فصل 2 بخش 9

CHAPTER 2.9

MYTH 9: “THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES”

Seek truth and you will find a path.

—FRANK SLAUGHTER

Okay, let’s get real here. We’ve just gone through all of the marketing and investment myths that have been promoted for years, at great expense to us, and to the benefit of big institutions. And my bet is that right now you’re probably shocked, but you feel incredibly empowered. You now know what to avoid and what to do to succeed.

But there’s one final myth to tackle. The myth that says the reason we’re not succeeding, not achieving, not growing is because of someone or something else beyond our control. Or the alternative thought that somehow we just aren’t made of the stuff that can help us master this area of our life. But here’s the truth: the ultimate thing that stops most of us from making significant progress in our lives is not somebody else’s limitations, but rather our own limiting perceptions or beliefs. No matter how successful we are as human beings, no matter how high we reach personally, professionally, spiritually, emotionally, there’s always another level. And to get there, we have to be honest with ourselves; honest about our unconscious fears. What do I mean?

Everybody has a fear of failure at some level; at times we’ve all been fearful that perhaps we are not enough. Even when we know what to do, our fear can keep us from executing our plans. As a result, rather than face our natural fears, what do we do? We come up with stories. Stories about why we’re not where we want to be. Why we’re not smart enough, successful enough, thin enough, rich enough, loved or loving enough. Our stories almost always relate to something outside our control, or our lack of some natural talent or ability. But talent and skill are two key elements to success attainable by anyone who is truly committed. You can get the skill if you can get beyond the mental limits of how hard, difficult, or “impossible” it may be to master something.

You’ve made the single most important financial decision of your life by deciding precisely how much you’re going to save to build your Freedom Fund—so you can tap into that and create a money machine that makes money while you sleep. And we’ve taken the time to look through all of the marketing myths that can trip you up along the way. So what’s left? The last thing out there standing in our way is often our own story, our own limitations, our own fears. The final obstacle to face is ourselves. That’s why, for 38 years, my passion has been helping people to break through from what holds them back—to help them get from where they are now to where they want to be, and faster. My whole life has been committed to helping people create breakthroughs. And frankly, while lots of people make this step complex, I’ve found there are only three elements that make the difference between success and failure in the long run––between whether you stay where you are, or you move forward. Whether you make excuses about what you don’t have or whether you get to enjoy the life you deserve.

BREAKTHROUGHS

So what is a breakthrough? A breakthrough is a moment in time when the impossible becomes possible—when you don’t just talk about something, but you finally take massive action and do whatever it takes to make it happen. You make a move to truly change and improve your world.

Often it’s frustration, anger, or stress that triggers a breakthrough. We hit our threshold: a point where we say, “Never again and no more.” Or inspiration strikes: we meet someone who inspires us and that makes us see how life can be so much greater than we ever dreamed possible. You meet someone who enjoys life fully, has a great relationship, is physically fit or financially free, and you decide, “I’m as smart as he or she is. I’m going to find a way.” What was acceptable before no longer is. There’s no going back now. It’s amazing what you can do when you decide to draw a line in the sand, commit to a new goal, and set a new standard.

Most people say, “It took me ten years to make this change.” But the truth is, it didn’t take ten years for a breakthrough. True transformation happens in a moment. It may have taken you ten years to get to the point where you were ready, or open, or maybe even provoked. But we’ve all had breakthroughs in our lives, and those breakthroughs happened in a single moment. We struggle with something for years—a job or a career, our weight or a relationship. We’re miserable until one day a trigger goes off. Suddenly, “That’s it.” “I love you!”

“I quit!”

“I’m in!”

“Let’s begin!”

Not within a day or an hour, but in that moment your life changes—and it changes forever.

Have you ever stayed in a relationship way too long, even though you knew you were unhappy, and so was your partner? You came to the edge of dealing with it, and then the fear of the unknown, of change, of being alone, stopped you. The fear of loss and uncertainty kept you from taking action, and you settled.

Whatever you struggle with, I know there’s a place where you’ve had a breakthrough before. Take a moment to think of one. What’s an area you used to struggle with—daily, weekly, monthly, for years or even a decade or more, until one day you hit your threshold? You became inspired, or fed up, enough to finally make a real decision to change this area once and for all! And you took massive and immediate action to make a change. You got it done. You finally kicked the habit and quit smoking. Or you left a job that made you miserable and started your own business. Or maybe you finally decided to start exercising and change your body or get yourself out of that bad relationship.

I want you to own that breakthrough. There was a time when things seemed like they couldn’t change, but you did it—you made it happen. You do have the ability to change everything in your life. No matter how long it’s been this way, you can change it all in a moment, a moment of real decision, a decision that is acted upon. That’s a breakthrough, and one is waiting for you right now.

THREE STEPS TO CREATING YOUR BREAKTHROUGH

There are three steps to creating a breakthrough: three forces that, together, can massively change any and every aspect of your life. Any one on its own can work, but if you put all three together, you will absolutely change the aspect of your life that you choose to focus on.

What are the three biggest challenges people face in America? What are the three areas that show up over and over again, causing pain in people’s lives? Our finances, our relationships, and our bodies. How many people do you know who struggle with money, who can’t save, who don’t earn enough, who spend too much, or who can’t figure out what to do next with their career? And what about relationships? Men and women, we are wired so differently—if we don’t understand each other, it can take so much work to maintain healthy intimate relationships, to understand what our partner really needs and wants, to communicate in a loving and supportive way. And then there are our bodies. We live in a time where the majority of people in the Western world are massively overweight. In the United States, nearly seven in ten Americans are either overweight (defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as having a body mass index of 25.0 to 29.9) or obese (having a BMI of 30.0 or higher). Our struggle with fitness and health has become a national crisis, and it’s spreading around the world as developing countries adopt some of our lifestyle and eating patterns.

Why do I bring this all up? What do relationship challenges and unhealthy eating habits have to do with your ability to achieve financial freedom? Well, whatever area you want to create a breakthrough in, whether it’s your body, your relationships, or this book’s focus, money, there are only three things that you need to look at. And they are the same three things no matter what kind of breakthrough you’re hoping to achieve. If you want to change your life you have to change your strategy, you have to change your story, and you have to change your state. Let’s begin with strategy, because that’s where most people start.

THE RIGHT STRATEGY

If you’re with me here now, reading this book, you’re in search of answers, of strategies, to take control of your money and secure your financial future. I live for finding strategies to improve every area of our lives. I’ve spent the past 38 years relentlessly focusing on finding strategies and tools to immediately change the quality of people’s lives. I’ve been successful and impacted over 50 million people in 100 countries because I’m obsessed with finding simple strategies that quickly lead to breakthroughs—breakthroughs in relationships, in finances, in careers, in growing businesses, in mind, body, and soul.

I’ve always believed the best way to get a result, the fastest way, is to find someone who has already accomplished what you’re after, and model his or her behavior. If you know someone who used to be overweight but has kept himself fit and healthy for a decade, model that person! You have a friend who used to be miserable in her relationship and now is passionate and in love for ten years going? Model her. You meet someone who started with nothing and has developed wealth and sustained it through time? Learn from those strategies! These people aren’t lucky. They’re simply doing something different than you are in this area of life.

I’ve spent my entire life as a hunter of human excellence. So to find a strategy that works, you go to the best; those who have proven results for the long term. And if you follow their strategies—if you sow the same seeds, then you’ll reap the same rewards. This is the essence of what I mean when I say, “Success leaves clues.” And this book is filled with strategies modeled from the very best.

The other thing the right strategy can do is save you the most valuable resource of all: time. If you start with a proven plan, the right strategy, you can literally convert decades of struggle into days of achievement. You can avoid the inevitable frustration that comes with learning something for the first time by trial and error. Instead, you can get results in days, instead of years, by learning from people who have achieved success already. Why reinvent the wheel?

So now there’s the question about the power of strategy. And if you read this book, you’ll have the best financial strategies that exist in the world today. I promise you that: because they’re not my strategies, they’re the strategies of the most successful investors in history. But as obsessed as I am with strategy, I know that strategy alone isn’t enough.

Why not? There are two key challenges to thinking that strategy alone can change your life. First, too often people have the wrong strategy, which inevitably ends in disappointment. You’re trying to lose weight by eating 500 calories a day—which, of course, isn’t sustainable. Or you’re sure you’re going to get rich off one hot stock—highly unlikely.

Where do most people go to learn strategy? Where do we look for advice and guidance? Too often from someone who isn’t successful in the very area we want to improve! How often do people get relationship advice from friends who are in lousy relationships themselves? Or fitness advice from a friend who struggles with his weight, too? How many people hear the message reinforced that they can’t change their body? Why that message? Because they’re surrounded by friends or family who aren’t fit. The same is true for financial advice. Looking to someone who has not developed real wealth is a recipe for disaster. It simply reinforces the belief that nothing will work. It’s not that nothing will work—it’s that these strategies won’t work.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

THE POWER OF STORY

Let’s go back to our biggest challenges: our relationships, our bodies, and our finances. In each of these areas, we get stuck for one of three reasons. First, as we showed above, we lack the right strategy. We all know a couple where the guy doesn’t communicate or the woman never stops talking. Neither of them understands the needs of his or her partner, much less meets those needs. And what about the friend who goes on fad diets constantly or is always looking out for a magical way to make a million bucks—telling himself that without it he’ll never be financially free. Without the right strategy, you will fail. And when you fail, you develop a lousy story: “My wife will never be satisfied.” “I’ll never lose the weight.” “The only people who make money are the ones who already have money.” Those limiting stories keep us from finding the right strategies, or, even if we have the right strategies, from executing them.

Do you know anyone like that? You put the answer right in front of their very eyes, and they still say, “No, that will never work because . . .” They’ll tell you a million reasons why it won’t work—they’ve got every excuse in the book. So if the right strategies are there in front of us, why aren’t people using them? Why are they still not achieving their goals? Why is it so hard to maintain a passionate relationship or lose the weight once and for all? Are 70% of Americans overweight because the strategy for becoming thin, fit, and healthy is really so complex? Is the information hidden and only available to the 1%, or incredibly expensive? Hell, no. The answers are available everywhere: There’s a gym with someone who can instruct you within a short drive. (God forbid we were to walk there.) There are trainers all over the world, some of which will coach you online, wherever you are! The web is filled with free advice, and, of course, there are thousands of books on fitness and weight loss available for you to download right now to your iPad or smartphone. You have to work to avoid finding the strategies for becoming fit, strong, and healthy.

So what’s the real problem? The answer is: we have to bring in the human factor. I always say that 80% of success in life is psychology and 20% is mechanics. How else do you explain how someone can know what he needs to do, wants to do it, has the right strategy to get it done, and still not take action? To solve this riddle we have to delve into the psychology of individuals: the values, beliefs, and emotions that drive us.

When someone has the right strategy in front of her, and she still doesn’t succeed, it’s because she’s missing the second key to a breakthrough: the power of story. If you’re not taking action and the answer is sitting there in front of you, there’s only one reason: you’ve created a set of beliefs that you’ve tied into a story—a story about why it won’t work, why it can’t work, why it only works for other people. It’s only for the rich, the thin, the lucky, the happy in relationships. It’s easy to come up with a limiting story.

So why bother to take action on a strategy that you “know” will fail? Well, strategy here isn’t the problem. Your story is. A half-hearted approach that says, “It might work, or it might not . . .”—of course it won’t! That belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. With a disempowering story, failure is nothing less than guaranteed. Which, of course, only reinforces your belief that nothing will work. And so the cycle continues.

But the people who make change happen, who get stuff done, who accomplish, who shift, who grow, who learn, they take their strategy and attach a new story to it: a story of empowerment, a story of “I can and I will” instead of “I can’t and I won’t.” It goes from being a story of limitation to a story of empowerment: “I will not be one of the many who can’t, I will be one of the few who do.” There was a time when I was 38 pounds overweight, and my story was, “I’m big-boned.” Which I am. But I was also fat. Stories can be true, but if they don’t help us, if they’re stopping us from having the life we desire and deserve, we have to change them. We’ve all had lousy stories in our lives.

I don’t make enough.

I can’t save more.

I’ll never read. I’ve got dyslexia.

My friend Sir Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin empire, has dyslexia, but it certainly hasn’t limited his life in any way. Why? Because his belief or story about dyslexia was empowering, not limiting. His story wasn’t “I’ll never read,” it was “I have dyslexia, so I have to work harder to make everything happen—and I will.” You can use your story, or your story can use you. Everybody has got an empowering story if he or she wants to find it. What’s wrong with your life is just as easy to find as what’s right with your life, when your story changes. If your relationship isn’t working out, all the good guys are gone, or they’re gay and you’re not. Or you’re gay and they’re not. There’s always a story, right? Stories control our emotions, and emotions drive all of our behavior and actions.

Let me ask you a question: Do you worry about money? Does it keep you up at night, stress you out thinking about your next paycheck, your car payment, your kids’ college tuition, or whether or not you’ll ever have enough money to be able to retire? What’s your financial stress really like? According to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), 44% of Americans, nearly half of us, report “high levels” of financial stress. Have you ever thought to yourself, “All this stress just might kill me?” Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, warned about the dangers of stress for a full decade before she realized that maybe it was her advice, rather than stress itself, that was sending people to their graves faster. “I’m converting a stimulus [stress] that could be strengthening people into a source of disease.” With a breakthrough in her thinking, and some powerful new research, McGonigal made a complete turnaround.

Turns out, stress might just be our friend. Just as you put stress on a muscle to make it stronger (by lifting weights or running), emotional stress can make us physically and psychologically stronger too. McGonigal now highlights new research showing that when you change your mind about stress, you can literally change your body’s physical reaction to it. In an eight-year study, adults who experienced a “lot of stress” and who believed stress was harmful to their health had a 43% increase in their risk of dying. (That sure stressed me out.) However, people who experienced an equal amount of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die! McGonigal says that physical signs of stress (a pounding heart, faster breathing, breaking out in a sweat) aren’t necessarily physical evidence of anxiety or signs that we aren’t coping well with pressure. Instead, we can interpret them as indications that our body is energized and preparing us to meet the next challenge. The bottom line is, science has now proven that how you think about stress matters—the story you attach to stress. Telling yourself it’s good for you instead of harmful could mean the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at 50 or living well into your 90s.

Success is my only mofo option, failure’s not.

—“LOSE YOURSELF,” Eminem

So what story have you been telling yourself about money? What’s stopping you from achieving your financial dreams? Are you telling yourself that it’s too early to start saving? Or too late to start rebuilding your investments? You’re not making enough salary to put anything aside? Or the system is rigged against you, so why bother trying? Maybe your story is, “The government has saddled us with debt, the financial system is in shambles,” or “I’m just not good with numbers.” Great news: you don’t have to be! If you’ve got a phone and a calculator or can download our app on your phone, to answer six simple questions about where you are today, where you want to go, and what you’re willing to do to get a financial plan that you’ll clearly understand about how to be financially free.

Maybe your story is “It takes money to make money.” One of the first people I shared an early version of this book with had a core belief of “I will never be financially free unless I have a way to make a lot of money. People who start with a lot of money can make millions, but not me.” After she read the chapter on building your own money machine with Theodore Johnson—who never made more than $14,000 a year yet turned it into $70 million over his lifetime—her story went out the window. Theodore wasn’t lucky. He used a simple system, the same one you’re about to learn.

Here’s her new story, and it could be yours: “If I just happen to use this simple system of compounding, I can make a lot of money, I can go wherever I want, I can live however I truly want, I can be financially free. There are no limits except the ones I impose on myself.”

One of my own financial breakthroughs happened with an important change in story. Growing up poor, I always associated a lack of money with pain for everyone in the family. I swore to myself early on I would never have a child until I was truly financially successful. I swore that someday I would be so successful financially that my family would never ever experience the humiliation, frustration, and pain of my childhood years of not being able to pay the bills or put food on the table.

And I made good on my promise. By the time I was 18 years old, I was earning as much as $10,000 a month, which at the time seemed like a huge amount of money. It still is. I was so excited, I ran back to my friends from my community, the guys I had grown up poor with, and said, “Let’s go have a blast: let’s fly to Egypt and race camels between the pyramids!” I had had this dream as a little boy. And I could now share this dream with my friends. But the response was hardly what I was expecting: “Easy for you, Mr. Rich Man.” The level of disdain I got from guys I considered to be friends shook me to my core. I wasn’t flaunting my money. I simply wanted to share my abundance with my friends and create an experience of real adventure. But I had to reevaluate. I created a new story: a belief that said you can do well but only so well, or else people will judge you. If you stand out and do too well financially, people won’t like you.

So for years, I did well in my life and businesses, but my income didn’t grow significantly. Until I finally hit a tipping point, a stage in my life where I thought, “This is ridiculous. If I could expand my intelligence, should I?” My answer was, “Of course!” If I could experience and give more love, should I? Of course! If I could expand my ability to give, should I? Of course. If I could earn more and expand my financial wealth, should I? And the answer was, “Of course!” For the first time, I felt hesitancy. Why was it that in every other area of my life it seemed natural to expand and become more, but when the issue came to money, suddenly it was different? Why? It made no sense.

But I knew the truth. I had a deep, unconscious fear that people would judge me because I had expanded in this area as well. I wanted to please everyone, I wanted to be loved so badly that subconsciously I not only made doing well financially something wrong but also subconsciously sabotaged my own success. Like so many people, I told myself that money was not spiritual. How crazy is that? Anyone who’s become truly wealthy knows the truth—the only way to become wealthy, and stay wealthy, is to find a way to do more for others than anyone else is doing in an area that people really value. If you become a blessing in other people’s lives, you too will be blessed. Money is only one of those blessings, but it is a blessing. It’s simply another form of freedom and abundance.

Money is nothing more than a reflection of your creativity, your capacity to focus, and your ability to add value and receive back. If you can find a way to create value—that is, add value for a massive number of people—you will have an opportunity to have a massive amount of economic abundance in your life.

I had to hit that threshold where I was tired of living that way and where I saw the absurdity of trying to fit in. It’s true: if you do well financially, you may be looked at as “the 1%.” In my life, as a kid, being a part of the 1% was something that was aspirational. I came from the 99%, I just wasn’t willing to settle for that, for my family or for my life. But staying there just to fit in—well, that didn’t make any sense. I decided I was tired of blaming others for my lack of financial progress. The story I had of my financial limitations had to go. I would love others, but I would not spend my life trying to please them—especially knowing that to please them I would have to play small. I don’t believe in my heart that our creator made us for that. It was time for me to find a way to earn more in the same way I strove to give more, contribute more, love more, and expand my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual capacity.

With that shift in belief, suddenly—when it was clear that this was not a should to conquer this area, but a must—along with the relational areas of life, strategies started showing up in front of me; they’d probably been there all along, but because of my mind-set, I was blind to them. Your whole world changes when you change your story.

Change your story, change your life. Divorce the story of limitation and marry the story of the truth, and everything changes. I can tell you: when you get rid of the limiting stories, take massive action, and find the strategies that work, the results you can create are truly miraculous.

Let me give you one final example. A dear friend of mine, Julie, a successful screenwriter who gets paid top dollar for her work, could never seem to make any financial headway. By the time she and her husband were in their 50s, they had a modest mortgage on a nice home, but only about $100,000 in an IRA—way, way short of what they’d need to retire. And their money was invested in a “socially responsible” mutual fund that charged high fees and ate up most of their returns.

Julie’s husband, Colin, wanted to invest more aggressively, but Julie wouldn’t even talk about finances with him. She told him she hated Wall Street and everything it stood for. In fact, the whole idea of money made her uncomfortable. To her, money was evil.

But then a breakthrough happened. Julie attended my seminar Unleash the Power Within (UPW), where we use the power of Strategy, Story, and changing the State of your mind, body, and emotions to create breakthroughs in every area of people’s lives. UPW is intense: I use music, dynamic movement, humor, and a host of other tools to put the audience in a peak state—and that’s when breakthroughs happen.

Julie’s goal that weekend was to turn her financial life around. How did she do it? First, she recognized that something had to change, or she and Colin were looking forward to some very painful “golden years.” It finally hit her that her negative beliefs about money were creating constant pain in her marriage and in her future, and she asked herself, “Where did this story come from?” And then Julie did something really important: she dug down deep and asked herself, “Is this what I really believe? We are not born believing money is good or evil. So where did this belief come from?” She didn’t have to go very far to find the answer. Both of Julie’s parents grew up during the Great Depression. Her mother never got the chance to go to college even though her academic scores were off the charts. Instead, she worked as a department store clerk for $9 a week, and didn’t dare complain about the low wages or long hours on her feet. Julie grew up hearing the stories over and over: how the rich exploit the poor, how banks and Wall Street stockbrokers destroyed the economy, how you can’t trust the stock market. So Julie made the association in her brain: “If I become a wealthy investor, I’ll be a bad person, and my mother won’t love me.” Julie realized that the story she’d been telling herself about the evils of wealth wasn’t her story after all; it was her mother’s story. “Money is the root of all evil,” was her mother’s mantra, not hers. This realization jolted her. The truth set her free, and those words lost all of their power over her. (In fact, when she did her homework on the biblical phrase, she found that it’s not “Money is the root of all evil,” but “the love of money” above all else—love, relationships, contribution—that’s the recipe for surefire disaster.) It was an amazing transformation. Once Julie got past her limiting story, she could sit down with her husband for the first time to talk about their finances. He was thrilled they could be partners in taking back control of their financial life. Imagine how hard it is to build wealth when your core belief is that money is evil. They dumped their high-cost mutual funds and transferred their IRA to a diverse portfolio of index funds with Vanguard. Then they put in place a long-term financial plan, like the one you’ll be reading about in these pages, to finally put them on the road to financial freedom.

Julie and Colin shifted their story. And what happened? They learned how to play the game and win, they learned how to create an income for life—just like you’re going to do in chapter 5.2. Julie and Colin learned how to put an extra $150,000 to $250,000 into their pockets over their investment lifetime just by getting out of those expensive mutual funds. How great do those golden years look now!

Remember, you know the answer, and the secret is simple: change your story, change your life. Divorce your story of limitation and marry the truth. You can make anything happen.

YOUR STATE

It’s hard to change your story when you’re in a lousy state. If you feel like hell, you don’t think to yourself, “Life is beautiful!” Have you ever been really angry with somebody, and suddenly you remembered every freaking thing that person ever did to irritate or annoy you? When you go into an angry state, it switches on the part of your brain that supports that state, and the story that keeps you there quickly appears.

By contrast, if you’ve ever fallen head over heels in love, can you remember how the world looked? It was like looking through rose-colored lenses: everything was wonderful, right? Rude clerks didn’t bother you; crying babies seemed cute. That’s how a positive state can change your outlook—your story.

Your mental and emotional state colors your perception and experience of everything in life. When I work with anyone—from world-class athletes to high-powered executives—we change his or her state first. There’s a part of you that, when it’s turned on, can make anything happen; but when it’s turned off, the world is dead. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You know when you get on a roll, and everything flows just perfectly without your even having to think about it? You ace the tennis shot. You say exactly the right thing in the meeting or walk out of the negotiation with exactly what you wanted. On the other hand, we’ve also all experienced the opposite: we couldn’t remember our home address, the name of our dinner host, or spell the word the. I call that the stupid state. But a few minutes later, it comes back to you: you remember the answer because you get in a different state.

The purpose of this book is not to try teaching you how to change your state—that’s the basis of many of my other books and audios, programs, and live events. But in a nutshell, you can immediately and radically change how you feel (and not just hope you feel good) by learning that by changing your body first, you can change your mind.

I teach many ways to create immediate change in your state, but one of the simplest ways is to change what I call your physiology. You can change the way you think by changing the way you move and breathe. Emotion is created by motion. Massive action is the cure to all fear. Think about it, fear is physical. You feel it in your mouth, in your body, in your stomach. So is courage, and you can move from one to another in a matter of milliseconds if you learn to make radical shifts in the way you move, breathe, speak, and use your physical body. I’ve used these insights for almost four decades to turn around some of the world’s greatest peak-performance athletes, financial traders, and business and political leaders. Last year, Harvard University did a scientific study that proved the validity of this approach.

Social psychologist and Harvard professor Amy Cuddy offered a “no-tech life hack” in her famous 2012 TED Talk when she asked the audience to change their posture for two minutes. Cuddy’s research showed that just assuming “power poses” or postures of high power (think Wonder Woman with her hands on her hips and legs firmly planted on the ground; or the guy in your office leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, elbows out wide—you know the one) increased testosterone (the dominance hormone) by 20%, while simultaneously reducing cortisol (the major stress hormone) by 25%. The impact of this biochemical change immediately transforms your willingness to face fears and take risks. All within just two minutes of changing your body. In Cuddy’s study, 86 percent of the power posers reported feeling more likely to take chances. But when the second set of volunteers were asked to stand or sit for two minutes in more passive poses, with their legs and arms crossed tightly, their testosterone levels dropped by 10 percent, and the stress hormone rose by 15 percent. Far fewer of these men and women, only 60 percent, behaved assertively. Remember, these weren’t just psychological changes but actual biochemical changes, hormonal changes. What I have taught for 38 years and what all of my students knew was true through experience was now validated by science. What does this mean? It means, basically, you rock. You’ve got some swagger in your step, you’re ready to put yourself on the line, to take the necessary risks and shape your world. Two minutes of posing can lead to the changes that either configure your brain to be assertive, confident, and comfortable, or really stress reactive. Our bodies are able to change our minds!

There was a time in my life when I was overweight and depressed, living in a studio apartment in Venice, California, staring at the empty furniture and listening to Neil Diamond records. Pretty scary, huh? One day a friend who hadn’t seen me in a long time stopped by. He took one look at me and said, “Man, what happened to you?” It snapped me out of my trance. I decided then and there to break the pattern.

So I put on my running shoes and grabbed my Sony Walkman. (Yes, I’m ancient enough to have owned one of those.) And in those days, you had to be committed to your music: you had one album to listen to, not 10,000 songs to choose from. I turned to the legendary rock band Heart, put on the song “Barracuda,” and let the beat ignite me. I took off running with the determination that I was going to run as hard and as fast as I had ever run in my life, and I wasn’t going to stop until I spit up blood. To say I was determined to push myself beyond my limits would be a serious understatement.

I’m sure it must have been a hilarious sight, given my excess 38 pounds and my beer belly flopping back and forth in the wind as I ran like a banshee. When I literally couldn’t breathe an ounce more of air, I collapsed on the beach and grabbed a journal I had brought with me. And in that state of absolute conviction, determination, exhilaration, and exhaustion, I sat and wrote down everything in my life I would no longer tolerate. The way my body was, my laziness, my shallow intimate relationship, and my disastrous finances. Right across from it, I wrote what I was now committed to creating in my life—and in that pumped-up, invigorated state, I felt certain I could find the way.

With a strong enough state, you will develop a strong story. My story was: “This ends here and now; my new life begins today.” And I meant it with every ounce of my being. I discovered that when you change your state and your story, you find or create the right strategy to get what you’re absolutely committed to. That’s how you create a real breakthrough—a new state with a new story and a proven strategy.

I went on to lose 30 pounds in the next 30 days, and 38 pounds total in a little more than six weeks. I was maniacal in my commitment. I set a new standard that day about who I was and what I stood for. It has not waned in the 30-plus years since that day (and my weight has never returned to that level either).

I went from earning less than $38,000 a year to more than $1 million a year just a little more than a year later. It was a level of change I couldn’t even imagine creating at the time. More importantly, I regained my emotional and psychological fitness—the two forces that truly change how someone’s life turns out. Determination, faith, and courage began to be the forces that guided my every action going forward.

Great strategies can surround you but they will be invisible to you unless you put yourself in a strong, determined, and empowered state. A state that will automatically breed the beliefs and stories that you can, must, and will achieve—and that you are committed to. With state and story combined, you’ll not only find the strategies that work, you will execute them and experience the rewards you desire and deserve. Do I have your full attention? If there’s any area of your life that you’re living that is far less than the life you desire, it’s time to change one or more of these elements.

Remember: we all get what we tolerate. So stop tolerating excuses within yourself, limiting beliefs of the past, or half-assed or fearful states. Use your body as a tool to snap yourself into a place of sheer will, determination, and commitment. Face your challenges head on with the core belief that problems are just speed bumps on the road to your dreams. And from that place, when you take massive action—with an effective and proven strategy—you will rewrite your history.

It’s time to no longer be one of the many but to become one of the few. One of the few who step up, own your true capability financially and in every area of your life. Most people start out with high aspirations but settle for a life and lifestyle far beneath their true capabilities. They let disappointments destroy them. Disappointment is inevitable when you are attempting to do anything of great scale. Instead, let your disappointments drive you to find new answers; discipline your disappointments. Learn from every failure, act on those learnings, and success becomes inevitable.

So next time you come up with a reason why you can’t do something, when you know in your heart that your spirit is unlimited, call bullshit on yourself. Change your state. Change your focus. Come back to the truth. Adjust your approach and go after what you really want.

Okay, deep breath. Or loud scream. Get up and shake and move. With these 9 Myths—these past limitations—now out of our way, it’s time to move on to Step 3 on our 7-Step path to Financial Freedom. We’re going to make the game winnable by coming up with a specific number—a number that reflects your exact financial dreams realized. Then we’ll create a plan, improve that plan, and find ways to speed it up so you can achieve your financial dreams sooner than you may have ever imagined.