فصل 03

Chapter 3

“I am wired to win.”

“The truth of it is, you are winning at the life you have.”

What if I told you that even when you think you’re losing in life, you’re actually winning? That everything that happens is really a victory?

It’s true. And that’s not just some feel-good self-help mumbo jumbo or a sales line that I’m feeding you.

You are a champion. You’ve knocked out goal after goal, cruising to an undefeated record. Everything you set your mind to comes true.

You’re probably starting to think I’ve lost my mind or maybe even that you’ve lost yours! Perhaps you’re convinced I’m talking to someone else – anyone but you. Let me explain before we both end up like a couple of basket cases.

Imagine this scenario: For what seems like all of your life you’ve been searching for love, that one special person to share your life with. But up to this point, it hasn’t happened. (Remember, this is an example, you can use any area of your own life where you have experienced being stuck in a cycle.) You’ve met people, had relationships, but all of them ended somewhere short of “forever.” You and “the one” just never materialized. The fairytale inevitably came to an end, often a very familiar kind of end.

After a while, you start losing hope. You start to wonder whether you will ever meet the person of your dreams. Maybe you and relationships just aren’t meant to be?

“Will anyone ever love me?”

“Am I worthy of being loved?”

“Why do I always seem to attract the same types of people?”

You look back at your childhood, to times when you didn’t feel loved enough. Or periods of adolescence where you felt like an outsider or past relationships that played out like a scene from the movie Groundhog Day except with different players each time. So frustrating!

Then one day, you meet someone. You go on a few dates and find out you really enjoy each other’s company. Things are coming along nicely as the days stretch into weeks and the weeks into months.

Eventually that day comes where you can’t help yourselves – you exchange your first “I love you’s”.

Not only are you in love, but you start to wonder, “Could they be ‘the one’?!” Could this be it? Wheeeeee!!! The bliss, excitement and possibility are invigorating and enlivening.

At some point however the dark clouds of doubt start rolling in, it starts in small ways that grow first slowly and then all at once until the storm finally breaks loose. No sooner are you “in love” than you start to fall out, waaaaaaay out. The smallest things turn to arguments. The chemistry slowly evaporates until your relationship is a desert, barren and dry and you are left with the soul-destroying basics of just trying to get along. Ugh. Not again.

At some point you both can see it’s not working – perhaps you reach a breaking point and have one (or a number) of those nasty fallings out. Maybe it just slowly dies until you eventually decide to pull the plug. Either way, you eventually go your separate ways. Oh well. You’re hurt, crushed but somehow resolute that eventually things will turn out for you. Someday.

Except they did. Even though it may look and feel like a loss, this was in fact a glorious, resounding win. A victory from the Gods. HURRRAH!

The truth of it is, you are winning at the life you have.

What if I don’t want this life? Fine; but this is the one you’re currently winning at.

BUILDING THE MYSTERY

How could I possibly call a failed relationship a win?

Well I’m not about to tell you how you’re better off without certain people in your life. I’m not going to assure you that you’re a special little snowflake who will find the perfect person “when you’re ready”. I’m not going to buy into the self-righteous bumper stickers and internet memes that tell you how great you are and that everyone else is the problem. You and I both know that when it comes down to it, that’s just not accurate.

Nope. You won at that failed relationship because you achieved exactly what you set out to accomplish in the first place. From the very first “hello”. “But, but, but my partner wasn’t stepping up, THEY ruined it!” I got that but what if you sub-consciously picked that person in the first place? The kind of ideal character to re-create the same vignettes of life over and over and over?

What if you are actually driven to prove the notion that no one will ever love you? What if it was planted there as a sub-conscious reaction to a turbulent childhood, bad breakups, or the like? And what if, with this pattern buried deep in your subconscious, you actively and deliberately undermined the success of your own relationship?

You became sensitive to problems where there were apparently none. You started picking at, getting annoyed by and blowing up the tiniest of things. Over time you proved your point and the relationship reached its obvious, final and natural conclusion. What if this is what you have become wired to win at?

You were convinced you weren’t worthy of a loving relationship, so you systematically set out to prove it and you succeeded. Congratulations!

If you think this is starting to make you sound like a hopeless sado-masochist, don’t worry. There is a silver lining in all of this.

You may not relate to the example I described above. Maybe you’re happily married to the love of your life. Or perhaps you’re beating off eligible suitors with a giant stick. Look at your own, “dark spots”, the parts of your life where you are most ineffective, where it seems like you have lost or are currently losing.

You see, our thoughts are so powerful that they are constantly pushing you toward your goals, even when you don’t realize what those goals actually are! Your brain is wired to win.

It doesn’t just apply to your relationships. This dynamic is at play in your career, your fitness, your finances and everything else you do. You are hard wired to win.

That brings us to our next assertion: “I am wired to win”.

You’re always winning because your brain is wired to. The trouble comes when what you really want—on a subconscious level—and what you say you want are different, sometimes radically so.

RULER OF YOUR DOMAIN

In his research, Dr. Bruce Lipton, the famous stem cell and DNA scientist, found that 95% of what we do in our day-to-day life is controlled by our sub-conscious. Think about that for a moment. That means that out of all the things you say or do, only a tiny fraction of them are with a true sense of volition.

Think of all those times you lost track of time, drove home and couldn’t remember a single thing about the journey, or forgot what day it was. For the most part, you’re basically on autopilot, mindlessly gouging your way through life’s predictable muddy field.

The path you follow through life is the one dictated by your deepest, most inconspicuous thoughts. Your brain is constantly pushing you along that path, whether it’s the one you would consciously choose to take or not.

Can’t seem to increase your income? Can’t seem to lose weight? Have you considered the subconscious, concealed beliefs about your income and your weight that may be driving your action (or lack of it)? You automatically relate to yourself as belonging to a certain economic class, with a certain level of fitness, and your actions serve to keep you in place, right where you’re most familiar to yourself.

I like to say that we win in domains or worlds. Let’s say you make $30,000 per year. That’s a domain. All of the planning, strategy and thinking you do to make that money constitute that domain.

Believe it or not, it’s not necessarily any harder to make $60k than it is $30k. You may think it is, but that’s not an absolute. Whether you work for $25/hour or $50/hour, 40 hours of work is still 40 hours of actual work. While it’s important to identify what you’re at work on and whether you are being productive instead of just busy, sometimes it really is a question of getting yourself into another domain. How does one do that? Firstly, you have to uncover and realize the ways in which you have limited yourself. The kind of, “absolutes”, that you are currently unaware of. In short, the conclusions that you have come to about yourself, others and life itself. Those conclusions are the limit of your potential. It’s only when you have broken through those conclusions and can experience a life outside of your current existence that you start to understand the power of this phenomenon.

While I appreciate that seems like an overly simplistic view of life, it’s a view that can open you up to whole other worlds of accomplishment although that’s a conversation for another time. In this instance, take the case that your life is split up into particular domains that you are existing in and winning at.

The point is, you’re winning in whichever domain you are playing in. You’re wired to win in that domain. What it takes to move out of that domain is going to require some significant changes to your automatic.

FIND YOUR WINNING EDGE

Still not convinced? It’s time to turn the mirror on yourself and find out exactly where your wins are coming from.

Look at your problem areas. Where in your life are you struggling most? Is it your career? Is it a negative habit? Is it your diet?

Maybe you’re constantly putting off work until the last minute. You’ll wait and wait until you absolutely can’t wait any longer, then bust out the project once the pressure of a strict deadline is looming over you.

We are always winning at proving something. In the case above, you win at proving either you have no time or that you are a procrastinator or a loser by getting things done at the very last minute. Or maybe it’s something else. The key here is to question yourself, look at your actions. What is the real point of all of this? What is it that you get to be right about when all is said and done?

Just like I demonstrated in the opening example about romantic relationship, we hold a certain belief about ourselves or life that we prove right time and time again through our everyday actions. Those beliefs uncannily turn out to be deadly accurate in our reality. Spinning your wheels? What are you out to prove there?

“I’m not worthy of love”, “I’m not smart”, “I’m a failure”, I’m not as capable as I used to be”. With these kinds of repeats stuck in your subconscious, is it any wonder that you are masterful in consistently proving them right? To succeed in another, more positive way, you’d have to prove those firmly held beliefs WRONG! For your persona, that’s a ground-shaking idea that is almost too much to bear. It would in fact unsettle the very foundations of who you have become!

Many of my clients, I have found, have one particular thing in common: the subconscious desire to prove that their parents did a bad job raising them. This can manifest in so many different ways, some being worse than others. Some are subtle, others obvious, while all are very potent.

You might try to prove that your parents failed to raise you well by treating your body like crap, getting arrested, becoming addicted to drugs or alcohol, dropping out of school, consistently failing in relationships, chronic financial crises or any one of a number of seemingly random paths we get ourselves lost in. They can drop all the way down to simply being disconnected or lost in the pressures of work as an adult.

All of these are real-life examples that some of my clients discovered about themselves that ultimately “proved” that one or both of their parents failed to do their job, that their experiences as children did not adequately prepare them for adulthood. This belief, conveniently, also allows for a ready-made explanation as to why they did what they did and why they, from time to time, acted like complete assholes to others in their life.

Can you see ways in which you do this in your own life? Think of the problem areas in your life. Now think about them in terms of what you are winning at. What do you see there?

If you’re struggling to get work done, perhaps you believe that you’re incapable or lazy. You prove that idea every single time you pause or procrastinate. You’re proving to yourself and others that you really are that person. Why do we do such things? We are survival machines and what better way to survive what’s to come than by re-living what has been, after all, it got you this far regardless of how bad or negative it has been. You have survived.

Don’t limit yourself to the examples I’m giving. They’re just that: examples. You could be winning at something completely different. Take some time for introspection. If need be, write down the patterns you are seeing. Put the pieces of the jigsaw together.

Maybe you had great parents but still find yourself incapable of committing to one person. Could it be because you believe your significant other couldn’t possibly live up to the example you were raised with?

The point is we all have these items.

Search out and connect all the different situations that came into play in your life. Take note of all the times you broke your promise to diet, save your money or speak your mind. Consider how many days you skipped the gym. Think about how you went to the mall instead of the bank. Pick one and see if you can discover the “win”.The amount of times you argued or lost your temper when you know you shouldn’t have. What is it all pointing to?

Whatever the domain you’re winning in, you’ll start to realize something – you’re really good at it.

You can avoid those dirty dishes in the sink for days. You’ll use every plate, cup, and piece of silverware in the house and then you start getting creative until you’re eating cereal out of a handy Tupperware container using a wooden baking spoon. Holy crap, a life hack, take a picture and get it on your Pinterest page!

It’s actually rather impressive in a weird kind of way.

Once you’ve taken the time to analyze your own life through this lens, you’ll start to see that what I’m saying is true. You really are wired to win. You really can (and do) achieve the things you set your mind to.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca once said,

“It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable”.

Right now, your mind is unconquerable when it comes to proving that you’re not worthy of love, that you’re lazy, or that you’ll always be out of shape or never have any money.

But if we change our thinking a little, we can use our mind’s unconquerable nature to act on all the positive goals and dreams we hold for ourselves. We are wired to win – we just have to point ourselves in the right direction so we can win at something we consciously choose.

CREATING A GAME PLAN

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts. Therefore, guard accordingly, and take that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.”

• Marcus Aurelius

We’ve talked about the enormous role our sub-conscious plays in everything we do. Even if we consciously made the right decisions at every opportunity, it would still only account for a fraction of our daily life.

The personal assertion, “I am wired to win”, will support you in realizing how truly powerful you and your mind are. But you still need a game plan.

That means we have to start filling our “bucket” with the right ideas. Here’s a good way to start.

Think about the thing or things you’d like to change in your life. They could be related to the problem areas you looked at earlier, or they could be something completely different.

Where would you really like to see progress? What do you really want to accomplish?

Take that goal and break it down. What exact steps do you need to take to achieve it? What are the mile markers you need to set out to identify your progress?

If you want to lose weight, think about how you’ll need to change your diet, get more exercise and generally adopt more healthful, nurturing habits. Go through the daily kind of actions you’ll need to practice. Get it in reality.

Don’t stop there. Consider the changes in mindset you’ll need to make during and after your quest to become more fit. You have to be relentless in the pursuit of your goal, particularly when those automatic past-based conversations start to become louder in your head.

Once you’ve faced your problems head on, how will your sense of self change? When you’re the fit and healthy person you want to be, how will your beliefs about yourself be different? What will that life look like? I would warn against the idea that you’ll suddenly be awesome. Your future is not the answer to your present.

As we’ve discussed, subconscious thoughts are deeply ingrained in your psyche, so it can take a lot of thinking, imagination, and commitment to transform these invisible yet powerful thoughts into ones that better align with your stated goals. As with every page here, make the time to take your time.

If you look at the problem areas you came up with before, you might be able to connect to an emotionally charged event somewhere in your life that helped set them in your mind, perhaps in the form of infidelity in a relationship, childhood bullying, parents that never quite lived up to your wants and needs, public embarrassment, or major career failures.

But the more you think about your future and what you really want to accomplish, the deeper those thought processes will work their ways into our mind and take hold. Remember, when you explore and discover what it is you’ve really been winning at, it’s not about fighting against or resisting those thoughts and actions but rather changing direction and setting yourself new goals and outcomes. This must be the kind of work that raises your awareness and throws up red flags for when you are getting off course. The better you understand your patterns the better shot you have in altering them.

When you have set out the goals that you are claiming as yours in life and, more importantly, relentlessly taking the actions to produce, it’s only a matter of when.

We are wired to win. You are wired to win. Define your game, embrace the challenge and strive to understand yourself in deeper and more meaningful ways.

True understanding of yourself and your personal constraints allows for ever-unfolding degrees of freedom and success. The more aware you become of your hard wiring, the more space and opportunity become available in those areas.

Step out there. Trust yourself, give yourself fully to your vast capacity for victory. Set yourself the challenge of winning in new and exciting ways. Demand your greatness of yourself and repeat after me: “I am wired to win”.