“What do you want most in life?“
Anytime a client tells me they want to “focus on what really matters in life” and “stop wasting so much time,” I ask them that question. If they can’t tell me what they want in the distant future, they can at least tell me what they want right now.
While they’re usually prepared for the first question, they’re almost never ready for my follow up:
“Then why don’t you act like it?”
High performers learn from other high performers. If you want to manifest a change in your life or achieve a certain goal, the best thing you can do is study people who have already done it.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with many hundreds of highly successful people.
Yet I’ve found that there are small things that distinguish the most successful few. One of those is role models.
If I asked how you train your mind, what would you say?
If any of those things are true, then you’re doing a great job of feeding your mind. But what happens when you feed yourself and don’t workout?
You get flabby.
People who hit the gym regularly have bodies that show it. The same is true for people who condition their minds. Conditioning isn’t about feeding your brain new information or how you brainwash yourself or finding productivity “hacks,” it’s about creating a training routine for your mind.
Thinking of your mind as a physical thing, a concept we call the body-mind, is a big shift for some people, but it’s fundamental to conditioning.
People who can’t conceptualize this are always at the mercy of their reptile brain and have little control over their thoughts.
I have a free e-book you can download for Building Your Limitless Mind. (and Audio Masterclass on it here)
But I’ve written this article for conditioning your mind for people who want to quickly take control of their thinking. If you want to be in your mind’s driver seat, the first step is to understand the physical forces that control your mind.
There are a plenty of reasons that your job can objectively suck:
You’d be smart for citing any of those as reasons for leaving; however, there are a number of self-deceptions we all suffer from that should lead you to question your motives before jumping ship:
Everyone deals with anxiety—to one degree or another.
Some of us squash it down, some of us develop coping strategies, but nonetheless all of us know that gnawing feeling in the pit of our stomachs. That sense that things could go wrong.
It’s exhausting. It takes away from the quality of your work, and more importantly, the quality of your life. You wake up on days you should be excited with a sense of dread, and it wears at you.
But anxiety doesn’t need to be your foe. In fact, you can use the same mechanisms that cause anxiety to drive you towards what you want. The brain functions that cause anxiety are incredibly powerful, you just have to know how to use them.
I train my clients not on how to cope with anxiety, but on how to use it to get what they want.
It all starts with understanding where anxiety comes from.
Inside we all have a vision for our lives and who we dream to be.
For some of us this is an extension of our current path, but for many of us, going after what we truly want requires a deliberate shift, which can be hard to do.
Not only must we find the fuel to drive ourselves forward, but often we too must remove those things that hold us back.
If you try to drive your car while the handbrake is still tightly gripping the wheels, you’ll hardly get anywhere, and going after what you truly want is much the same way.
In his book The Icarus Deception remarkable thinker and prolific author, Seth Godin, challenges us all to fly closer to the sun.
We all know the legend of Icarus, yet on the first page of his book, Seth identifies an aspect to the story that many of us don’t know.
In a bold plan to escape the prison of King Minos, Icarus’ father, Daedalus, crafts a pair of wings for himself and his son.
With the wings attached with wax that melts under heat, Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, but, of course, as the legend goes, overcome with hubris the young boy soared too high, lost his wings, and fell to his death in the sea.
The lesson we are taught from this story is not to dream too big, not to fly too high, but, as Godin points out, the part of the story that is often missed is that Daedalus also cautioned his son not to fly too low, as the sea below would steal the lift from his wings, and also lead to certain death.
Yet, that’s exactly what most of us do.
Fearful of flying too high, we settle for flying too low. Fearing what it means to stand out, we conform, doing the same things as everyone else, somehow hoping for a different result.
Godin implores us to see that our careers have changed, and putting your head down and working hard is the wrong answer.
“Your ability to follow instructions,” Godin notes, “is not the secret to your success,” and inside this wonderful book he encourages us all to see our role like artists, creating, and sharing our uniqueness with the world.
Even if that’s not how you perceive your career, the lesson still holds. To create a truly remarkable career and life, you must break free of the groupthink to cultivate different ways of thinking, and take different types of actions.
While we often perceive that flying closer to the sun requires great risk, even the grandest of plans comes together through a series of small steps, that are embodied in this simple two-step exercise:
1. Dream BIG. Bigger than big. What is your version of flying high? Close your eyes and imagine what this means for you. For a few minutes, watch a mental movie of you flying all the way there. Imagine what you are doing, who you have become, and most importantly, the feeling of soaring to new heights.
2. Focus on one step: From where you are today, imagine the one step that is now in front of you. Some of you might imagine that as a big step, such as your next promotion, and others might see it simply as the actions you are taking today. Now, with all the energy of reaching new heights, see yourself taking this step.
In achieving even the tallest goals, you don’t need to think beyond this, but to merely keep taking each step as it presents itself, step by step, flying higher and higher.
I recommend doing this exercise frequently (I do it daily), continuing to drill into your mind your highest vision for your life, and reinforcing your focus on CRUSHING the step right in front of you.
I don’t know about that, but I certainly know that many of us want to keep unlocking more of the power of our minds.
When I first began this work, I thought of getting what you want far more practically than I do today.
Back then I saw it as getting clear on what you want (goals), and building powerful processes and skills to get it.
Today, that’s still the foundation of my system, yet over the years I began to see the deeper force behind all these things is your mind.
I saw that, in order for you to be willing to dream up what you truly want, you must build that type of optimism and belief into your thinking.
That for you to take powerful actions, and to have the motivation to keep getting better and learning skills, you must condition your thinking to do so.
In all, behind these practical steps to getting what you want, it is our ways of thinking, feeling, and our motivation to take actions, that is driving all of the steps.
And, behind this, there is something else too, what we might call “Will.”
That is, quite simply, your skillfulness at getting your mind to unlock more of your potential.
We all know that our minds quite happily operate in our comfort zone of habit and redundant thinking, and left to their own devices will do more of the same.
Rather than go to the gym and give it your all, for instance, the mind does what it is comfortable doing, and it’s the will that trains the mind to stretch and do more.
Similarly, when you dream, when you really think big, even if you can stretch your mind far enough, you must be able to get it to stick there, to form a new comfort zone beyond where your old fears and inhibitions would kick in.
Training the mind to flex this way is more than just occasionally thinking positive, and, instead, like training any skill, you want to use your will to methodically train.
When you’re at the gym, by challenging yourself to reach new levels, you keep proving to your mind that it can comfortably keep expanding your capabilities.
In your work, you want to remind yourself that you can give more, do more, take better actions, and keep proving to your mind that you can achieve better results.
And, in every aspect of your life, you want to train yourself to see the limits that your mind had imposed and keep doing things that expand your view of what is possible for you and your life.
In going for what you truly want, you surely need clear goals, and powerful processes and skills, yet all of these things only become possible through unlocking the power of your mind.
This week Elon Musk unveiled a new “master plan” for his ambitions with Tesla and SolarCity.
Doing so, he said: “Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.”
Don’t you love that?
Someone who knows how “idiotic” his ambitions are, but who only keeps doubling down.
What enables him to do that? What does it take to keep driving your grandest vision for your life?
Well, of course there are many things that can unleash us in life but principally there is one…
A tough one. A real tough one… Stop fear from holding you back.
Look, fear holds us all back. It leads us to question ourselves, to be tentative, to look for the easy way out, and so on, yet it is an emotion we can learn to master.
As I wrote about some time ago in reference to Adam Grant’s fantastic book, Originals.
It’s not that men and women who do remarkable things never suffer from fear, it’s that they are unwilling to let fear dictate their choices.
How do you do this for yourself? Honestly, it’s not easy, and, it can take constant vigilance, yet here are three powerful ways to do it:
If you want to be a Mind Champ at this, I suggest downloading my free e-book to Building Your Limitless Mind.
But, you can also make a lot of progress eradicating fears, simply following these three steps:
1. Ask, what do you possibly have to fear? You do something, it goes wrong, so what? Maybe you lose some money. Maybe you lose some time. But, if the consequences were terribly dire, you wouldn’t be considering it anyways, right?
2. Instead of fearing actions, fear inaction. How would you feel at the end of your life knowing that you played it safe, that there was a dream you failed to pursue, that you left the grandest vision for your life on the table? Fear that feeling!
3. Pull yourself toward the feeling of what it’s like to put fears behind you. How good does it feel to crush a fear? Say, if you were terrified to jump from a high diving board, how do you feel once you’ve done it? Don’t you want more of this feeling?
Candidly, from my research and personal experience, these types of questions are not to be asked once, but constantly, daily, in a life of expanding what is possible for you.
P.S. You can read here more mindset articles.
P.P.S. And you can read here more specific articles on destroying fear.
This article first appeared in BOSS Magazine
So often in life, winning is about doing away with the competition. Few knew this reality better than the late, great, Muhammad Ali. His actions provide some useful lessons to anyone who wants to get out and win. Here are six of the most important ones.
Train Your Mind
Ali didn’t just train his body in the gym, although that was clearly important. He did much more by training his mind. Often, that is the only difference between a winner and the runner-up. The person who trains his or her mind always has an advantage over one who doesn’t.
It’s something that many people in business simply don’t recognize. Technical skills, like jabbing in the case of Ali, or analyzing companies in the case of bankers, go only so far. What distinguishes the truly successful is mental toughness and the ways in which they use their minds to win.
Use Your Environment
It’s not hard to see that someone training in the boxing gym from an early age will quickly develop mental strength. The regimen involves getting hit repeatedly by an opponent and yet still coming back for more, again and again and again. That alone takes mental strength—something conditioned on Ali by his environment.
Consider your job and ask yourself, how can you use the stresses of your environment to build mental toughness? Got a tough boss? Use him or her to harden you up. Face a lot of on the job stress? Take time each night after you get home from work and mentally prepare your mind to deal with the obstacles you think you will face tomorrow. You don’t have to get hit in the head every day to get mentally strong.
See Yourself as Invincible
Famously, Ali said, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.” Is this the reason he is still lauded as the best ever pugilist?
Ali trained himself to believe that winning was inevitable: a sure thing, a forgone conclusion. There is no one harder to defeat than a person who believes that they are invincible. Think about that.
When your opponent doesn’t just think they can win, but just knows it, then they will keep going until the job is done. That was Ali.
What would you do, if you just knew you were going to succeed, that success was inevitable? Probably a lot more than most others.
Exploit Your Opponent’s Weak Minds
Better than just going in knowing he’d win, Ali waged psychological warfare on his opponents. He’d tell them again and again how he was going to destroy them in the ring.
His combined exuberance and eloquence were sure to raise nagging doubts in the mind of an opponent. That wasn’t just showmanship on Ali’s part, it was part of the strategy. Or put more simply, those boasts were an artillery barrage on the psyche of his opponents before he’d even stepped into the ring. By the time Ali arrived, the softening up job was already half done.
Now, I’m certainly not advocating that you taunt your colleagues or competitors, but do consider, how can you use your superior mental strength to exploit their situations to your advantage?
Use Your Opponent’s Strength Against Them
Ali wasn’t the largest heavyweight boxer in the field. He faced men who were much bigger and stronger than he was.
What did he do? He used their strength against them. Consider his match against George Foreman. Ali simply allowed Foreman to keep swinging and wearing himself out. Sure that meant Ali had to take a few hits to the body, but when the exhaustion slowed Foreman to a crawl, Ali finished him off.
Again, I’m not suggesting that you let your opponents keep swinging at you without fighting back, but consider how this idea applies to say negotiation. Fatigue your opponent, throw up roadblocks, find ways to wear them down and get what you want.
Have the Will to See it Through
Ali’s inner strength allowed him to take on the United States draft board when he refused to go fight in Vietnam. Others dodged the draft, or fled. He did not. He simply came out and took whatever was coming at him, stayed true to himself and his beliefs. He paid a price for that. But I don’t think he ever doubted that what he was doing was right.
Ali once said, “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them—a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”
To build mental strength takes time, effort, and most of all, will. You can’t expect to hit the gym once and build a rock solid body, and you can’t expect to think tough once a year and build mental strength. Practice this in everything you do; make mental toughness not something that you do, but a part of who you are.
Yesterday, my editor wrote me, “Great week for the Blades Bandwagon!!”
It was a great week. In fact, it was an incredible week.
We launched the Trump book. We had two great placements in the New York Times and American Spectator, and we have ridiculous interest in the book.
Yet, until he emailed me, I hadn’t thought much about it.
Instead of celebrating what we achieved this week (let alone the years of effort that built to this) I was too busy looking forward, preparing myself to crush next week.
Last year I developed what is one of my most potent tools, “The Formula.”
As someone who has always been driven towards building a magical future, I built The Formula to keep reminding me to love the present moment.
The Formula = Love the now + Love the future, now.
To break it down, the first part of The Formula, “Love the now,” simply reminds you that now is all that you will EVER have.
All of your past. All of everything that you have done. All of everything that you have become is happening right now.
Now is the only moment that you can EVER possibly experience, so, love it, now.
And I mean really love it. Punch the air. Dance around. Sing out loud. Smooch with your lover. Just absolutely love your life right now. It is all you will EVER have.
Even if your life feels very hard right now (as my life did for years), train yourself to love it. Feel grateful. Feel alive. Feel joy. Choose to find these feelings inside of you, now!
The second part of The Formula, “Love the future, now,” does the same thing, except it reminds you that even a future that you are fabulously excited about, you can only ever experience now.
This means, no matter how amazing you dream your future to be, it is not “reaching” that future you want to be excited about, but loving being excited about this future now.
You stop pretending that there is some life out in front of you. You stop living inside the illusion of one day how your life will be and how you will feel, and instead, you choose to feel this way now.
Putting both parts together, I hope you can see the devastating power of this tool.
Too often we find ourselves living in the past or dreaming of a brighter future, when the only moment for you to be loving your life is right now.
There is no other time. There is no other life. There is no other you.
There is only the life that you are choosing to be loving right now.
The Formula, along with a handful of my other Tools, are the pinnacle of my work on the mind.
All these tools are incredibly simple, and that’s the point…
But even then, it can take real effort to remind yourself to use them!
Most of my life I’ve been crippled with fear.
Fortunately it has mostly been the fear of failing to live the most amazing life I can imagine, and it has only crippled me in doing things I don’t want to do.
In our society fear is often seen negatively, when in fact it is our savior.
Like insecurity which keeps us secure, and pain that tells us something is wrong, fear is a signal that gets our attention.
Fear is neither good nor bad, but merely a matter of how you respond to it.
In one of the two TV shows I watch, The Men Who Built America, Carly Fiorina says—
“The difference between people who succeed and people who fail, I think, in many cases, it’s not fear, everyone experiences fear. The difference is, what do you do with your fear? Do you work to overcome it or do you let it defeat you? I think that is actually what distinguishes very successful people from others.”
All of us know that in the face of fear our nervous system triggers a fight-or-flight mechanism.
But what many don’t recognize is that before we fight or flight, we freeze.
Like a deer in the headlamps, it is this freeze mechanism that gets most people shot. In the face of fear, they neither move towards or away. Unsure of what to do they do nothing, which is the meaning of being crippled by fear.
Instead, take on the things you fear. Engage your fear. Sense it. Smell it. Taste it. Roll around in it. Play with it.
And then break its friggin’ back!
P.S. You can read here more mindset articles.
P.P.S. And you can read here more specific articles on destroying fear.
Recently I saw this quote from Mark Cuban—“Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it all away from you.”
Back in the day I would have vigorously agreed, but not today.
While his quote might powerfully resonate in sport, like Andy Grove’s notion of business paranoia it is hardly a fulfilling way to live your life.
A couple of weeks ago over dinner with a Silicon Valley hitter, we got talking about the relationship between success and happiness.
He observed that although the big name Silicon Valley players seem to have it all, when you spend time with some of them, seeing them running ragged chasing the next bouncing ball, you wonder, where is the joyfulness?
This I call the paradox of success—The more success you achieve, the more success you require to feel fulfilled.
Not to dump this complex subject on you right here, but the paradox is that the success-driven brain isn’t programmed for happiness.
It is programmed to believe that when it achieves success—which is impossible because success can always be defined as “more”—happiness will follow.
But it doesn’t. The brain and happiness don’t work that way. Hence why Robin Williams hung himself from a door and many successful people have more dollars than smiles.
People identified to their “success program” will never be happy because like the “oxygen program” that demands constant breathing, the success program’s desire for more, more, more can never be satisfied.
Not to rain on the world’s consumer parade, but this is why us humans will keep getting more wealthy and less happy.
My success program has served me exceptionally well, but the morning after my dinner flying out to Vail I decided to check it with the luggage at the plane door.
I resolved: No writing. No reading. Minimal emails, client calls, and ranting like Geoff Blades.
It wasn’t easy for me. I love my work and in many ways doing my work is doing what I want (and indeed even experimenting with not working is working), but in taking time off I returned to New York with fresh realizations.
I used to brag that on a weekend trip to Cabo while sitting by the pool I read half a dozen books, but today I would just be hanging with my girl in the sun.
A suicide bomber working for 72 virgins and a maniacal Silicon Valley player might be driven by different goals, but neither of them is living today.
Do yourself a favor this summer. Check your success program and find the time to kick back and smell the sunshine!
In The Magic of Thinking Big, David Schwartz writes, “Your mind is a thought factory. It’s a busy factory, producing countless thoughts in one day.”
He goes on to write that production in your thought factory is the responsibility of two foremen—Mr. Triumph who manufactures positive thoughts and Mr. Defeat who is of course married to Debbie Downer.
“Both Mr. Triumph and Mr. Defeat are intensely obedient,” Schwartz writes, “All you need do to signal either foreman is to give the slightest mental beck and call.”
He goes on to say, to see how these two foremen are working for you every day tell yourself, “‘Today is a lousy day.’ This signals Mr. Defeat into action, and he manufactures some facts to prove you are right.”
“But tell yourself, ‘today is a fine day,'” Schwartz continues, “and Mr. Triumph is signaled forward to act. He tells you, ‘This is a wonderful day.'”
As you know from reading these newsletters, your mind is a muscle which grows stronger according to how you use it, and Schwartz’s foremen are the same way.
As he puts it, “If Mr. Defeat is given more work to do, he adds personnel and takes up more space in your mind,” and he will ultimately take over your entire thought factory.
“The only wise thing to do,” counsels Schwartz, “is fire Mr. Defeat.”
He only stands in the way of doing what you want, so why do you want him messing around in your thought factory?
Instead, as Schwartz advises, “Use Mr. Triumph 100 percent of the time. When any thought enters your mind, ask Mr. Triumph to go to work for you. He’ll show you how you can succeed.”
To put this idea into practice, take out a piece of paper or a sticky note or anything else you will read every day, and write my First Rule of Mind Control—
I ONLY THINK ABOUT WHAT I WANT!
Do you want to be happier? Better?
More engaged? More focused? More alive?
Do you want to get done the things that matter to you?
In Podcast 2.0: THE HOUSE OF FLOW, I share with you powerful ideas on becoming fully absorbed in what you are doing, and I take you deep inside my HOUSE OF FLOW.
Step inside. Get absorbed. Come more alive!!
P.S. This is an old podcast, and my later and greater version of the House of Flow you can listen to here.
There is an interesting notion in Vipassana meditation.
You see, when you sit for some time with your legs crossed under you, until you become expert at that posture, you suffer extraordinary pain.
At first it just feels uncomfortable.
Then your legs get that pins and needles feeling. And then it just hurts.
It pretty much just hurts for years, but you learn to work with the pain.
You don’t label it. You watch it expand and contract, move in waves, whatever it does.
You don’t try to resist it. You stop thinking, How long will this last?
You just sit with it.
Through working with the pain, you learn you are not the feeling body and the thinking mind.
Now, here is the thing.
Some teachers will say: well, why work with pain when you can work with pleasurable sensations in the body?
Some will even go so far as to say it is part of the teaching that they have harems of women.
I call bullshit because of something I think legendary teacher, Shinzen Young, told me, or helped me see.
You can fool yourself with pleasure.
You can pretend that you have transcended, or perhaps mastered the body/mind, but why then be pulled toward the pleasure?
I used to think that the hard part about my job was becoming immune to criticism.
But as I got more into it, I realized that wasn’t the hard part.
You can become all badass and say, “I don’t care what other people think,” but if on the other side there is this small part of you that gets excited when someone likes a photo you took, or feels a hit of validation for every person who likes what you wrote, then what have you achieved?
You may be immune to criticism, but you are “controlled” by your cravings for praise.
If you want to truly become immune to criticism, begin the other way.
Become immune to praise.
“What would you say if I told you I could change this for you right now?”
“What do you mean,” he asked, “On the lift, we only have a few minutes.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I would say you are crazy,” he nervously chuckled.
I agreed and then I asked him, “How good would it be if we got to the top and this debilitating fear of public speaking you had was gone?”
“What would you say to that?”
“I would say you perform miracles, because this fear has held me back my entire career,” he said.
So I asked him, “What is possible for you when this fear is gone?”
“Well, anything is possible for me when I’m leading more confidently,” he uttered.
“And, how do you imagine yourself being different?” I queried.
He beamed and said, “I would be able to lead my teams in ways I haven’t before, and my career would be on a new trajectory.”
“Great,” I said, “And how does this feel?”
“It feels wonderful,” he said, “And I feel so confident.”
“And how does this make you feel,” I asked.
And while he described how good it feels feeling confident, I said:
“Now, quickly, with this feeling imagine yourself standing in front of your team where you used to have that problem, and notice how it now feels different.”
He looked at me and said, “It feels wonderful and I am confident.”
Shocked, he asked me, “How did you do that?”
“I didn’t do it, you did it…
…and now you know how, practice this every day until you feel yourself speaking confidently,” I shouted as I skied away.
P.S. You can read here more mindset articles.
P.P.S. And you can read here more specific articles on destroying fear.
Lindsay Vonn is a monster on skis.
With four World Cup championships and as the first American woman to win an Olympic Gold medal in downhill, she has become the face of U.S. alpine racing.
As a world-class athlete, you readily surmise that she has built herself to win. Any top athlete must begin with the right genetics, she came out of the factory that way, but so did millions of other people.
She must have been gifted with opportunity. She needed to start training young enough and be lucky enough to have the right environment, parents, and coaches to foster her development and train her skills.
That might get you a long way, but what sets apart a champion is still something different.
It isn’t that she is out there training six days a week, six hours a day in the off-season!
Or that she is constantly training her technique for speed and efficiency.
Or that she fuels her body and trains her mind for winning.
Or even that she risks her life and limb skiing to exceed her limits.
The secret to her success is still something different.
It is, like hand-building a Ferrari piston-by-piston, stitch-by-stitch, Lindsay Vonn has dedicated her life to building herself to be the fastest woman on skis.
While it is obvious that building yourself into the person who can be win is an essential component to competing at the highest levels in sports, it is also the same for all success.
In my career books, I call this Starting With You. This means, before you focus on what you must to do get what you want, instead start by focusing on who you must become.
This I call people building. It is building you into the monster you need to become to get what you want.
I’ve been slipping in and out of trance state all week.
Having finished ten days doing hypnosis and being hypnotized my body is eager for more trance. Yes. I know it sounds weird, well, to anybody who’s never been in hypnotic trance. Or at least anybody who didn’t think they’d been in trance.
We go into mild trance all the time.
Take this example of highway hypnosis, when we zone out driving along the road.
Or the many times we find ourselves just staring into the distance. Or sometimes while watching TV, relaxing into a trance-like state. Or while reading, just letting the words fade out and staring calmly at the screen.
You see, it’s perfectly natural that we go into these trance states many times a day.
Because these are natural ways of being, it’s easy to practice this calm, relaxed way of being.
As we focus our attention on say a point on the screen or the stillness of our hands, we allow our bodies to relax. As I relax, I often notice a calmness in my mind, like my thoughts slowing down. As my thoughts slow down I begin to notice my breathing. My heart rate slows, my breaths become shallower. As I breathe more slowly, my body relaxes. As my body relaxes, I breathe more slowly. That’s right. It’s this easy to bring our minds to this place.
It’s a wonderful way of being, and also a powerful experience for evolving our minds.