Drag all the painful baggage of the past with you and feel the burden. What is this pain going to cost in your career? What will it cost you in your relationships? What will it cost in terms of your self-image and self-confidence? Really feel the pain on an emotional level; use your body; breathe as you would breathe; hold yourself the way you would if you were feeling the pain. Live the pain. Focus on it. Now repeat the process, only this time project yourself five years ahead. Imagine how the failures in your life are going to multiply, and feel the weight of these piled -up failures. What do you say to yourself, how do you feel about yourself? Are you stronger or weaker? More in control, or more out of control? Picture what you will look like as a result of holding on to this limiting belief. Do you look older? Do you look more energetic or less energetic? More attractive or less attractive? What are the costs to you in every area of your life? What has it cost your loved ones? Its been five long years. Let the pain that you were feeling compound, let your body slump with the pain. Project the cost to you in every area of your life. Now repeat the process for 10 years, and 20 years.

Note: This process is very painful if you carry through and do it tight. When Terry, my writer, did it, he felt an impulse to quit after projecting into only one year. But if you feel the pain strongly enough, your mind will force you to change ... NOW! Do whatever it takes to make the pain of the future feel real.

4. Come back to the present, shake out your body, and take some deep, energizing breaths. Now, pick out the new, positive belief that you want to install in place of the limiting belief. Use your body to totally energize yourself. Your mind is ready for change ... get yourself totally excited, energized. Tum your new belief into a phrase that makes you think, "If I had these beliefs tight now, it would totally change my life."

5. Close your eyes. Think about the immediate changes that would occur if you changed your belief right now. Imagine how much more confidence and in control you would feel. Feel the confidence and control, and use your body to reinforce the feelings. Breathe as you would breathe if you had the belief tight now. Move five years ahead. Carry with you all the achievements youve gained as a result of making the change. How do you feel? More in control or helpless? D you have lots of energy, or are you tired? Are you more attractive, or less attractive? Do you have more to offer yourself and others, or less? What about your confidence level? Are you generally more excited about life, or less? What about financially? Did you try some things that you would never have tried, make some commitments you would never have made? How has this change cascaded into the other areas of your life? Are your relationships more powerful, more exciting? Feel the changes, live the changes. What do you say to yourself after living this way for five years? Now go ahead another five years and repeat the process. Thats a decade of positive change! How much better are you? Feel how much your life has been enhanced. Now go ahead 20 years, two decades of positive change that expands your life!

6. Look at both destinies and decide which destiny you are committed to hav ing. Come back to today, and feel the excitement and unlimited possibilities that creating your new future will bring.

7. Sit down, and write down how each new belief you install is going to enhance your life.

What this process does is establish new associations in your subconscious mind. It links pursuing positive change with pleasure, and not pursuing positive change with pain.

You can use this method to change virtually any limiting belief you have. Its degree of effectiveness is dependent on your ability to go through the exercise and make both the pain and the pleasure feel absolutely real. I have outlined this procedure with the hope that you will try it and be titillated by its potential-1 strongly urge you to experiment with it, and to do more research by studying the

work of Anthony Robbins and others to further the development of your ability to change and take control of your life.

ANCHORING

Every day, in every moment, your subconscious mind is at work forming associations that link things, events, and people to pleasure and pain. What I have been talking about throughout this chapter is how to gain control over these processes so that you can direct your life. There is one particular process that I am just learning about that is particularly powerful and compelling. It is called anchoring.

Anchoring is the subconscious mental process that links a sensory stimulus to an emotional state or set of states. What does this mean? Whenever you are in a relatively intense emotional state, whether positive or negative, any significant, repetitive extemal stimulus becomes associated with the emotion or set of emotions you are experiencing. If the association is strong enough, then a recurrence of the extemal stimulus can actually trigger the emotional state.

The extemal stimulus can work through any one or any combination of the five senses. For example, how do you feel when you see a flashing red light in the rear-view mirror of your car? Most people feel dread, regardless of whether they were actually doing something wrong, because at some point in their life they got a ticket.

Another example is the feelings and memories that certain songs evoke in our minds. If you and your "steady" in high school had "your song," for example, when you hear that song you will almost always think of your old steady and the good or bad times that you shared when that song was playing. Your spouse or close companion may have a particular way of touching you or a tone of voice which evokes feelings of closeness and warmth. The smell of baking bread may make you feel hungry, even if you have eaten less than an hour before. You get the idea.

I spoke earlier of physical rituals. Well, guess what? Physical rituals are triggers for anchors established in the subconscious. It is possible to actually install anchors to trigger any state you desire. If you want to feel focused at work, you can develop and install a triggeanchor association that lets you call upon that state when you need it. Once again, I refer to Anthony Robbins to describe the methodology:

Basically, there are two simple steps. First you must put yourself, or the person youre anc horing, into the specific state you wish to anchor. Then you must consistently provide a specific, unique stimulus as the person experiences the peak of that state. For example, when someone is laughing, he is in a specific congment state-his whole body is involved at that moment. If you squeeze his ear with a specific and unique pressure and simultaneously make a certain sound several times, you can come back later, provide the stimulus (the squeeze and the sound), and the person will go back to laughing again.

The four key elements of creating and using anchoring successfully are:

1. The intensity of the state-for an anchor to be strong and enduring, you need to achieve an intense emotional state; the whole body and mind should be involved. The strength of the anchor is in direct proportion to the intensity of the emotional experience.

2. The timing of establishment-the anchor trigger (whether established with sight, sound, touch, smell, or combination) should be induced at the peak of the emotio nal experience.

3. The uniqueness of the stimulus-the stimulus must be something unusual. If you habitually mb your chin, that would make a bad trigger, because you would inadvertantly induce the state and your mind wouldnt know what to do with it. The trigger would soon be diluted and the anchor would wear off. The best anchor triggers are a combination sensory stimuli such as both a unique sound and a touch.

4. Replication of the stimulus-the stimulus must be repeatable. For example, if the anchor is the phrase "I love you" said in a certain tone, then both the words and the tone must be replicated to successfully trigger the same response.

When you go through the anchoring process, you usually have to repeat it several times before it takes hold. After you have gone through the process several times, test it. One young fellow I know was having trouble smiling at pretty young ladies when he caught their eye. He didnt feel intimidated, he just couldnt smile. Then he leamed about anchoring.

One day, a very nice and vivacious-looking young lady smiled at him, and he found himself smiling back. Because he had just leamed about anchoring, he recognized an opportunity. While he was feeling exactly the way he wanted to and doing exactly what he wanted to, he touched his left ear on the jawline right above the lobe. Now, at any time, he can touch his ear in the same way and smile a warm and friendly smile, and his report is that he elicits many more smiles from attractive ladies than ever before in his life.

I suggest that as a supplementary method of change, anchoring can be very powerful. It is so powerful because it works directly on the subconscious. You can use it to hamess any emotional state you need to help you accomplish the task at hand. You can use it to achieve focus on your work, to energize yourself when you are tired, to feel excited and powerful when you are feeling down, to feel confident and enthusiastic before you give a speech.

Why does it work? I really dont know. In the story of Dumbo the elephant, the infant elephant with huge ears convinces himself that he can fly as long as he holds a "magic" feather. The feather of course isnt magic; its a psychological crutch. Perhaps anchoring is just another magic feather. But so what? It works!

CONCLUSION

All Ive done up to now is scratch the surface of the central problem and the solution to attaining the ability to consistently act in accordance with your knowledge. Ive identified the central problem: the conflict of emotion and reason. Ive discussed the supercomputer model of the human mind and shown that the key to success is establishing goals backed by consistent and viable motivation and commitment.

In this chapter, Ive touched briefly on some techniques you can use to attain that motivation and commitment. All of these ideas come from spending a large portion of my adult life reading, leaming, and figuring out why people (myself included) do the things they do and how they can change. But it is far beyond the scope and intent of this book to provide much more than this kind of broad outline. There is a lot more detailed infomiation out there beyond what I have offered, and I urge you to pursue it. I think the bibliography Ive provided is a good starting point.

One thing I have leamed about myself and other people is that anyone can change, but only if he or she desires to change. I have an acquaintance who calls me regularly to discuss her current personal problems. Her life is an endless loop of making the same mistakes in diffe rent forms over and over again. I feel for her because she has so much potential But as I have observed her and the many other people around me, I have seen a common element: something that approaches love of misery.

It is a phenomenon that I first found unbelievable, until I discovered a psychologist named Karen Homey, who in her books explains how people get trapped into endless loops of self-destmction and yet find the drive to continue making the same mistakes, often with incredible vigor, passion, a nd enthusiasm.

The process revolves around an intricately organized system of false pride. It is so predominant that it exists to some extent in virtually every person I have ever known, myself included, and I believe it deserves special attention. I will address the problem in the next chapter.