You Have No Idea How Powerful You Are
Download Options: PDF
Article Text:
Over 30 years of practice as a clinical psychologist working at the forefront of mind-body medicine, thousands of people have worked with my methods and been thrilled with the results. Now it’s time for this wisdom to be available to everyone, because it works for everyone, everyone who is interested in living life large.
The fact is you have no idea how powerful you are. Every human being is endowed with a power that stretches beyond most peoples’ imagination, but so few of us ever look for it. Once you know what I know, you’ll be able to realize your dreams: health, prosperity, love, a fulfilling life purpose, a better world, you name it. Whatever you most want out of life, I can give you the tools you need to control your destiny. And to do it, you don’t have to “fix” yourself. You’re O.K. just the way you are. You don’t have to be gifted, brilliant or saintly. There’s nothing wrong with you.
In this series of articles, I will prove to you that you’ve succumbed to a powerful illusion. Most of us are living inside of a box, defining ourselves and our future based on what we’ve experienced, what we can see, taste, smell, touch, think and feel. It’s an excruciatingly small box, like an over-tight shoe. And it’s just a powerful illusion. I will prove it to you.
You can break out of the box, no matter who you are or where you’ve been. I live outside the box and it’s not that complicated to get there. Once you learn how to live outside the box, it’s a small matter to control what goes on inside of it. You’ll find it easy to change your life then, no matter what you need or want.
How big is your box? Perhaps you’ve already arrived. You’re a captain of industry, a mover and shaker on the political scene, a social icon, eat great food, take great vacations. But you’re still living in a box. Many of you yearn for more, but you can’t quite put your finger on what you’re missing. Or perhaps you’re an industrial worker in Gary, Indiana: you’re hardworking, probably came up the hard way, you support your family and against the odds, you’re realizing the American dream. But for many of you, the dream hasn’t delivered and you know it. Or maybe you’re a person who’s been trying to jettison the box for years: you’re already exploring the frontiers of human potential, looking for ultimate meaning in life and don’t care about the status quo. You’re sure that “something more” is out there because you can taste it, but the way to get it isn’t clear. You sometimes feel caught between two worlds. Or perhaps your life has reduced you to the basics of survival: you’ve been grappling with illness, the legacy of emotional pain, loss of your job. You know you’re in a box. You fight pain and hopelessness with courage and faith. Many of you may have consigned yourself to suffering, after trying everything in the book. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be that way. Whatever your station in life and whatever your history and prospects, I assure you, your thoughts about who you are and what you can do are too small, way too small.
So, are you in or out? It will depend on how much you’ve bought in to the box. In this series of articles, I will use scientific proofs, clinical experience, and your own experience to help you tear down the walls of your box. For now, I want to challenge your beliefs about what you can do by dismantling the two biggest lies in our culture, lies that prevent us from living out our greatest dreams.
Think of someone who has overcome the odds to demonstrate tremendous strength and character. Take someone like Lance Armstrong: seven time winner of the Tour de France who overcame testicular cancer to lead a worldwide movement to raise cancer awareness. You look at someone like that and you say “Wow, he’s a hero.” I pose a question to you: what is the difference between Lance Armstrong and you? The answer is: none. But the distinction is that he knows this, and you don’t.
There are two big lies that hold people back monstrously. The first big lie is “Hey, you know, it really isn’t all out there - having your dreams, having a wonderful life – that’s boloney. Come on, get real, maybe make a plan that allows for a compromise, find your niche, tone it down a little. Get in line, because I’m sorry, it just isn’t out there.” I’m telling you, that that is a lie. It is just a crock. It is not true. It is the message of darkness.
There’s a second big lie out there. That big lie is “Oh yeah it’s out there alright, it’s out there for Lance Armstrong! But you, you’re just not good enough.” If you succumb to this lie, you have two directions you can go in. First, you can just accept it. “Alright,” you may say, “I’m not good enough. What the heck, I can read about Lance Armstrong in the papers, identify with him and enjoy life vicariously.” Your other option is to do something about it. If you want to do something about it, the first thing most people do is to reach out for a means of power and control. There are experts like Tony Robbins, teaching you that you can have prosperity and success and live a good spiritual life if you just reach out and take hold of the world. There are experts like Dr. Phil, who specialize in the “get tough” psychological approach, insisting we should stop excusing our weaknesses and shape up. These approaches are helpful. You are better off being a whole person, becoming all you can be at the psychological level, going out and creating health, wealth and prosperity in the world. But these approaches still fall short of the mark. They won’t get you out of the box. Why? Because that second lie really is a lie. You’re fine, you’re good enough.
It’s not that there is something wrong with you. That’s what someone like a Lance Armstrong knows. If you got to know him, you’d find that he hangs out in the bar in Austin too much and he’s a bit of a local character and he’s got his human foibles, just like we do. Somehow that didn’t stop him. He’s still a hero. You do not have to be perfect – that’s just another lie designed to hold you back. Don’t believe it.
How about a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Churchill, a Mother Teresa? What about them? Are they different from you, the same as you? There’s one basic difference. The great ones face themselves in the mirror. They take their own measure and they don’t do it superficially. They don’t just say “Hey, I’m making six figures, give to charity, have a nice family, and go to church.” They plumb their depths. They face life with the utmost self-awareness and honesty. Such people come to face life with courage, and with faith in something. Faith is different for different people. You look at a Lance Armstrong, and it’s basically faith in himself – a “nothing is going to stop me” type of faith. With a Desmond Tutu, it’s faith in God. With a Roosevelt, it was faith in freedom from tyranny. The great ones all have a rock solid faith in something. They meet the challenges they face with courage. And because they have courage, they persist until they find the answers, and they don’t give in to fear or pain.
It isn’t that people with courage don’t experience fear or pain. There is nothing wrong with experiencing pain or fear – they’re our built-in alarm systems. If my arm is broken, or if I’m in danger, I better know it. Pain and fear get a little overwhelming sometimes, but you can’t let them run the show. There are people who face difficult odds, face down their pain and fear and live heroically anyway. We are too often ready to mythologize them, but not ourselves and not each other, and there’s something wrong with that. Make a list of your own heroes. Your name better be on it. I challenge you to begin seeing yourself as a hero as a first step toward living life large.
I get some interesting responses to this challenge. A few people say, “Oh, yeah! I’m there!” Others have said “Why bother? . . . It takes too much out of you. Life’s already kicked me around, turned me every which way but loose. I just don’t have it in me for another round.” These people have caved to the limitations of life because life’s been hard and they’re worn down. Their attitude is like the one in the famous old Blues refrain, “If it hadn’t o’ been for bad luck I wouldn’t have had no luck at all.” These platitudes resonate with us because they have real meaning.
Why bother? I’m telling you, it is dangerous to undershoot in life. See what this life has to offer. You are living this life now. People have different opinions about the meaning of life – perhaps you believe in reincarnation and think we come around again and again, or maybe you believe you live out this life and die and go to heaven, or perhaps you think that life is simply “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” But you can’t debate that you’re here now. This is what you’ve got to work with. Do you really want to undershoot it? Why shouldn’t you go for it, whatever your dreams are? You’ve been told, “Hey it’s not out there.” I’m challenging you. I’m saying that’s a crock, it is out there. And you’re good enough to have it.
Why get a little out of life when you can get a lot? There’s a Hindu fable that fits here. There was a lioness that was hunting sheep while she was pregnant. She gave birth and then died, and the sheep took in the cub and raised it as a sheep. Now, here’s this lion, thinking it’s a sheep, bleating and baah-ing and when there’s a threat, he runs away in fright. Another adult lion comes along one day and says, “What the heck is going on here?” He grabs the young lion by the scruff of the neck, carries it over to a little pond so it can see its reflection, and says ”Look, you are a lion, not a sheep. You are not designed to go around bleating and running away in fear. You are designed to roar, and let the trees and everything else shake in fear of you. Recognize your power. You are a lion.” That’s what I’m telling you. And that’s what these people – Armstrong, FDR, Mother Teresa and countless others who are just the same as you and me, have seen when they look themselves in the mirror deeply - very deeply – deeply enough to break out of the mold – deeply enough to believe in something that you’ve never seen before and hardly dare to believe in.
Why doesn’t everyone just do it then? Why isn’t everyone just living life large? Why am I even saying this? It’s simple: it is frightening. It’s scary enough to look at your own warts and blemishes, let alone your greatness. If you dare to look at your own greatness it’s threatening, particularly when you start pressing beyond human limitation and begin to see just how awesome life can be. Maybe you’re a disciplined athlete living beyond the threshold of ordinary human endurance, or perhaps you are practicing meditation or prayer and have directly experienced levels of consciousness most people never see. When you begin to see the amount of power that can move through you, it’s going to scare you at times. And, you probably already have a lot on your plate that occupies your attention and keeps your life squarely within comfortable limits. You may be thinking, “Living life large is a great idea, but I’ve got to pick up the kids, pay the bills, succeed at work. If I have a spare minute, I need to catch up on my sleep, and you’re telling me ‘Oh, I’m so powerful.’” But, I’m calling you out. I am not denying the way that your responsibilities tug at you, but they’re piddling compared to what you really are when you take a deep look and begin to break out of the box of human limitation.
I want you to review your life for a moment and ask yourself whether you’ve ever done anything particularly good. Ever surprised yourself, lived up to some ideal that went beyond the “normal” limited existence you were living (you know, lie number two)? Have you ever had dreams? Remember when you were a kid? This makes me think of my daughters. You see this in kids all the time. I remember my older daughter saying “I’m going to be the greatest music star in the world . . . I’m going to be Sandy.” “Sandy” was the name of the female lead in the movie Grease, played by Olivia Newton-John. My daughter went around for a good year thinking she was Sandy. I saw the movie about a fifty times. But that wasn’t enough for my daughter. In addition, she was going to be the greatest ballerina, and she was going to be the greatest doctor, and she was going to do all these things at once.
You remember dreams? You had dreams. Then you went to school, learned some stuff, hit the world. Maybe you hit a war, or discrimination - but you definitely hit ‘something.’ And then you said “Whoa (lie number one), it’s not really out there, I better get real.” You knew you didn’t want to be like the grasshopper in the French fairytale about the grasshopper and the ant. In that tale, the grasshopper partied all summer while the industrious ant was storing up supplies for the winter. Winter came and it was hard. The ant, sitting in his cozy den with plenty of food, hears a knock at the door. It’s the grasshopper, near frozen, wanting to come in. “Sorry,” says the ant - and we all know what happened to the poor grasshopper. That story has been used to terrorize people into a neurotic, conservative work ethic for generations. “So, it’s best to live life small, store up for the winter, because it really isn’t out there anyway. Don’t count on anything other than your own hard effort.” Boloney. Guess what: it’s O.K. to be the grasshopper from time to time – there’s no penalty for loving life – and if you only live like the ant, you will miss the meaning of life altogether. Dare to see how great you are. Stop believing in limitations of any kind. Bring out the heroic instead.
Have you ever been heroic? I want you to brag. Have you lived life large at times? I remember when I was in junior high school, stumbling my way through social scenes because I didn’t feel totally adequate. I mean, I was O.K. but I was not the most popular guy and a little geeky. I’d get pretty nervous asking girls to dance. But I had a good friend who went to a different school and his school had teen dances. I didn’t know any of those people. So I decided to go to his school dances and I created a whole new me. I was really popular there, and actually won a dance contest. They didn’t know me from the Man in The Moon, and I was a different person there. I was able to try out new ways of being that I gradually brought into myself over time, eventually genuinely. But there was something heroic about having enough guts to go into this other school where I didn’t know anyone and become what was my image of a ‘cool guy.’ Now, come on, you can’t identify with something like that? Haven’t we all been in there?
When have you shown some guts and been heroic? I asked that question in a seminar I held at my Center last year. Sara, a member of our group who has been confined to a wheelchair her entire adult life, shared a true story. “I would like to talk about a good friend of mine named Barry, who just died, not because I don’t like to talk about myself but he’s been a great inspiration in my life. He grew up in Wyoming, and his family was outdoors all the time. He participated in everything you can possibly do outdoors, and he wound up being on the first American team to climb Everest, along with the National Geographic. Shortly after the Everest expedition, when his first child was two years old, Barry was in a helicopter crash in the wilderness and he became a paraplegic. He was full of despair and anger. He went and lived with a Tibetan Lama for two years and he developed serenity, patience and wisdom. He had two more boys after that. He raised three sons and became a luminous writer. He helped found a magazine and wrote for it for quite a few years. My latest issue has a lot of his writings that people have remembered and printed to celebrate his life. Barry said that the reward of life is relationships, and relationships are love that does not die. He said a lot of wise things, but to me, that sums him up in a nutshell. He was a wonderful, interesting, energizing person, and I am very happy to have known him. In knowing him, I found the courage I needed to find, and I learned through both our struggles, that anybody can find courage.”
Is that not a perfect example of a hero? Think of it. How about if that happened to you and you became a paraplegic after living a robust athletic life? If that happened to me, I’d be tempted to metaphorically stick my thumb out, hoping the Good Lord would give me a ride out of here. Almost everyone would. Obviously, there came a moment where, in that certain deep way, Barry looked himself in the mirror and said, “Here’s where I am, here’s what I’ve got, what do I stand for?” And he made it happen. It’s fair to call him a hero. We see in him someone who overcame great hardship to live life very large. Barry sought for and found something in himself that swamped the effects of paraplegia. A lot of people are seeking that kind of awareness. I’m here to tell you, you don’t need to go to Tibet and live with a Lama to get it. You can get it in the comfort of your own living room. You will find it in the comfort of your own mind. I’ll describe precisely how you can do it.
For now, the point I want to bring home is that anyone can realize their dreams. Live life large no matter what. Forget the lies. There is nothing wrong with you. You are not too deluded, dumb, ill, out to lunch, too young, too old, or unfit in any way that can prevent you from realizing your goals. It’s just that there’s something you need to know that most people don’t know. I’m going to lay it all out for you in this series of articles. I’ll do it with scientific fact and time-tested wisdom, and I’ll make it so transparent that your grandmother would be able to pick up this ball and run with it if she’s interested.
It’s a fact: what your grandmother doesn’t know and what you may only suspect, is that the physical world you live in and the limitations you face in it, are not fixed. That’s what I meant when I said earlier that most people are living in a box and don’t even know it. The world as you perceive it does not actually exist the way you think it does, and I will prove it to you in the next article, but stick with me for a moment and don’t leap ahead. In Article Two I provide proof that the physical world is not fixed or immovable. The world and the universe that surrounds it are made of energy. It only seems hard, fixed and tangible because you “think” it’s that way. What if I said I could teach you to “think” differently, and in doing so, that you could learn to control the energy that makes up the physical world? Once you can do that, you can shift almost anything that’s going on inside the box. It’s an intriguing concept that happens to be true. If you think that this is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, you simply haven’t been keeping up with what’s going on in the fields of neuroscience, biochemistry, quantum physics, mathematics and mind-body-medicine. There is scientific proof that there is another world or worlds back behind this one, worlds made up of energy and pure thought. The idea is just new to most people.
I live outside the box, totally familiar with the worlds of energy and thought that exist back behind the physical world and dictate its structure. I have guided many thousands of people there. I can take you out of the box and teach you how to control what’s going on inside the box. Until you experience life outside the box, you’re a good bit like the person who grew up in Mud Flaps Mississippi who has never been to the big city. You just don’t know how good life can get.
I always tell the folks who come to my seminars “You all already know the biggest secret in town and that’s a big advantage. The overwhelming majority of people out there do not know what you know.” What my students know is this: the worlds of energy and pure thought that exist back behind the physical world are objective and real, and there are methods that work with scientific precision to help you tap into these realms and use their power to change your destiny. You access them by first going inward. Having accessed them inside your mind, you are able to apply them with phenomenal success in every aspect of day to day living.
Let’s say you’re interested in gaining this knowledge and getting out of the box. You have some choices about what you want to do with it. For some people, their interest is to get better from something, like a serious illness. Perhaps you want to harness the power outside the box to vastly improve the quality of your life by attaining prosperity, love, a vital life purpose, and so on. Still others are explorers at heart, interested in seeing everything there is to see. And then there are those who want to go from having it all to being it all, which is to say, they want to become one with the thought that governs the entire universe. All of these goals have great merit. There are all kinds of people, seeking in many different directions in life, and they all count.
Do you think it is “ethical” to focus on the acquisition of wealth? Some people don’t, but I do. I do not make judgments about people. If prosperity is what you need and want, you should have it. Take for example a man I’ve been working with recently. He came up hard in New York. He didn’t have much of anything: not much education, not much culture, not much money. He’d flirted with disaster again and again. For him, the thing that really mattered was getting a nice, big house to enjoy with his family and to impress people. And I’m here to tell you his desire was not superficial. It is easy to say it’s superficial if you haven’t come up poor in life. What he wanted wasn’t without merit: the American Dream. Concretely, when he started working with me he was making about $40,000 a year. Now, doing work that he loves, he’s clearing $1,000,000 annually. You can call him superficial if you want to. I would call him happy. And you should know this man. This is a guy who, after he came into some wealth, met a poor family, tried to find employment for the father, and bought the father a used car, because he knew that transportation would make the difference in the family’s survival. Today my client is involved in many beneficent causes. He’s a good man. He’s a hero in his own way. My methods worked with precision to help him realize his dream.
We all have our stories, and our own legitimate desires to go with them. For some people, psychological health is the big issue – gaining freedom from things that have plagued us, like loss, abuse, addiction, or relationship problems. Some of our stories are pretty darn devastating and we’re trying to overcome them. Plenty of us have purely physical challenges – disease, injury or handicaps. One thing or another we face. Live life large anyway. I can prove to you that you can do it, but first, you have to want to do it, no matter how difficult the past has been.
You can do it, whatever your goal. I’ve helped countless people overcome grave physical illness for example. Some years ago it was my practice to do Social Security Disability Evaluations for the state of Maryland. Anyone who works in that field knows that the ability to hold a job is the primary criterion for whether a person is disabled or not. One case involved a man who arrived at my office on the arm of his wife. He’d had a severe stroke two years prior. He was Mexican-American, in his mid 50s, and had been heading a mid-sized corporation of about 200 people at the time of his stroke. As he presented in my office, he could hardly talk. He sounded much like a kindergartner with severe speech pathology: stuttering through one-word statements, almost unintelligible. The family was Catholic, and a priest from their archdiocese who was a gifted healer had been working regularly with the man. When the evaluation was done, I offered to do some “energy work.” I hoped he would be open to it, based on his openness to healing from his priest. He was eager to try it, so I had the man stand up. By using simple techniques I’ve developed for moving energy which I regularly teach my students, I focused electro-magnetic energy on his brain. He was trying to speak as I worked on him, an excruciatingly slow, halted effort to tell me about his guilt regarding his wife. Some minutes into my treatment he shifted into lucid speech, mid-sentence. He moved from stumbling over a disjointed stream of words that went something like “ . . . I . . . . feel . . . bad . . . wife . . . alone,” into a fluid, articulate statement “and I feel so guilty because I can’t be there for her.” Then he shouted, ”Oh My God, Oh, My God, I’m back.” And the three of us cried in each others’ arms.
My methods work – sometimes miraculously so, like with the previous example. I can apply the methods, but I prefer to teach other people how to heal themselves. Five years ago a friend of mine paged me with a life and death emergency in the middle of the night. I was in Maryland. She was in California. She was sitting bedside at the hospital with her one year old son who was dying from an undiagnosed illness. His fever was 106.5 degrees and would not respond to analgesics. His ear drums and mucus membranes had ruptured. He was covered with a scarlet rash. His heartbeat was irregular. The doctors had done everything they could, but her son lay dying. It was a parent’s worst nightmare. This same friend had attended a seminar at my offices in Maryland just months before, where she had one brief lesson in how to do energy work. I advised her to do it with her son for ten minutes and then repeat the treatment at 90 minute intervals through the night. She did. Her work had the effect of stabilizing his heartbeat and dropping his temperature by three degrees. At dawn the next morning, the doctors cinched on a diagnosis: Kawasaki Disease, a rare disorder that can be lethal. Her son was moved immediately to UCSF Childrens Medical Center for treatment. His recovery was remarkably fast, with no ill after-effects to his heart or arteries. There is no doubt that this mother was able to sustain her son long enough for the doctors to diagnose and treat him before the disease claimed his life. And she did it after one short lesson.
A lot of people come to me because they are trying to sort out precisely who they are, their purpose in life, and other important spiritual questions. The methods I teach will get you the answers to questions like this, allow you to map out your future, and make it happen. Three years ago a beautiful young woman in her mid twenties came to see me. She was miserable. She had been a journalism major in college but didn’t like that profession. A career in modeling and fashion had scarred her badly. She was working as a waitress, desperate to find meaning in life. Armed with the techniques I taught her she courageously launched onto a new path of self-exploration. She discovered she wanted to become a psychologist, but her undergraduate GPA was too dismal to make it into graduate school. She consistently practiced the simple techniques of mental mastery and energy movement that I teach at my Center as a means to force circumstances to comply with her self-styled vision and gained her reward in a most unusual way. She didn’t have the grades and she didn’t do an outstanding job on the GRE and, on a first effort, she was refused admission to the university of her choice. Then, out of the blue, she got a letter from the University saying they would be pleased to admit her the following Spring. The story gets even more interesting. This university had a standing policy of no Spring admissions.
Others of you may be adventurers – a lot of people come to do work with me just because they are sick and tired of a narrow little world. It is good to become a citizen of a larger world. I can show you how to travel through the worlds of energy and thought that exist back behind the physical world as you know it. If you choose to do that, you’ll gain vast amounts of knowledge. One of the things you find is that half the things that plagued you here in your daily life weren’t in fact what you thought they were. You find that your true nature is omniscient, omnipotent, unlimited by time, space or distance, yet you’ve been hemmed into this tiny limited existence called “ordinary life.” When you break out, you have the feeling of “Aahhhh, I’m free.” That’s a good thing to do.
I wanted to be an adventurer when I was young – a Pizarro, a Vasco de Gama, a Columbus. I was like Captain Kirk – determined to “go where no man has gone before,” and in fact, I’d been traveling in the worlds of energy and thought that exist outside the box since I was in college. But, it wasn’t to be, because I’m a company man. What’s needed is freedom for each and every human being. So, I became a healer. Then I found out I love healing better than everything else.
Traveling through the worlds of energy and thought that exist behind the physical universe is exciting and liberating, but there’s still more. It is possible to get to a place where you perceive the ultimate reality that’s back behind it all – the one unified perfect consciousness or “thought” that governs the form and function of everything in existence. In physics, this phenomenon is called “The Unified Field.” Faithful people call it “God” (or another name, depending on your religious perspective). By any name, I assure you the phenomenon is real. Normally, we experience ourselves as separate from others and from the world. But if you choose to reach for the ultimate reality you will experience yourself, others, everything in the universe, as one – one mind, one great cosmically perfect thought. You come into such peace, such stillness, such expansive power. I know thousands of people who’ve found that. And you don’t have to look too far to find an example of such a person who everyone knows: Mother Teresa.
Of the many remarkable stories about Mother Teresa, there is one that stands out to me. It’s a story that was widely reported in the news media back in the mid 80’s during the thickest military conflict in Lebanon. Mother Teresa went to Lebanon to meet with the Syrian Colonel who was the military commander of Beirut. She told him she wanted his help to go with her nuns into the city to rescue a group of children who’d been abandoned in a bombed-out orphanage. The Colonel was more than distraught. As he told it to the journalists later, “the last thing I needed was a living saint on my hands.” He refused to allow Mother Teresa to enter the war zone because he could not guarantee her safety. “What if there is a cease fire?” she asked. He replied, “Mother, if there is a cease fire, I will escort you into the city to collect the orphans, but there are no plans for a cease fire.” She asked for a private room. She and her sisters meditated in silence for a brief time. The sun set and rose. A cease fire was declared at first light, much to the Colonel’s shock and dismay. The Colonel arranged for the sisters to get to the orphanage. The children were rescued.
Mother Teresa knew how to access the power behind the world as we know it, and direct it for a higher purpose. Now, her method was prayer, and people might want to dismiss what happened there as some miraculous inscrutable activity of God’s. Sorry. Not so. Yes, Mother Teresa’s method was prayer-based, but you can’t discount the fact that she was able to call the universe into action. And we can all do that. My methods differ slightly from hers – they are more science-based - but I’m telling you, you can learn to call the universe into action if you want to. I do it and I’ve taught countless people to do it. Saints are not born, they are made, and if you want to be a saint, you can be a saint. If we move forward with good methods, good understanding and a good heart, we can really have it all by being it all.
Now, wherever you fit . . . maybe you don’t like putting yourself in a category. I don’t like that either. Maybe you have your own ideas about what you want and how life should be, and they’re darned good. What am I telling you? Do not give up on your dreams. Do not succumb to the lies that perpetuate life in the box. Live life large instead. Have the courage. Be a hero, and don’t be held back by the local landscape. I see people getting constantly distracted by the local features, the idiosyncrasies of life: “What about my children, my job security, who’ll take care of my parents?” Let’s face it, if it isn’t one thing, it will be another, but where are you going to put your attention and effort? Don’t focus on your problems so much – they make you forget your power. Do not be swayed by your inadequacies or the things that look so “big” that make you think you’ll never make it, because you know “you’re just not good enough.” Remember, that’s lie number two. Or “Hey, maybe it’s really not out there.” Remember, that’s lie number one. It’s all right to limp and get bruised and get hurt. But you are so powerful, that what you are facing does not have the ability to stop you. And I’m calling you on it. I can teach you the simple methods that will let you get out of the box but you must do the work. So, in the words of that famous footwear icon¸ “Just Do It.” See how great you are. You deserve it.
Exercise Number 1: Awaken Your Dreams
For now, try the following simple exercise. Sit back in a comfortable position. Draw in a deep breath, hold it briefly, then blow it out, and as you do, close your eyes and give your body permission to relax as much as possible. Then just try on the idea that you can have it all. Imagine it. It feels odd at first, just to consider it. Then notice how just considering it makes you feel more free and optimistic. Then let yourself get a bit enthused, and you’ll find yourself starting to dream again. If you had a magic wand and could wave it to get whatever you want, what would you get? Some things would be immediate and obvious – like good health and wealth – but dig a little deeper. Assume you have the basics, perhaps you already do, and then ask yourself, what else do I want out of life. Dream really big. That’s what the great ones do. Write it down. Now, I’m going to show you how to get it.