How does success feel to you? If you’re like most of us it doesn’t feel much like success, but rather it just feels like one more toe hold as you make your way up the rock face trying to get to the top.
At least in that case you might be climbing for fun, but for many people, success is about getting somewhere.
But, there’s a problem with that – I’m yet to meet a successful person who was “there.”
Right? Someone who said, “yep, I’m successful, I’m there, so I’m done.”
Because of course it doesn’t work that way, it’s more like degrees of happiness, where if you buy into the BS of the modern era you can always be more happy – which, of course implies that today you are less happy. Wrong!
For those and many other reasons, if you’re like most of us, success feels hard. It feels very hard.
And for good reason.
Wall Street is a very hard career. You’re working around the clock. High stress. Tons of activity. Deadlines. Phone calls. E-mails. Always on.
And the same is true elsewhere.
All the time you hear from entrepreneurs that every day they motivate themselves by the fear of failure, telling themselves if they fail to make it work their wife will leave them, their kids will be relegated to public schools, and their career and life will have been a miserable failure.
Sure, those type of ideas can be powerful tools of motivation, but like working a chain gang, it feels hard and can also lead to early death.
And this problem extends far beyond the business-world, where it seems just trying to make it successfully through the day feels very hard for many.
Just look at our kids, they’ve got so much stress to perform we have them loaded up on Ritalin. For mothers at home they’ve got them loaded up on wine, Prozac, weed, crack, and all sorts of drugs, if Katie Couric’s show on Mommy’s Little Helper is any indication, mommy’s are getting blazed just to make it through the day.
Look at the studies on stress and you see the same thing, that we have it so good, yet make it feel so bad is what leads to our heart attacks, high blood pressure – and ultimately early death.
Some might say, yep, “that’s just life in the modern era.” BS, I say, if that’s life in the modern era then we have to change it.
That’s a win lose. That’s like saying to me, would you prefer to have your left arm or right leg amputated? Um. Neither!
So when it came to building Wall Street Teach, I make an important agreement with myself that if I was to make this happen, I’d have to go after it hard, I’d have to work at it as hard as any other time in my life BUT
I WANTED IT TO FEEL EASY. I wanted to avoid success feeling as it had in the past, driving myself with fears, stressed out all the time, all that pressure and intensity constantly driving me like eight cups of coffee pumping through my veins.
Beyond a choice, it became a necessity for me, for to get my body to do the work I had to make an agreement with myself that it would never be that way again.
Instead, I wanted to do the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life, yet make it feel easy, effortless, exciting and fun.
So, how do you do that?
Sounds hard, right?
Well add this –
I wanted to do it without any substances. No five cups of coffee just to get me going like I had to do working at Carlyle, just all natural human energy. No work-hard play-hard, eighty hour weeks and three nights of binge drinking like I’d done in my early years at Goldman. And no other drugs, uppers or downers, I’d experimented with over the years to give me that good feeling.
I wanted to do it and be free. I wanted to be free of all the stress and free of all the substances. I wanted to just feel that good everyday just being me, what I’ve come to call, get ready for it – FEELING GOOD.
Now, full disclosure I’m not there yet, even after three years working on it, I’m not quite there, but this has been so important to me that I’ve kept working at it.
In fact, this has been so important to me that I’ve designed a program to help you do it much faster, a program I call CHANGE YOUR MIND, which is designed to teach you to do all this in 30 days.
What that’s designed to do is train your mind to learn new ways of getting things done, such that you can do very hard things and make it feel easy, effortless, so you can WALK THROUGH THE WORLD WITH EASE.
Without going into any detail on this, let me share with you just one idea you can begin putting to work right away.
It relates to the way in which you motivate yourself, YOUR MOTIVATIONAL DIRECTION.
Now, here’s the thing to know on motivational direction. You can be motivated in either one of two directions. You can be motivated towards what you want, such as moving towards pleasure, or motivated away from what you don’t want, such as moving away from pain.
What’s powerful in this idea is once you understand how you are motivated in a certain context you can begin to change this in ways that feel the best.
For instance, when success feels hard, it’s typically because the motivational direction is away from, as is the case when an entrepreneur pushes themselves with the stressful and awful feeling of being terrified to fail. Sure, it might be a strong motivator, but it’s an awful way to feel every day just to get yourself moving.
Or when a banker works all night doing a model because they have a stressful deadline coming up, which feels very different to staying up all night for the pleasure of doing a model!
So, what if you begin to change your motivational direction? What if you could be motivated powerfully in the other direction, so that rather than being driven by awful feelings like stress and fear, imagine you could now be driven by powerful positive towards motivators like excitement and passion and enthusiasm and desire, all sorts of good feelings that make you feel better and better the closer you get towards your goal.
Again, this isn’t easy to do, this has taken me years to figure out, and years to program, yet simply putting to work this idea for many of my clients has been a cure from success feeling hard to success feeling so easy you might hardly believe it’s happening.