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Toxic Emotional Habit #3: Automatically Assuming that a High Price Tag Means High Value

A lot of people confuse price with value. You do know how prices are set, right? Prices are set through supply and demand. When there is a limited supply and there a significant amount of demand, the price goes up.

Similarly, even if there's a huge supply, if the demand is big enough or constant enough,

the price goes up as well. This also works the other way. If there's a lot more supply than demand, the price goes down. Pretty basic, right?

I need you to pay attention to demand. A lot of people have this crazy idea that demand is essentially a product of need. When the price of wheat or pasta, for example, goes up and people assume that it's because of need. People just need for pasta, bread, noodles, you name it.

What if I told you that demand can also involve perceived demand? In other words, the perception of value by people demanding a particular product because in economics there is such a thing as substitution.

You might be thinking that the demand for wheat is fixed, but you have to also keep in mind that people can switch or substitute rice, potatoes or other forms of starch for wheat. Wheat, after all, is not the only game in town.

I bring this to your attention because a large component of demand involves group perception. The more you can convince people that a certain item has value, regardless of how abundant that item is, its price will go up.

A classic example of this is the diamond industry. Did you know that diamonds are actually quite common? That's right. This crystallized form of carbon is actually not that rare. However, thanks to the DeBeers cartel operating out of South Africa as well as long-running, intensive marketing campaigns, diamonds have become very expensive.

In fact, a lot of guys customarily give their prospective fiancée diamonds. It's kind of a rite of passage when people get engaged. However, despite that volume of demand, the actual supply of diamonds is so vast and so great that the actual pricing of diamonds doesn't make any sense.

It shouldn’t be as expensive as it is. Do you see how this works? This is due to manufactured demand.

What does all of this have to do with you? Very simple. Just because something has a high price doesn’t necessarily mean it has value as far as you are concerned. Its high price may be due to some sort of group delusion like diamond prices. It may be due to some sort of manufacture exclusivity. How do you think luxury goods get marketed?

When you watch a Calvin Klein commercial or view Ralph Lauren print ads, they try to get you to buy into a lifestyle. A lot of these photographs just show really attractive people in exotic locales and maybe one of those people would be wearing the actual item that's being advertised.

However, these compositions are so off center that you're almost wondering what is being advertised. It's not like the jeans that are being marketed is front and center of the ad. Instead, you see this really attractive model looking to the side like she has a problem or another guy just looking dreamily off center to the side of the photo.

This is not a mistake. This is not an accident. This is intentional. The real product here is not the jeans. Instead, it's the lifestyle that you're supposed to buy into because it's so awesome, it's so different from your life.

Your life is boring. These models’ lives, on the other hand, are exotic, and you buy into that lifestyle when you buy the product. Do you see how it works?

In other words, they are appealing to what's missing in your life. Your life involves nine-to-five routines. You show up to work, you punch the clock, you work your eight hours then you go home. Rinse and repeat. Year after year. Decade after decade. Sure, from time to time, you go on a vacation and try something new, but that's your life.

Calvin, Klein, Ralph Lauren, all these great fashion brands understand this. That's how they market to people. Abercrombie and Fitch turn this into a science. Basically, they don't show you your life.

Instead, they show you this alternative life that you could have, and you experience it when you buy their product. This product is the gateway to this lifestyle or experience.

I know this sounds pretty weird, and probably you’ve been thinking, “Would people really fall for this?” You only need to look at the billions of dollars being spent every year or lifestyle marketing to get your answer. The answer, of course, is a resounding yes.

The worst part to this marketing is that it drives home the point, ad after ad, video after video, and message after message that your life sucks. It's not complete. It's not good enough. There is something better out there, but you need to buy our product to get there.

When you ask people buying Gap jeans, or other fashion items like Giorgio Armani accessories, they want to be able to explain this to you except they will just tell you, “Well, it fits good. It fits well. It looks good on you.” That’s their conscious answer but, subconsciously, they made the selection because of this lifestyle that’s being pushed.

Let's put it this way if we take people’s word for it and they actually bought stuff because it fits well, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this but there are tons of other clothing lines out there that fit well. What makes this brand any different? What makes it so special?

It really all boils down to marketing.

This is what you pay for when you spend $300 on a pair of jeans from one brand when you could have bought another brand of jeans for $30! The funny thing about this is people do this with a smile on their face. They think that they’re locking into a truly awesome brand.

However, if you look at the material, the design and everything else, it's really hard to justify on a purely practical level spending $300 on a pair of jeans when you can buy it for $30 from another brand or a no-name brand. The difference? The lifestyle.

I bring this up because this is what inflates perceived value. That value is air, but let's be honest. It’s clever. It shows genius on the side of these big brands but, ultimately, there’s not much difference in practical terms between a $300 pair of jeans and a $30 pair.

For this to work, they have to trick people into thinking that high price means high value. The more people you successfully program with this mindset, the larger the market gets.

Considering that there is a multibillion-dollar luxury goods market stretching across different industry verticals tells you all you need to know about how pervasive this programming is.

I wish I could tell you that this only applies to clothing or perfume or cologne. It doesn’t. The mobile device you have in your hand is proof positive of this. If you’re just looking for features, you probably would be better off with an android device that costs all of $50.

There's really no compelling reason you should spend over $500 on a mobile device that has a nice little logo of an apple behind it. Do you see how this works?

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I come across people who say, “Well I spent $600 on this model because it's worth it. It brings so much value to the table. No, it doesn’t. I mean if we're really honest with ourselves here and are willing to let go a lot of the marketing program.

Sadly, this leads to emotionally toxic habits. Just because something has a higher price doesn't mean it automatically has a lot of value. You shouldn't beat yourself up over the fact that you cannot fill your life with high-price-tag items.

At the end of the day, they may not have the value that you're looking for. If you really think about it hard enough the only value any item can bring is the value you read into it.

This process again reflects how the market works because pricing mechanisms don't work based on how much labor somebody puts into product. Karl Marx is absolutely wrong.

According to his book, Das Kapital, the real price of any product is the amount of labor that is put in there. Capitalists make money when they sell the product far in excess of the amount of money they paid the worker to create the product. That’s how Marx thought.

What if I told you that even if you spent two thousand hours creating a product but when you put it on the market, nobody wants to buy it. How much is that product worth? That's right, a whole lot of nothing.

Pricing is set by demand. This highlights my point. This drives home my point. The price of something or value of something is something that you read into it. It comes from you.

You have to break the artificial link between price and value that is set by the other people. Just because something has a high price tag doesn’t mean it has a high value. You beat yourself up to buy that thing because you want to be highly valued.

Believe it or not you have your own intrinsic value. Regardless of what you put on, regardless of what you buy, regardless of what you eat, that value remains.

Think of yourself like a piece of gold or a hundred-dollar bill. If I took a hundred-dollar bill in front of you and spit on it, stomp on it with my foot, crumple it, throw it around, drop some slime on it, how much do you think that hundred-dollar bill is worth? That's right.

It's still a hundred dollars. Some people will pick it up because they know value when they see it.

The same applies to you. You may be covered in rags. You may look all scuffed up. However, you still have value. Always keep this in mind because the stuff that you have may not have a high price tag.

However, this doesn’t take away from the fact that you still have value. Now, the secret to all of this is the only person that unlocks your value is you. If you act like a high-value person, people will respect you.

If you respect yourself and treat others with respect, people will respect you. At the end of day, this really all boils down to your choice and your decisions.

Toxic Emotional Habit #4: Focusing on “Extracting” the Good Things People Have Going On Instead of Seeing Them as Complete People

Do you hang out with people who are emotional energy vampires? These people hang out with you just to soak up your positive vibes. They don’t contribute anything. They’re very depressed. They’re very anxious. All they talk about are their problems.

They still hang around you because they want to feel good. So, you talk about what's going on. You talk about things that are going right, and they ride on this positivity. They suck it all up. These people are extracting positive energy from you.

They don’t really see you as a complete person. Instead, they see you as a host. They are energy leeches. Believe it or not you probably do this as well at some level or another or in one form or another.

It's very rare that you come across somebody who just likes to hang out with you because of who you are. They don't want anything from you. Instead, they just want to be around you.

Some are even gracious enough to want to give to you not because they are expecting something in return, but that’s just who they are. They have a lot of abundance in their life, and it flows outward.

Unfortunately, most people are not like that. Instead, we hang out with other people to extract things. Now, it would suck to hang out with people who try to extract money from you. You probably know some people like this.

However, by and large, it takes another form. These are people who are emotional vampires. I’m sure you have at least one friend who’s like this. All he or she talks about is her or his problems. They talk about past relationships. They talk about things that are not going right.

Furthermore, other people like to stoke your own insecurities because they’re insecure. So, they get you to talk about your own frustrations by talking about theirs. They're not looking for solutions, mind you. These people just want to feel that there are other people as miserable as them in the world.

Do you think this is a positive thing? Well, you might want to think twice. Maybe at first it feels good. However, the more you trigger each other's negativity, the more you create a negative emotional soup between you.

Instead of your friendship enabling both of you to get out of this emotional hole, you actually end up handing each other shovels. As you dig in alternating terms, you deepen each other's hole.

Believe me I’ve been in this type of relationship. I’ve had friends who just talk about stuff that’s, and by the end of the conversation, I’m either so sad I want to kill myself or I’m so angry that I want to kill somebody else.

This is a form of extraction. It doesn’t have to be one person feeling good at the expense of another person. It can be two people making each other miserable by reinforcing each other's negativity.

You have to get rid of this especially toxic emotional habit. Why? The more you extract from somebody else, the less likely you're going to solve your own problems. All you're doing is just consoling yourself with what is fundamentally wrong in your life without really doing it to solve it once and for all.

You're definitely not challenging yourself. You’re not pushing yourself past your comfort zone. Instead, you’re locked deep within your comfort zone, and you're just rehashing this negativity or you're extracting some sort of emotional comfort from your friend.

However, at the end of the day, you don't lift a finger to fix your problem. You wallow in it.

Toxic Emotional Habit #5: Sponging Emotionally Off People

Have you ever hung out with people who think exactly like you? You may be thinking that this is a good thing. You might be under the impression that this is exactly the kind of friends you need because, hey who doesn’t want to feel appreciated? Who doesn’t want to feel like they belong?

Unfortunately, that feeling of belonging has limits. There is such a thing as a comfortable prison. When you’re hanging out with people who just reinforce your worst preconceptions, you're not doing yourself any favors.

You end up talking and preaching to the choir. You motivate them by telling them stuff that they already, and they do the same to you, and nobody's any wiser. Nobody progresses.

Nobody challenges their biases. Nobody improves their chances of breaking out of this mental prison.

You have to understand that mental prisons become more restrictive when people who live in them network with each other. A sense of powerlessness, a sense of constriction and the other negative dimensions of mental prisons are made worse when we hang out and network with or bond with people who share the same problem.

Don't get me wrong. I’m not saying you don't get any sort of emotional payoff from this. There is some sort of emotional payoff. However, you're paying a high price for it. You’re reinforcing each other's biases. You keep rehashing each other's pet peeves.

If you don't believe me pay attention to a friend who you are emotionally sponging off or who’s doing this to you. Track the topics you talk about. I’m willing to bet a lot of money that you talk about the same stuff over and over again. In fact, you consciously bring back stuff that you’ve already talked about because you want to get that emotional rush.

This is toxic. You're not challenging each other to get out of the emotional rut. Instead, you’re again helping each other dig a deeper hole.

Let Go of Toxic People

To some extent, this is actually similar to the five toxic emotional habits I described above. A lot of the people who have those negative emotional habits are the same as the people who I’m going to describe.

You just have to mix and match these, but the effects are the same. They lead you to a bad place. They reinforce all your worst emotional habits.

If you wanna try to make things as simple as possible for yourself, just identify the following five types of toxic people in your life and start distancing yourself from them. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to cut them off entirely.

You don't have to turn your back on them. You just have to give yourself enough distance so their negativity doesn't poison you.

A little distance can go a long way. They’re still in your life. You still talk to them from time to time, but they're not so close and so dear that they end up dragging you down. At the very least, you’re not so connected to them that you are stuck in this downward emotional spiral.

Toxic Personality Type #1: The Black Hole

This person has deep and profound emotional needs. They’re very needy people. You can’t tell by their appearance, mind you. Some look very successful. Some are very attractive.

However, when they open their mouths to somebody they feel that they can trust, it’s all about me, me, me. It’s all

about how I lost out, what I need, how the world's unfair, on and on it goes.

It's as if any kind of reassurance, any kind of comfort or any kind of emotional support simply won’t measure up. Even if you give and give and give, it’s still not enough because that's how needy they are. They are black holes. All they know and all they seem to be capable of is sucking in positive energy.

Do yourself a big favor. Stay away from black holes. I’m not saying that you should cut them out, but don't get so near. Why? Well, imagine a spaceship or a planet getting close to a black hole. What do you think happens? Here's a hint. There's a bad ending.

Toxic Personality Type #2: The Judge

Do you have a friend or an acquaintance who’s constantly putting everybody and anything and any situation into neat, tidy, little boxes. This might not seem all that negative at first.

However, this habit of theirs can be quite toxic because life is not black and white.

When somebody sees you, they say, “You're a loser” or another person says, “Oh, you’re a winner.”

It’s easy to think that when somebody comes up with a negative judgment that it's unfair.

It’s tempting to think that when you come across some sort of negative judgment that this is a bad thing compared to when somebody has a great impression of you and says, “Oh, you’re a winner.”

Well, what if I told you that they are equally toxic? Why? People are people. We change all the time. We have different dimensions. We have different aspects. There are so many sides to us and to reduce somebody into a one-word description really strips them of their humanity.

If you say to a friend of yours that she's ugly or she’s she stupid, you reduce that person's being to just one attribute. Maybe they’re just behaving stupidly that one point in their life, but for the rest of their life, they’re acting like complete and total geniuses.

Now, does it make sense to dismiss that person as an idiot? The same applies to physical appearances or income mobility or the ability to increase one's net worth.

Unfortunately, none of this nuance matters to the judge. This person derives a tremendous amount of comfort in making his or her world as black and white as possible. Everything is extreme. Either somebody is a loser or somebody is a winner. There’s no in-between. There’s no middle.

Stay away from these people. Again, you don't necessarily have to stop being friends with them, but achieve some sort of distance because, sooner or later, you start adopting that black- and-white mindset, and this is very corrosive because the world is not black and white. It's not gray either. It has so many colors. It's so rich, so vibrant and so beautiful.

Toxic Personality Type #3: The Stylish Hoarder

The style hoarder is a person who looks at different people’s lives and tries to find trends or styles that they can collect. When you talk to this person, they’re not really interested in the real you. They couldn’t care less about your hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations, insecurities. None of that matters.

Instead, they look at what you are doing. They’re obsessed with all sorts of trends. These can be technological trends, fashion trends. Regardless, it's stuff that other people are doing.

They then use this as some sort of grid when they're judging you, and they say, “Ah, this person, does he think this way? Does he share in that trend? Does she have this fashion sense that is kind of trendy?”

That’s their value to you. You basically vindicate their judgments regarding tends because they're extracting a large sense of their self-worth and ego from that. They feel good about being able to spot these trends. They feel good about being part of the right crowd or people who think the right ideas.

However, they’re very shallow. They collect. They grasp. Conversely, the motivation is very shallow. It's really all about making themselves feel good, feel substantial and feel worthy.

Unfortunately, this is all at the surface level. They don’t really have the core conviction or the substance of the trends that they are so obsessed about.

When you hang out with these people, you become superficial as well. You start slicing and dicing people based on where they are in terms of politics, cultural sensitivity, ideology, personal style.

Unfortunately, human beings are greater than the sum of their parts. You can take one person and strip that person to different layers, but guess what? When you put all those layers together, they don't add up to that person. Something's missing.

Maybe we can call this the soul. Perhaps we can call this the essence of that person. Regardless, the truth is you can’t just strip people based on these trends and reassemble them into a complete person. You missed the point. You missed the person.

That's how these people think. That's how stylish hoarders look at the world. They see it as layer after layer of stuff that they can reconfigure, recombine, and slice and dice, mix and match.

If you hang around these people long enough, you become like them. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking falls flat when it comes to reality because people, ultimately, are not like that. We're worth more than the sum of our parts. We’re not just thin, superficial layers.

Toxic Personality Type #4: The Troll

Internet trolls are annoying. You probably already know this. However, the problem is they’re not always obvious. In fact, one of the most common forms of trolling involves flattery.

There are people who think 180 degrees opposite of whatever view or opinion you posted. They couldn’t disagree with you

more, but you cannot tell based on their response.

It seems like they’re supporting you. It might even come off like they are egging you on. However, what they’re really doing is trolling you because they don't agree. Whatever opinion you shared doesn't line up with what they actually think and believe.

Why are they doing this? They're doing it for laughs. They get a sick sense of satisfaction in being complete and total liars. However, the problem is trolls eventually reprogram themselves.

It’s not uncommon for a troll to get such a kick getting people to agree with things that they themselves hate because this makes them hate the person or ridicule the person in their minds.

Eventually, they get so trapped in their decision that they no longer know what the truth is. The whole point of the game is just to get a rise or a reaction from people. They’re not really invested in whether things are right or wrong or whether things are proper or unjust and unfair.

Instead, it’s just the emotional rush that they're getting. “The person is agreeing with me, and he’s a complete and total idiot and a bigot. I gotcha!”

Who do you think pay the bigger price? The person who is at least honest with his or her opinion as unpopular or unpalatable as it may be, or the person who egged him on?

Remember if you engage in this behavior, you’re really trading in your soul, and by soul I’m not talking about some quasi-mystical component of your life. I’m talking about your integrity.

You're lying basically.

The worst part to all of this is that the lie eventually seeps in and becomes you. It becomes part of you. You reach a point where you don't even know which side is up. That's how confused trolls are. They become some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

It all boils down to feeding insecurities because they're very insecure at some level or another. That’s why they get a kick out of getting people to say stuff that they hate or say stuff that they deep down inside want to say.

Thanks to their behavior, encouragement and underhanded tactics, they get people to voice out stuff that they wish they could say or stuff that they hate.

Hanging out with these people brings out the worst in you. Moreover, you end up with somebody who doesn’t really appreciate you for who you are. If you’re not careful, you might end up becoming like these people. Their whole existence is a lie.

Getting rid of emotional clutter requires in your emotional habits as well as an affirmative decision to stay away from people who tend to reinforce those negative emotional habits. This is not easy. A lot of this stuff may be fairly easy to understand, but it’s definitely not easy to do. You have to keep working at it.

The good news here is that you don’t have to achieve total freedom from these emotional habits and these people overnight. You don’t have to do that. You just have to decide to take baby steps and stick with those steps. Allow yourself to be consistent. The good news is if you keep putting in constant effort, eventually, you will break free.

Again, please note that this doesn’t mean that you have to cut out a lot of people from your life. You just need to put some distance between yourself and them so they do not emotionally corrode and corrupt you.

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As I mentioned in an earlier section of this training, watch what you feed your head. In that section, we talked about watching your habits and paying attention to the people you hang out with. While this is important, you also have to take care to make sure that you absorb the right kind of stimuli.

In any given day, we subject ourselves to all sorts of inputs. Interestingly enough for the vast majority of these inputs, we are completely unaware. There are always things that we see, smell, taste, touch and hear. However, despite the thousands of daily stimuli we are subjected to, we actually only get to remember a small fraction of them.

Of these memories, we only analyze or judge an even smaller fraction. Among these realizations, only a very small amount make it to our personal narrative. In other words, only a fairly small amount of the things that we become aware of, analyze and think about in any given day become new revelations to us regarding who we are.

For the most part, they either reinforce things that we already think we know about ourselves, or we simply remember them, think about them, focus on them and eventually forget them.

Now you may be thinking that this is completely normal. You may be thinking that this is just the way things are. For the most part, you're correct. But the problem is we can subject ourselves to all sorts of stimuli that create psychological clutter.

Now these are different from emotional clutter. Emotional clutter triggers your feelings about your place in the world, what you're about, what you're capable of, your relationship to people, so on and so forth.

Psychological clutter on the other hand involves psychological routines that shape your personal narrative. The way you read things produces emotional states. Choosing how you opt to analyze these stimuli takes quite a bit of work. You have to be mindful of how your mind functions.

This is where getting rid of psychological clutter really helps. When you police the things that you feed your head, you are able to identify your psychological processes and over ride them if they were against you.

What should you be mindful of? What should you guard against? Like I mentioned earlier, we absorb all sorts of thing throughout the day and you have to really classify these things using broad headings so as to warn yourself about their content.

For example, we can feed our heads shallow forms of entertainment. This can be worthless YouTube videos. This can also be porn. This can take the form of insults and trolling on comment sections as well as Twitter feeds.

These are not 100% devoid of value, but they are essentially worthless because they're so shallow. They don't really engage you on any deep level. They don't challenge your assumptions about yourself, reality and the world. Instead, they just create some sort of emotional payoff.

Your mind is engaged. You're having fun and that's pretty much it.

Another form of toxic psychological input that you should be mindful of involves ideas that make you less content. It's one thing to challenge yourself and your existing preconceptions, it's another to absorb ideas that really erode your ability to be content. Ideas involving your sense of worth, the worth of other people and life in general.

The interesting thing about this is at first, it starts off as another form of entertainment. You can hang out at certain message boards and people just keep repeating the words “kill yourself” or saying that life doesn't really matter or there's really no point to everything.

There are many variations of this. Now I'm not going to debate the philosophical finer points of these ideas. Maybe on a philosophic, rational and logical basis there may be fire where there is smoke. Instead, I'm just going to focus on their effect on you.

It's one thing to challenge your assumptions so you can live your life in a more effective way. At some level or another, we definitely need to destroy any false idols that we have involving a mistaken assumption to expectations.

That's part of growing up. That's part of being a responsible adult. But there are ideas that can make you less content. Precisely because they erode your ability to be content. I hope you see the point here.

I'm not talking about coming across an idea that makes you question the religion that you're born with. That's one thing. In fact, in many cases, that's healthy. I'm not advocating atheism here. Instead, I'm advocating people actually believe what they claim to believe.

In that situation, whatever religion you're born with stops being a simple label that's passed on from generation to generation and instead becomes truly your own. You actually live out the truths preached by that system of faith.

You see it play out in your life. You see that it's reality and it's reinforced in your mind and you consciously choose it. I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking instead about ideas that destroy your ability to be content. This involves the nature of humanity and the point of life. There are certain ideas out there that basically lead to the conclusion that it's all worthless, pointless and useless.

How can you be content if you buy into that? How can you build something when that is the kind of ideas you surround yourself with or you subject yourself to online content that repeats that same corrosive message over and over again?

Another type of input that you need to be very careful with involves toxic emotions. If you keep running into content that just almost always automatically puts you in a negative emotional state, there's a problem. If you're feeling a tremendous amount of negativity, you are eroding your personal effectiveness.

A lot of people try to trick themselves into thinking that this is just part of them being real. Reality in their minds almost always is negative. If it isn't negative, it's unreal. It's some sort of self-delusion.

Well, thinking of life in black or white turns that way. It definitely positions you for toxic emotions. You end up repositioning your world in such a way that your emotional extremes become even more extreme.

Finally, you have to stay away from time wasters. Sure they're engaging, fun and a lot of people talk about them, but eventually, they just take up too much time. This is time you could've spent developing yourself. This could've been time that you spent discovering certain truths about yourself.

Make no mistake. Opportunity costs don't just apply to economic issues. They also apply to your psychology.

For every second you invest in activities that rob you of your time, you're missing out on something more worthwhile. Maybe you could've been doing something that would enable you to become a more in tune, honest, authentic person who lives in integrity.

To get out from under these negative psychological inputs, you need to call a spade a spade. Don't be afraid to label things as they are.

It may seem harsh, it might even seem foolish because it becomes abundantly clear that you're engaged in counter productive thought patterns or allowing yourself to be exposed to this material. You have to overcome your pride and just call things the way they are and simply label them.

The more you label, the more you choose to become aware, the less likely you will keep absorbing this information and these stimuli without a fight. At least you become more knowing and aware that this is going on. Eventually, you will be able to take action on them. You will be able to avoid them or work around them.

Seek and destroy anti affirmations

What if I told you that every single day, you are playing out a script in your head? You're not super conscious of this script, but if you really pay attention to yourself, you're saying certain things about yourself, who you are, what you're capable of and what you're about. Psychologists call this self-talk.

Now you may be thinking that this is just a simple psychological reporting mechanism. Like you're looking out the window and you're seeing stuff play out, then you're just describing to yourself what you're seeing.

There's some of that, but a lot of it really is some sort of running commentary about who you are and what you're capable of doing. You're also telling yourself what your capacities are.

You have to be very mindful of your self-talk because if you develop a negative habit of saying negative things about yourself, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. I can understand if you stub your toe or you hit your hand somewhere because of a mistake you've made for you to say “I'm such a dumb ass.”

People do that all the time. That's perfectly normal. But if you keep repeating that to the point that it's not really a reflection of a bad mistake you just did right now, then there's going to be a problem.

If you keep repeating these negative statements when you remember a mistake you did in the past, what you're doing is you're reprogramming yourself to be what you fear. If you keep saying that you're an idiot, then guess what? You will turn into an idiot.

If you keep saying that you're clumsy and you make mistakes all the time, don't be surprised if you start committing more errors.

This all leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy because you are programming yourself based on the things that you keep saying to yourself. You have to understand that your brain is not just sitting back and absorbing all of this passively.

It's not like it's taking it all in and letting it all pass with no effects. It's actually storing it and reading it as some sort of programming and don't be surprised if your negative self talk ends up holding you back and dragging you down.

These are anti affirmations. You probably already know what affirmations are. These are supposed to inspire you. These are words that are supposed to give you strength and focus. You're supposed to say these things to yourself to pump yourself up.

Unfortunately, we also suffer from anti affirmations and unlike positive affirmations, we automatically engage in anti-affirmations unless we choose to be aware of them and disrupt the process. We're already doing this.

There are 5 general groupings of negative self-talk “scripts” you need to neutralize. I've organized them in terms of themes and effects.

The first type involves self-talk that kills your self-esteem. When you engage in this self-talk, you program yourself to feel less worthy. You're basically telling yourself in so many ways that you are not worthy, that there's something wrong with you, that you're no good. You keep judging yourself in the worst way.

The second them of negative self-talk scripts involves security. When you say these things to yourself, you make yourself less and less confident, and less and less secure. You say to yourself, “You're always screwing up. You don't really know what you're doing. You're incompetent.”

This is different from “You're dumb” because when you say you're dumb or you have low IQ, you are getting to the root of who you are. You're eroding your self-esteem. Instead, when you engage in negative self-talk that makes you insecure, you talk about your capabilities. You talk about your capacity to do certain things.

Another negative self-talk theme involves your personal effectiveness. You keep saying to yourself, “Well, that didn't work. Why would it work the next time you try?” You keep repeating this type of script and soon enough, you're not even going to try.

Why? In the back of your head, you know that there's a high chance that you would probably fail. So why even try? What do you think happens? You become a less effective person because any kind of skill, even if it's something that you know like the back of your hand, will eventually erode if you don't engage in it constantly and consistently.

Believe it or not, even riding a bike, which you should know instinctively after several years of riding bikes, can become very difficult if you let enough time pass. This creates a negative downward spiral.

You get bad results, you feel worse about it so you're less likely to try, you also feel less worthy and this leads to you trying even less and on and on it goes. There's a tight connection created between poor performance, poor self-esteem and poor results.

Another theme that you should pay close attention to involves your lack of clarity. You can engage in self talk that erodes your ability to properly see things for what they are.

Instead, you just see things as a giant fog or haze and it's all just wrapped up in a confusing label of your situation. One common negative self-talk script that the people use is, “I'm just not lucky. It's just not working out.”

I hope you can see how this leads to confusion because when you say “I'm just not lucky” you shut off all internal dialogue. There's no need for your analytical and rational side to break down the facts of what's going on in your life in such a way that you can make sense of things.

If you just dismiss everything as just a bad roll of the dice, there's no further analysis needed. How can you analyze luck? Things just didn't line up the way they should. Tough luck.

This creates confusion. This makes you intellectually lazy because believe it or not, things don't happen for the most part by random chance. Usually, the results you get are the effects of your previous decisions.

The last time I checked, the iron law of cause and effect is still in effect. Decisions that you're making now will play a role in the reality you're going to live tomorrow. This has always been true and will continue to be true.

Unfortunately, when you engage in self talk like luck, the system, or people, or it's all a conspiracy, you create confusion for yourself because you create this logical fog that has some elements of rationality. At some level or another, it kind of makes sense.

You end up tricking yourself into thinking that “That's all the analysis I need. I don't need to go any further in analyzing these core issues with my life. I just have to go with the fact that I'm just not lucky.”

When you create this confusion for yourself, you're really robbing yourself of all the power that you already have. Last time I checked, it doesn't really matter what you look like, where you came from, where you are, the mistakes you made in the past, you can always choose to turn things around now.

You can allow yourself to be driven by your visions and your hope for the future so you can move passionately to build the kind of tomorrow you want for yourself.

Finally, there's another set of self-talk themes that make you mentally lazy. This is, by and large, related to the confusion that I mentioned earlier, but it requires its own category. Because people tend to absorb these. As the old saying goes, birds of a feather flock together.

When you hang out with people, don't be surprised if you start thinking like them. This happens because you absorb other people's attitudes and their way of looking at the world.

You wouldn't do this if this didn't work in some level or another. People are not stupid. You're only going to absorb mental habits only if they serve some sort of purpose. At some level or another, it works, but the problem is you may be settling for an idea that is not all that deep.

It's not all that comprehensive and worse yet, you position yourself to live life based on assumptions. Instead of challenging your reasoning faculties, you become stuck. You just look for certain signals and you start jumping to conclusions.

Things like racial prejudice, religious bigotry, scientific dogmatism and similar mental habits make you lazy.

Instead of allowing yourself to be open minded enough to actually look at the facts and try to come up with different readings, interpretations or better yet, coming up with your own theory, you start the game with this template in your hands and you're just imposing this template on everything you come across.

Not surprisingly, most of the time, you come up with a bad fit. Things that play out in your life don't neatly fit this intellectual template that you use. But people who do this can't be bothered.

They become mentally lazy. If they come across a pattern that has 5 things and 2 match their assumptions, that's good enough. It doesn't matter if the conclusion that they come up with is actually not all that good. It's close enough in their minds.

Beware of the affirmations that fit any of these 5 themes. Doesn't matter how you say them. Just pay attention to these themes. If the things that you say on a daily basis lead to these conclusions, then you're in trouble. Disrupt them.

Try to overcome them. How? One of the most effective is to just simply override them. What this means is you say another affirmation to replace them instead of automatically launching into “Well I'm just not lucky. I'm dumb.” You turn things around and say something else.

How to craft affirmations that actually work

This subsection is going to be a little bit difficult because I can't give you some sort of magical laundry list of affirmations that will work in your situation. A lot of other books try to do that, but let me tell you, they fall short. Why? They don't know you.

The authors of those books obviously

can't read people's minds. That's why it doesn't make sense for them to come up with this canned list of affirmations that work on people depending on certain situations.

That gives you a certain level of reassurance that they even try to do that. But I think it causes more harm than good. Instead, I'm just going to walk you through a process of you crafting your own affirmations that have a higher chance of working.

Why? They actually fit your set of circumstances. They actually reflect your background and experience. They are responsive to how you see the world.

First, you need to go beyond the basic and the shallow. When you give an affirmation to yourself, you have to cut to the heart of the issue. Instead of just simply saying, “I look good” think of why being told you look good matters. When somebody says that you look good, it means that they appreciate you, see your value and they think that you matter.

Focus on those things. Don't get so caught up in the wrapper which are the shallow and obvious words. If you do that, your affirmations don't sink deep enough.

They're very easy to override or ignore because at the end of the day, your problems may feel like they're so big, so deep that whatever you say to yourself is simply not going to reach them,

 

much less neutralize them. Strip away the shallow and basic part. Focus on the meat and potatoes inside.

Next, you have to custom tailor your affirmations based on how you actually think. This requires that you listen to yourself first. When you say certain things to yourself, how do you phrase it? Do you just say “I'm screwing up” or “I scored big this time” Pay attention to your actual internal dialogue and then phrase the affirmation to fit that dialogue pattern.

Again, this is something that only you will be able to find out. Based on my experience and research, a lot of affirmations out there flat out fail because they seem so superficial, contrived and basic. It's as if you're just trying to hypnotize yourself.

You keep repeating these words like they're some sort of mantra, but they're not sinking in. They're not producing the desired effect. How can they? They don't even fit the way you normally talk to yourself.

This is why it's really important for you to focus on how you actually think. How do you phrase these mental words? How do you string them together? Now that you have a general idea of the affirmation you want to give to yourself, mold and reshape these to fit the way you normally talk to yourself. That's how you get it to sink in.

Another form of clutter that you really need to get out from under involves what you do for a living. If you're like the typical American, chances are you're not all that happy with your job. Welcome to the club.

Most people that I've spoken to in researching this training actually hate what they do for a living. I'm not talking about a

slight discomfort here and there or some generalized resentment. They actively hate it.

If given a chance, they would do something else. In fact, a lot of people say that they would do it at the drop of a hat. They might even take a pay cut. That's how strong their discomfort is with the things that they do for a living. Believe me. This is a really big source of clutter.

If you go to a job that feels like a daily humiliation, what effect do you think that would have on the rest of your life? It's not going to remain hermetically sealed.

It's not like you kind of enter this super sanitized antiseptic chamber for 8 hours and then you get out of it to enjoy the rest of your life. It's not like what you do in those 8 hours and your mental state before, during and after those 8 hours will not have an effect on the rest of your life. It obviously does.

A lot of family abuse actually arises from this. For example, a father is unhappy with his career, don't be surprised when he's not a very forgiving person as far as his kids or his wife are concerned.

The same applies to the mom, and the kids. They're not happy with school, that's going to produce turbulence across the board. It may impact their relationship with their parents.

So how do you get rid of career clutter? How do you work around this sense of animosity, fear or ambivalence you have about the things that you have to do to put food on the table? Here are just some suggestions.

Again, I'm not cramming an answer down your throat. You just have to pick and choose among these. Tweak them for them to make sense in your particular situation.

Choose to love what you do

The first thing you can do is to go to work with the clear objective of loving what you do. You know what you normally feel about your job. This is not a mystery.

But starting at a certain date, I want you to consciously find the enjoyment, meaning and value in what you do. Savor it. Celebrate

it. Embrace it. Allow yourself to feel good about the things that you do.

Believe it or not, finding passion in what you're currently doing for a living is actually easier than you think. How am I so confident? Well, let's put it this way. If your job is such a complete and total waste of time, you probably would have found an excuse to quit your job earlier.

If it really burns you or if it really is such a black hole in your life, you would've found the will and the strength to quit your job earlier. You would've been able to do that, but you're still there.

I discovered this when I worked for an insurance company and I had this friend who walked in and he would just bitch about his job all day, everyday. As he was shuffling the papers, seeing the clients, looking through the manuals and procedure books.

He would just complain all day, everyday. Well, sure enough, the company went through a reorganization and there were several months where supervisors as well as management staff were actively evaluating everybody in terms of termination or early retirement.

What do you think my friends reaction was? It's not what you think. If he really hated this job, he would've been excited about the possibility that he may get retrenched because it comes with a nice, fat, lump sum as well as retirement benefits. After all, he's been working there for at least 20 years. Instead, he was scared stiff.

During those months, it dawned on him that as annoyed as he was about certain aspects of his job, by enlarge, he loved his job. It was one of those massive personal realizations, but of course when he shared this with me, he wasn't exactly emotionally honest about it.

Because hey, let's face it, if you've been bitching about your job for several months or even years to your friends and then all of a sudden, you come back with a total 180 degree different view of your work, you'd look like a fool.

But reading between the lines, I knew this happened. It dawned on him that his job wasn't as bad as he thought it was. Soon enough, I started seeing Paul smile at work more often.

In fact, he would often whistle. He didn't get retrenched, but the possibility of being let go finally woke him up to what exactly made him show up to work for well passed 20 years.

If you are in a job that you feel is a dead end, sucks up your soul or otherwise feels corrosive, I want you to stop and think about what activities you engage in at work that keep you coming back.

Like I said, finding passion in what you're doing is easier than you think. At least one activity gives you enough passion to want to come to work day after day, week after week, month after month. Find that.

It may have something to do with autonomy. It may have something to do with the subject matter you're engaged with. It may have something to do with the people you work with. It doesn't really matter. Find passion in what you're doing.

If this doesn't work for you, the next technique that I know works involves gamification. This is just a fancy word for trying to turn certain elements of your job into a game.

Maybe you can look at different processes that you do and try to tie some sort of achievement at the completion of a process. Maybe you work at an office where you can easily compare your performance with other people.

In that situation, you can create a leader board. There are really no prizes here, but by looking at your job as some sort of giant video game, you can see yourself start at a level and move up.

You can find yourself going from milestone to milestone, achievement to achievement. In other words, you start looking at it differently. It no longer seems like some hazy mishmash of pointless activities that don't really lead you anywhere.

Instead, you see a nice linear progression and if you treat your job as a big enough video game with a heavy focus on unlocking more and more achievements and racking up more points, you might be shocked to discover that your boss would love to promote you more often.

You might be pleasantly surprised by how much more money you'll be making.

How does this work? Well, it's actually quite simple. You have to understand that the amount of money you're making at work is really the price tag your boss or the powers that be puts on the value of your work.

Of course this is discounted by their profit margin, overhead and other factors. Still, it's an assessment of how much value you bring to the table.

If you apply gamification techniques to your work activities so you become more productive, your work quality goes up and you are able to handle more difficult tasks, the value of your work increases. What do you think happens then?

For quite some time, your boss will be enjoying a bargain because the total value of your output is so much bigger than the amount of money they're paying you.

But since the labor market is still a market, your boss would be a fool to keep this disparity going for too long. Eventually, they would start ratcheting up your compensation to get a little bit closer to the actual full value of your work.

Now don't get too excited. It will never get there, but at least you will be making more than you are making now. More importantly, your standing within the company increases because people know that you are a tried and proven source of value.

You're not just another face in the crowd. You're somebody who actually cares about their work. You're actually part of that core group of employees who take things to a whole other level.

Another technique you can use to love what you do is to get a sideline. You can start an online business, maybe it's an online store, maybe you could look into drop shipping. Maybe you can even freelance on the side. Whatever the case may be, you start doing things on the side that earns an income.

This has the effect of directing your attention to activities that have nothing to do with your main 9-5 job. A lot of the stress and negative feelings that you have about your work can stem from the fact that you just have all this idle time. After you get home from work, you start thinking about what happened at the office and you feel bad.

Now, instead of doing that, you start thinking about your sideline and doing freelance work, doing production work or online promotions, you don't give yourself the opportunity to keep picking over stuff that you're frustrated about.

This keeps things fresh with your main 9-5 job. Eventually, you start looking at it with a different perspective. It's no longer as suppressive as you previously thought.

Finding the courage to let go

Now, as powerful and effective as loving what you do may be, for some people, it's really not an option. They just can't find the passion in what they're doing, gamification doesn't work and try as they might, their sideline doesn't keep them distracted enough. They're still unhappy.

In this situation, you have to find the

courage to let go of your job. It's cluttering up your mind. It's just creating too much negativity in your life. It's this source of toxic thoughts that you can't shake off, regardless of how hard you try.

You probably would rather consider this as your first option, but I suggest you try to love what you do first. If that isn't working, you have to come up with a game plan to let go.

Don't play the game the way most other unhappy employees do. They reach a point where the straw broke the camel's back and they put in their 2 weeks notice. Instead, set your resignation or retirement date at a comfortable point in the future.

Ease into it. For example, you can say to yourself, “Okay, I'm unhappy with this job. It's not really leading me anywhere. It's causing a lot of problems. I'm going to quit. But I give myself 2 years or 1 year.” Whatever the case may be, you have to give yourself a nice cushion.

One practical effect of this is that you know that at some point in time, your income is going to drop because you're going to quit your job. This pushes you to plan better so this way, whatever money you save, you can invest. You can manage your resources better.

You're not putting yourself in a situation where the date all of a sudden appears and you just have to quit and your income drops like a rock. Then get so desperate that you find another job that is similar enough to your old job that you become miserable again. Your career tragedy repeats itself over and over again. Don't do that. Ease into it.

You have to set that date, but here's the secret. Once you set that date, stick to it. That's how you make progress. Unfortunately, a lot of people try to set up false ultimatums to themselves. My friend, Paul, that I described earlier did this all the time.

He'd often say to me in frustration, “That's it man. In 6 months, I'm going to leave.” Then he would give me a date and say “Mark my words. When that date comes, I'm out of here.” Sure enough, that date came and went and he's still there. He was still bitching, still complaining and life went on.

You have to set a date when you will take that leap. When you do this, you push yourself to plan ahead. You start putting away money, creating a reserve and most importantly, you start setting yourself up for a soft landing. Maybe you can start an online business. Maybe you can get a job search going that leads to a much better work.

Whatever the case may be, you use that deadline to push you to action. It's not just like some sort of mental or emotional bookmark. That's how Paul handled deadlines. That's why he didn't get far. Set a date and stick to it.

Unleashing the power of passive online income

Regardless of whether you stay with your job or you are planning to transition to self-employment, you might want to consider setting up a passive online income business. This involves creating an online asset that you work really hard to build up.

But the good news is you work once, but the income keeps coming. You work once and earn many times.

Now don't get too excited. This doesn't mean that there's absolutely no further work involved. Such systems don't exist, believe it or not. Despite all the hype that you have heard, there's no such thing as a complete “set it and forget it” income system or “online income machine”

There's still going to be some sort of work involved, but it's not going to take up so much time like an active job.

The big difference between a passive income and an active job involves having to work to earn. With active income, no work means no pay. With passive income, you can work to build up the asset, stop working and still generate an income.

That's where you need to be because when you stop working on one asset, you can build another asset and another one after that and before you know it, the little trickles of online income add up to a nice river of revenue that can not only exceed your 9-5 income, but give you a tremendous amount of freedom.

How come? Well you build them up once to get them going and you don't have to babysit them. You don't have to do work to earn unless, of course, you get into freelancing, which is really just like working a 9-5 job but on your own terms and timeline.

The core dynamic of freelancing is still similar to active income. You still have to perform work for you to get paid. You stop working, you don't get paid. Essentially, you're selling your time.

With passive income, you put in the time once and then the system produces revenue on its own. You don't have to babysit it so you can set up other systems. If you're able to successfully set up passive online income streams, you can lead a digital nomad life.

There are many bloggers out there who jump from one country to the next. They take on many different hobbies. They let the world know what they're up to with their Instagram account or their blogs.

They're able to do this, of course, because of passive income. Their blogs make money through advertisements. Their Instagram accounts make money through sponsorships. You can be one of those digital nomads. I've already revealed the secret here.

You should disabuse yourself of the idea that there's this one massive way to make money online. I'm sorry, but unless you are thinking of building a startup, that's just not going to happen and usually when you build a startup, you basically trade your life for the business.

Startups require a lot of time and there's really no indication that the startup would succeed as how much time, effort and mental energy they take.

Instead, I'm talking about building up small, passive income streams and these asset's incomes are fairly humble. You don't really make all that much, but the good news is when you create many of them, these streams add up to quite a bit of money.

This is especially true if you get into e-commerce by building your own drop shipping store. If you want to totally own your time and enjoy a tremendous amount of personal and financial freedom, look into earning from internet-based assets.

There's an old zen buddhist saying “less is more” Now, for the longest time, a lot of people were ridiculing this statement. The underlying assumption being that it's impossible. Other groups of people will keep repeating this mantra over and over until it really doesn't mean much of anything.

This really is too bad because there's a lot of truth to this. Less is more. How come? Well, like I mentioned in the story I shared earlier, when I was in college, I didn't have much stuff. I did not have enough money left over for much food, much less, possessions. But guess what? The stuff that I did own, I truly enjoyed.

I remember buying this nightstand from a goodwill store in down town San Francisco. I hung on to that nightstand for close to a decade after graduating college. It meant that much to me.

I really became attached to it not only because of its functionality, but also because of the fact that it reminded me that I don't really need all that much stuff when I moved from apartment to apartment and from my apartment to my first house.

That nightstand was a tangible reminder to me that it was really my attitude that made me feel content. It's my mindset that made me feel that things were worthwhile and complete.

I shared this with you because it's easy to think that for you to feel secure, you have to surround yourself with a lot of stuff. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that for you to feel confident, the stuff you own has to have the right labels, logos or has to be made by the right manufacturers.

The reality is that these things only have meaning because you choose for them to have meaning. The meaning comes from you. Like I said, I had a nightstand that was all scuffed up and didn't really look all that good, but in my mind, it was quite precious. I thought it was very elegant. It made for a nice little center piece.

You have to adapt the same mindset with the things that you own. Because if you read that much meaning into the things that you buy, you end up buying less.

Your mind can only hang on to so many points of reference as far as meaning is concerned. You will be able to enjoy your possessions because ultimately, they remind you of what's really truly worthwhile in your life.

You're no longer engaged in this fruitless race of just acquiring more and more stuff because you're looking for more and more meaning.

Instead, when you choose to become conscious of how each and every existing possession you already have gives you meaning, you feel more content. There's less of a hole in your life that you need to fill with people, possessions, ideas or activities.

Strip down the things you enjoy

The next step you should take involves doing a complete assessment of all the things in your life. This includes people, activities and actual things. Methodically think about the different people in your life.

What do you enjoy about them? What do they bring to the table? How do they engage your sense of meaning and purpose? Do the same with activities you engage in. Apply the same analysis to the things you own.

When you do this, you probably would come up with many different reasons, but the more you do this, certain patterns start to emerge. You start connecting the dots and it turns out that people, activities and things in your life all share certain common themes.

When you're able to do this, you start looking at these things in your life for what they are. You appreciate them. They're no longer proxies for that ultimate sensation that you're looking for.

They're no longer “stuff” that you have to acquire so you can feel good about yourself. Instead, you strip everything down to emotional states that are real. You start seeing these themes work

together. Accordingly, you're less likely to keep acquiring stuff because at this point, it doesn't make any sense.

Rediscovering the essence of enjoyment

You may have a lot of stuff, but do you really enjoy it? You may have a lot of time, but do you really live in that time? These questions go to one place: enjoyment.

You have to ask yourself, what can you appreciate about your life on a daily basis? What are the things that you really look forward to? If you're completely honest

with yourself, you should be able to find at least one or two items and that's good enough.

Unfortunately, a lot of people can't even get that far. A lot of them are so confused that they can't even name one. Think back to what you look forward to day after day. What can you appreciate daily?

Another way to answer this question is to focus on loss. As the old saying goes, you only miss the water when the well is dry. Day after day, you go to the well to get water. In fact, it's so routine and you've done it so many times that you don't even think about it. Getting water from the well is automatic.

Now can you imagine a bad drought and that water runs out? Prior to it running out, you start becoming aware of how important it is. Before you know it, the water is gone. You remember its importance.

Think about certain challenging times in your life where you lost stuff, people, or you were unable to engage in activities that you normally do. What can this tell you about what's important to you? What should be important to you? What does this tell you about things that you should be enjoying?

Zero in on the process of enjoyment. When you're enjoying something or the company of people or enjoying an activity, try to break it down into a statement that you can express.

I enjoy doing this because it makes me feel alive. I enjoy doing this because it challenges my sense of adventure. Whatever the case may be, list down reasons why you enjoy certain things, certain activities and why being around certain people feels so good.

After you've written down your answers, ask yourself, “How can this enjoyment enrich the rest of my life?” In other words, if you're able to enjoy yourself in certain contexts, why not take things all the way? Why not find that level of enjoyment in other areas of your life?

Whatever you do... do this

I know what I'm about to say is easier said than done. I know that you have all sorts of duties, responsibilities and obligations that really require your attention and you're not able to fully enjoy life and be in the moment. I understand that, but regardless of what happens and how you do things, at least try to do this.

Try to make great memories. Right now you may be stressed. You may be struggling with deadlines or other minor fires or emergencies happening in your life. Still, enjoy what you're doing because when you take a snapshot of what's going on in your life, eventually some of it would make it to your memory banks.

I know it sounds like a cliché, but life is actually much shorter than you care to realize. I know right now you're probably struggling to keep your head above water in certain aspects of your life, but try to take mental snapshots of where you are.

Try to zero in on those points of enjoyment. Believe it or not, you will reach a point in your life where you look fondly back to them. Eventually at a certain point in your life, you will realize the power of memories.

Unlocking the power of memories

Usually, when people think about memories, they often view it in utilitarian terms. You remember stuff because it enables you to do certain things in the future. You remember how to do things, you remember people's faces, you remember certain dates. It's supposed to lead to some sort of practical advantage.

However, it's also powerful in terms of your sense of meaning and contentment. When you learn how to unlock the power of memories, you will be able to willfully remember things. It's like watching a movie from the past and as you probably already know, when you see a lot more details in a movie, you will be able to piece it together better.

This has a very powerful practical effect on your life. Part of the reason why too many of us are so stressed out, fearful and depressed is the fact that we really have faulty memories.

We fail to see things in context. Surprisingly, we blow things out of proportion, we worry ourselves sick about things that have yet to happen, although we've seen that pattern play out many times before.

The problem is memory. If you are able to willfully remember patterns and details from the past, you would feel more in control. Things won't seem as chaotic or as menacing or as unsolvable as they seem right now. When you are able to willfully remember things from the past, your memories can give you the incentive you need to adjust your filter.

The reason why we tend to react negatively now is because we have adopted bad filters at some point in the past. Maybe it was innocent or not. Whatever the case may be, we have a bad filter. Unfortunately, we only discover that it's bad when it's too late.

A better approach would be to really highlight our ability to remember so our filters become clear. We instantly notice that our filters are not doing us any favors.

We naturally become aware that our filters are working against us instead of for us. For this to happen, you have to have the power of remembrance. You have to have clear memories.

Finally, if you were to put a lot of time and focus in remembering your past more effectively, this can lead to conscious filtering. I hope this much is clear.

All the processes that I've described up to this stage in the training point to the conclusion that we are active editors of our reality. You have to understand that the stimuli the world is sending you is neutral. It is you who gives them meaning.

We can do this passively or consciously and actively. Regardless, it's going to happen. Unfortunately, a lot of the frustrations people have about their lives is due to the fact that they're simply not conscious of their personal filtering process.

They just let it hit them. They think that this is the truth because this is how their mind normally works. It doesn't have to lead to that conclusion.

You can consciously filter the stimuli that's coming in. You can change what you focus on and of these stimuli, you can change how you interpret them. Finally, you can change what you choose to remember and how this relates to your personal narrative. That's how powerful your mind is.

Unfortunately, you won't benefit from this if you fail to be conscious about it and you fail to take control of it. When you keep exercising your power of memory generation and recall, eventually, you start filtering your reality in a very conscious way.

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I wish I could tell you that there is some science to contentment. I wish I could report that there's some sort of equation that you just need to plug in for you to be content. While there is quite a bit of science involving issues revolving around contentment, ultimately, it's an art.

It's kind of like baking a cake. Anybody can break down the ingredients. People can do

a good job describing the sequence in which you mix, fold or otherwise work with the ingredients.

But as you probably already know, there's a lot more to it than that. Even if somebody were to follow the recipe to the letter, it would still not turn out as well as the cookies or cake or brownies somebody with 10 years of experience would produce. What accounts for the difference? Art.

This is a term that covers basically being able to do the right things at the right time to produce the right outcomes with the right people with the right motivations. Art really is all about

working with your particular set of circumstances and these circumstances change over time. You yourself also change over time.

When you put all these things together, life is an art. And of course, one of the biggest projects that we have to embark on involves contentment. To become content, you have to treat it like an art. There's no one size fits all solution.

There's no equation. There's no magic formula. I know that there's a lot of books that try to give you this impression, but I'm sorry to report that you're wasting your time looking at contentment from that perspective.

Instead, it's an art. And just like with any other art form, there are certain features that you should look for. Work with these features. Make them connect with your particular personal reality and your particular context for things to work out. Now this doesn't happen overnight, but with enough effort and consistency, things will fall into place.

There is such a thing as enough

The first thing that you will learn when you look at contentment as a personal form of art is that there is such a thing as enough. I know that sounds crazy.

Currently, you're thinking the opposite. Currently, you're going through all sorts of frustrations faced with so many challenges

precisely because you don't believe that you have enough or that you are enough.

You have to believe that there is such a thing as enough. You have to allow yourself to believe that there is a mental state of enough. Without this belief, you're just going to be taking shots in the dark.

You're just going to continue to struggle unnecessarily for a ridiculously long pace of time. Make things easier on yourself by simply stipulating this as an article of faith.

Allow yourself to believe that there is such a thing as enough. I can be rich enough. I can be good looking enough. I can be attractive enough. I can be effective enough. I can be enough of a person. I can be happy enough.

When you allow yourself to believe in the concept of enough, things start to crystallize. You're no longer dealing with this confusing fog of emotions, frustrations, anxieties, depression, stress. Instead, you start cementing things. You start putting limits to things. You're no longer shadow boxing with vague ideas.

You have to believe that there is such a thing as enough. After you reach that point, you then also have to believe that it's perfectly okay to stop wanting after you have achieved that state of enough. This is how you reach contentment.

Unfortunately, there is no magical blueprint that accurately takes you from point A to point B with pinpoint accuracy and fidelity to whatever is going on in your life. You have to find that point.

Achieving emotional contentment

When you allow yourself to think that there is such a thing as enough, then the next step is you would believe that you can be happy enough. You let go of some imaginary state of euphoria or bliss.

You leave the world of Disney and enter the

world of reality. Being emotionally content doesn't have to conform to some sort of golden standard that remains unchanged throughout your life. Instead, being emotionally content really depends on your circumstances.

If you find yourself in a building that is flooded and you have water up to your neck, you can find emotional contentment even in those stressful circumstances.

Of course the situation will change your definition of contentment, but at least if you're open minded to it, you will be able to achieve that especially if you have to wait for help to get to where you are.

I know that's an extreme example, but there are many situations in your life where you are stuck. Regardless of how hard you try or what you do, you're just there. It's just not going to change. The only thing that can change is how you choose to perceive your situation and this is where emotional contentment comes in.

Listen. We can live in an ideal way. Ideally, everybody would be making a million dollars a year. Everybody would have the very best that life has to offer, but that's not reality. We have to emotionally make peace with what we have.

At some level or another, we have to want the reality that we have. This is where emotional contentment comes in. It's an affirmative choice on your part. And it arises from the willful belief that there is such a thing as enough.

This is completely 180 degrees different from how you normally think about things. Normally, you think in terms of more, more, more. You think in terms of bigger, better, bolder. This is an affirmative choice.

Psychological contentment

When you allow yourself to believe that you have enough and that you are worthy enough, you can reach psychological contentment. It really all boils down to your self-esteem. If you think you're good enough and things are okay enough, you have to allow yourself to stop at that point.

This doesn't mean you have to stay there permanently, but you have to rest. It's okay to stop struggling. It's okay to stop treading water.

This gives you a tremendous amount of psychological balance. Because instead of pumping out all this mental energy trying to grasp at your world and try to assert some sort of control, you realize that it's okay and you start sending out energy in a more focused and direct way.

In a way, achieving psychological contentment is not much different from somebody who is treading water. If you know how to swim, you know that when you tread water, you can kick and move your legs around in a very minimal way to keep afloat. You use up less energy while maximizing your floating time.

Compare this when you first learned how to tread water. You were kicking around frantically thinking that the more you kick around, the more you stay afloat. It then occurred to you that when you do that, you actually reduce your floating time because you tire out. You start to drop like a rock as your legs give out.

Psychological contentment is the same way. You don't have to pump out mental energy by revisiting stuff, worrying about stuff, dragging stuff from your memory banks, agonizing over them. You don't have to do that. Instead, you will be able to focus on the here and now and allow yourself to be in the moment.

Spiritual contentment

If you learn the art of contentment, you start looking at your spiritual aspect in a more positive light. I don't want to sound harsh, but a lot of modern people often address spiritual issues in physical ways.

Either they plug in sex, power, domination or drugs. Whatever the case may be, what would have otherwise needed a spiritual key

is addressed by something completely different.

When you achieve some level of spiritual contentment, you make peace with the fact that there are certain things in your life that you just can't explain. You accept them with what at first feels like an uneasy truce. Eventually, it starts to sink in. And instead of filling a void, things actually become clearer.

You start seeing the outlines of the parts of your life that form your spiritual void. You can then manage them in a more comfortable and less stressful way. You're less likely to plug in things that don't belong there. All of us have a spiritual side because ultimately, this aspect of our self speaks to our need for meaning and purpose.

Letting go of attachments

By this point, you should have done quite a bit of de-cluttering. Once that happens, you would then be in a position to give meaning to that lack of clutter.

that you put in the space freed up by clutter.

You have to remember that lack of clutter in of itself is not what you're aiming for.

Instead, the meaning that clutter had in the first place and in this case, the meaning

This all leads to the issue of attachment. The reason why we tend to accumulate a lot of stuff is because we weed in all sorts of meaning into them.

Eventually, we get so accustomed to this meaning that we actually develop an attachment to the stuff that supposedly produces that meaning. In reality, those items are just mirrors. The meaning really comes from us as I've mentioned in the previous video.

At this stage, you're going to zero in on this fact and take the willful, conscious and affirmative step of cutting loose your power of attachment. You say to yourself, “This is what I normally do.

I look at things like cars, clothing, jewelry, degrees, certificates as sources of meaning. But it's really me who gives that meaning. Now I'm going to cut my attachment to this stuff that I thought gives me meaning and focus on its source.”

When you do this, you cut through false assumptions regarding the source of your security, confidence and personal pride. Now I wish I could tell you that this is very easy and straight forward. It isn't.

I reserved this for this stage of the training because it's so heavy, intimidating and difficult. But I've got some good news for you. The difficulty is not inherent or intrinsic in the act itself. What makes it difficult is your own attachment.

The good news is you can overcome that by simple commitment and choice. Keep choosing to let go of attachment.

At first, you might falter, you might slip up, it might seem like it's too difficult, but if you keep at it, kind of like water dripping on a hard rock, eventually, you'll create a hole in that rock.

Eventually, the hard rock will give way to the water. You have to do the same with attachment in your life.

Overcome these enemies of personal change

I'm well aware that you're really dealing with big issues. A lot of them are habitual in nature. In fact, you've grown accustomed to them over the course of many years. The good news is if you allow yourself to become familiar with how you, yourself would put up a fight, you can achieve great progress.

Believe it or not, when people try to make the changes that I described in this training, their minds actually operate in predictable ways. You can see these coming.

By choosing to get ready for them and having a prepared answer, you can go a long way in defusing them and getting out from under their effect. But if you let them hit you like a ton of bricks, you may be so surprised and so unprepared that you go back to your old habits.

I'm just going to lay out 3 scenarios here, but they should give you enough of an idea how your mind will try to process the change that you're trying to impose on your life.

First, don't be surprised if your mind tells you that being content means you're being a loser. The assumption being that truly dynamic lives of excellence require constant conflict, struggle and effort.

There has to be this frenetic energy where you're constantly pushing against the walls of your comfort zone. Anything less than this means that you have just given up. Anything less than this means that you have lost out and you are a loser.

This is not true. In fact, being content is the mark of a winner because not only are you conserving energy, but you're focusing energy to where it truly needs to go. The most efficient way to become a loser is to burn yourself out by constantly chasing your tail and going around and around or taking shots in the dark and tiring yourself out.

Another thing you can say to yourself is that being content means you will be left behind. This is a trick that plays up your dependency on external validation.

You measure your success based on the lives of other people. You're always thinking “What do they think? How would they view what I'm doing?” But that's precisely the kind of thinking that got you this hole in the first place.

You're so focused on other people's expectations on you that you have lost sight of what truly matters to you. In fact, things may have gotten so bad that you are actually living somebody else's life and expectations.

Just remember that when this idea enters your mind. Being content doesn't mean you're getting left behind. In fact, being content means you're setting your own life's pace and you're taking ownership of it for once.

Finally, be prepared for the idea that being content means you are lowering your standards. This really is just a variation of the idea that a life worth living must involve constant struggle.

While it's true that to truly take your life to the next level, you have to struggle against certain issues in your life. You have to face certain challenges. There are certain mental giants or demons that you have to slay.

But this is different from thinking that you have to do that all the time, all day, everyday. If you were to do that, then your life is just one giant struggle. It's just this black hole of stress. Do you see how that cuts against you and leads nowhere?

When you start thinking that being content means lowering your standards, you're just playing mind games with yourself. You're just giving yourself an excuse to stop trying to change your life for the better.

Contentment is the precise opposite of lowering your standards. Because you have found your standards and you have identified what is worthy and meaningful, you enable yourself to be content.

This training has laid out how you can learn to de-clutter your life on many different levels. This training has also taught you the importance of contentment. As awesome as these ideas are, they're not going to do you any good if you just keep thinking about them. For them to change your present personal reality, you have to take action on them.

Challenging how you think is an action. It's not a mental emotional exercise because it has a direct effect on how you act as well as on the things you say. You have to take action. You have to decide on a date, prepare for that date and regardless of what happens, start on that day.

This also means that you have to plan things right. This training has given you a framework, but it really is just a sketch because you have to fill in the details.

Not only am I not a mind reader, I can't step into your life and make the hard calls and hard decisions that need to be made for real and effective change to happen. The only person who could do that is you.

This requires planning and attention to detail. Most importantly, this requires commitment. How important is commitment? Well, you need to keep at it because real change doesn't happen on a “one-time big time” basis. It's not like you do a lot of things for one week and all of a sudden, your life is dramatically different.

This is not the movies. This is your life and often times, you need to make small changes that scale up over time. This is a compounding effect where you invest in certain actions and decisions every single day and their accumulative effect goes up over time.

However, for you to benefit from these effects, you have to keep doing them for a long enough period of time. Compounding, after all, is not just a phenomenon you observe with your bank

account or stocks. Instead, it also plays out in your habits. It plays out in your daily activities and decisions. A little bit of consistency goes a long way.

You may be thinking that you're not really putting in that much effort or you're not doing too many dramatic things on a day to day basis. That's okay. As long as you're putting in the effort, as long as there is consistency in your actions, the results will scale up soon enough.