You now have the power to never again suffer from your own ignorance. Open your mind to possibility and opportunity and get excited about all the positive changes you could experience in your life in the very near future.

With this new found mindset, the next step is to take the appropriate actions that lead to your desired goals. To make this as practical as possible, here’s a process that can lead you to any change you want to make happen in your life. Remember to apply everything you learned in this article, and the previous in this series, as you go about creating positive change in your life.

1. Start “looking for doors” that will lead you to your goal
2. Once you find the doors, open them
3. Evaluate what you find inside and decide which path to follow further
4. Once you follow a path, focus on dynamic refinement of the process until you achieve your desired outcome (remember that everything can change, including your desired outcome).
5. Accept that you can’t know everything or be everything within the confines of your physical body and mind, so narrow your focus to objective problem solving based on what’s in front of you

While you go through this process, keep in mind your view of the world, including your insights and your ignorances, are helping and hindering your progress. The more you increase your awareness and decrease your ignorance, the easier your life will be and the less friction you will face as you make change.

Coming Up Next – Understanding Your Power As A Change Catalyst

In the next and final chapter in my series on positive change, I’m going to tie in everything you’ve learned so far and leave you with I believe is the single most important insight you can gain from this series.

While everything I’ve talked about so far has been about you helping yourself, you obviously don’t exist in isolation. There is an entire universe that is influencing you, but perhaps more importantly, you are influencing it.

You’re going to see that it’s not just for your own benefit that you need to adopt these positive change principles. It goes much deeper than that.

Next we’re going to continue to build on the concepts introduced in the previous article, which are -

1. Confidence can be created through training, repeating processes so you build on your results
2. Raise your self awareness so you can be master of your universe, rather than your perceptions mastering you
3. You must continue to move forward regardless of how you feel or what conditions you face because it’s not always going to be a smooth ride

These ideas focus on you being the catalyst for change, so let’s take a deeper look at how much power you really have to create the kind of results you want in your life…

A Hard Lesson: You Can’t Control Everything

Potentially one of the most depressing moments in your life, especially as a young person, is coming to grips with your own limitations. I’m all for creating a strong base of self esteem so you feel like you can achieve anything, but it’s necessary to realize that you’re not going to be the best at everything and some things you won’t ever be able to do.

We’re all born with gifts, natural abilities, and strengths, but conversely, there are things we’re not good at and other elements that impact our lives, which are based on the “luck of the draw” that is the lottery of life. Your genetic make-up, where you are born, what era you are born into and all kinds of things can hinder your ability to create the change you want in your life.

Your environment has a huge impact on who you are, how you think and what you do. You can expand your universe by taking in new inputs, but you’re limited to what inputs are available (hence the phrase you don’t know what you don’t know). Although you live in an infinite universe, for most of us we can only function within a finite universe or, well, your head might explode, or at least you won’t be able to function within the framework of the society you call home, or the body you operate within.

Despite having your own unique set of circumstances based on your environment, physical make-up and ever expanding consciousness, there are universal principles that you can apply to help you create what you want in your life, regardless of your limitations. In the end, as is always the case, in comes down to the choices you make.

You’ve been given the power of freewill, which means in all circumstances you can make a choice. This is a wonderful gift, but dangerous in the “wrong” hands, so it pays to put some effort into ensuring you are making smart choices – that’s smart in relation to what you want of course, which is going to be different from person to person.

Let’s take a look at a basic framework of ideas you can use in order to help you make the right choices. Like the previous article in this series, I’ll draw upon other blog posts I’ve published as source content for the ideas. Please read the source articles too as they will enhance your understanding of each concept.

 

4. Make Smart Choices (Stop making it hard for yourself and don’t just follow the herd)

Source: How To Combine Your Brain And Willpower To Break The Pattern Of Average Results

When faced with a situation where you’re simply not good at something or there is a barrier that is completely out of your control stopping you from achieving something, it’s important that you see reality for what it is.

Of course we can choose to see things in a different way, to put our positive glasses on, or perhaps simply not think about or perceive something at all because it serves us better that way. However, fooling yourself to believe you can fly and consequently jumping off a building causing massive injury is not the kind of positive thinking or awareness change we are after here.

The article on using your brain and willpower to create change introduced a logical idea when faced with a world of inequality: You need to accept the conditions you operate within now and do the best with what you have been given.

This is actually more critical than you might think. It’s not just about accepting that you will never be tall if you are short, it’s important that you make choices that allow you to develop what you are naturally gifted at (in the height example, you do things that short people have an advantage doing).

There are people in this world who prefer to take on challenges that they are handicapped to perform in some way. That’s fine, and I’m not going to argue against this, but for the greater majority of people on this planet, making your life harder than it already is, is not a smart choice.

We’re looking for the path of least resistance, and the lowest hanging fruit.

Make choices that leverage skills, talents or abilities that you were born with or have developed over time to give yourself an advantage. It’s usually much more fun and gratifying to do this, you earn greater rewards because you put more into it and do it for longer, and on a global scale, generally you give more back to the world too.

Don’t fight what you can’t control and gravitate to areas where you can provide effortless value. When I say effortless, I don’t mean it won’t be work, but the process of work is enjoyable even when it’s frustrating, painful or exhausting. You’re developing aspects of yourself that were meant to be developed, rather than struggling to do something you’re not good at.

This makes complete sense right?

Yeah, sure it does, but for many people on this planet they consider it a pipe dream to do what they want, and here’s why…

1. You don’t know what you’re good at or “meant to do” or how on earth it could help you make money, or if it even should
2. You’ve made less than smart choices and find yourself in a situation where you feel trapped doing something you don’t like
3. You live in a society where you don’t even have your basic needs met, so thinking about what you might be good at doing rarely even crosses your mind, making enough food to survive, or finding a place to sleep that is warm, are the only challenges you deal with on a day to day basis

The fact that the third point is even relevant is particularly sad, in terms of a reflection of who we are as a people. It’s safe to say that if you’re reading this you’re dealing with issues one and two and have risen to the point where your basic needs are met. Although at one stage I’d like to more thoroughly review some things we can do to help eliminate that third condition, that’s a topic for another article on another day.

So, assuming your basic needs are met, in most cases to create the positive change in your life, the big mistake you are making right now is bad choices, choices incongruent with what you want. Every day you wake up and repeat activities that reinforce what you don’t want, which are born from thinking in a way that doesn’t take you to where you want to go, or to who you want to be.

This is an easy mistake to make because most of society is doing exactly the same thing. In order to break out of this pattern you essentially have to be “weird”, which in context is not doing what the majority think is accepted behavior. The problem is that you are a herd animal and it’s uncomfortable enough just to even bring up the subject of making changes that most people will criticize you for, let alone to actually do it. This is why it’s critical you start to connect the dots and realize that –

• A) You’re going to have to be different to most “normal” people if you are to go after what you want
• B) The perceived normality is, however, just an illusion, brought about because everyone thinks in a certain way and thus acts in a certain way, which doesn’t make them happy, often causes other people as well as themselves to suffer and worse still, usually damages the planet too

If you can break the illusion simply by choosing not to partake in the accepted behaviors and thought processes, then you’re on the way to making a difference.

This is not a situation of black and white choices of course, so you’re going to have to make some decisions based on what you believe is right given what you want to change. I reiterate, you need to do the best with what you have been given, which is not usually doing what everyone else does or doesn’t do.

You’re going to face ridicule (all entrepreneurs and revolutionaries know what this is like), but the fact is, if you just keep doing what everyone does, you’re going to get the same results. Break the pattern, stand out from the crowd, start making smart choices and people will look at you funny at first, but once they see how big an impact it has on your life, they’re going to start looking at you as if you are some kind of genius. You may even become a leader – now that’s a scary thought isn’t it!

What’s particularly powerful about this shift in awareness and behaviors, is that at first sure, you’re doing it for your own self good, but it can go much further. It’s when one individual starts making smart choices – let’s call them “enlightened choices” – that the run-off effect is an impact on people around you, who may as a result of observing you, start to make similarly “unusual” choices. Like a good pyramid scheme, if enough people do this, then the world can change for the better, as these two fellows certainly understand –

Daisaku Ikeda (Japanese peace activist) said – “A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind.”

Gandhi said – “Be the change you wish to see in the world”

Although you may be looking to create positive change to aspects in your life, making smart choices can have a ripple effect that can change the behaviors of the entire human race. The great thing about this is all you need to worry about is making what you perceive as the right choices given what you want to change. It’s not always easy, but becoming aware of your power to make the choice and not simply go with the status quo, is a huge first step.

If you’ve managed to raise your self awareness to the point where you understand you are master of your own interpretation, you’re focusing on changing the internal dialogue with yourself for the better, you’re seeing the world in a much more positive light, you’re committed to working on something long enough to get a result and you realize that it’s not always going to feel 100% perfect along the way, all that’s left is to figure out what the right choices are, and then make them.

Let’s take the next step and look at how we can determine what the right choices are…

5. Follow Success Patterns (Don’t reinvent the wheel)

Source: How To Find The Courage To Change By Raising Your Awareness

Much of this source article focuses on raising your awareness to the point where you realize what you want, a recurring theme in this series on positive change too. There’s a very relevant point to extract from towards the end of the article, which can fill in one of the final missing ingredients to create the change you want in your life.

It never fails to amaze me how many people don’t figure out this very simple idea. I’ve had people come up to me and ask for my advice on how to do something and in so many situations, even if I know absolutely nothing about who they are, what they are good at, or even the area they are focused on, this advice still applies.

This concept applies universally to all forms of change, there is always some form of help available. If you want to make money doing something, find someone who’s figured out how to do that. If you’re about to face a new challenge, like becoming a father or mother for the first time, there are other people who have been through this experience before you. If you want to start a revolution and eliminate a great injustice, or stop a global catastrophe, or just figure out how to change your fashion style so you will be more attractive to the opposite sex, aspects of how to do all these things is learnable because it has been done before.

Even if you are doing something completely new in a completely innovative industry, or you’re attempting to break new ground, there will be success principles that other people have used that will apply to what you are doing. You’re learning some now just by reading this article. All you have to do is get out there and find the right people or the right information to start filling in the blanks to figure out what your immediate next step is, what the smart choices are.

You might need a coach or mentor, or perhaps you can study a guru or just read a good book. Maybe a structured course, or even a full degree is the answer. Maybe just a conversation over a cup of tea will give you want you need, or perhaps taking a hands-on training program is what you require.

In most circumstances, to learn what you need to know is a holistic process. To determine what steps you need to take and to undertake the necessary personal growth you require to get where you want to go, it is necessary to collect input from all kinds of sources, some that you proactively seek out, others that just show up at the right time (more on this later in the series).

In my own experience to create the change I desire in my life I usually go with a combination of experimentation (mandatory for most change to occur), with passive observation of people who have what I want, combined with active study of materials from experts and when possible, some personal time spent with people, some who just came about at the right time and taught me something they may not have even realized they were teaching, and others who I sought out to solve a particular problem.

As Mulder constantly reminded us in the X-Files, the truth is out there, you just need to go looking for whatever truths will help you to create the change you want.

What If You Don’t Know What You Want?

As one final piece of advice before I end this part of the series, if you’re not even sure what you want, consider things you might like to have, or what about you or your immediate environment that you want to change, and then start looking for alternative choices you could make today to take you towards that reality.

You have to understand that making smart choices is not an absolute endeavor. You will never know the “right” decision beyond what is best for what you want to be in a given moment. This means that what is right for you will change constantly, it’s part of the growth process that is the evolution of your consciousness. In order to help you get closer to figuring out your truth, you will need to sample and experiment.

Follow success patterns based what you think and feel might work for you, or focus on making changes that eliminate what you don’t like about your life right now. Sometimes a process of elimination will lead you to what you want, but that doesn’t mean all the principles you have learned up to this point are not relevant. They apply equally the same.

You will always have the power of choice and it’s up to you to figure out what you want, no one else can decide this for you. That’s why raising your awareness as a basic concept is so important, it will give you the insight to know that change needs to be made in the first place, triggering the cascade of decisions that will lead you to greater clarification of what you really want.

Coming Up Next: Where Does Change Really Originate From?

The puzzle is looking a lot more complete. You now have some strong foundation concepts that can help you to realize the change you want, namely -

1. Confidence comes from training
2. Become self aware so you can use your perception as a positive force in your life
3. Work consistently regardless of external conditions and their effect on your feelings
4. Make smart choices based on your own strengths and what you want, not what everyone else does
5. Follow the success patterns that are all around you, ready to be learned whenever you need guidance

Most of these ideas reflect on you as the center of your own universe, which is certainly true, but we’ve left out a key point – everything is connected.

I touched on this idea when I talked about how you changing yourself can result in changing others around you, but it goes much further than this.

Everything you do influences other people, just as what other people do influences you. There is a mass interconnected web that you must learn how to operate within if you want it to help, rather than hinder you from experiencing the positive changes you desire.

Once you are aware of what I will cover in the next article you may even begin to question where change comes from or what you even are. We are heading into uncharted waters, so stay tuned, there’s more to come yet!

Here Is What I Know So Far

I’ve proactively changed many aspects of my life for the better, especially in the past five years. The key word here is “proactively”, which could be interchanged with the word consciously, or intentionally. The point being that I decided I wanted something and then went to work to create the change necessary to have what I wanted. It wasn’t just hoping, dreaming, or thinking about the change, it was all of those things AND focused action designed to take me there.

The end outcome of achieving what I set out to is usually different to what I expected, and of course as per the universal rules I talked about in the first article in this series, the process, the journey of creating the change turned out to be more valuable than actually arriving at the outcome.

Although we are motivated by changing certain physical circumstances we exist in, often it’s the internal shift, the growth we go through on a personal level, that turns out to be the most valuable outcome. The physical benefits are like having the cake, while the real change is learning how to cook, something you can take with you long after you finish eating the cake.

Although many of the stories I’m about to tell you relate to a personal milestone, event or challenge from my life, the cornerstone of the story is the lesson learned as a result. Luckily for us, I’ve been chronicling many of these lessons by revealing the stories here on this blog, so together we can go on a trip through the last ten years of my life and extract some of the most important and powerful revelations as they apply to creating positive change.

I’ve included a link to the original articles that recount in more detail the situations and the key learnings. I strongly recommend you read these articles too, as they will greatly reinforce the messages of this article series.

This is some of the most powerful content in this blog in terms of helping you change your mindset, increase your own self awareness and achieve what you want. I say this in confidence because they are the benefits I gained by living these experiences.

Here we go…
1. Personal Congruency (Confidence through training)

Source: Personal Congruency… At 21? How To Be Confident At Any Age

Way back during the first year of this blog I talked about my trip to Seattle to play in the 1998 Magic world championships (a card game that has a competitive tournament series, sort of like poker, but geekier). During this trip I was able to meet some of the stars of the game, and play against the best of the best. The result of this once-in-a-lifetime experience was a change to how I perceive people who are considered famous and a deeper understanding of how they got there.

People who are exceptionally good at something get there because they repeated processes over and over again in preparation for an experience, or in an attempt to qualify for the experience. They then had the experience, which helped them become more confident heading into the next similar experience. This is why in professional sports or competition of any kind it’s usually a huge advantage to have “been there before” as you’re not intimidated by what you don’t know.

This opens up the idea that expertise and success comes to people who choose to go after it. Yes talent, gifts and luck play a part, but the greater your “courage of conviction”, the more likely you will be successful. If you build the tools to create the courage through hard work, then you are more likely to succeed, even if you have never had the success you are striving for before.

It’s worth reading this article because I wrote it when I was 26. I’m 30 now and a lot happened during those years. I wrote that article having had minor financial success in my life at the time, but feeling confident about where I was heading because the positive signs were becoming very consistent and I truly began to believe I could have what I wanted, at least financially, because of what I was doing. I was starting to become proof of the concept I was writing about. I was starting a process of change, just as I was starting to build this blog.

2. You Control Your Perception (Interpretation is half the battle)

Source: The Key To Happiness

I read a book called Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman. It’s a really interesting book, and one of the most enlightening ideas I took away from it was this -

Optimistic people do not see reality. Instead they contort their interpretation of what they are experiencing to see it as positive, regardless of what is really happening.

Pessimistic people have a much firmer grasp of reality and as such often see the negativity in what is happening to them and other people around them.

Optimists are essentially fooling themselves so they feel better. They manufacture hope and as a result live longer, happier lives. Pessimists see a form of truth, which you might say is more accurate than the optimists, but they consequently suffer more.

So do you want to be the happy fool or the sad realist?

When I was in my early twenties clearly my mind had decided that it preferred to see the negative in what was going on around it. It became so good at this, that the body it had control of started to malfunction.

My mind created so much fear that I started to get panic attacks. Even when there wasn’t a large predatory animal trying to hunt me down, which is a more typical reason for my body to react the way it did, as if it was preparing to fight or run away from the danger, I was feeling these sensations. It was horrible.

I created danger and fear when it wasn’t there and it was because I had learned how to think about things the wrong way. I distorted my interpretation of reality to the point where I suffered physical pain. I call that a form of insanity, but I did find a way out…

As a result of this experience I became a very, very good listener, and this has nothing to do with listening to other people. I started listening to, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I started to observe my own thoughts, and wow, were they broken.

Back when I wrote the key to happiness I was at a stage where I observed my thought process for the sake of becoming a better thinker. You can call this cognitive behavior therapy if you like, but it’s not that complicated, all you really have to do is “watch” how you talk to yourself. Once you do this you start to realize, at least this is the case for many people, that you really don’t like yourself very much. You spend your entire day being insecure about pretty much everything.

My god was this a turning point for me! I couldn’t believe how mean I was. I thought I was a good person before this, in fact I thought I was so nice that I deserved better in my life, but I was wrong. I was an absolute bastard to the person that mattered most – myself. I spent nearly every waking moment judging myself, and the world around me, and 90% of the time I was negative.

From the seeds of your worst moments, come your greatest strengths. Becoming aware of my own internal dialogue was a massive gift and has positively influenced my life since then. The awareness born from actively listening to how I talked to myself, and then making a very conscious choice to change how I interpret the world around me and thus how I talk about experience to myself, gave me the toolset I need to, well, be happy.

I can’t really put it any better than I did at the end of the article, so I’ll repeat it here…

Happiness is ultimately not in anyone else’s hands or controlled by any external element at all. It’s purely a choice you can make. As often as I can I choose to be happy. It’s not always as easy as that but by undertaking to change the way you think and create an ongoing positive dialogue with yourself you are both working towards the same goals – that’s you and your little voice – both aiming for happiness.

Once you gain the power by becoming self aware of your own voice inside your head and how you perceive the world around you, half the battle is won. You are in control and that will always be the case no matter what happens to you or your environment.

Creating positive change in your life begins with how you interpret life itself. If you want things to change for the better, the first step is to make the choice to see the world in a way that is beneficial, on the inside. The outside world is always open to interpretation, and you will never know the real truth, so why not create perceptions that help you?

The key take away from this article is self awareness is the first step towards creating the change you want, in fact, it is all you ever need if you really drill down to it. You are the master of your own universe.

3. Work Ethic (Do it even when you don’t feel like it)

Source: How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

This is still one of the most popular articles on this blog with almost 250 comments as I type this, I wrote the article because it is clear people need encouragement. Heck, I need encouragement too, so I wrote this just as much for myself as I did for you.

Your mind is your strongest asset and your weakest link, and can be a very clever saboteur. It has a huge influence on your emotional state, and your emotions are the fuel that feed your creativity, or stifle it.

If there was a lesson that every blogger, entrepreneur and athlete knows well, it’s the importance of consistence and persistence. I wrote about this in some depth in my very first free report – How To Start An Internet Business – and it’s safe to take this on board as fact.

To be successful you’re going to have to work hard, over a long period of time and there will be stages, many of them, where you just don’t feel like it. If you want to change, learning how to work through periods of lack of motivation, depression, feelings of loss, confusion, or any state brought upon by negative thought patterns, requires that you learn two things -

1. Your thoughts are choices of perception that you are in control of entirely (the previous section discussed this)
2. You can choose to just do it (credit to Nike) regardless of how you feel

As you probably know from experience, sometimes even when you are aware of your inner voice, and even despite telling yourself all kinds of positive and good things, you still feel like crap. The reason for this is you don’t believe in what you are saying to yourself, which is often very hard when you’re still on the journey to change, because your physical reality hasn’t become what you want it to…yet.

A true master of self awareness chooses their emotional state because they are in complete control of their internal configuration and have need for nothing in the external world (like totally zen). For most of us, the outside world has, and will have for our entire lives, a huge influence over us because we want something from it. As long as you have a sense of attachment to anything, and this is especially true for attachments to people, you’re going to suffer (go Buddhism!).

This happens to me too, and although I can say it’s not as pervasive as it once was, I still feel lousy sometimes when I’m not getting what I think I want, when I want it. This is especially the case when you are working to change something that requires you have an experience you have never had before, or where you have attempted to have the experience, yet failed, perhaps multiple times, reinforcing the belief that you will never attain your goal.

Chances are if you are reading this blog, one of the things you are attempting to do now is make money online, and you’re not there yet, so you’re forced to do things to make money that you don’t like (e.g. a job), and you feel bad about it. This is a classic situation where you need to push through and keep going, even in the face of emotional adversity, and as I outlined in the article, often simply making the decision to act even when you don’t feel like it, will pull you out of the negative mood.

The important point here is that you need to realize your process to come to a change is going to involve feeling all kinds of emotions, many of which will not help you change in the direction you want to. The greater the change you desire, the longer the journey, and the more you are going to experience along the way. It’s your job to pilot the ship forward no matter what the conditions, with the belief that your destination is always moving closer, even when you feel like you are going backwards, and you are never certain of when you will arrive.

Coming Up: Taking It To The Next Level

I’ve introduced you to three principle concepts required to realize positive change in your life -

1. Confidence through training helps you create a foundation for growth
2. Self awareness – You choose your perception of reality
3. Working regardless of inner or outer conditions is the path to what you want

You can no doubt see how all three of these concepts are very interrelated and impact each other. As you continue through this series you’re going to see that all these concepts are governed by universal laws, and in the end there is only one variable that really matters when it comes to making change. That variable is you.

Coming up next we’re going to look even deeper at how you are the greatest agent for change there is today. Although your focus right now might be to change aspects of your own life, by the end of this article series you’re going to see how important it is that you go through this process, because if you can truly grasp this, you will see that you’re also the key to changing absolutely everything that you perceive as wrong on this planet.

But let’s not get too deep just yet. First we need to understand what’s governing the process of change, how your own behavior dictates results, what drives your behaviors and how simple it really is to change behavior if you just tie it all into the right mindset.