So, how was it?
How was your 2022?
Out of 100, how would you say your year has been?
Of course not everything is perfect in our world and in any of our years, but how would you rate it among your best years?
Whether it’s among your best or not, how would it be to have a method to get the best from your year?
And use it to best set yourself up for next year?
Best movie ever
There’s lots of ways that you can best review your year and best prepare yourself for next year.
Over the years we’ve experimented with many methods, and this is the best that we keep returning to.
Ideally, every day you’re already focused on the details of what you’re doing to keep making things the best they can be.
And here we’re focused on doing something simple, fun, and incredibly effective for looking back on the best of your year.
Now, this isn’t to say that you never reflect on things that didn’t go best.
But if you do, you never want to dwell on that stuff, and ideally you want to see how you solved it, or otherwise powered through.
Because the point here isn’t watching every twist and turn.
You’re showing your brain the best of this year and giving it a map for making 2023 your best too.
Living your best
Want a secret key to living your best life?
It’s basic neuroscience—
You are what you practice.
Practice your worst, experience your worst.
Practice your best, experience your best.
Because the brain has some 70,000 automatic thoughts a day that are 80-95% negative and redundant—meaning, nearly all the same negative thoughts repeat each day, as I wrote about here—you’re utilizing this mechanism.
Rather than just accepting what that brain serves you straight from the “Thought Factory,” you’re filling your brain with the best “content” for it to keep repeating.
So if a person’s brain is being run by the miserable media for instance, and they keep practicing thinking about the worst of the world, or how hard this or that is or has been, well, then, this is what you keep experiencing like a bad dream, over and over.
Whereas if you’re constantly “imprinting” your best experiences you keep experiencing your best life.
“Highlight reel”
To be clear, this is what we’re talking about here—
“High Light Real” = A highlight reel of your year.
Like you’d watch sports highlights, for instance, here you’re watching your highlights.
Just, with a deep twist.
For each of these three words comes with a deep meaning.
“High?”
This is THE MASTER KEY for living your best life—
Do you live in low or high energy?
If the only change a person made was this, they would transform their life, although there’s many reasons why this can be hard.
In our school Rapid Sustained Transformation, RST, we do this by rapidly optimizing three types of energy.
The first that we can all easily identify with is whether you’re living in low or high Physical Energy.
We all get that a person lacking energy has a worse life.
It’s not just that low energy can be equated to negativity, depression, exhaustion, slothfulness, lower-quality thoughts, feelings, actions, ultimately to feeling worse and being less effective in every way, etc.
The not so obvious fact is that the exact same person living in high energy will have an ENTIRELY different life.
Low or High Life?
Different goals, different friends, different hobbies, different loved ones, different success, different wealth, etc.
In RST this is referred to as living your Low Life or High Life.
“Locked In” either way of being and your life is completely different.
Do it for a few days and it doesn’t matter, but perhaps a few weeks or certainly months or years of being a certain way and, for worse and better, you stay much the same.
I’m betting that you have had these experiences over time or even this year?
When you were lower energy, what were those times like?
Perhaps feeling more sluggish, less motivated, lacking that excitement and vitality that we all love to feel?
And how about these moments when good things are happening, you’re excited, going after it, winning, or at least playing, or chilling feeling good, or partying, or whatever it is for you that are your highest energy moments?
Which moments would you like to enjoy again and reinforce in your brain?
Imagine if you could live more at these high energy peaks next year, how will you be different?
“Light?”
OK, so what’s the light of your “high lights?”
The shallow side here is to say, lighten up, see the lighter side, etc.
But dive deep and you see that in ALL spiritual teachings darkness is evil and good is light.
I will say that RST is opposite to religious, spiritual, enlightenment traditions in that we have zero spiritual beliefs, and we never rely on faith, only on what you can validate immediately in your own experience.
Yet, being the most advanced school of human evolution that we can imagine for elevating yourself and humanity all the way, some things sound like spiritual teachings.
At Level 5 of The Simulation, for instance, we refer to the creating mind as God-mind, where YOU are the creator, just like dreaming at night.
And all the time we’re seeking to rise, ascend, gaining more light, lighter energies, lighter ways of being, etc.
Elevate mastery
“Elevate is THE MASTER KEY” is command one in RST.
So you’re CONSTANTLY elevating your mind higher and higher, getting lighter and lighter.
Obviously the Bible is big on ‘Let there be Light.’
In the Jewish mystical tradition Kabbalah, for instance, the purpose of life is “earning” more Light.
So there’s deep meanings to this, yet here we’re just focused on capturing your best moments of your year when you were feeling more light.
Perhaps free, unburdening, more light-hearted, floating, living in lighter energies, feeling lighter, smiling more, relaxed, laughing, having a good time, living more on the light side, elevating beyond the darkness, etc.
Are these lighter moments not some of the best experiences that you would like to practice again and again?
Can you imagine, if you live lighter next year, how will you think, feel, be different?
On a spectrum
You see in the case of “High” and “Light” that we’re playing with polarities.
You’re evolving along a spectrum to living higher and more light.
Which is what is happening all day every day, naturally.
Your energy and thoughts move around, don’t they?
Bouncing from lower to higher.
From darker to more light.
We all very well know that our thoughts and feelings are this way.
And so too are your actions.
One day your workout can be flat like a tire whereas another day you can be on fire, for instance.
What gives?
Doesn’t matter.
Until the “Top of Stairs” teachings in RST we never use time going deep into these things—such as what the inner voice really is—but focus on what’s practical for rapidly optimizing your thoughts, feelings, ways of being.
This is what we’re doing making your high lights more real.
“Real?”
This is a high light “real” because you’re making it more “REAL.”
As I said up top, in your brain and nervous system, you are what you practice.
Habits, for instance, which I’ll likely write about in coming weeks why those books on habits fall short so of course 80% of new year’s resolutions fail by Feb 15, work this way.
What you repeatedly do is who you are.
This is why RST is for what you repeatedly do as many seconds as you can all day every day living in your best body and brain, having your best thoughts and feelings, taking your best actions.
Doing this you’re constantly filling your brain with your absolute best.
This is what we’re doing making your high lights “REAL.”
When you highlight something that you’re reading you’re marking it out to make it more real in your brain, aren’t you?
Here we’re doing the same.
We’re looking back at your high and light, ideally your highest and lightest moments of your year, reinforcing them in your body and brain, making them more and more real.
Let’s walk through three steps for best doing this.
1. Collect High Lights
There’s of course lots of ways that you can collect high lights from your year.
One way that we find useful is to break your year down into months, and ideally weeks if you choose, by say going back through your calendar and extracting your best high lights.
I’ll share with you that with some clients and some weeks in our business and my life there aren’t the best high lights.
And there are also plenty of low lights, like the battles we’ve lost and painful scars I’ve earned this year.
You never want to deny this truth.
Life is on a spectrum, and here you want to seek the absolute best high lights that you can, even if some weeks this might be simple things like having a great meeting or the most magical day or dinner or love making.
Whatever it is, seek your best, highest, lightest experiences.
It can also be helpful to break this down into categories.
Five categories that we utilize over and over in RST are referred to as “Sliders.”
It’s not worth going into why they’re called this, just think of your Sliders as a way to easily capture your hopes, dreams, goals, needs, wants, haves, etc. into these 5 universal categories:
- Your fabulous life: Yes, we can all find fabulous in our lives. What’s the best of yours?
- Your best career or business: Again, it may not be THE best, but what’s the best of yours?
- Your relationships and friendships: Reflect on feeling the love
- Your lover or lovers: Reflect on making the love 😎
- Your mission or purpose: Really, what most matters?
There’s lots of ways you can do this and do what feels right for you in collecting these highest and lightest experiences to make more real.
2. Make more REAL
Just reviewing your best high lights you’re already making these more real in your body and brain.
Doing this a client said to me that she had forgotten how many awesome things happened this year.
We’ve been working through some hard stuff in her business and just looking for high lights she already “balanced” her brain.
Also, keep in mind that there is no such thing as “memory.”
Every time you “re-member,” you re-constitute, re-assemble your memory of this experience based on now.
So as you’re remembering back to your highest and lightest memories making these more real, feel free to dress them up even higher and lighter.
Just reviewing these you’re re-imprinting your brain and nervous system, making these experiences more real.
But if you want to REALLY fully experience them, and make them as REAL as you can in your body and brain, play around with these “Deepeners” and “Intensifiers:”
- Lead with the physical: Use your body to celebrate these moments, such as pumping your arms in the air like you won gold
- It’s ALL about emotion: REALLY, REALLY feel these experiences, REALLY, REALLY
- Watch yourself in them: Like you’d watch a pro athlete highlight reel, see yourself in your high lights, and dress them up brighter, bigger, with sound, taste, touch, and everything else that makes them more and more REAL
- Experience POV: REALLY experience these moments through your own eyes, hearing, feeling, being as you experienced at the time, again dressed up even more if you choose
- Simulate backwards and forwards in time: Give your brain the full experience of your high lights, seeing what led to them, seeing what happened after, and perhaps even celebrating better things that didn’t happen, YET.
3. Program 2023
OK, so how was it?
Of course I took us on the longer, more scenic route and I hope it was a lovely adventure for you.
Having now done this, would you say that the way you look back on your year has enhanced?
Perhaps your score out of 100 is higher, and lighter?
Now while you’re feeling this high and light, how might you project forward into 2023?
As I keep banging on about, this beautiful brain of yours is a simulation machine that will simulate next year EXACTLY how you dream it to be.
So, how do you dream it to be?
What would make this your best year ever?
REALLY, even if it’s “unrealistic,” that’s what we do here.
So how would this absolute best version of your year be?
What sort of things are happening?
How are you thinking?
What ways are you feeling?
Who are you being?
Out of 100, how would you score your year?
This of course doesn’t mean that your year will play out this way.
And you never fixate on outcomes because they are out of your control.
But relative to say what the mayhem media is programming, doesn’t it feel good to be programming your best experiences next year?
You might even go all the way and create your “High Light Real” for next year, as though it already happened.
Perhaps you might even reinforce this weekly, or even daily.
And, who knows, you may even be looking back a year from now seeing it did 😎