That’s not what you want. You don’t want to feel anxious with an X sign over to it; you want to be calm and not anxious at all. So when you do this exercise, go over your list again. Be clear that you’re saying where you do want to go, not where you don’t want to go.
The brain is literal. It doesn’t reinterpret. It doesn’t change “I don’t want to” into an understanding of what you do want. Clear and direct instructions are a language that your brain does understand.
I find that almost everyone can tell me what they don’t want. It’s not surprising for people to have been in therapy for years and still not know what they want; they simply have never thought about it.
It’s important for you to know that you’re never going to get beyond your limitations in that way. When people struggle to come up with an answer as to what the life of their dreams would look like, I say, “That’s why you don’t have it yet. You can’t have something if you don’t know what it looks like.” It’s as if they’re standing in the street crying. I ask, “Why are you crying?” And they say, “Because I didn’t get there yet.” And I say, “Where?” And they say, “I don’t know.”
The Law of Attraction
In simple terms the Law of Attraction means you get what you think about, what you focus on, what you talk about, and what you believe. The question is: Is your balance of thought, communication, and belief more on the side of what you want or the side of what you don’t want in your life?
Most people can articulate vividly and emotionally and in great detail all of the things that aren’t going right in their lives. They are completely clear about who caused it and why they are so miserable and constantly tell anyone who will listen all about it. Do you know someone like this…perhaps you? Is it any wonder that they…or you…would continue to attract the same problems and situations over and over again?
Where your attention goes, energy flows!
What shows up in your life has less to do with where you were born, how you were raised, or what you look like than with what you focus on. Such factors do play a part in your expectations, but at any point along the way you can change your focus and stop using your past, your looks, and who you know as your excuse to not be living the life you really want for yourself.
If you want something to change, you have to change something!
KEY 2
RECOGNIZE WHAT’S IN YOUR CONTROL
CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONAL WORLD
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can change;and the wisdom to know the difference.
– Serenity Prayer
It is critical for you to recognize that you can’t control everything. However, you do have control over what you need in order to create the life of your dreams.
When you focus on the part of life that is out of your control and try to change it and fail, then you feel like your life is out of your control. The emotions that stem from the feeling of being unable to control your experience and help yourself are anxiety, frustration, and depression.
On the other hand, when you focus on what you can control, you feel strong and empowered to move forward and attain your life’s goals, aspirations, and dreams.
Here’s an analogy to help you understand this better. Why do most people feel in control when they drive a car? Because they’re focusing on the steering wheel, which is the part of the driving experience they fully control. Because, in essence they’re mostly out of control when it comes to protecting themselves from getting killed in a car crash. Most accidents don’t happen because a driver drives off the road but because another car crashes into their car.
When you focus on what’s out of your control, you get anxious, frustrated, and depressed. But when you focus on the part of life that you have the ability to control, you feel empowered and calm. When you focus on what’s in your control, you feel empowered and have the internal drive to make things happen, because it’s in your power to succeed.
One part of your experience that you can control is your emotions; you can make the rules as to when you experience a specific emotion. You also have the ability to turn emotions on or off. When you develop the skills to activate and deactivate your emotions, then you have the power to choose to supercharge your emotions so you win.
How Your Emotional Anchors Are Developed
You have millions of experiences in your lifetime. However, experiences do not in themselves have any emotions associated with them. Death is death. House is house. Car is car. Accident is accident. Child is child. Wedding is wedding. These are all neutral events and situations.
On the other hand, you have a vast range of feelings. We’ll look at this in more detail later, but for now suffice it to say that there are many different feelings that you can apply to any experience.
According to developmental psychologists, by about age eight we’ve pretty much compiled in our subconscious mind all the different emotions we’re going to experience in our life. These emotions become anchored to various events. There isn’t any hardwired automatic connection between a specific event and specific emotion; it has to be developed.
Your life experiences play a major role in forming these connections; these experiences forge a connection between two unrelated entities. For example, there is no natural connection between being slapped and running onto a street. However, if a toddler runs into the street, he gets a smack from his parent for putting himself in grave danger. The toddler will connect street with smack and most likely not run onto the street again. If a child associates a lollipop with good behavior, she’ll feel good when acting that way, even though, in essence, the behavior and the lollipop are two completely separate entities.
It is your mind that makes the connection between those two separate things. It’s important to know that you have the ability to connect any feeling to any event.
This concept is going to prove very useful to you in freeing yourself from limitations and supercharging yourself to win. You have the ability to attach good emotions to desired actions and propel yourself towards your desired direction.
Your emotional world is like a compass – its needle always points north, which correlates to feeling good. You learn how to forge the connections between feeling good and your desired outcome. You learn to change and control your internal world so that the things that you choose to move towards are in line with your emotions. They can begin to move you in the proper direction and it feels good.
When you wind up in a problem situation, where for some reason something is causing you pain, fear, and stress, you can connect a different feeling or a different meaning to that situation. You have the choice to create a different feeling in response to any event that has caused you discomfort up to right now.
In essence you’re not really changing a situation around you – and yet you are. You’re changing your whole world. Because you’re changing how you feel in a situation that in the past has been troublesome, you’re freeing yourself from its clutches.
For example, suppose you have fear connected to heights. Remember that heights stay heights; this fact will never change. But you can change your feelings associated with heights. “Heights” doesn’t specifically have to be connected with “fear.” You can enable yourself to feel calm next to “heights,” despite the fact that currently heights and fear are connected.
Why? Because experiences and emotions are not hard wired.
If a certain feeling – fear – has become connected with heights, you can change that association. You can control your internal world so “calm”