Are You Ready to Succeed?

An Unconventional Guide to Personal Transformation in Work & in Life

By Srikumar Rao, Rider House, 2006

Many people hanker for a happy and successful life, and try different avenues to lead to happiness and success - but far too often fall short of achieving these goals.

A process, however, exists that can be used to change one's life and achieve what one desires. As promulgated in a popular, innovative and unconventional course called

"Creativity and Personal

Mastery" that is taught by Dr. Srikumar S. Rao at Columbia Business School, it identifies important points on how one can improve one's life tremendously through

defining personal ethics and goals and working to achieve them.

Many people hanker for a happy and successful life, and try different avenues to lead to happiness and success - but far too often fall short of achieving these goals.

A process, however, exists that can be used to change one's life and achieve what one desires. As promulgated in a popular, innovative and unconventional course called "Creativity and Personal Mastery" that is taught by Dr. Srikumar S. Rao at Columbia Business School, it identifies important points on how one can improve one's life tremendously through defining personal ethics and goals and working to achieve them.

This outstanding book focuses on personal development  but eschews the “established” methods for an unconventional and exhilarating new approach which might just be able to change your life for the better. If you are really serious about enjoying abundant success and fulfillment and are eager to enjoy your true potential, but have so far been unsuccessful at your attempts to learn to do so, and are open to trying something new  then this book is for you.

The only question is: Are You Ready to Do It?

A “mental model” is a notion we have of how the world works, of how things ought to be done or are done. People use mental models to explain why things happen. You use them to console yourself and tell you what you should do. Most of the time, you don't even know you are using them.

·Be open to positive changes in your life because you want them to take place.

·Pause whenever you encounter new ideas, ponder them, and explore their ramifications. Keep bringing them to mind at odd moments until you feel completely comfortable with them.

·Start a journal and make entries regularly and frequently.

·Be particularly aware of your emotional state; write it down and see how it changes over time as you continue to ponder the ideas and concepts presented.

·Recognize that this is merely a starting point. You are launching yourself onto a path of awareness and growth that will take years, decades; maybe the rest of your life.

The first step to take is of course to realize that change does matter, and not only to us as individuals but to everyone. Therefore it has to take place at not only one level.

1.              Individual attitudinal change. We will have to recognize that we do not function in isolation, that we have an impact on society and are, in turn, impacted by it. It's counterproductive to profit at the expense of others. Greed is bad for everyone.

2.              Organizational structural change. The world may have altered greatly in the last few years, but our institutions have remained terribly antiquated and unsuited to the present era, and are thus grossly inadequate.

3.              Societal value change. As long as material accumulation remains the index of success, we will have excess. We will amass things galore, but happiness will remain a stranger. Too many of our athletes, politicians and business leaders are poor role models, but we have spawned them through our idolatry.

Individual attitudinal transformation is to a certain extent under one's control and will take place as one develops. If one attains a position of great prominence and influence, one can begin to work to change society as well.

It Ain’t Real!

Your life is hemmed in by the things you know to be true that aren't. It's time to start setting yourself free.

The first block to personal mastery, and one of the biggest, is our unquestioned mental models, our fixed ideas of how the world works and how things should or shouldn't be done. We base them on perceptions and ideas, and use these models for everything, for better or for worse; our lives are jumbles of these models.

Some of these facets of your life, these mental models, are merely based on wrong perceptions and are not true at all. Maybe NONE of them are. Here's a thought - maybe YOUR LIFE IS NOT REAL at all, and never has been!

A breakthrough happens when you slip into a parallel universe that has always been available to you but which you never really looked for - an alternate reality that you will discover for yourself and which will allow you to see your situation in a more positive light.

Here are some pointers:

If you're totally unable to live in your alternate reality, it’s very likely that you've picked one that you cannot accept on any level. Remember that you can't fool yourself.

Write it down! Write down every scrap of evidence that supports it.

Don't complain and moan: Explicitly label each setback as a learning opportunity and list what you could have done to avoid it and what you will do in the future.

Don't immediately pick the most horrendously important thing bothering you right now. Start with something important to you, but not one of the big boulders in your life.

Try living in a reality where others recognize your caring nature and where they come to you for help with their problems.

Be gentle with yourself. If you're not having much luck, don't beat yourself over the head and make it one more way in which you can define yourself as a failure. Be patient!

It’s Mental Chatter, and It’s Real!

Your mental chatter is your constant companion. It's the monologue that is going on in your mind. It never ever leaves you and you can't even shake it loose. You build mental models out of your mental chatter.

And now that you know you can change your reality, what do you propose to do about it?

Here are some helpful hints you can consider:

·Observe your mental chatter dispassionately and record it.

·You may feel that you register only 10 percent of your thoughts. You're wrong. It's unlikely that you are aware of even 0.000001 percent of your thoughts. The good news is that even the most minimal level of awareness creates profound change.

·Don't beat yourself up when you note the negativity of your thinking.

·Some of your mental chatter may turn out to be with minimal emotional undertones. That's fine. Just note it.

·You may find that negative judgments tend to produce emotional downs, while thoughts of gratitude produce an elevation of spirits.

Awareness: The Only Tool You Will Ever Need The weeds in your life will wither when you expose them to the light of awareness. This tool gives you emotional control. It helps you become conscious of what you are permitting to grow inside you, for something amazing to happen afterwards.

The Witness: The Best Friend You Will Ever Have

As mentioned previously, you have to

dispassionately observe your mental chatter and categorize it. The “guy” that does this observation is the Witness.

A strange thing happens when you call your Witness up. You feel as if you are living life on two parallel tracks. You are doing things you normally do, yet are also watching yourself do the things you normally do.

The Witness is merely an observer. It doesn't condemn nor judge nor compliment. It lets you see things as normally as you see them. The Witness is the one that calmly exposes you, and your models, to yourself. You see with absolute clarity the many ways in which you frustrate yourself and act in selfdefeating ways. And you begin to learn to control what you let into your mind and influence you.

That is how you start straightening out your life. Pull back and call your Witness into action.

You Can Change the Universe!

Influencing the Universe is simple. It can be summed up in the Law of Increase: Whatever you are truly grateful for and appreciate will increase in your life.

Here are some important points to live by:

·There is much less work needed to get in sync with the Universe than you might think. Instead of frantically doing things to get what you want, you can try “calm being”. Be clear about what you want and relax  it'll come to you in time.

·Of course you can't abandon working for what you want wholesale, but you should learn to dovetail work with “calm being”.

·If you find it difficult to beam health, prosperity, and other good thoughts to your rivals at work or to irritating colleagues, pause to consider their lives. Imagine how terrible it must be to live like that.

·If you look sincerely for the miracles in your life, you will find them in droves and you will soon start producing them effortlessly.

·Don't talk about producing miracles or about trying to produce them with skeptical friends or relatives. Try it silently and let your own faith develop.

·Be patiently persistent. For some it may take a long time. That's okay  just as long as you keep your intent alive and strong.

·When you change, so does the Universe, and in conformity with your change. It cannot help but follow.

·So if you would like a job, you need to free your mind from thoughts based on desperate want and instead concentrate on being crystal clear about what you would like.

·If you’re seeking a significant other, you can stop the ceaseless search and instead concentrate on becoming the person with the

Personal Power is a month-long training program that covers many areas of personal development. You see this program advertised on late night television and many successful people offer testimonials supporting it. In this set of 30 tapes, Tony Robbins describes a variety of self-help techniques and provides exercises to help internalize the experience.

On the first tape, Robbins talks about the keys to personal power as the ability to make effective decisions and take consistent action. His ultimate success formula:

1.     Know your outcome (what you want).

2.     Get yourself to take action by deciding to do so.

3.     Notice what you are getting from your actions and change your approach if necessary.

Use role modeling to accelerate the pace of success. Seek out people who are already successful and find

out what the person is doing to be successful. Model what they are doing and you will get the same results.

Robbins includes practice exercises with each lesson. On this tape he asks listeners to write down two important decisions that they have been putting off and decide to take action on these decisions immediately.

Tape two of this volume is about the controlling forces of pain and pleasure. Robbins says that we will do far more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. To change ourselves, we must focus our attention on how not changing our behavior will be more painful than actually changing it. Also determine how changing will bring you more pleasure. Change what you link pain and pleasure to in order to help change your behavior. Use pain and pleasure instead of letting them use you.

The exercise for this lesson is to write down four actions that you know you should take and evaluate the pain that has kept you from taking these actions, along with the pleasure from not following through. The strategy then is to reverse the process by determining what it will cost you if you don't follow through along with the pleasure that you will get from taking action.

Here are the main concepts from the remaining tapes. They follow the same format with a discussion by Robbins along with a set of exercises to follow:

Neuro-Associative conditioning (NAC)- is a technique, developed by Tony Robbins, for conditioning yourself where you are aware of how your thoughts, feelings and actions directly affect your life. Everything that you think or do is a cause set in motion, and will have an effect or result in your life. These events begin to stack up and take your life in a particular direction. It's important to decide what is your ultimate destiny- what you want your life to be. Write down previous positive and negative NACÕs that have shaped your life.

The emotional state that you're in determines your behavior and performance. You are always responsible for your own states. Some of the ways to change your state include:

Using physiology- move your body differently (as if you are already successful). Use your voice to help put yourself into a peak state by projecting more enthusiasm. Practice changing your breathing patterns and facial expressions so that you have more control over your emotional state.

Exercises- practice going from dispassionate to passionate, determine the difference in how you moved and breathed, your facial expressions,

voice, etc. Robbins has participants practice speaking in a flat, dull tone, to projecting more excitement. Get leverage on yourself- list 10 reasons why you must change your behavior now and the reasons that you know that you can. Interrupt your present pattern of association- design four to five ways to get yourself out of the limiting beliefs or associations. Condition a new empowering association until it is consistent by feeling and thinking about it over and over until you have internalized it.

Change your state by controlling and directing your focus- since most of what is going on around us is being deleted or ignored, we must control what we are picturing in our minds, and how we are seeing it (dimension, brightness, etc). Control the questions you ask yourself- eliminate endless loop questions (such as: "why can't I get thin?") and replace them with empowering questions ("What is the healthiest food I could enjoy right now?").

Values- we want certain things or conditions in our life because of the pleasurable states we think they will give us (means values). Changing a value changes what the brain is paying attention to and how we respond to different situations.

Belief- a feeling of certainty about the meaning of something. Your beliefs determine whether or not you feel like you're meeting your values and they can either limit or liberate you.  Types of beliefs- global beliefs (generalizations such as: life is. people are) Rules (for me to feel successful, I must have___).  By being aware of your beliefs and changing some of your rules and global beliefs, you have much more control over your emotional state.

Exercises- look at what is most important in your life, along with your rules and values. List the negative emotions you would do almost anything to avoid. Find out what your rules are by writing down what has to happen for you to experience all of these emotional states. Begin to question your rules and determine which ones are limiting you so you can change them.

To change a belief, you must identify it, and link enough pain to it so your brain wants to move away from it. Link massive pleasure to the new belief, condition the new belief by rehearsing over and over how your life will be better with this new belief. Some sample core beliefs- the past does not equal the future. There is always a way- if you're committed.

Exercises- identify a belief that you want to change and think about the consequences in 5, 10 or 20 years if you don't change. Step back and realize that none of this has happened yet. Determine what new beliefs that you need to reverse the process. List areas of your life that are not what you want them to be and write down what additional beliefs you would need to live by in order to set goals and achieve them.

Power of Why. We must have a big enough "why" to succeed, enough compelling reasons to drive us forward to do whatever it takes to achieve our goals. Who you become in the process of achieving your goals is the real purpose.

Goal setting- list your goals and write down the time within you are committed to accomplishing them. Focus on specific goals that you can achieve in the next 1, 3, 5 or 10 years. Select the top 3 goals in each category and list the most compelling reasons to accomplish them. Be aware of the various types of goals, such as financial goals, personal development goals, family goals, career goals, etc. For each one, write down what action you could take right away to make initial progress. Do the rocking chair test to help you commit- see yourself as an old person who had or had not accomplished these goals.

Power of rituals- many positive or negative emotions we feel on a regular basis are the result of an internal ritual. Rituals are the habitual ways of looking at the world, talking to yourself, performing daily activities and moving your body.

Exercise- list your negative and positive emotions and what rituals (recipes) you have for creating these emotional states. Develop a pattern interrupt for the negative rituals and think of new rituals that you could develop that would be more empowering.

Anchoring- is setting up a trigger to help put yourself into a desired state. This could be something you say to yourself or the way you clap your hands together. This technique is an important part of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and is also used by many athletes to keep themselves in a peak state. Whenever you are in an intense emotional state, anything that happens around you consistently while you are in that state gets associated to it. Positive anchor- when you are at the peak of a desired state, do something over and over again until it is conditioned, such as touching your thumb and middle fingers together. Later you can use this anchor to help put you back into the peak emotional state.

Swish patters- get rid of negative emotions by picturing the negative scene, along with the ideal scene. See a slingshot firing the ideal scene and it gets bigger and bigger until it bursts through and destroys the negative scene. Another swish technique is to see the negative scene as getting

smaller and smaller and turning black & white. The desired scene becomes more vivid and colorful.

Condition yourself for wealth- money is a means to measure the value between people. One way to encourage more financial abundance is to change the negative associations that you have about money and see all of the positive things that you could do with it. Make abundance an absolute must- set a specific amount of money that represents financial abundance, and commit to a financial plan.

Figure out what you don't understand about money and investing, and get help. Develop a belief that who

you are is much bigger than anything that could ever happen to you financially. Robbins believes that financial abundance comes from doing what you love most, doing it massively, and making sure it creates tremendous value for other people.

References- people have many positive and negative references based on their life experiences. Take control of your references by defining what must happen for you to feel successful or a failure. Create new definitions that makes it easier to succeed and more difficult to fail. Eventually you will create enough positive references to develop more confidence in your daily activities.

Exercise- list five of your greatest successes and write a paragraph describing each one. Use these examples to remind yourself that you can always find a way.

Increasing health and energy- Use daily aerobic exercise and deep breathing exercises. Breathing controls the flow of lymph, stimulates the immune system and carries out the body's wastes. Eat at least 70% water rich foods (fruits & vegetables). 

Otherwise your body is not able to process the wastes and becomes clogged up.

Exercise- write down everything that has passed through your lips in the last 24 hours and the percentage of water rich foods. Decide on a diet that will help you achieve greater vitality.

Relationships- think of a relationship as a place to give rather than receive. Don't let arguments get out of control by using pattern interrupts. Look for ways (triggers) that show our love- some people need to be shown, others need to hear it or to be touched in a