Beyond the Average

Over the years, I have written a lot about goal setting and how it can change and improve your brain and life. Am I saying that if you spend a little time setting a few goals then lots of benefits will automatically flow to you? No, I’m not saying that.

What I am saying is, if you seriously want to improve your life, you can, but it takes effort. With enough intense time spent thinking about how your life has been in the past and what you want it to be in the future, you will lift your mind and body to a new and higher level. And that’s over and above the real successes you will derive from goal setting.

Ask yourself, “What do I really want out of life?” I’m pretty sure you don’t want to, as Henry David Thoreau said, “live lives of quiet desperation,” as seems to be the case with most people.

Hinduism tells us that every human being wants four things: pleasure, success, a responsible discharge of duty, and liberation. But you have to find your own version of these things.

To help you figure that out, ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you want your life to be just another life?

2. Do you want to be average?

3. Do you want to make a difference in this world?

4. Does accomplishment mean a lot to you?

5. Do you want to become a better you, a better person?

6. Do you want to be in great physical and mental shape with ideal health your entire life?

7. Do you want to live a very long active life?

8, Do you want to make a fortune –a million dollars, or ten million, or even a hundred million? (Think what good you could do with that money!)

9. Do you want more choices in your life, the kind that making your own fortune could give you?

10. Do you want to leave the world a better place than you found it?

11. Do you want to help others as you help yourself?

12. Do you want to travel and experience the entire world and its cultures?

13. Do you want to substantially raise your level of contentment and fulfillment?

I dare say there’s not a single human on the planet that has not, at one time or another, entertained some great big dream for their life. What have you thought about and dreamed about doing? Are you doing things that will lead you to that goal now, things that will lift your life along with the lives of your friends and family?

There’s no reason to live a life of quiet desperation. You just need those goals and to take those steps to move your life beyond the average.

The Four Pillars of Well-Being

Years ago, I noticed that when I became engrossed in my goal setting state of mind (almost a meditative state of mind) I would, at times, begin to feel very calm and at peace with the world. I focused even more with a pen in hand, writing goals and steps down, and I would feel even more euphoric. I didn’t understand why, I just knew it felt good. In fact, it felt fantastic!

Of course, it was a wonderful triumph to reach or exceed the goals I had set down, but why did the process of thinking about my future goals or writing them down give me such a mental boost, one even more euphoric than the actual accomplishment of my goal?

There is a brilliant scientist who thinks he knows the answer and, in my mind, he has proven it. This University of Wisconsin professor, Richard Davidson, was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2006. He established the four pillars of mental well-being: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. I think my goal writing does all of that.

Davidson was actually asked by the Dalai Lama to study the possible connection between the meditative state of mind of some of the Buddhist Monks and their emotional and mental lives. So, he hooked up 128 electrodes to the head of a French monk, Mattieu Ricard. When Ricard began to meditate, Davidson recorded an immediate increase in gamma activity, those brainwaves associated with higher functions like cognition and memory. Later, they studied more monks as well as a control group of college students and found that the monks produced gamma brainswaves that were thirty times stronger than the students brainwaves.

But what does all this mean? Simply put, this, along with other research, unveils the real possibility that the brain, like the rest of the body, can be altered intentionally. Just as we build muscle through exercise, we can build our brain through mental exercises.

Davidson actually found that meditation results in a redistribution of gray matter in the brain as well as a decline in the loss of gray matter. A person’s physical health can also be affected by his or her mental state. According to Davidson, it might also be used to modify emotional response like depression.

I think all of this research and the conclusions Davidson came to can be very helpful for all of us as we focus on adding more awareness, connection, insight, and purpose to our lives. We can work on this and, as a result, use our brains to do so much more.

Letting the Mind Heal the Body

Our brains are so powerful. They can make physical changes in our bodies beyond what we would normally give them credit for or realize. One good example is the placebo effect. Researchers that study the brain-body connection have shown in numerous experiments how the brain can be tricked into believing that a simple sugar pill can relieve pain or cure an illness if the person is told and believes that the pill being taken truly is genuine medicine.

Some years back, I was re-reading a book I’ve talked about many times before called Super Brain by Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi. They point out that any of us can, if we so chose, set up or create our own placebo effect at any time and without any kind of pill.

Chopra and Tanzi explain that “the effect isn’t limited to drugs, which is important to remember: anything you believe in can act as a placebo.” The authors go on to ask the question concerning patients that took the sugar pill. “Where did the patient’s relief come from? It came from the mind telling the body to get well.”

The body really believed what it was being told and then it relieved the pain or healed the sickness. In other words, your mind can, and does, control healing of all kinds including pain, disease, and wounds that our bodies deal with from time to time.

These authors go on to say “Being your own placebo is the same as freeing up the healing system through messages from the brain. All healing is, in the end, self-healing. Physicians aid the body’s intricate healing system (which coordinates immune cells, inflammation, hormones, genes and much else), but the actual healing takes place in an unknown way.”

Using the mind-body connection certainly takes a lot of work inside the brain but when you think of the huge possibilities you can quickly see that it’s certainly worth the work and effort. One of the conclusions that the authors suggest in conquering and taking advantage of the mind-body connection is summed up in this sentence: “In serious illness, doubts and fears play a marked role, which is why a practice like meditation or going to group counseling has been shown to help.” That is certainly worth trying for most, if not all of us, whenever we want to cure our pain, problems, or disease.

The authors suggest that there is a method through which anyone can apply their own placebo effect:
1. You trust what is happening.
2. You deal with doubt and fear.
3. You don’t send conflicting messages that get tangled with each other.
4. You have opened the channels of mind-body communications.
5. You let go of your intention and allow the healing system to do its work.

When we get a cut finger, we slap on a band aid and know that it will heal itself. In doing that, we’ve just let our brain send a positive message to our cells to do their job. But when we get a serious disease, we often let our minds jump into the mix with all kinds of worry and negative thoughts doing pretty much the opposite of the list above.

The bottom line here is, if were are going to benefit from our own built-in ‘placebo effect’ we’ve got to, at a minimum, follow the list of 5 conditions above. If you can do that, you are supporting your body’s ability to take care of you, as it is supposed to do.

The Great Gift of Travel

For many years, I have preached about how great travel is for the human brain and body. To visit new places or countries lifts or expands the mind so much and can help you understand and accept the differences between us and people from other countries and totally different cultures, beliefs, religions, and political views. I strongly believe that travel makes the world a much better place for you and your children and your grandchildren.

I was introduced to travel at a very young age when my father was assigned to a job in Turkey to help people there get more out of what they were doing for a living. Mostly he showed them how to improve their production, whether it was farming, ranching or writing their own story. He did a great job and helped lot of people.

That experience, and our family traveling to nearby countries like Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Italy, France, England, and many more, really grew my love of travel. Those experiences motivated me, later in life, to travel to many other places. I have now traveled to 95 countries!!

For example, earlier this year Kimberly and I visited Barcelona, Vigo, and Cadiz in Spain, Lisbon in Portugal, La Harve and South Hampton in England, and when that all was done, we took that fantastic train ride that goes under the English Channel to Paris, France!

Then just last week we got back from a celebration of my upcoming 80th birthday with all my kids and grandkids — 38 of us all together. I took them on a European Disney cruise! What a great birthday gift. Well, oops, I was the one who paid for it all, but it was worth every penny.

When you want to give a great and powerful gift, it’s my opinion that one of the greatest gifts you can give your kids, grandkids, and even friends is the wonderful gift of travel to new and different places. It doesn’t matter if those new places are just new states or cities that they have never been to. It’s still a new experience that will lift their minds and spirits.

My advice to you, my readers, is that you think about what kind of traveling you’ve done recently and maybe look for different places that you can take your loved ones and friends. I can guarantee that they will remember those trips and thank you for the rest of their lives, especially those young kids. It’s a super gift that they can’t just throw away like stuff you might give them. It lasts a lifetime!

Thats my challenge to you — give the gift of travel and I’m pretty sure you will enjoy the experience immensely in giving it, traveling, and seeing how much your family and friends will love it!

All the Humans We Meet

So, we’ve been traveling again. I just got back from a couple weeks in Europe. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I love to travel because of the stimulation it gives my mind and my spirit. The newness of the experiences and the variety of the places and cultures all combine to inspire and energize me. But there is one thing I don’t find much different from place to place–people.

As much as we might want to imagine it, people around the world are, at their center, pretty much the same. I know that, in my experience, most people are good and kind and want to help regardless of race, religion, or country. We all have this binding similarity that is all too easily forgotten—that we are all human and we all want the same basic thing… to be happy.

That’s why it’s so upsetting when I see in the news about people segregating themselves from each other. Whether it’s one culture feeling distrusting another culture or the one political party trying to make it look like members of the other political party are another species, these divisions just make it harder for us to understand each other. It really makes no sense for us to think this way and, even worse, to teach our kids to think this way.

What would really help is for us all to stop and think that each individual person and realize that we all have the capacity for love and caring as well as hate and anger. Everyone we meet is someone’s child as well as someone’s friend and maybe even a mother or father or sibling. Each of us struggles with pain and misunderstanding. We all have dreams and desires. That is who these other’ people are–not a complete stranger but someone that is an awful lot like ourselves.

Knowing this I am not at all surprised to find, as I travel, smiling faces and kind gestures in every country and every culture I get to experience. I think if we expect animosity, we will find animosity, but if we expect compassion and generosity, it will be there for us to find. So, let’s all try to get past these divisions and try to understand that, like us, these other people we hear about or meet as we travel, they are struggling, wonderful humans too.

As much as we might want to imagine it, people around the world are, at their center, pretty much the same. I know that, in my experience, most people are good and kind and want to help regardless of race, religion, or country. We all have this binding similarity that is all too easily forgotten—that we are all human and we all want the same basic thing… to be happy.

That’s why it’s so upsetting when I read in the news about people segregating themselves from each other. Whether it’s one culture feeling hurt by what they are told about how another culture sees them or the one political party trying to make it look like members of the other political party are another species, it really makes no sense and is not helpful to keep pushing that division.

What would really help is for us all to stop and think that each individual person and realize that we all have the capacity for love and caring as well as hate and anger. Everyone we meet is someone’s child as well as someone’s friend and maybe even a mother or father or sibling. Each of us struggle with pain and misunderstanding. We all have dreams and desires. That is who these other’ people are, not a complete stranger but someone that is an awful lot like ourselves.

Knowing this I am not at all surprised as I travel to meet smiling faces and kind gestures in every country and every culture I get to experience. I think if we expect animosity, we will find animosity, but if we expect compassion and generosity, it will be there for us to find. So, let’s all try to get past these divisions and try to understand that, like us, they are human too.

A List for Hard Days

In the last couple of posts, I talked about some of the essential components needed to reach your goals including taking action and writing out your goal. Without doing that, you can’t even get started. But what will keep you going once you do get started? All the best intentions in the world are not going to help you when things get really challenging. The things I’ve mentioned do help but I have one more thing to make it even more likely that you’ll reach your goal.

Let’s start with an example such as dieting. You go out to eat with all the best intentions to stick to a healthy, low-calorie diet. Then you find yourself there with a salad in front of you while your companions are enjoying prime rib and pizza and suddenly, your mouth is salivating nonstop. You begin to wonder, Why in the world am I dieting when I could just be enjoying myself? Somehow, maybe because your friends know you are on a diet, you stay strong and dig into your salad.

The next day, you see yourself in the mirror and can smile at yourself, knowing you stuck to your goal. In the afternoon, you are out playing ball with the kids for an hour instead of just ten minutes which had been your limit in previous times. It’s times like those that make it easy to remember why you’re changing the way you eat. In those moments, you can honestly say you don’t miss those grande mochas with whipped cream or the bowl of ice cream after dinner.

Unfortunately, your day isn’t filled with those reminders and maybe the next day you’re at work, a co-worker walks in with donuts for everyone and you hear your inner voice asking you why you are torturing yourself, making all the reasons you wanted to diet a little fuzzy all of a sudden. That’s when the idea of just one donut doesn’t seem like a truly bad thing and there’s no one at work that knows about your diet goal to help keep you on track. It’s then that you need a true will power tool.

The tool I think that works the best for this is something I call B-RAM. You can read about it in Chapter 7 of my book, How to Ignite Your Passion for Living. B-RAM stands for Benefits, Reasons, and Motivations. This B-RAM is a list of the real end goals you’re after. Losing weight isn’t just about looking good, it’s about feeling better, getting off medication, reducing your risk of disease, and increasing your energy so you can do more for yourself and your family. You know this is why you do it but in those really trying moments, they are just hard to remember clearly.

With a B-RAM list though, all you do is write down the list of the reason you are chasing this goal, then you can pull the list out and read it over to remind yourself. You’ll want to keep that list as handy as possible. Maybe put it on your phone, on an index card in your wallet, or on sticky notes posted on your glove compartment and bathroom mirror.

To make this B-RAM list really effective, you must list every single benefit, reason, and motivation that will make this goal worth working so hard for. The longer the list, the easier it will be to keep on track because you can see, just by looking at your big, long list, that those trying moments are really worth getting through. Then when you read it, you’re reminded of all the good things you can look forward to when you reach that goal.

If you can just read your lists and keep yourself going, soon you won’t spend any time wondering why you work so hard or why you don’t just give up. How come? Because soon enough, you’ll be living with those benefits, not just reading about them!

A Brain Hack for Big Goals

There is no particularly easy way to reach your goals but there are certainly easier ways and harder ways. Whether your goal is to make a million dollars, write a bestselling book, or visit 100 different countries, the easier way to reach those goals includes a very simple thing—making lists. And I don t mean in your head. I mean writing those lists down. Why does writing out a list make reaching a goal easier? Because if you write it down it does some very good stuff inside your brain.

In Chapter 7 of Henriette Klauser’s book, Write It Down, Make It Happen, she tells the story of her friend Sydne who turned her life around mainly from the single action of writing down a list of goals. Klauser says, “Writing a list gets it out of your head. Heads can be dark swamps, the conversations, the constant chatter, whatever you want to call it, keeps interfering. Writing a list gets it out of the swamp, onto paper. You can see a list in black and white and it’s real.”

She goes on to say that if your lists are very specific, your brain will more likely help you reach those goals. “When you are vague and general, you are safe. Get to the essence of it; that’s when things happen. Nothing can happen when you’re generalized and safe–nothing changes.”

The author’s advice is to use listing as an opportunity to crystallize your intent–to learn what matters most to you. She goes on to say, “Keep that list handy, and look at it regularly, especially if you lose heart or feel scared. Emblazon it in your mind. Repeat to yourself ‘This is what I want, and it is waiting for me.’”

Remember, keep your list very specific even for things such as buying a car. She says you don’t just want to write that you want a new car, but put down the make, model, and other details you want in that car. The more specific, the more real it will feel.

I must say that goal setting and writing down the specifics of my goals has changed my brain and improved my life in huge ways. When I was 27 years old, I set the very specific goal to make a million dollars by the time I was 30 and, yes, I wrote it down and looked at that written goal on a regular basis. On top of that, I went to work finding the ways and means, along with getting great help from a couple of fantastic mentors, to hit my target. I missed the goal though. Well, that is to say that I missed the date by one year but reached it at age 31! But I don’t think I would have reached it at 31 if I didn’t put down my specific goals in writing.

Pretty much the same thing happened when I set the written goal to write a bestselling book. That book was How to Wake Up the Financial Genius Inside You, which eventually sold over one million copies.

I am absolutely convinced that writing it down did in fact change my brain and make all those great things happen. So, if you are not already writing your specific goal lists down, I hope you start doing so right now.

Goal Busting Formula

As mentioned last week, there really is a formula for making your big goals actually happen, and it takes more than thinking and wishing them to come true. So, there is a kind of formula for successful goal setting that you need to apply to all your big goals.

• Be clear about what you want and go big.
• Set lots of small goals broken up into daily and weekly goals so they feel, and actually are, achievable.
• Write your goals down and review them often.
• Remember to always keep busy. Research suggests that a broad goal of simply staying busy is better than doing nothing and will help keep you happy.
• It takes 66 days to change a habit and 80 days to develop a solid, healthy habit so keep working at your goal until pushing through those steps become the habit you want it to be.
• When it comes to that good ol’ self-talk, it has been shown that asking yourself rather than telling yourself that you are going to reach a goal is much more effective. So, start asking the question “Can I reach my goal of _______?” Then answer by saying “Yes, I can!”
• The key to change and control is “awareness”. Pound that into your head. Always be aware and observe your internal dialog, paying close attention to what you are thinking. Yes, that’s thinking about thinking and if you do that consistently you will find that it helps you see what you need to change and how to change it.
• According to David DiSalvo’s book, What Makes the Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, you should spend more time reading about people who use self-control and discipline. By doing that, you will boost your own self-control and self-discipline.

Now that you have a list to go by, go ahead! Create those goals and take the steps needed to make them happen! It’s just not enough to really want it. Take action and use your desire and passion to fuel it.

Next week, we’ll talk about ways to make reaching your goal even easier.

Royal Reality

As I wrote last week, the death of my older brother right in from of me shook me up for the rest of my life. Probably more than anything else, the simple fact that life is fragile and so very short and can end at any moment, has been forcefully pushed in my face and inside my heart.

At the tender age of 15, I suddenly knew for sure that life could be finished in an instant. I knew that fact from an intellectual point of view as well as an emotional one. But knowing such a thing became a huge wakeup call that drove me to do more–much more–not only then, but throughout my life. Since then, I’ve always had an acute sense of time’s passing and of its absolute and undeniable precious value.

Without question, my first big goal after that great tragedy was to play professional basketball. In my 15-year-old brain I just felt that if I became a great basketball player it would make sense out of my brother’s death. So, I took off chasing that dream. However, there was a problem. I had a great dream but without a great plan, could I really reach that goal? Oh yes, I had a good mind set, and a pretty firm one, but what my young brain didn’t realize was that there is so much more to a winning formula than setting a big goal.

Today I like to tell people, “Yes, I played basketball at Utah State University.” Then I slowly admit that I didn’t actually play very much, but I had a great seat on the bench. I slowly gave up my great dream to be that next Bob Cousy—one of the great players back then.  

It was tough to hang on to a goal that seemed to be slipping further away with each game. I wasn’t tall enough and I was at least one step too slow. Besides—and this was probably the biggest thing holding me back—I didn’t have a well thought out plan of attack that would have set out the details of all the workouts, ultra conditioning, and extra dedication I should have added to my training, both on and off season. I pretty much just dreamed about playing pro basketball. I thought, “I’m going to be professional. I’m going to be a big basketball star. I’m going to be like Bob Cousy, some day!” Nice thoughts, but I had no thought-out plan!

It was during those college years that I began to learn the rest of the formula, or the rest of the code and pathway that lifts a person into the rarified air that transforms great dreams into great goals, and then all the way through to one’s own “royal reality”. I’ll talk more about that formula and what it can do for you in upcoming posts.  

Don’t Live Without Passion.

It doesn’t take much thought to realize that life really is too short, so you just have to live every day with more passion! Time squandered, is time wasted.

Most people, when looking back at their lives, are in more pain over the things they didn’t do rather than over the things they failed at while trying to do them. Yes, I do believe most of us would rather try and fail than never try at all. Why is that? I think it’s in our nature as humans to want to receive long lasting and deep satisfaction from struggle and hard work, because even if we fall short of our objective, at least we know we tried.

I’ve certainly had my share of failures and tragedies. But I wouldn’t have it any other way because, in most of those failures, I’ve learned so many huge lessons that, in the long run, greatly enhanced my life.

Let me briefly tell you my own story. It was a “Sudden Death Wake Up Call”.

I had a pretty ordinary beginning into this life. Born in Portland, Oregon in 1944 (that means next year I hit the big 80 mark!), I was the second born in my family, so I was always trying to prove myself, to measure up to my older brother.

My life and my mindset were forever shocked and changed when, at the age of 15, my older brother died, literally, at my feet, while playing basketball. We were in an outdoor stadium halfway around the world in Ankara, Turkey. That one life-shaking event permanently altered my way of thinking, something that is with me to this very day, yes, even as I write these words. As I express myself and think about the big picture of life, it helps me understand that life can be gone in a moment. It’s a sobering thought.

Yep, we all have an end to our life, or as some people say, “Nobody gets out of here alive.” It doesn’t matter how rich or powerful you are, you and I really have a fairly short time to be here on planet earth. So, all of us need to live with passion right now and go after the things in life that we really want. Not only will you get more out of life, but it will also give you a great and powerful lift to your mind and body.

Next week I am going to write more about this event with my brother and how it pushed me to see the bigger picture of life and death. It makes me much more accepting of our hardships and every day it pushes me to live in this “right now moment”. I’ll write more about my early life and goals that I set for myself, some of which I reached but not all of them!

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