“Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.”
— NIELS BOHR
Would you like to change your life? Would you like to have . . .
Of course you would. That’s why you’re reading this book!
I’m sure this isn’t the first book of this type you’ve read. In fact, you’ve probably tried many things to achieve results like the ones I just listed. Let me ask you a question:
What have you tried to do to change your life?
If you’re like the thousands of men and women I’ve spoken to at my seminars or coached in our mastermind groups, you’ve probably tried:
Hey, wait a minute! What’s that last one?
If you’ve ever read a self-help book or tried anything in the personal-growth industry, it’s very likely that you’ve tried using affirmations or positive statements to change your life. Studies show that millions of people have been writing, speaking, and listening to positive statements for years—perhaps even decades. So let’s begin at the beginning. . . .
Question: Why have so many of us spent so much time saying, writing, and listening to positive statements?
Answer: Because that’s what we were told to do.
Highly successful people over the years have told you, me, and millions of others that if we wanted to change our lives, we should use positive statements. And who were the individuals telling us to follow this method? Those who I call “traditional success teachers.”
We’ve used positive statements for years, because that’s what we were told to do.
These highly successful people told us in books, seminars, lectures, and movies—pretty much everywhere we looked—that there was another traditional success teacher telling us that we should use positive statements if we wanted to change our lives. So, of course we tried it.
Which brings us to the next question. . . .
Question (and this is really important): Do positive statements actually work to change our lives?
Answer: Of course they do. There’s no doubt that positive statements or affirmations have helped millions of people achieve their personal and professional goals.
But there’s just one teeny little problem. . . .
Question: How come I’ve tried using affirmations and didn’t get what I wanted?
Answer: Because there was something missing.
What Your Mind Can Do
The human mind is an incredibly miraculous thing. For example, it created the computer I’m typing these words on right now. It is a human mind—your mind—that is reading these words and processing their meaning in a split second.
If you are reading these words in a building right now (for instance, your home, your office, the library, and so on), the human mind created that. If you’re reading this book in a car, truck, minivan, or commuter train, the human mind created that, too. (I just hope you’re not reading while driving!) Nevertheless, if you’re in a building or vehicle right now, the human mind conceived it, and lots of human minds (and bodies) worked together to build it.
Consider that the human mind also created the fields of science, religion, philosophy, mathematics, history, and every work of art that has ever existed. Here are just a few of the things your miraculous mind can do:
Analyze, brainstorm, create, dream, engineer, form, generate, have a hunch, imagine, judge, know, learn, meditate, originate, plan, rationalize, speculate, think, understand, visualize, and wonder.
Isn’t that amazing? And you can do all of that before breakfast!
We often forget what a miracle our own mind is. We often think of ourselves as static, fixed, unchanging beings: I am what I am, and that’s that. But consider this for a moment: have you always been the person you are right now? Are you the same person today as when you . . .
All of these stages of life have one thing in common—each one meant change. You underwent change when you went from crawling to walking . . . from being dependent to being independent . . . from single to married . . . from working at a job to owning your own business.
Life, at its essence, is change.
Life, at its essence, is change. In fact, every day of your life means change, because every day you are a different person from the day before.
Now, here’s where things get really interesting. . . .
What the Traditional Success Teachers Taught You
What is an affirmation? Simply put, it’s a statement of something you want to be true in your life.
Your thoughts are like seeds. You plant these thought-seeds every minute of every hour of every day of your life, whether you’re aware of it or not. As you think about anything—life, money, relationships, your health, your family, your past, your present, your future—these thought-seeds are planted in the fertile soil of what we could call Infinite Intelligence, or God.
Your life then becomes a reflection of the thought-seeds you’ve planted in the “soil” of Infinite Intelligence. Therefore, your life is a reflection of the thoughts you consistently think.
You would think that, with the sheer number of books and programs in our industry that support this notion, by now we’d all know how to change our lives simply by repeating positive statements over and over. But all you have to do is look around to see that unfortunately, this is not the case (yet). The question is: Why not?
Your life is a reflection of the thoughts you consistently think.
The Missing Piece
Let’s say, for example, that one of the changes you wanted was to earn more money. Because you had this goal, you began to study how to achieve it. You read books, attended seminars, and listened to traditional success teachers who told you that in order to change your life (that is, make more money), you must first change your thoughts about money.
Makes sense so far. You understand the truth of the statement, “As you sow, so shall you reap,” which is simply another way of saying that your life is a reflection of the thoughts you consistently think (the thought-seeds you’re planting).
You think back to childhood and recognize that perhaps you grew up experiencing a lack of money; therefore, you identified that the thought that’s been holding you back is, I don’t have enough money.
Now that you’ve identified the main thought that’s been keeping you stuck, you realize that your next step is to change that thought. In other words, you decide to stop planting negative thought-seeds (that created a life you don’t want), and start planting positive thought-seeds (that will, you hope, create the new life you do want).
Then you did what the traditional success teachers told you to do: started using positive statements or affirmations to change those old thoughts into new ones. Why? Because you’re trying to change your life, so you need to change your thoughts, and so of course the way to do that is to change negative statements into positive statements.
For example, to overcome the negative thought of I don’t have enough money, you started saying, writing, and repeating the positive statement: “I have enough money” or even “I am rich.”
And because you’re a good student, you did this over and over and over again. Dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times.
Then what happened?
Let’s give it a try.
Right now, say to yourself, “I am rich.”
Say it again—this time with emotion.
“I am rich!”
What just happened in your mind?
Did you hear something else in there?
Was it a voice that said something like, “Yeah, right!”?
So here it is, the key question I must ask you now:
Question: Do you believe your own affirmations?
Answer: The plain and simple truth is that many of us simply don’t believe our own affirmations. We’ve been saying, writing, and repeating these positive statements over and over again for years; but for some reason, we just don’t believe them.
And that lack of belief, which I call the Belief Gap, is the “something missing” in our old approach.
The Belief Gap
Whenever you’re trying to change your life—for example, make more money, find a more fulfilling career, attract your soul mate, improve your health, lose weight, and so forth—what you’re really trying to do is create a new reality for yourself. Let’s illustrate that by saying that you want to go from your current reality to a new reality.
Perception is reality to the perceiver.
The funny thing about reality, though, is that all reality is perceived reality. Another way of saying that is: perception is reality to the perceiver.
For example, let’s say you have a die-hard Boston Red Sox fan and a die-hard New York Yankees fan, and they’re in the same room watching the Red Sox play the Yankees. (I have no idea why they’re in the same room, but still.) Are these two people going to see the same game?
The answer is, of course, yes and no.
Yes, they are watching the same set of circumstances that occur on the field—a guy on one team gets a hit, someone on the other team strikes out, and so on.
But no, they are not watching the same game at all! That’s because one of them will celebrate whenever “his” team gets a hit, while the other one will moan in pain. One of them will high-five his friends (who also root for “his” team) when “their” team wins, while the fan of the other one will mope around for days because “his” team lost.
That’s why perception is reality to the perceiver.
Going back to our example, here’s what’s really happening when you’re trying to change your life:
1. Right now you are living in what I call your Current Perceived Reality (CPR). In your CPR, you have what you have, you know what you know, you do what you do, and you are what you are. This is your Current Perceived Reality—and to you, your perception is reality. There is nothing else. It is your own little universe.
2. What you want is to be someplace else. You want to change something about your life (get a new result). For instance, you want to change your weight, your finances, your health, your relationships, your level of fame, your sphere of influence, your lifestyle, or any number of other things. That “someplace else” is what I call your New Desired Reality (NDR).
3. Between your CPR and your NDR lies what I call your Belief Gap: the space between where you perceive you are right now (your CPR) and what it will be like when you arrive “someplace else” (your NDR).
Here’s a picture to illustrate what I’m talking about:
How big is your Belief Gap? That depends on a number of things: how long you’ve been in your CPR; how hard you think it will be to get to your NDR; how many of your friends tell you, “It’s impossible,” when you tell them your dreams; and so on.
Also, you probably have different Belief Gaps for different results you want to realize in your life. For example, you may think it’s really hard to lose 20 pounds, but really easy to make an extra $10,000 a month. Or you may think losing 20 pounds is a piece of cake (pun intended), but to make an extra $10,000 a month is well nigh impossible!
Bottom line? Until you cross your individual Belief Gap for each result, outcome, or experience you want in your life, it will be very difficult for you to make the leap to reach the new life and create the new reality you desire.
How to Bridge the Belief Gap
Have you ever realized you were planting negative thought-seeds (for example, I’m broke, I’m lonely, I can’t lose weight, I’m unhappy), decided you wanted something better, tried saying positive statements over and over again just like they told you to, and then had . . . absolutely nothing happen?
Me, too . . . and about a gazillion other people.
But why?
Were we incapable of thinking a positive thought, not smart enough, not motivated enough, not educated enough, or just not meant to be successful?
The answer is: none of the above.
The reason the traditional method did not give us the results we were hoping for is because we were trying to overcome the Belief Gap using only statements, since that’s what we were told to do.
Your mind responds automatically to something that’s both simpler and more powerful than statements.
But your subconscious mind, the place where positive changes begin, responds automatically to something that’s both simpler and more powerful than statements.
However, since no one told you that before, you kept using a method that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. It’s like you have been working really hard trying to build a new house . . . but the only tool you were given was a chainsaw.
Well, I’ve got some exciting news that could very well change your life:
Rather than continuing to beat yourself up
for not getting the results you wanted,
let me introduce you to a method
that’s both simpler and easier than
the one you’ve been using.
Now It’s Your Turn
You’ve been trying to change your life by using statements to overcome your Belief Gap.
However, starting in the next chapter, you can start to change your life by asking a new kind of question.
What on Earth do I mean?
