Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life (19 page)

Ready?

TAKE STOCK OF YOUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS

It’s time to start a list. I want you to write down some of the successes that you have achieved in any and every area of your life. These achievements do not have to be life-changing, earth-shattering moments of crowning glory. They can be tiny, anything from accomplishing a good hair day to making a well-cooked breakfast! (I’m not kidding—I made eggs over easy the other morning without breaking the yoke, and I was slapping myself on the back all day. It’s the little things.…) There’s always
something
you can feel good about and be proud of having done. Did you finally clean out your closets and get those old clothes to the Salvation Army? Did you pay your taxes on time? Did you cook a great dinner for friends or family the other night? Then write it down! There’s no time limit—keep adding to it as you go about your daily life. In this way, you will create a list of successes that you can refer to in times of fear and self-doubt.

Whenever you are feeling afraid or defeated, take out the list—whether it’s recorded on a piece of paper or on your iPhone—and go over it, reinforcing the feelings of competence and strength that come with achieving anything, great or small. When we take note of our achievements, we learn through personal, hands-on experience that we actually
are
capable. By creating an emotional atmosphere that amplifies your self-worth
in this way, you can begin to believe in your abilities to achieve even more.

CREATE A SMALL VICTORY

While the first exercise focuses on successes you have already achieved, this exercise will focus on going out and creating more. Our experiences, whether recent or long past, help us define who we are and what we are capable of. If our life is one where the glass has been half empty, then failure and disillusionment become self-fulfilling prophecies. Now we’re going to use the same trick of the mind to program you for success. The very same thought patterns that have eroded your belief in yourself can also build it back up.

Let’s go back and take another look at Shay from
Chapter 5
. It’s week one. She is in the gym with Bob and me for the first time. In a matter of days, she could be eliminated from the show and sent packing, back home to keep committing suicide by food. The clock is ticking. Now, Shay is not stupid. She knows that diet and exercise are her keys to weight loss and health—lack of knowledge is
not
one of her issues. Her problem is much simpler and much more heartbreaking, not to mention much more universal: she doesn’t feel capable of the work or worthy of the end result.

I know that the
only
way to change that is to create new experiences for her, experiences where she proves to herself that she is capable of strength and success. It doesn’t have to be a huge triumph—it’s not like I’m going to tell her to run a marathon. Any little achievement will do. We then take that achievement, plant it like a seed, nourish it with appreciation, and watch it grow.

So it’s do or die in the gym, literally. I’m trying to get Shay to climb the rotating ladder for thirty more seconds, and she’s totally falling apart. Crying, sliding off the equipment, making all kinds of negative statements: “I can’t do this!” “I’m in too much pain!” “I just want to go home!” She’s working overtime, but at the
exact wrong thing—she’s trying desperately to write the same old story that she’s a failure who’s destined for misery. With all the patience I can muster (and you know that’s not my strong suit) I spend a half hour trying to coax her back onto the ladder to do a full thirty-second climb. I’m sweet. I’m kind. I’m loving. Nothing gets through to her. But if she doesn’t climb the ladder, she will see it as one more piece of evidence that she is incapable, further proof that she is a lost cause.

If you saw episode one of season eight, you may remember what happened next. I unleashed. I wasn’t going to let Shay continue telling herself she “couldn’t” ANYTHING. She wasn’t going to continue gathering evidence of her ineptitude, not on my watch. I screamed and cursed at the top of my lungs: “Shay get on the fucking ladder!!! GET ON THE FUCKING LADDER NOW, SHAY!!!” It was not pretty. I grabbed her by the shirt and literally threw/pushed/pulled her onto the ladder and continued screaming bloody murder at her to climb or else.

And you know what? In those few moments, Shay was so terrified of me that her fear circumvented her internal dialogue of “I can’t.” She was too afraid of
me
to remember to tell herself that she couldn’t do it, and so she did it. And not just one thirty-second climb either—she ended up doing five that day, and the day after that she did five consecutive minutes. After that she stopped telling herself “I can’t,” and she went on to break the record for the fastest hundred-pound weight loss by a woman contestant.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not suggesting you need to be verbally assaulted, or that a maniac has to threaten to rip your arms off and beat you with them, if you are to escape the negative inner monologue that keeps you down. It’s really up to you to get yourself out of your comfort zone, read from a new script, and give yourself a chance at the life you deserve. As your confidence builds, slowly you’ll begin to realize that the whole notion that you are incapable is utter crap.

How quickly this happens varies from person to person. Some people need to make many little achievements before
they snap out of it and realize that they’re actually competent, effective human beings. For others, the “aha” moment is practically instantaneous; they realize with the first success, even if it’s tiny, that everything damning that they have thought about themselves is untrue. The prison in which they have been living is a construct of their imagination, and they’re free to toss those shackles off and fly. Please don’t think I mean that only success will follow—you
will
have setbacks, trials, failures. But as you slowly build your self-esteem, your self-image will be redefined. You will see yourself as a person who learns from mistakes and overcomes adversity, rather than a person who gets devastated by them.

It’s important, especially at first, that you are measured in your risk-taking. When I was screaming at Shay, it was over
thirty seconds
on a workout ladder—something
anyone
with two functioning legs should be capable of doing. It’s important that the risk I wanted her to take was something I
knew
she could do. Setting her up for failure would have been the worst thing at that moment.

It’s the same for you. You have to be smart about what you decide to go for and pick something that’s achievable. For example, if you haven’t jogged in five years, don’t get out there and try to run a mile. Instead, go out and jog for 60 seconds, then walk for 60 seconds to recover; do this for 20 to 30 minutes. Then build on that in baby steps. The next week go for 90-second jogs. Then 120 seconds, and so on. If you can do more than that and advance faster, awesome, but the key is to make sure you give yourself something achievable to do, so you can build your self-confidence.

Success begets success. Once you start really focusing on the sense of accomplishment you get from achieving a result, even a minor one, it will help you to shut down negative emotions like anxiety and self-doubt, and you’ll find yourself up for bigger and bigger challenges. Before you know it, your baby steps have become huge strides forward.

RELEASE GUILT AND SHAME

As long as you are carrying guilt and shame around with you, you will never be able to build a healthy sense of self. These emotions really only serve to indicate that you have taken on someone else’s crap, or that you haven’t taken proper steps to right a wrong you inflicted. Beyond that, all they do is waste your energy and make you feel bad. Who needs that?

This is the same stuff we talked about in
Chapter 5
, on forgiveness and understanding, but I bring it up again here because recognizing how you have taken on other people’s fears, anxieties, and issues is a crucial step on the road to taking your life back. What do you feel guilty or ashamed about? Usually it is nothing more than a trip someone else has laid on you that you have internalized. By recognizing that other people have shortcomings and issues, too, we avoid making them our own, leaving us to travel light, without the baggage of those around us.

Not buying it? Positive that your guilt and shame belong to you? It’s possible, but unlikely, so let’s go in for a closer look. Guilt is when you feel bad about something you have done, as in
I bought myself a flat-screen TV and now I feel guilty because that was so selfish and indulgent of me
. Is treating yourself really something you should be feeling guilty about? The actual
reasons
you feel guilty are usually that someone has told you or implied that what you have done is bad. Suppose you take this scenario to its worst case: you have a compulsive spending problem, you’re strapped for cash,
and
you didn’t ask your significant other before making the purchase. You
still
shouldn’t feel guilty, because it’s unproductive. It will only further erode your self-esteem, making your issues that much worse. The answer is to work on your spending problem and to make amends with your spouse or partner.

Shame can get confused with guilt because they often go hand in hand, but they are different. Shame is the humiliation and embarrassment that can come as a result of guilt, but it doesn’t
always have to stem from something we have done. Some of us experience shame for just literally being.

I have known people who were raised to be ashamed of their physicality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, the town they were born in, and so on. Now I ask you, as a sane good-hearted person, where is the shame in any of those things? No matter who you are, what your background is, or where you come from, you have
nothing
to be ashamed of. Shame is a feeling that is put upon us both directly and indirectly. No child is born ashamed of themselves—it’s ingrained over time. “You oughta be ashamed of yourself”—remember that one? Or it could be as simple as picking up on something your family and friends felt uncomfortable about and then internalizing it and making it about you. Sort of like kids can do with a divorce. The parents are unhappy, so they split up, but the kid might take it on and believe that it was his fault. If only he were a better kid, they would have been happy and stayed together. And the shame of feeling like a failure or a disappointment sets in—even though the divorce had nothing to do with him, and the parents had actually hated each other for years and finally got healthy enough to end the unhealthy relationship.

Anyone who is directly manipulating, judging, and/or shaming you is a person with his or her own issues. They can play on your emotions to get you to do something they want. Ever been guilted by your parents about visiting them for Christmas when you really need a vacation to the Bahamas? Now, whether you choose to go home for Christmas is up to you. Go or don’t go, but there’s no need to place all this emotional baggage on the situation. It’s up to you to opt to take that on or not. You have a choice!

Another possibility is that someone is projecting the things in his life that he is afraid of or feels insecure about onto you. Often we fear things that are different because we don’t understand them, and that’s scary, or it challenges our dearly held beliefs and way of life, which can be even scarier. For that reason we can resent those things and condemn others for being so different.
More people have died due to fighting over religious beliefs than any other known cause of death.

When it comes to shame, ask yourself if the things you feel ashamed about are truly unnatural and deplorable. I highly doubt they are! Most likely you picked up these judgments and shameful feelings along the way, whether from our culture or our families and such.

Let me give you another example of the way we pick up shame
indirectly
. Let’s say you are overweight and you feel that it’s “gross.” You hate your body. You won’t work out in a gym with thin people because you’re afraid of what they’ll think of you. I have heard women say they are humiliated for their husbands to see them naked. That’s so sad. Where did this attitude come from? Fat is merely stored energy. It is a physical state, nothing more and nothing less. It implies zero about your value as a person in this world. In fact, some cultures glorify being heavy and consider it a sign of affluence. Now, I am not suggesting it’s okay for you to let your health go. (It’s not! Your family and friends want you around for years to come.) But I’m trying to point out that the opinions we form about ourselves are taken on, not intrinsic.

So where did your shameful attitudes come from? Did you pick them up like a common cold? Actually, yeah, sort of. We are social creatures, and we are inclined to pick up the ideals, energies, and attitudes of those around us. Maybe your parents made an issue of your weight as a kid, asked you in front of friends, “Do you really want to eat that?” Or possibly they weighed you every week, making you subconsciously feel that if you didn’t hit the benchmark, you would be unlovable and so on. In most cases this is not malicious on the parents’ part. It’s usually just misguided concern: concern that they should be doing something, and helpless because they don’t know what. They also probably worried that people would believe they didn’t care about their kid’s health if you were overweight, and so they overcompensated by nagging and pestering every time you put anything in your mouth. But even though the comments clearly stem from your parents’ insecurities, of
course you’re going to feel you need fixing. Thus the shame of “not being good enough” or letting your parents down sets in.

Maybe your shameful attitude has nothing to do with your parents. Maybe you feel ashamed of your weight because on the schoolyard as a kid your peers tormented you by making cow noises when they walked behind you. (This one comes from my own personal junior high hell.) Still, kids who bully on the playground are kids who feel insecure and powerless, so they pick on others in an attempt to have power over someone else and regain a feeling of control. Yep, we already covered that ground, so I hope you are starting to see the pattern.