If you want to make long term change in your life and are not prepared for what might come up and how to handle it. You may find you self right back where you begin sooner that you might think.

Recently I have been making some relatively big changes in my life and I have noticed a couple of patterns that have showed up where I could have easier fallen back to where I started, if I wasn’t prepared.

In this post I thought I would share with you some of these patterns so we can both be more prepared for what shows up and to help push though to make that long term change that we are looking for.

One of my first mentors was my first sales manager Mr Dean R and he used to say that “A Leopard doesn’t changes its spots”

He would say this when a sales rep would leave his team in a hast blaming everything else except themselves only to come crawling back months later with their tail between their legs vowing that they had changed only to make the same mistake as last time and leave the company.

Now after years of observing myself and others what I think Dean was really referring to back then was the self image.

The self image is that image we hold of ourselves deep within our subconscious, the image we hold based on what we believe and value about ourselves to be true and it will determine what we think we are capable of and ultimately dictate the results you get in your life.

How is your self image?

I first learned about the concept of the self image after reading one of my favorite books by Dr Maxwell Maltz called Psycho Cybernetics.

Dr Maltz was a leading plastic surgeon in America  in the 1940’s, 50’s and 1960’s and after observing that so many patients’ unhappiness and insecurities were not cured, as they and he had believed would occur when he gave them the perfect new faces they desired.

Dr. Maltz suggested that many people “see themselves” inaccurately, their perceptions distorted by unchallenged and often erroneous beliefs embedded in the subconscious mind. – The self image.

The classic example and one of the best metaphors to explain what and how the self image works is the demonstration of a thermostat in a room.

If you set a thermostat in a room at 26 degrees Celsius and the room temperature reaches 28 degrees the thermostat will stop and weight for the temperature to drop or cool down to 26 degrees or below.

As soon as the room temperature drops below 26 degrees the thermostat will kick in again and start heating the room up until it gets back to 26 degrees.

Your self image works very much the same way, if you earn lets say $5000 a month and you suddenly start to earn $7000 a month and your self image hasn’t adjusted to except the new found fortune, just like the thermostat your self image will kick in a find a way for you to either spend the extra money, give it away or go back to earning $5000 a month.

I noticed this happen when I was in sales, whenever I had a really big month of sales and earned well above what I would normally earned my self image would kick in and very subtly start to sabotage my thoughts and behaviors.

For example I might have slacked off more the following month or have thoughts like “hey I did really well last month, I can afford to take it easy, I earned it” or I would spend money more impulsively.

The opposite was also true, if I had a slow month and dropped below what I was use to and comfortable with earning I would become extremely focused, stop going out on weekends, stop spending on an impulse and work harder with my clients to get the sale.

You can see the self image at work almost everywhere, you see it when people attempt to lose weight, they tend to progress really well for a few weeks or a month and start to lose some weight and then a month later, lose the momentum only to return to old eating habits and back to where they began.

It is also like the lottery winners who end up broke within a few years, their self image didn’t have time to adjust to their new found fortune and as a result they end up losing the money only to be back where they started or worse off a few short years later.

The self image works in very subtle ways and it can often be hard to identify what is happening until it has already happened.

I find the evolution of change has stages and choices, if you choose badly you will end up stuck isolating where you are or back to where you started, if you choose well and coach your self image to move along with you as you progress, your self image will then maintain and propel you towards the new change for long term results.

To help demonstrate this look at the picture below:

Don't get stuck on the setbacks, learn from them and break though

Let’s say you are moving towards a worthy goal as you go along you will hit challenges , however if you don’t allow yourself to get caught up in them you can break though and you will then coast along often quite easily to the next challenge or setback.

As opposed to the opposite of not breaking though and you just end up get stuck and eventually heading back to where you began, because you didn’t coach your self image along with you.

One of the major traps I have witnessed from the self image is what I call the reward trap or the “I’m doing really good” trap.

If you have ever attempted to make lasting change I am sure you will be able to relate to what I am about to say.

Let’s say you are trying to change your diet, you start out great, you stick to your new diet for a few weeks/months and then you may notice a voice in your head that says “hey, you are doing really well you can afford to have some junk food”

This is yourself image showing its head, now it is fine to treat yourself and reward yourself in fact it helps you stay motivated and on track and if it is only that once then it won’t make a big impact on your long term health or goal.

However if you are not careful and if you don’t nip this in the butt quickly before you know it you can easily be back to where you started, which is not ultimately where you want to be, right?

Getting stuck in patterns from the old self image

What helped me push though these moments is to think about the reason WHY you what to make these changes in the first place.  By following though and committing to these changes what is it going to give me, what pleasures will I gain?

The self image works very subtly, you may only be slipping up a very small amount each day, but these soon compound and before you know it you are stuck where you began.

On the other hand once you have your self image on your side it works in ways to propel you towards your desires, almost effortlessly.

Another strategy I use is visualization, there have been countless studies done on power of visualization and many top athletes and even astronauts use visualization techniques.

Visualization is also one of the techniques Dr Maxwell Maltz talks about in Psycho Cybernetics as a great way to re train your self image.

However the point of this post is to understand what the self image is and to be prepared for it, whenever you make changes in your life there will be setbacks, after all the habits and behaviors you are replacing, changing or improving did serve you at one stage and it only makes sense that your self image doesn’t want to let them go so easily.

If you want to make long term changes you must be prepared for it and learn how to retrain your self image to work for you instead of against you.

Whenever you are faced with a decision to move towards what you desire or to move in the other direction this quote always provides me with the power to choose right.

To get a much more in-depth understanding of how the self image governs your life and how you can reprogram it for success I can’t recommended Dr Maltz Psycho-Cybernetics more highly, it is one of the most impactful books I have ever read.

Someone recently asked me what is a life hacker? Depending on whom you ask and in what context you may get many differing answers.

For me when I was going up the term hacker was mostly used to reference a computer wiz kid who would hack into someone else’s computer or mainframe and take control of it. Usually a big multinational company

For me hacking is all about figuring out how something works and then influencing it to do what you want it to do. Figure out how to get the most out of something using the most effective and efficient means possible.

One way of looking at life hacking could be applying the 80/20 rule to everything in your life. The 80/20 or the Pareto principle in case you are not familiar states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

If you want better and faster results in your life, whether it is about health, building muscle, financial independence, relationships, communication, marketing, or anything else you can apply the 80/20 and be amazed with the results you get.

There have been many giants that have paved the way before us and have always stated if you want extraordinary results you need to do extraordinary things or at least out of the ordinary.

Many times when you look at how you can hack a certain part of life most of the traditional thinking doesn’t work and many times it is counter intuitive actions that bring the results.

A perfect example of this and perhaps one of the most recognised life hackers is the author of the The 4-Hour Workweek – Tim Ferriss.

In Tim’s latest book The 4-Hour Body he hacks the human body, in one of the chapters Tim shows you how to lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing.

Coming from conventional wisdom this can’t be true, how can you lose weight while binging? Well you will have to read the book to find out

For me this is what hacking is all about, what small measurable actions you can take that will have the most impact.

You can apply these principles to anything in life. At the moment I am in the process of building up a new email list, I want to build it fast and with the least amount of effort.

So instead of doing what I did in the past, which was publish articles, comment on blogs, participate in forums, and upload videos to YouTube in the hope to get traffic to my landing page, I stared placing ads on adswap networks and doing adswaps with other people in my target market.

I get to grow my list by leveraging other peoples list and they get to grow their list by leveraging mine.  It is a great win win situation and it takes much less time and effort.

The world famous marketer Jay Abraham talks a lot about leveraging other people’s things like list/money/resources/customers/almost anything.

Another example of which I am focused on is eating more organic and Alkaline rich foods. You have to eat regardless so why not eat foods that will provide you better health, more energy and wellbeing.  You feel better and perform better and (hopefully) It will cut down on medical costs and suffering in the future too.

I would love to hear from you, what are some of the ways you hack your life to get better results?

Just over 1 year and 9 months ago I started this blog. In fact this is the very first domain name I ever registered (it was registered in April 2008), originally I brought it to promote one of many mlm companies I have played with in the past, when I think about I don’t know why I thought this domain name would make a good fit.

Anyway when I decided to turn it into a blog (June 2009) I had the intention to create an authority site around personal development, cut a long story short I started auto blogging and got sided tracked in many obscure niche markets and kind of forgot about it.

This time around I am doing what really wanted to do which is have it as my own personal blog, where I talked about whatever I want. At the moment my focus is on building my online business so I will be ranting about that. However I don’t want this to be just about marketing.

I have employed a Tony Robbins coach about 7 months ago and I will also be reporting about different techniques and strategies that are working and the ones that didn’t too. As the saying goes…

“Good judgment comes from experience which comes from bad judgment”

Now that I have gathered my focus and narrowed down to specific results and not bogged down in the trenches fighting against the search engines in weird little niche markets I am really looking forward at re-launching this blog.

Anyway that is enough about me, this blog is really here for you, sure these are my words, opinions and weirdo stories however my hope is that you will find value in each and every one of my posts, after all this world is only as good as the knowledge we share with each other.

If you have any topics yo would like me to do post about, tell me in the comments until next episode.

Laters

UPDATE – I want to give you a heads up: My friend Russell has an amazing offer at the moment, for only $37 he is giving away over $2000 value plus his exact system called 20 Minute Pay Day which he shared with one of his students that is currently making them $422.82/day only working around 20 minutes but don’t just take my word for it, there are screen shots PROVE to it. Check out this quick video

I always have a little chuckle to myself every time I get my mind clear and everything I ask for seems to appear all around me like magic – the law of attraction at its best.

Recently and I have been asking for guidance in various areas of my life. Most of the time this ‘asking’ I am referring to has be mainly subconscious or done indirectly though frustration and being more aware of limiting patterns and beliefs.

As a result I started getting all these mentoring and coaching programs show up in my email inbox which I actually ignored most of them and then the phone calls started. I started receiving phone calls from all my favourite ‘gurus’ that I follow.

To get to the point I ended up choosing Tony Robbins Coaching Program within about 4 days I had my coach, Ben assigned to me. As of today I am 6 sessions out of 36 in total.

To be honest I was a bit sceptical at first as I really wanted help for a new business project I am working on and I wanted to hire a coach that knew specifically about business and internet marketing. I was looking some very elite IM coaching programs also, no doubt about it, it was a very hard decision

But after many hours of thought I went with the Tony Robbins Program mainly because of 2 reasons.

1. It is Tony Robins Elite Coaching Program, do I have to say any more.

2. Everything you do or don’t do ultimately comes done to your mindset and how you think. I forget who said it but there is a saying that goes “80% mental 20% mechanical” – I went with this approach and after 6 weeks I am glad I did.

So what I thought I would do today is share one of the strategies my Tony Robbins coach has taught me that I have found useful over the past 6 weeks and beyond.

If you are familiar with Tony Robbin’s material this is make a lot more sense if you are not then I suggest you go and watch this short video.

There are basically 3 ways you can change your state (mind state) A) Change the way you use your body like posture, breathing, facial expressions, etc. B) What you focus on in that moment, are you complaining or are you grateful? C) What you believe or the meaning you have about a certain situation.

In most cases you can change just 2 of these things and you will change your state. Now using these 3 elements I am sure you can accurately describe a what some ones posture might look like if they were depressed and what someone might be focused on if they were happy or what you would have to believe to feel grateful to give half of your fortune away like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have pledged to do.

Understanding this you can then map out the recipes for happiness, playfulness, gratitude, or any other emotion or feeling you wanted. And that is what I want you to do:

Choose 5 emotions or feelings that you want to experience on a consistent basis, they can be anything you like.

Now feel that emotion or feeling and that note what you are focusing on, how are you holding your head, is it up or down? What about your breathing, is it deep, shallow, fast or slow? Etc.

Do this for all five emotions and then on a conscious basis practise experiencing the emotions, set you alarm on your phone to remind you every 2 hours for a week. Stop whatever you are doing, stand up, go for a short walk, even if it is only to the bathroom and then go through your recipe for happiness or whatever emotions your have chosen.

I know this sounds dorky, hairy fairy and all that however the truth be told 80% of the thoughts and feeling your experience today you will experience again tomorrow, so I hope you are having a good day today

I suggest you do this exercise for 3 months or more as it is all about conditioning, once you have conditioned this Power Emotions into your mind and body you life will not be the same again, I have only been doing it for 6 weeks and my life is already more amazing than it amazingly was before.

I would love to hear you feed back, results, or criticism so talk back to me.

I have just gotten back from a two day event with my mentor Marc Dassualt, the theme of the event was about developing an exponential mindset. If you don’t know what exponential means it is increasing at an increasing rate. Or in other words it is earn more money faster, or becoming better as a sport faster than everyone else.

As I have mentioned in previous posts this year one of my goals is to acquire more of an exponential mindset so I can have and expect exponential results.

Over the next couple of weeks I am going to share with some of the powerful concepts I learnt over the weekend and show you how you can implement these same strategies in your life or business to also have exponential results.

The first powerful concepts I want to share with you is what I like to call “The 1% Difference”.

Here is a diagram to help me illustrate how it works and what it is:

Now which curve would you like to be on and why? Curve A, Curve B or Curve C?

They all start at the same point and all finish at the same point however each one has very different results.

The fact that we are talking about having an exponential mindset curve C is a typical exponential curve so you would expect that one to be the better one, right? Well let’s have a look at Curve B it is the shortest and most direct to getting to the end results, however this is not exponential.

Curve A is where you really want to be, and here is why. If you shade the space under the curve as a measure of what you can achieve is shows that curve A has the biggest results in the shortest period of time.

Let me explain, let’s say one axis represents time and the other money, as you can see from the diagram below Curve A is where you get exponential results.

So the question you should be asking “how do I get on and stay on Curve A? Excellent, great question I am glad you asked

You get on Curve A simply by improving at 1% at a time. Now please notice this is important I said Improving 1% at a time not Doing 1% at a time.

Here is the power in improving just 1%.

If you improved your business for example just 1% per week then you would have a 167% improved or increase in business results over the year, it is 1% compounding which is nothing short of excellent!…but wait,

What if you improved just 1% every day you would have a whopping 3778% increase – That’s OUTSTANDING! And all just from improving 1% a day.

You don’t need to take massive amounts of action and burn yourself out you simply just need to be focused and improve at a rate of 1% per day to get exponential results.