Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life (25 page)

Immediate feedback is important because it keeps you from reinforcing negative patterns, actions, or behaviors that get you stuck in a rut, literally. So the final nail in the structure of specific practice is to undo your bad habits by altering these neural pathways. You can override the old bad habit by wiring a new behavior or thought pattern—another reason that continued learning is so critical to your success. When you create new, constructive pathways, the old, destructive ones atrophy. As in, they go away! By refusing to indulge in negative thoughts or self-destructive behaviors, over time you weaken their hold over you.

We can’t talk about cognitive mapping without bringing our emotions into the discussion. We are sensitive, feeling beings, and our emotions carry a lot of weight. If we are going to remap our inner landscape and replace destructive habits with effective,
successful ones, we need to manipulate our emotions so that they are working for us, not against us.

If something feels good, you’re likely to do it again. If something doesn’t feel good, chances aren’t super that you’re going to go back for more. So how do we get ourselves to repeatedly engage in behaviors that may not be instantly gratifying? By focusing on your emotional attachment to the end result.

Let’s use a simple example. Let’s say you hate running. I do. I
hate
it. I also don’t exactly love steamed veggies. That said, I’m on the treadmill running most days of the week, and I’m eating up my beans and greens just as often. Why? Because I
love
that the running and the broccoli help me fit into my skinny jeans, which makes me feel sexy. I love that they give me more confidence. I love that after engaging in these healthy behaviors, I feel energized and in a good mood.

By focusing on these hugely positive results and my attachment to them, I’m able to change the associations my brain makes with these objects. Instead of associating running on the treadmill with boredom, fatigue, and agony, I’m associating it with strength, health, and sexiness! By forming these new, positive associations with certain behaviors, we create strong cognitive maps that ingrain these behaviors into habit.

And by forming a positive emotional association with certain objects around you, you’re more inclined to be successful. Objects in our environment can strongly influence what we think and practice, as we’ll see in
Chapter 10
. But gearing your environment for success is crucial, and manipulating yourself to see healthy objects that might normally make you cringe in a beneficial light is a perfect example.

In the above instance, we have:

Treadmill = looking awesome in skinny jeans, more energy, better sex life

Broccoli = disease prevention, years of quality living

Such associations also work in reverse. I want you to start attributing hurtful things like junk food, alcohol, cigarettes, and maybe even credit cards (if spending is your problem) with the negative, dark emotions they cause in the long term, even if they provide momentary pleasure:

Burger and fries = muffin top, lethargy, self-loathing, muumuus

Credit card and late-night Internet shopping = fear, debt, anxiety

Alcohol = lack of productivity, hangover, regret

Cigarettes = painful, premature death

Get the picture? By playing this little game, you are facilitating your internal rewiring to abandon bad habits and create good ones.

Now, there are always objects in your environment that have you hardwired in ways you might not even be aware of. Things around you trigger certain behaviors or dynamics, good or bad.

Let’s say you’ve been binge-eating late at night while sitting in a particular spot on your sofa watching TV. Now you’ve decided you really want to stop that behavior. But every time you sit in that spot on the sofa, you find it impossible to stop snacking. You cannot rationally “think” these kinds of ingrained habits away. They are wired into your brain with an actual physical, associative connection. But you can swap out old objects that trigger you negatively for new objects that trigger you positively. So in this example maybe you sell the sofa or give it to Goodwill and get a new seating arrangement that has no associations with midnight Doritos parties, allowing you to “turn over a new leaf.” Or if you can’t afford a new sofa, you slipcover it and use it to meditate, or you sit there to read a favorite author. Follow me? You want to create a positive association with sitting on that sofa instead of what you had before.

Here’s another example. Many people who go through a breakup with someone buy new sheets. They associate the old bedsheets with the old person, and they want to “start over.” Out with the old and all that. Same idea.

You can also form positive associations with seemingly random objects that give you psychological support. How many of you have a good luck charm? Every morning I make tea, and I have a large cup collection that I choose from. If I use my disappearing dinosaur cup one morning and on that day I am particularly successful in my work, I will reuse that damned cup until it crumbles in my clammy death grip or until my streak is broken.

A friend who shall go unnamed (so I don’t embarrass the hell out of him) is a Major League Baseball player. His team had been on a losing streak, and then finally they won a game. My friend decided that the reason they won was that his son had given him a pair of “lucky socks” to wear for the game. He wore those socks for every game the entire season, and oddly enough, the team did pretty well. The socks, not so much. I only hope to God he was washing them between games.

You can see how it’s possible, and sometimes even productive, to associate a certain dynamic with an object. My friend associated winning with his lucky socks. Obviously his socks do not have magic powers, but he believed they contributed to the team’s success. So in a roundabout way, those socks contributed to his forming a habit of winning, by inciting a winning attitude and the behaviors that go along with it.

Now, don’t get crazy and form some sort of emotional attachment to a teacup and some socks, or toss everything out of your home should you get dumped tomorrow. But there are ways you can use this physiological fact to alter your behavior.

One more example. Last for this chapter, promise.

If you want to lose weight and have been going to the same supermarket for years buying garbage foods, try a new supermarket! Find a local farmers’ market with new grocers, new foods, in a new locale. Bring a good friend who shares and supports you
and makes you laugh so you associate positive fun with that market. Start a new pattern of buying all healthy, nourishing foods. Then repeat!

On your road to success, you can harness this power of association to work for you in myriad ways. Your environment influences your thoughts, choices, and performance in life to a significantly deeper extent—that’s why I’ve written a whole chapter about it. But before I get to environment in the macro sense, there’s something I need to cover at a more basic level, and that is organization. If you want to be ready for the opportunities coming your way, you have to get your life in order, literally.

*
Philip E. Ross, “The Expert Mind,”
Scientific American
(July 24, 2006).

CHAPTER TEN

GET ORGANIZED

I
t’s no good just floating through life expecting the things you want to fall out of the sky. A huge part of actually going after what you want proactively is organizing yourself to do so. There are two parts to it: organizing your goals and organizing your environment. (We’ll deal with your environment in the larger sense in
Chapter 11
.) Organizing your goals is very simple and amazingly powerful—all you have to do is get out a pen and paper or sit down at your keyboard. The fact is, when we write down the things we want, we are way more likely to achieve them.

WRITE IT DOWN

The “mass of men” slog through life with no particular agenda, in a state of mind-numbing aimlessness. The average person sets generalized goals that simply focus on a positive outcome, such as “I want to be healthy” or “I want to be rich.”

But the
exceptional
person is the one who knows what he or she wants and sets very specific goals that are not just about the outcome but about the process of getting there. This is why I talked early on about creating a powerful vision, so that you can define your goal in detail and dimension. Step Three underlines some of those lessons about goal-setting, but with a different focus: on
action, not deliberation. We’ll literally chart a road map of the steps you need to take to achieve your vision.

It starts with writing it down. A terrifying statistic floating around on the Internet says 95 percent of people don’t have written goals and they fail because of it, while 5 percent do write down their goals, and they succeed. Who knows where these statistics come from, but in my experience, this one has to be pretty close to accurate. There are so many reasons why it’s important to write your goals down. Lucky for you, I’m going to break them down one by one.

First, from a psychological perspective, seeing your goals in writing makes them more real and forces you to form an emotional attachment to them. They become concrete things instead of vague hopes floating around in the back of your mind.

From a practical standpoint, writing down your goals will help bring a direction and focus to your day so you don’t waste energy or spin your wheels. Many people get caught in activity traps that waste time, thereby rendering themselves unproductive and increasingly discouraged. The trick is not to prioritize your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. Cliché number—well, who’s counting?

Additionally, long-term goals can be overwhelming, and many people struggle to keep sight of the big picture. It’s easy to become intimidated by the details and worry about everything you will have to do to get where you ultimately want to be. But if you let that happen, you will give up before you’ve even begun. So it’s not just about getting your goal down on paper, but doing so in a very specific way. Break your goal down into bite-size steps so that you understand clearly just how manageable each one is, just how achievable your goal will be when you approach it appropriately.

The most effective way to begin is at the end. The end goal you have in mind is the frame of reference for everything you do. Be specific. Have a way to measure what you’ve done. And create goals that are achievable. They should also be challenging enough
that they require at least six months to a year to accomplish. Be mindful of some common pitfalls:

Now, really?
Unless you are six feet tall and dangerously skinny, you will probably never be a supermodel. But you can still take great care of yourself and look amazing and become an on-camera fashion correspondent, or work as an editor at a fashion magazine, become a stylist, what have you. There’s always a way to find work in whatever world you love, even if it’s not in the way you first think.

Don’t be vague
. Don’t start out with a goal like “I want to be happy.” You must define what happiness
means
to you before you can go out and achieve it. Does it mean being married to the man of your dreams and living on a ranch in Montana? Or does it mean living on Wall Street as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company?

What’s your yardstick?
Don’t set a goal like “I want to be thin and healthy.” My contestants and
Losing It
families say things like that all the time. But when I ask them what that actually means in real terms, they have no answer. If you don’t have a clear idea of what something looks like, what something is, how will you know you’ve achieved it? Instead, try saying “I want my blood pressure at 120/80,” or “I want to be able to run a half marathon,” or “I want to lose 60 pounds.”

Once you have determined the ultimate goal, make a plan for how to reach it using short-term goals. This is where you break it down to manageable stages, those bite-size pieces I discussed above.

One of the best ways to break the big ’uns into small, attainable short-term goals is to create a goal pyramid. It will allow you to literally plot a course of action, connecting the things you are doing right this moment to the future you envision for yourself. Your ultimate goal goes right at the top, followed underneath by monthly, then weekly, then daily, then even hourly goals.

WORKING IT OUT

Copy the blank chart on
this page
and get cracking. After you have filled it in, keep a copy with you at all times to remind yourself of what you need to do to keep on track. I have created an example here to help you get the idea
.

Writing down tasks and organizing them by scale and time frame is an invaluable practical tool when it comes to achievement. Reviewing your goals regularly is a crucial part of your success, and must become part of your routine. Post copies of your pyramid in your office, on the fridge, on the bathroom mirror, by your bed—wherever you’re going to see them regularly and often. Look at your goals throughout the day to focus yourself so that each day contributes in a meaningful way to your overall vision. Each morning when you wake up, look at the pyramid. Reevaluate your immediate and daily goals. Then each night, right before you go to bed, evaluate what you achieved and what remains to be accomplished. This process will keep both your subconscious and your conscious mind engaged and working toward fulfilling your aspirations.