Back to Basics: The Simple Tools that Change Everything

Welcome. I am not Kevin Spindt. If you've ever been to one of these before, you would recognize that far more handsome gentleman being extremely clever, suave, and exceptional with technology. I'm pretty good, but not exceptional, so you'll bear with me if we get stuck. Kevin's out today, and I am the CEO of The Pacific Institute.

I've been at this role for about two years. I've been a student of The Pacific Institute for about 20 years. In my career, I've run other companies, typically venture-backed or private equity-backed, and deployed this sort of stuff with great success, and now I'm just absolutely privileged to have the role that I've got right now. So one more time before we begin, this is Beyond Limitss. Please give me the gift of seeing your beautiful face if you're able to, and share your location in the chat.

Beyond Limitss is a monthly conversation. We do this every month, first Friday of the month, and it's for folks like you who want to think differently. Perhaps you've already gone through some of The Pacific Institute's curricula. Perhaps you've experienced some of our consulting. And we vary the topic each Friday, at the top of the month.

So as you probably know, we are here to help people unlock their ability to think, act, and behave differently, create the future that they want. One by design, not by the default tapes that we've been given graciously by our parents, our teachers, and our friends when were younger. You may know of a guy named Lou Tice who said all sorts of things, and I'm going to quote him a little bit. One of the things that he said is, "All meaningful and lasting change starts on the inside and then works its way out." So, let's do what Kevin does to get started. In the chat, could you please tell me something good that's going on with you?

I've even got Kevin's music. Tell me something good. What do you got that's good today? We want to share something good because it activates awareness in our minds. It leads us towards positive ways of thinking that is moving towards things that we want rather than away from things that we don't want.

What do you got? Tell me something good since we last met. I'll tell you. We talked about this executive team MRI program, I think two Beyond Limitss ago. It's going crazy.

I'm interviewing so many wonderful people and learning so much about companies because of their engagement in that. Tim was recently promoted. Yes. Kate Spector connecting with good friends. Kelly, remind me, Kelly, where are you?

Because I want to go find you. Welcome to your granddaughter, Lolly. Excellent stuff. Thanks. Okay, Akron, you're far away.

I can't make it. Keep going. My daughter and I were on the jumbotron. Oh my gosh. I wonder what you did, Brian, to get on the jumbotron.

I hope it was okay. Mark A., "I like the five to 15-minute break." That's great stuff. Positive attitudes about all the good things in life. We often go past these things with ease, right? So, that's great.

Thank you for that. What I thought we would do today... Oh, thanks, Randy. I'm looking forward to that as well. This is a small preview.

So, a lot of you have touched The Pacific Institute before, but not everybody. I thought what we would do today is sort of a back to basics on TPI. And so what you're going to get over the course of the next 45 minutes is a refresher on the essence of thought patterns for high performance. Are you ready? Let's start with this poem.

I'm sure you all know, or many of you know Shel Silverstein. You've read it to your kids, perhaps it was read to you, or you're reading it to your grandkids. This is one of my favorite poems. "Listen to the mustn'ts. Listen to the mustn'ts, child.

Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, and the won'ts. Listen to the never haves. Then listen close to me. Anything can happen, child.

Anything can be." Why in the world would I have picked that poem? Tell me in the chat.

Absolutely love this poem and everything about it. It's my favorite. These books that he wrote, or these books of poetry are just delicious. No limits, that's right. That's right, Tim.

No limits. All things are possible if you believe. Correct. That's right. Anything is possible.

Anything can happen. Anything can be because we act in accordance with the truth, not as it really is, but as we believe it to be. Our beliefs do guide our actions. Our beliefs drive our behavior. If you believe you're not worthy, you're not.

If you believe you can't, you can't. So, let's start. This is a sort of a session in two parts, and part one is fast. It's about I have to. I have to.

Does anybody ever say to themselves in their mind, "I can't do what I want because I have to, dot, dot, dot"? The answer is yes. You all do it. I do it. I did it just this morning.

Can you put some examples in the chat that are personal to youThings that I have to do that limit me from doing things that I want to do. Could be about fitness, could be about balance, about growth, about wealth planning, about religion, about relationships. So I want you to think about this, whether you're sharing it in the chat or not. I want you to really... Oh, there you go.

Walk six miles a day. Speak my mind. I can't speak my mind because I have to remain loyal. I have to avoid shaking the boat. I can't walk six miles a day because it takes over an hour.

I don't have that kind of time. These are the sorts of things that we say to ourselves. I can't do what I want because I have a day job. Oh, see, but there's a little positive end to that. Sabbatical next year.

Whoop, whoop. Indeed. The King of Charleston, Nick Gardine, "You have to get paid." Yeah. You have to save money. I have to go to work because I have to make money, and if I don't, my whole livelihood's at stake.

My family depends on me. That's real. That's real, and I'm not saying that that's not true, but you don't have to. Right? You don't have to.

If you don't, there will be consequences, but you don't have to do it. There's really only one thing that we have to do. Does anyone know what it is? Put it in the chat if you do. Tim, "Breathe." The opposite of that is Kate, "Die." Ylette, "Die." That is it.

You guys are good. Everything else is a not a have to. It's just that some of the things that you are choosing to do or not do may create significant consequences that you're trying to avoid. The only thing that we as humans must do is die someday. And even that, for many of us, if we're lucky, we get some flexibility, we get some choice around that.

Yeah? So at The Pacific Institute, we talk about this language of ownership. I want to, I choose to, I get to. I get to go to work today to help all sorts of people. Let me tell you a story.

This morning, I woke up and I looked at my calendar, and I have such a busy day today, like all of you. And I have meetings before and after this Beyond Limitss. And I said to myself and my wife, she was listening, I said, "Oh, and then I have to do this Beyond Limitss talk." Now, my wife knows this stuff, and so she looked at me and she said, "What? You get to do it. You get to go and show up and help all these people, and they're there for you." And I realized I teach this stuff.

I teach it and I still fall down. I still mix it. So this is something we have to be really attentive to. What's going on in our brains, the neuroscience here, is when you say, "I have to," that's the executive control network of your mind issuing a directive. And it's issuing that directive to the part of your brain that we used to call the creative subconscious.

Right? The part of your brain that is sort of you, that's trying to keep you the way that you are, stable, safe, unchanged. That's actually called the default mode network. We're renaming this. There's a new book coming out.

You'll hear all about it. And that default mode network says, "That's not like me. I don't have to go running every day. That's not like me." And you get this resistance between the executive network and the default mode network, which creates this sense of energy depletion. It's unsustainable, and you push back.

No, I don't. I don't have to. If you say, "I want to," you're stronger. Now what you're saying is, the part of me which is me wants to. It's not somebody else making me do it.

The part of me which is me wants to do it. And so it minimizes that strain, that resistance, that your default mode network, again, your creative subconscious, is

exerting to keep you the way that you are. But the neuroscience shows that I get to. It's my idea. I like it. I love it.

That's even more powerful. And the reason why is now you're getting down to your beliefs at the worth and identity levels of who you actually are. That's how you rewrite that part of you that says, "I never work out." You don't have to. It's your idea. You get to do it.

Go get it. It starts to integrate that into the human that you are. So that's the key. All of you who've been through these programs have heard this sort of thing before. Really be mindful of it.

People around you are saying, "I have to" all the time, out loud. You're saying it all the time. Be a helper. Notice it and lovingly show them that they have nothing that they must do. It's just the consequences of not doing some of these things might not be what they want.

So it's a choose to, it's a want to. I get to do it. Part two is where you guys are going to start to do some work. Okay? So be ready.

Are you ready? Let's rehearse the core idea behind thought patterns for high performance. And that is really essentially assessing how we are doing using a tool like the balance wheel or the growth wheel, imagining, in an enormously idealistic way, what it would look like if were doing better, and then using really precise language to visualize that. Right? It's sort of shifting that I have to into the I get to in the present tense.

And we're going to do this with your lives, and you do not have to participate in the chat, but I will, and I encourage you all to, because I'm going to be asking you questions about areas of your life. And we're going to start with identification. Get a piece of paper out. Get a pen or pencil outAnd I want you to imagine the seven to 12 areas of your life that are important to you. Examples are in the right-hand pane there.

Your finances, relationship with your kids, your fitness, your wealth, your golf game. Everyone's going to have a different list, and that's okay. We want for this list to be no more than 12. You just run out of space in your life. And more than five or six, your life is probably more nuanced than just five or six things.

We find the sweet spot is seven to 12. Should I give you some thinking music? I'm going to give you a minute on this. I'll give you another 60 seconds. And you may be one of the people who's saying to yourself right now, "Oh, I've done this before.

I don't need to do this right now." This is something that we recommend people do every month, or at least every quarter. What you'll find is that the list of things that you just made, they'll change. You won't even have some things on the list that you used to. I used to have Spanish on my lists. I became fluent in Spanish.

I got busy. I'm doing other things now. My Spanish is rusting.

Okay. Next step is I want you to score each of these areas on a scale of one to 10. Now, before you begin, listen carefully. A one means with respect to this area of my life, work, golf, whatever, it means with all of the power of your imagination, you simply cannot imagine this part of your life being any farther away from what you want it to be. I believe in the power of your imaginations, so no one should give anything a one.

You can always think of a worse outcome, a worse reality. And 10, on the other side, is precisely the opposite. With all of the power of your imagination, you simply can't imagine this part of your life improving in any way. I would encourage you not to give anything a 10 either. And then there's a linear scale in the middle.

Go ahead and just put a number next to each one of these things. So as you're doing that, think about putting in the chat, what is your lowest number? You don't have to tell us what the category is, but what's your lowest number? And what's your highest number? Randy's lowest is a four.

Mine's three. Highest is nine. Kelly is right up the middle. Five is lowest, six is highest. Four to eight.

Good, Marianne. Thank you. Five to eight. Four to nine. Tim's got a three.

Gonzalo's four to eight. There's a lot of that. Great. Five to eight. B, thank you.

Three to eight. Bienvenidos. Good to see you. Good stuff. Stacy, thank you for your honesty.

What we now do is we take these numbers, and we like to draw them so that we can actually have a visual to see. So there's two ways that we do this. You're probably familiar with this way, where you have a pie, and each slice of the pie is one of the areas that you listed. And then there's sort of an outward radial chart where up here is 10, and all the way in the middle is a one. That's sometimes hard to do with pen and paper.

In a minute, I'm going to just give this to you. You could take a picture of that, but it only allows for a few of these things. So we have to subdivide, but let me go back for a second. Another way is just to chart these out as a bar and see kind of where you are on things. AndI think this is a really surprisingly useful thing to do is to visualize it.

Why? Because we think in three dimensions. Who knows what those three dimensions are? If you do, put it in the chat. The first one, I'll give you a hint, is words.

While you're trying to remember what the other two dimensions are, why don't you just draw your scores out? I'll give you another few minutes to do that so that you can actually see, by your own judgment, where you are against your ideal life. Words, pictures, emotions. Very close, Stacy. We think in words, they create pictures, and then we have emotions, and those emotions get grooved to become beliefs.

Absolutely right. More music while you draw.

15-second warning on drawings. I don't want to lose any of you, because if you finish your drawing and you're waiting, I bet you're going to go check your email. Oh, my gosh, what happened in the last five minutes that I missed? Look at what you've drawn. Here you are living your life.

This is the one you get. It's finite. There's a bunch of things that are important to you, and many of these things that are important to you are fives, fours. What in the world are we doing? We all have enormous opportunity to change, right?

This is why we're here. Why are these scores so low? So question, and this one is for the chat, and I'll be vulnerable and play, for any one of your low-scoring areas, why did you give it the score that you gave it? I'll start. I gave my general fitness a five.

I'm really busy at work, and I have lots of commitments after work, so there isn't really time. Why did you give this area of your life a low score? Even if you're not going to put something into the chat, answer the question for yourself, and not in your mind. Write it down. Write it down with words.

Christie, thank you. Because there isn't time to accomplish in that area right now. Ah, Lolly, a little bit more locus of control inside of me. Because I am not giving it the time that it deserves. Ask yourself why not.

Stacy, I keep forgetting about it. Randy, physical health four. I haven't prioritized fitness. I need to become more organized with my time so I can keep my exercise schedule. That sounds a lot like I have to.

Not to say that mine wasn't. I'm really busy at work. I have to be at work. I've got lots of commitments. Oh, okay.

Here's another one. I'm not interested with the new direction at work. So for that one, that's kind of interesting. You're thinking-- I'm not sure what the category was for that. Was it your work life?

It could be, because if it was your work life and you gave it a four or something because you're not interested, that's useful. That's helpful. Cindy, great one. Thank you for your honesty. Not focusing on healthy nutrition.

Right. So Gonzalo, it's like, how can I possibly do this? My finances are low. Is that a little bit of putting the cart before the horse? Performance at work.

Thank you. This is really helpful. We don't want to spend all this time in this part of our life that's not sort of ideal or closer to an ideal because it hurts. Doesn't it hurt? When you really take a minute and meditate on this thing, it hurts.

You're frustrated. You have these emotions about it, right? We think in words, and then we see the pictures. I promise myself I play pickleball every morning, just not doing it. And then I have this emotion, and the emotion is about my own worth.Yeah, I'm not prioritizing me regarding fitness.

If you're not doing it, who will? Right? Okay. So let's stay in this one area, renovating my home and my yard, not prioritizing my fitness, whatever it is. Think now and write down this answer.

What is preventing this part of your life from being better? Really get to the root cause of why you gave this a lower score.

Mine was not prioritizing fitness, and here's my answer. I'm jumping into work first thing in the morning. I'm spending two or three nights a week gigging with my band. On the other nights, I'm trying to be attentive to my wife and family. So whether you put your answer in the chat or not, thanks, Cindy, write it down.

Write it down for yourself. What is preventing this part of my life from being better? Too busy to plan healthy meals. Not enough time. That's the same one I gave.

Right. Right now, my finances are limited by eight to five schedules. That's why. Not taking the first step. Thanks, Stacy.

What I want to offer you as you take this step in this hour-long journey is to look at your answer to this question and love yourself. Like wow, you really want this thing, and here's what's limiting you, and it's okay. It's a choice that you're making, and it's still okay. This is not the time to be beating yourself up about it. It's a time to be compassionate.

Tim, not a big enough why. Maybe you don't really want whatever it is. It's also the case that some of these areas of our life around the balance wheel or in the bar chart, they're less important than others. That can always happen, and that's okay, too. When you say something like, "I'm not taking the first step," or, "I'm not being intentional enough with my time," those are really good answers, and I want you to ask yourself why.

Why? This is an important part of your life. You gave it a three or a four or a five. You want it to be better, but you're not doing it. Why?

So try to get to the five whys almost, if you've ever run that exercise. When you answer that question why, you'll give yourself a good answer and then look at that answer and ask again, "Why did I say that?" And you end up with something pretty deep pretty quickly. It's a want. That is why. Why is it a want?

You see what I'm doing. All right. We're going to move on to the next step here. The next step is, can you identify the beliefs that you have that might be limiting your behavior here? So again, Randy, not being intentional enough with my time.

What is the underlying belief? B, what is the underlying belief? What are the underlying beliefs here? I'll tell you what mine is about my lack of focus on my fitness. It's a belief that my health and fitness are fine in spite of my cardiovascular predispositions.

My grandfather dropped dead of a heart attack when he was in his 40s. I'm 54. I'm fine. Notice how I'm acting in accordance with the truth, not as it really is, but as I believe it to be. This is my underlying belief.

I'm fine. I can go up and down stairs fine. It's probably not true. What are the beliefs that you have that might be limiting your behavior? Write it down for yourself.

Cindy, "I'll work on it next week. I know I'll get to this next week." Good one. Thank you for sharing. What are the beliefs that you have?

Ah, Tim, "I won't get the results I want. I'll fail. I won't be good enough." These are beliefs about capacity, about self-efficacy, or they're beliefs about our environment. "I'll do it all right, but that guy over there is going to stop me." These are just beliefs, and if The Pacific Institute were a religion, this would be its bible. We act in accordance with the truth as we believe it to beNot as it actually is.

Please take that in. We are all walking around, fully autonomous agents, lots of intelligence, acting as though our beliefs are true. Some of them are, but most of them are limiting. There are really four kinds of beliefs and from a sort of neuroscience perspective, two of them are really fundamentally hard to change. The four kinds are, one is beliefs about our worth.

Okay, our worth. So if you have a negative belief about your worth, it's going to sound something like, "That's not for people like me," or, "I don't deserve that kind of success," or, "Who am I to want that?" Yeah? Does anyone recognize any of those things in the belief that they think is holding them back on one of those? Because worth beliefs, they come from a very young age. They're the hardest things to overwrite.

It takes lots of experience to overwrite them. The second kind of level one belief that's right next to worth is in a belief about our identity. "Well, I'm just not creative. I'm just not a leader. I'm the kind of person who plays it safe.

I don't like public speaking. I've always been this way." That sort of stuff. These identity beliefs are just about as hard to change as worth beliefs. I'm not saying they're not changeable. We know how to change them.

But listen to your beliefs about why you are in the spot you're in, why you gave this area of your life a three or a four. If it's a worth or an identity belief, we've got more work to do, and it's okay. What we have to do in that case is we have to prove to ourselves over multiple iterations that we're wrong. We can overwrite that belief. I'll show you how in a second.

There's two other kinds of beliefs. One of them is a belief about expectations. Expectations about what will happen if I were to do something. Right? "I won't get the results I want.

If I speak up, they'll think I'm arrogant. I'll probably get rejected." Belief expectations also include things about the world at large, even without us acting in it, like, "Our government will never fix this economy." Things like that. Right? Things that aren't really about you, but they're your filter, your bias around how you perceive the world, and they block out all the other things that could prove you wrong, right? Those are expectation beliefs.

They're easier to change than worth and identity beliefs. They only take, really, one emotional experience can change these. The fourth one is a belief about our own capability or our capacity, and we call that self-efficacy. So if you have negative self-efficacy in an area, you're saying things like, "I could never run a marathon." It's not a belief about your identity, it's about your ability to get something done, right? Or a belief about, "I'm not the kind of person who can learn a second language." It sounds like an identity belief, but it's really about your assessment of your ability, your self-efficacy, right?

Thank you very much for that. So these are the four kinds of beliefs, and expectation beliefs and capacity, capability, or self-efficacy beliefs, those are easier to change, but they are all changeable with the same system. So we talk to ourselves about ourselves, about our worth, about our identity, about what we can expect, about what we're capable of, and that word creates an image, and we have an emotion, and that drives our

beliefs about ourselves. Our self-image is the collection of all of these beliefs about ourselves. And then what happens is we act in accordance with it. So we go out into the real world and we perform. And we don't perform in accordance with what we might want.

No. We perform at the level of our self-image. That's how we perform. That performance reality is then judged by us. We watch ourselves perform.

"I had a really clean shot on goal, and I shot and I completely missed the goal. Ball went out of bounds. I'm no good at playing forward in soccer. I'm just no good at it." I was just talking to myself. You see?

And that talk, that self-talk, what did it do? It created a picture. I felt negative emotions, and it deepened this belief that my capability about myself is, "I'm not good at it. I should maybe play defense, or maybe I should quit altogether." So if you look at the cycle, there's only one place that you can break through and change. You can't just force a new self-image.

You can't break through there. And you can, at times, go out there and through sheer force of will, perform a little bit better than your self-image allows you to. But the only place to make lasting change is focusing on interrupting ourselves. Remember that pattern interrupt, which is all about how we speak to ourselves. Our self-talkis our gateway.

It's the tool that we have. And as you know, we talk to ourselves a lot. Like 50,000 thoughts a day, something like that. How many of those are positive? Very few.

I can't remember the actual number, but it's low percentages. So that's why we want to think in ideals, because when we think in an ideal about a low-scoring area of our life, those are just words that create pictures, and then we can have emotions about how cool it would be if, and it literally overrides beliefs. So I want you each to take two minutes to write down what it looks like if this one low-scoring area of your life, if it were a 10. So remember what 10 is? Ten is, I can't imagine this part of my life being better with all of the power of my creative mind.

So you need to reach big here. So big that you might feel embarrassed to share it because it will look like you're bragging. That's okay. You're allowed to brag to yourself about yourself. That's really the only thing you're allowed to do when it comes to bragging.

What would it look like if this low-scoring area of your life were a 10? Put it in the chat if you feel safe doing so. Every tree must find its place in the sun. Global book tour, baby. Yes.

Sherry, you nailed it. Cindy, how more confident? What would that look like? Be specific. So you feel more confident, then what happens?

What's happening around you? What are people noticing? How is everything changing? Global book tour. Sherry, you and I are going on it together.

I love it. So take a minute and write down your answer here. You don't have to share, but it would be more fun if you did. The most important thing is that when you do this, you should feel a little panicked. There's a part of you that should say, "Whoa." That's when you know you've reached.

Is when the thing that you're now describing about this future state of yours is so hard to imagine that you gasp a little bit. Yeah, Mark A.

I love it. "I would be able to breathe easy." Yeah. Come on, King of Charleston. I met Nick in an Uber when I moved to Charleston, and he was driving around, and he introduced me, and we got connected, and here he is. He's a great guy.

What else you got? Remember, this should feel like, "I don't know how to get there." If you know how to get there, it's not really a goal as much as it is a thing on your to-do list. Just go do it. Everyone got this? And that's just Mother Nature.

All right. So Kate, awesome. I'm noticing that some folks are already in the advanced course, and they're writing these words in the present tense. Why present tense? So Kate, you did it.

Mark A, you did it. You let your conditional future tense, "I would be able to breathe easy." That's okay. "It would impact every other area of my life." That was the assignment I gave you. You haven't done anything wrong. But now, let's get to the actual tool here.

The tool is visualization. We think in three dimensions, words, pictures, emotions, and pictures are so much more powerful than words. So we self-regulate our whole behavior, not at the level of what is possible for us to do, but at the level of what we believe we're worthy of, what we believe our identity is, what we believe about our expectations about the world, and about our capacity. So we're all living under our potential because these beliefs aren't optimal. And we change these beliefs, and we make them more optimal by visualizing a new future where this belief isn't playing a role.

But that future that we visualize creates an emotion, and that emotion has to be absolutely positive. It has to be so vividly positive that you become dissatisfied with your current. And it is truly the emotion that you feel and the degree to which you feel it, which writes beliefs. Emotions can also be negative, and if you feel those strongly, you will also write beliefs about negative things. Yeah?So that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to make our visualizations of the new so clear that we draw ourselves into the future. And there is a neuroscience hack that we use that works really well, and it's about the tense of verbs. The reason why this works is because there's some parts of our brain that don't really focus on whether something has actually happened or we're just picturing it. And so when we bring things that we want in the future into the present tense, in spite of the fact that they're not true, this part of our brain, again, it's the default mode network, it's going to say something like, "That's not like me. No.

I'm like this. I'm not like that." Yeah? And that default mode network is really strong. It's what we used to call, again, the creative subconscious. It's really strong.

And so the only way to override that is not to try to force, but to have this vision of the future that's so powerful in the present tense, you can overwhelm it. You can overwhelm it if the emotions are really positive. If when you see yourself in that new light, you clearly, crystal clearly, through your own eyes, as though it's already happened, and you feel how good that feels, over time, depending on the depth of the old belief, you literally just overwrite it. Okay? So we're trying to create enormous present tense emotions.

So your next assignment is I want you to take that version, that language you just wrote in this one areabout what a ten would look like. And here's six rules. There's actually 11, but here's the six that I want to focus on. Make sure that it's a full

sentence written in the first person. It is you, me, that's doing it. The second thing is write it as though it is already done. It's a statement about the future, but write it as though it's already done. And write it in a way that ensures that you're full of vivid imagery.

Randy, perfect example, "I am strong." I am, right? Healthy, fit. I weigh less than 220, and I enjoy eating treats when I want to, with the smiley face, which matters. It's about the emotion. So the idea is you can even say in this, here's the vivid imagery, and by the way, Randy also added metrics, 220 pounds.

Add emotion. Fill it with how you feel. I feel so strong, healthy, fit, and I love eating treats every now and then. Right? Don't forget that the ideal is the focus here.

That's the sixth rule. Writing this, it may make you feel uncomfortable, and you may even feel ashamed to share it. And that's okay. You don't have to share it. In fact, when you write these, I'm going to call these affirmations.

When you write these affirmations in this way, if somebody else were to read them, they would probably think you're a little crazy. It's not for other people. It's for you. Gosado, "What is the difference between the present tense versus I'm working to be this?" It's all about the energy that we create. When you say, "I am working to become a thing," it's already true.

You're working. So it's a statement of potential. That's what you just did, and the part of your brain that keeps you the way that you are says, "Oh, I don't have to do anything. It's just a statement of the potential that I already agree to." That's the difference. You don't want to talk about potential.

You have the potential. You don't want to talk about the path. You want to talk about it already being done. It will hurt more. It will hurt more, and that's what you're trying to do is sort of override these beliefs about yourself that are limiting you with new ones that are flamingly positive and emotionally compelling, even though they're not true.

That's the most important thing. They're not yet true. Do you have this? Has everyone rewritten it? If anyone wants to share, some of you already really have this, but you can see how it's really important to get the language just right so you create exactly the picture that you want.

Now I'm going to give you some homework. Only if you are dissatisfied with parts of your life, only if you want to grow. If you don't, you can ignore this part. Or if you're too busy. I know you're all so busy.

I like it, Yulet. You are breathing easy. In spite of the fact that right at this very moment, you may not be you're doing it right. Here's your homework. I want you to take the thing that you just wrote, and I want you to read it to yourself aloud.

Out loud. Alone. Don't share it with your spouse, "Look what I'm becoming." It's for you. How many times a day should you do this? When you read it out loud, and you picture it, and then you feel the emotions of it, could you do it just once?

That would work. This actually works if you do this once a day, particularly right before bed or right before you wake up. Right as you're waking up, excuse me. It actually works, but if you do it more frequently, it will work more frequently. You will literally start to notice the things around you that can help you to make this changeIt is simple, and it's a little bit unbelievable until you go into the neuroscience.

It actually works. It is our thoughts, like these kinds of sentences about a future that's not yet real, that determine our future, our thoughts that accumulate to become our new

beliefs. Good stuff. Great shares. So I have one more homework assignment for you. We just did this work for one of those areas.

The reason why we call that wheel a balance wheel is because if you're only focusing on one area, you become unbalanced. I have a friend named Bob Gregoire who introduced me to The Pacific Institute who taught me that. He had a client who all he wanted to do was win this bodybuilding contest, and he worked so hard to make at it. And after 18 months, he was affirming, he was doing this thing. I can't remember exactly what the affirmation was.

He won. And his wife left him, and his kids don't talk to him anymore, and he lost his job. So the idea here is you do this for every wedge of the pie. It's only seven, eight, 10 things. It's only seven, eight, 10 sentences.

You write each of these down, and my coach likes to remind me, "Just put it on the mirror where you brush your teeth." You can't avoid that, right? Put it on the mirror where you brush your teeth, and once a day, you go through each of these things. Ladies and gentlemen, you've all graduated from the one-hour version of Thought Patterns for High Performance, and I hope that it was useful for you. Are there any reflections? What did you find most useful today?

How can you apply that as early as today in your day-to-day life? Would love to hear. It would be valuable to me to hear what you found most useful. You can send me a text if you want to tell me what you found least useful. While you're answering that question, there is a next step.

Thanks, Ela. There is a next step, which is Invent Your Future Pro. This is a short course. It's two hours for four sessions, total of eight hours over a two-week period. And our next course is coming up in June, on June 9th.

It's next week. It's $750 for the entire course. Kevin Spence is the guy who teaches it. Scan the QR code if you're curious to learn more. Mark Anthony, "Incredible how just thinking about these things makes you feel a specific way." Yeah.

Thanks, Dalene. Thanks, Cindy. We will stay on for the next few minutes if there are any questions. If not, really appreciate your attendance. Drop off whenever you like.