Face the sun

Face the sun

"When you face the sun," wrote Helen Keller, "the shadows always fall

behind you."

This was Helen Keller's poetic way of recommending optimistic

thinking. What you look at and what you face grows in your life. What

you ignore falls behind you. But if you turn and look only at the

shadows, they become your life.

When I was younger I remember hearing other kids tell a joke about

Helen Keller. "Have you heard about the Helen Keller doll?" they

would ask. "You wind it up and it bumps into things."

I've often thought about that joke, and why such a joke about someone

who was deaf and blind was funny. I think the answer lies in our

nervousness about other people overcoming huge misfortunes. (Perhaps

we laugh nervously because we haven't overcome our own small ones.)

In our own day and age, we are quick to consider ourselves victims. We

are all victims of some sort of emotional, social, gender, or racial abuse.

We enjoy taking what difficulties we have had in life and blowing them

up into huge injustices.

Helen Keller didn't complain about being from a dys-functional family,

or of being a woman, or of not being given enough money from the

government to compensate her for her handicaps. She had challenges

most of us can't even imagine, but she refused to become fascinated by

them and make her handicaps her life. She didn't want to focus on the

shadows when there was so much sun.

There is a bumper sticker that I see every so often as I'm driving around:

"Life is a bitch and then you die." I always wonder about that bumper

sticker because it seems illogical. If life is that bad, death should be

welcome. The sticker should say, "Life is a bitch, but the good news is

you die."

British author G.K. Chesterton used to say that pessimists (like the

person with that sticker on his car) don't stay anti-life very long when

you put a revolver to their heads. All of a sudden, they can think of a

million reasons to live. Those million reasons are always there, down

inside of us, waiting to be called up. Our pessimism is usually a false

front put on to get sympathy.

Another popular bumper sticker has been "Shit Happens." I happen to

consider that bumper sticker to be ironically optimistic. It's one of the

qualities of optimists that they are not surprised, overwhelmed, or

offended by trouble. They know that trouble comes, and they know

they can handle it.

Some people have been upset by the popularity of this slogan, and I've

seen them try to counter with the sticker, "Love Happens." Actually,

they have it wrong. Shit does happen. But love does not. Love doesn't

happen all by itself. Love is created.

In his stirring book Son Rise, Barry Neil Kaufman tells an astonishing

true story of how he and his wife healed their once-autistic son and

helped nurture him to a happy, extroverted life. Kaufman and his wife

made a conscious choice to see their son's disability as a great blessing

to them. It was just a choice, like choosing to face the sun instead of

facing your shadows. But as Kaufman says, "The way we choose to see

the world creates the world we see."

Turn your mother down

Turn your mother down

Psychologist and author M. Scott Peck observes, "To a child, his or her
parents represent the world. He assumes that the way his parents do
things is the way things are done."

In Dr. Martin Seligman's studies of optimism and pessimism, he found
out the same thing: We learn how to explain the world to ourselves from
our parents—and more specifically, our mothers.

"This tells us that young children listen to what their primary caretaker
(usually the mother) says about causes," writes Seligman, "and they
tend to make this style their own. If the child has an optimistic mother,
this is great, but it can be a disaster for the child if the child has a
pessimistic mother." Fortunately, Seligman's studies show that the
disaster need only be temporary—that optimism can be learned...at any
age.

But it is not self-motivating to blame Mom if you find yourself to be a
pessimist. What works better is self-creation: to produce a voice in your
head that's so confident and strong that your mother's voice gets edited
out, and your own voice becomes the only one you hear.

And as much as you want to eliminate the continuing influence of a
pessimistic adult from your childhood, remember that blaming someone
else never motivates you because it strengthens the belief that your life
is being shaped by people outside yourself. Love your mom (she learned
her pessimism from her mother)—and change yourself.

Get up a game

Get up a game

It is said that John F. Kennedy's father's credo was, "Don't get mad, get
even."
And that credo has a certain vengeful, clever wisdom in it as far as it
goes, but you might go even further with this credo: "Don't just get
even—get better."

When Michael Jordan was a sophomore in high school he was cut from
his high school basketball team. Michael Jordan was told by his coach
that he wasn't good enough to play high school basketball. It was a
crushing disappointment for a young boy whose heart was set on
making the team, but he used the incident—not to get mad, not to get
even, but to get better.

We all have those moments when people tell us, or insinuate to us, that
they don't think we measure up—that they don't believe in us. Some of
us have entire childhoods filled with that experience. The most common
reaction is anger and resentment. Sometimes it motivates us to "get
even" or to prove somebody wrong. But there's a better way to respond,
a way that is creative rather than reactive.

"How can I use this?" is the question that puts us on the road to
creativity. It transforms the anger into optimistic energy, so we can
grow beyond someone else's negative expectations.
Johnny Bench, a Hall of Fame baseball player, knew what it was like to
not be believed in.

"In the second grade," he said, "they asked us what we wanted to be. I
said I wanted to be a ballplayer and they laughed. In the eighth grade
they asked the same question, and I said a ballplayer, and they laughed a little more. By the
11th grade, no one was laughing."

Our country has gone through a difficult period of time since World
War II. We no longer value heroes and individual achievement as we
once did. "Competition" has become a bad word. But competition, if
confronted enthusiastically, can be the greatest self-motivating
experience in the world.
What some people fear in the idea of competition, I suppose, is that we
will become obsessed with succeeding at somebody else's expense. That
we'll take too much pleasure in defeating and therefore "being better"
than somebody else. Many times during conversations with my
children's teachers, I am told how the school has progressively removed
grades and awards from some activities "so that the kids don't feel they
have to compare themselves to each other." They are proud of how
they've softened their educational programs so that there's less stress
and competition. But what they are doing is not softening the
program—they are softening the children.

If you are interested in self-motivation, self-creation, and being the best
you can be, there is nothing better than competition. It teaches you the
valuable lesson that no matter how good you are, there is always
somebody better than you are. That's the lesson in humility you need,
the lesson those teachers are misguidedly trying to teach by removing
grades.

It teaches you that by trying to beat somebody else, you reach for more
inside of yourself. Trying to beat somebody else simply puts the "game"
back into life. If it's done optimistically, it gives energy to both
competitors. It teaches sportsmanship. And it gives you a benchmark for
measuring your own growth.

The poet William Butler Yeats used to be amused at how many
definitions people came up with for happiness. But happiness wasn't any
of the things people said it was, insisted Yeats.
"Happiness is just one thing," he said. "Growth. We are happy when we
are growing."

A good competitor will cause you to grow. He will stretch you beyond
your former skill level. If you want to get good at chess, play against
somebody better at chess than you are. In the movie Searching for
Bobby Fisher, we see the negative effects of resisting competition on a
young chess genius until he starts to use the competition to grow. Once
he stops taking it personally and seriously, the game itself becomes
energizing. Once he embraces the intriguing fun of competition, he gets
better and better as a player, and grows as a person.

I mentioned earlier that I'd heard a report on the radio that there was a
Little League organization somewhere in Pennsylvania that had decided
not to keep score in its games anymore because losing might damage the
players' self-esteem. They had it all wrong: Losing teaches kids to grow
in the face of defeat. It also teaches them that losing isn't the same as
dying, or being worthless. It's just the other side of winning. If we teach
children to fear competition because of the possibility of losing, then we
actually lower their self-esteem.

Compete wherever you can. But always compete in the spirit of fun,
knowing that finally surpassing someone else is far less important than
surpassing yourself.

If you're better at a game than I am, when I play against you and try to
beat you it's really not you I'm after. Who I'm really beating is the old
me. Because the old me couldn't beat you.

Play the circle game

Play the circle game

If you use my four-minute, four-circle, goal-setting system described
earlier you can be the creator of your universe.

"You know, that's blasphemous," a seminar student once told me during
a break. "Only God can create the universe."

"But if you believe that," I said, "you must also believe as it is written,
that we were all created in God's image. And if you believe in God as
the Creator, and that He created us in His image, then what are we
doing when we don't create? Whose image are we living in when we
deliberately do not create?"

Try this: After you wake up in the morning, wipe the sleep from your
eyes, sit down with a pad of paper, and draw four circles. These are
your own "planets." Label the first circle, "Lifelong Dream." (And in
order to keep this example simple, I'll make it strictly financial, although
you can do it with any kinds of goals you want.) Your lifelong dream
might be to save a half a million dollars for your retirement years. So,
put that number in your "Life" circle. Then look at circle two, the next
planet in your solar system. That circle you will label, "My Year." What
do you need to save in the next year in order to be on course to hit your
life savings goal? (When you factor in the interest, it's less than you
think.) And when you arrive at the figure, make certain that it matches
up mathematically with your first circle. In other words, if you save this
amount, and save, say 10 percent more each year that follows, will you
achieve your "Life" number? If not, do some more math until you get a
direct connection between your yearly savings projection and your
lifelong goal.

Now that you've got your first two circles filled with a number, move to
the third circle, "My Month." What would you have to save each month
to hit your year's goal? Then put that number down. Three circles are
now filled.
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Now go to the final circle, "My Day." What do you need to do
today—that if you repeated it every day—would ensure a successful
month?
(By the way, as I said, this doesn't have to just be about money, it can
be about physical fitness, learning a language, relationship networking,
spirituality, nutrition, or anything important to you.)
The power of this system lies in thinking of it as a universe, which, as
Wayne Dyer keeps reminding us, means "one song." When you work
the math, you cannot help but see that each circle, if done successfully,
guarantees the success of the next circle. If you hit your daily goal
every day, your monthly goal is automatically hit—in fact you don't
even have to worry about it. And if your monthly goal is reached, the
yearly goal has to happen. And if your yearly goals are hit, the lifelong
goal cannot not be reached.
When you study the irrefutable mathematical truth contained in this
system, a strange feeling comes over you. You realize that all four
circles are ultimately dependent on the success of just one circle: the
circle labeled, "My Day."

Then you get the strangely empowering sensation that you have just
proved on paper that your day and your life are the same thing. There is
no future other than the future you are working on today. Your future is
not stranded out there somewhere in space.

This is what the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke meant when he said,
"The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before
it happens."

Remember that once you have worked out the math for this, the circle
game is only a four-minute daily exercise. Many times in seminars I
give, participants will say that they are too busy for all this goal-setting
activity. They have lives to live! But I like to remind them of
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the words of Henry Ford who said, "If you do not think about the
future, you won't have one."

And I also like to stress that I am only talking about four minutes a day.
The purpose of making the circles mathematically sound is that you can
remove the elements of "faith" and "hoping" from your action plan. You
know your goals will be hit. Who would you want to bet on, the tennis
player who has faith that she's going to win or the one who knows she's
going to win?

By drawing these simple four circles you can create your universe
anywhere, anytime. Waiting in line at the bank, sitting in the doctor's
office, waiting for a meeting to begin, or just doodling. Each time you
do it, your universe gets closer to you. Each time you draw the circles
you are hit with this revelation: There is absolutely no difference
between succeeding today and having a successful life.

In The Magic of Believing, Claude Bristol recounts a particularly
absent-minded habit of his that, looking back, may have had a bigger
impact on shaping his universe than he ever realized. He said that
whether he was on the phone, or just sitting in moments of abstraction,
he would always have a pen or pencil out doodling.

"My doodling was in the form of dollar signs like these—$$$$$—on
every paper that came across my desk. The cardboard covers of all the
files that were placed before me daily were covered with these
markings; so were the covers of telephone directories, scratch pads, and
even the face of important correspondence."

Bristol's later studies on "mind stuff experiments," "the power of
suggestion," and "the art of mental pictures" caused him to conclude
that his lifelong habit of doodling dollar signs had had an enormous
impact on programming his mind to always be opportunistic and

enterprising when it came to money. The fortune he acquired demands
that we take his observations seriously.

Make somebody's day

Make somebody's day

To basketball coach John Wooden, making each day your masterpiece
was not just about selfish personal
achievement. In his autobiography, They Call Me Coach, he mentions
an element vital to creating each day.

"You cannot live a perfect day," he said, "without doing something for
someone who will never be able to repay you."
I agree with that. But there's a way to make sure you can't be
repaid—and that's doing something for someone who won't even know
who did it.

This gets into a theory I've had all my life, that you can create luck in
your life. Not from the idea that luck is needed for success, because it
isn't. But from the idea that luck can be a welcome addition to your life.
You can create luck for yourself by creating it for someone else. If you
know about someone who is hurting financially, and you arrange for a
few hundred dollars to arrive at their home, and they don't even know
who you are, then you've made them lucky. By making someone lucky,
something will then happen in your own life that also feels like pure
luck. (I can't explain why this happens, and I have no scientific basis for
it, so all I can say is try it a few times and see if you aren't as startled as
I have been at the results...it doesn't have to be money, either. We have
a lot of other things to give, always.)

When you get lucky, you'll get more motivated, because you feel like
the universe is more on your side. Experiment with this a little. Don't be
imprisoned by cynicism posing as rationality on this subject. See what
happens to you when you make other people get lucky.

Promise the moon

Promise the moon

One frightening and effective way to motivate yourself is to make an
unreasonable promise—to go to someone you care about, either
personally or professionally, and promise them something really big,
something that will take all the effort and creativity you've got to make
happen.

When President John Kennedy promised that America would put a man
on the moon, the power of that thrilling promise alone energized all of
NASA for the entire time it took to accomplish the amazing feat. In his
book about the Apollo 13 mission, Lost Moon, astronaut Jim Lovell
called Kennedy's original promise "outrageous." But it showed how
effective being outrageous could be.

In his book Passion, Profit, and Power, Marshall Sylver recalls seeing a
billboard in Las Vegas put up by one of the casino owners who wanted
to become a non-smoker. The billboard read: "If You See Me Smoking
in the Next 90 Days, I'll Pay You $100,000!" Can you see the power in
that promise?

A couple of years ago I promised my children that I would send them to
camp in Michigan. They had been to the camp near Traverse City before, and loved it. When you live
during the year in Arizona, there's something magical about the water
and emerald forests of northern Michigan. It was an expensive camp,
but when I made the promise I was doing well financially, and I was
confident that they could all go.
Then as the summer neared I'd run short of money and had to rearrange
my priorities. My speaking schedule had replaced much of the
commissioned selling I was doing and it looked like camp might not be
in the picture.

I remember specifically talking to my boy Bobby, who was 8 years old
at the time, about how times were temporarily hard and how camp
didn't look like a good possibility any more this year. He was in the
front seat of the car and I'll never forget for as long as I live the look on
his face. He said very softly, so softly that I could barely hear him, "but
you promised."

He was right. I didn't say I'd try, I didn't say it was a goal, I promised.
And the feelings I had at that moment were so overwhelming that I
finally said to him, "Yes, I did promise. And because you reminded me
that it was a promise, I will say to you right now that you're going to
camp. I'll do what it takes. I'm sorry that I forgot it was a promise."

The first thing I did was change jobs, and my first condition on
accepting my new job was that my bonus for signing was the exact
amount of money it took to send my children to camp. It was done.

Get your soul to talk

Get your soul to talk

We've always been a little nervous, culturally, about talking to
ourselves. We usually associate it with insanity. But it was Plato who
said that his definition of thinking was "the soul talking to itself."
If you really want to get your life worked out, there is no one better to
talk to than yourself. No other person has as much information about
your problems and no other person knows your skills and capabilities
better. And there's no one else who can do more for you than yourself.

A lot of people in the motivational and psychological professions
recommend affirmations. You choose a sentence to say, such as, "Every
day in every way I'm getting better and better," and repeat it whether or
not you think it's true. While affirmations are a good first step to
re-programming, I prefer conversations. Conversations work faster.

The two most inspirational guidelines to productive self-conversational
exercises are in Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism and Nathaniel
Branden's The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. Seligman offers ways to
dispute your own pessimism and create the habit of optimistic thinking.
Branden offers provocative sentence stems for you to complete.

Rather than brainlessly parroting "I'm getting better and better" to
myself, it makes a longer-lasting impression when I logically argue the
case and win. With enough back-and-forth conversation, I can prove to
myself that I am getting better. Proof beats the parrot every time. It's
one thing to try to hypnotize myself through repetition of words to
accept something as true, and it's quite another to convince myself that
it is true.

Branden suggests that we get our creative thinking going each morning
by asking ourselves two questions: 1) What's good in my life? and 2)
What is there still to be done?

Most people don't talk to themselves at all. They listen to the radio,
watch TV, gossip, and fill up on the words and thoughts of other people
all day long. But it's impossible to indulge in that kind of activity and
also get motivated. Motivation is something you talk yourself into.

Try to sell your home

Try to sell your home

Once when Steve Hardison and I were discussing a few of my old habits
that were holding me back from realizing my business goals, I blurted
out to him, "But why do I do those things? If I know they hold me back,
why do I continue to do them?"

"Because they are home to you," he said. "They feel like home. When
you do those things, you do them because that's what you're
comfortable doing, and so you make yourself right at home doing them.
And as they say, there's no place like home."
"Home" can be an ugly place if it's not kept up and consciously made
beautiful. "Home" can be a dark, damp prison, smelling of bad habits
and laziness. But we still don't want to leave it, no matter how bad it
gets, because we think we are safe there.

However, when we inspect the worn-out house more closely, we can
see that the safety we think we're experiencing is pure self-limitation.
It's very hard to leave home—many of us try and fail many times. Noel
Paul Stookey wrote a hauntingly beautiful song called "The House
Song," which captures this feeling. The opening words are, "This house
goes on sale every Wednesday morning...and is taken off the market in
the afternoon."

After grasping Hardison's metaphor of home, I immediately saw that I
needed to move out of my house. I needed to move up in the
neighborhood. I needed a better home. A home that contained habits
that would keep me focused on goal-oriented activity. Hardison helped
coach me in that direction until the new activities began to feel like
where I should have been living all along.

Hardison's metaphor of "home" as the equivalent of old disempowering
habits has stayed with me for a long time. Recently while I was putting
together a tape of motivational music to play in my car, I included the
energetic "I'm Going Home" by Alvin Lee and Ten Years After. As I
drove around listening to it turned up all the way, I thought about what
Hardison taught. I let the song be about the new home I would always
be in the process of moving to.

Don't be afraid to leave the psychic home you're in. Get excited about
building a larger, newer, happier home in your mind, and then go live
there.

In Colin Wilson's brilliant but little-known, out-of-print novel Necessary
Doubt, he created Gustav Neumann, a fascinating character who made
many discoveries about human beings. At one point Neumann says, "I
came to realize that people build themselves personalities as they build
houses—to protect themselves from the world. They become its
prisoners. And most people are in such a hurry to hide inside their four
walls that they build the house too quickly."

Identify the habits that keep you trapped. Identify what you have
decided is your final personality and accept that it might be a hasty
construction built only to keep you safe from risk and growth. Once
you've done that, you can leave. You can get the blueprints out and
create the home you really want.

Bring on a good coach

Bring on a good coach

After a rare disappointing round on the golf course, Tiger Woods will
often take a golf lesson.
When I first heard about this, I asked myself, who could give Tiger
Woods a lesson in golf?

But that was before I ever really understood the value of coaching. The
person who taught me that value was a young business consultant
named Steve Hardison. Hardison taught me this: Tiger takes a lesson not
because his coach is a better player who can give advice and tips, but
because his coach can stand back from Tiger Woods and see him
objectively.
Steve Hardison had created an art form of coming into corporations and
seeing things objectively. In fact, his perception ran deeper than that.
He had near-psychic power to "see what was missing." It was a gift he

could also apply to individuals, but only if they were ready for the rigors
of his coaching.
I used to teasingly call one of his illustrative personal stories "The
Parable of the Mission." As a young missionary for his church in
England, Hardison broke all records for enrolling congregants. He
contrasted his own method with that of the other missionaries.
While the others would rush out and knock on doors all day, Hardison
would spend the first part of each day planning and plotting his
activities. By creating his day before it happened, he was able to
combine visits, economize on travel time, and increase the number of
enrollment conversations in a given day. He also used his creative
planning time to set up intra-neighborhood referrals for himself so that
many of his visits came with a reference.
The other missionaries were very active, but they were focused on the
activity, not the result. They were in the business of knocking on doors
and scurrying about—Steve was in the business of enrolling people into
the church. The records he set for enrollment were no accident. He
planned things that way.

Steve helped me understand something that lives inside of all of us,
something he called "the voice." When you wake up in the morning, the
voice is there right away, telling you that you are too tired to get up or
too sick to go to work. During a sales meeting when you are just about
to say something bold to a client, the voice might tell you to cool it.
"Hold back." "Be careful."
"The trick is," said Steve, "to not ignore or deny the existence of the
voice. Because it's there, in all of us. No one is free of the voice.
However, you don't have to obey the voice. You can talk back to the
voice. And when you really get good, you can even talk trash to the
voice.

Make fun of it. Ridicule it. Point out how stupid it is. And once you get
into that way of debating your own doubts, you start to take back
control of your life."
Many times I'd be in the middle of a large business project and ask to
meet with Steve for an hour. After he listened for a few minutes, he
would almost invariably see right away what was "missing" in my
behavior. Like a great golf teacher watching Tiger Woods' backswing,
he would say, "Are you willing to accept some coaching on this?" And I
would eagerly say yes. Then he would tell me truthfully, sometimes
ruthlessly, what he saw. I didn't always like what he saw, but I always
grew stronger from talking about it.

Hardison's coaching was so jolting that sometimes it reminded me of an
incident that happened to me when I was a boy playing Little League
baseball.
I had injured my knee in a play at third base and when the game was
over the knee was swollen and my entire leg was stiff. As I sat on the
bench with my leg straight out in front of me, a doctor whose son was
on our team was kneeling down by my leg as my father looked on.
"I'd like you to bend your leg now," he said to me as his hands gently
held my swollen knee.
"I can't," I told him.
"You can't?" he asked, looking up at me. "Why can't you?"
"Because I tried, and it really hurts."
The doctor looked at me for a second, and then said simply but gently,
"Then hurt yourself."
I was startled by his request. Hurt myself? On purpose? But then,
without saying anything, I slowly bent my leg. Yes, there was
tremendous pain, but that didn't matter. I was still mesmerized by his
request.

The doctor massaged my knee with his fingers and nodded to my father
that everything would be okay. I'd have to have x-rays and the usual
precautionary exam, but he saw nothing seriously wrong for now.
But I was still aware that something very big had just happened to me.
After a boyhood that was characterized by avoiding pain and discomfort
of any kind, all of a sudden I saw that I could hurt myself if I needed to,
and that I could do it calmly without batting an eye. Perhaps I wasn't
the coward I'd always thought I was. Perhaps there was as much
courage in me as in anyone else, and it was all a matter of being willing
to call on it.

It was a defining incident in my life, and it was not dissimilar to the way
Steve Hardison, as a coach, has required that I call on things inside me
that I didn't know I had.
One time I was having a hard time enrolling people into seminars and
doing my prospecting calls on the phone. Steve grabbed the phone and
started calling people and signing them up. Then he accidentally dialed
a wrong number and reached some mechanic at a car repair garage.
Most people would have apologized at that point and hung up and
dialed again. But rather than waste the call, Steve introduced himself
and then stayed on the phone—until the mechanic had signed up for a
seminar.
Hardison is a gifted and courageous public speaker, a resourceful and
relentless salesperson, a talented athlete and a committed family man
and church member. The kind of guy who used to make me sick!
I could write an entire book about Steve Hardison's remarkable work in
coaching and consulting, and someday I just might. Examples of ways
that he coached me to higher levels of performance are plentiful. But I
think

the greatest thing he has taught me is the value of coaching itself.
Once you open yourself up to being coached, you begin to receive the
same advantages enjoyed by great actors and athletes everywhere.
When you open yourself up to coaching, you don't become
weaker—you grow stronger. You become more responsible for
changing yourself.

In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck writes, "The problem of
distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this
life is one of the greatest problems of human existence...we must
possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual
self-examination."

The best coaches show us how to examine ourselves. It takes courage to
ask for coaching, but the rewards can be great. The best moments come
when your coach helps you do something you have previously been
afraid to do. When Hardison would recommend that I do something I
was afraid to do I'd say, "I don't know if I could do that."

"So don't be you," he would say. "If you can't do that, then be someone
else. Be someone who could do it. Be DeNiro, be Bruce Lee, be
anybody, I don't care, as long as you do it."
Coaching's contribution to my life is illustrated in these words by French
philosopher Guillaume Apollinaire:
" 'Come to the edge,' he said.
They said, 'We are afraid.'
'Come to the edge,' he said.
They came.
He pushed them.
And they flew."

You can get coaching anytime. If coaching is appropriate for your golf
or tennis game, it is even more appropriate for the game of life. Ask
someone to be honest with you and coach you for a while. Let them
check your "swing." Let them tell you what they see. It's a courageous
thing to do, and it will always lead to more self-motivation and growth.

Swim laps underwater

Swim laps underwater

When Bobby Fisher prepared for his world championship chess match
with Boris Spassky, he prepared by swimming laps underwater every
day.

He knew that as the chess matches wore on into the late hours, the
player with the most oxygen going to his brain would have the mental
advantage. So he built his chess game by building his lungs.

When he defeated Spassky, many were surprised by his astonishing wit
and mental staying power, especially late in the matches when both
players should've been weary and burned out. What kept Bobby Fisher
alert wasn't caffeine or amphetamines—it was his breathing.

General George Patton once gave a lecture to his troops on brainpower.
He, too, knew the connection between breathing and thinking.
"In war, as in peace, a man needs all the brains he can get," said Patton.
"Nobody ever had too many brains. Brains come from oxygen. Oxygen
comes from the lungs where the air goes when we breathe. The oxygen
in the air gets into the blood and travels to the brain. Any fool can
double the size of his lungs."

I learned about Patton's passion for teaching his troops deep breathing
from Porter Williamson. I had once written a few political radio and
television commercials that caught Mr. Williamson's attention, so he
called me and asked me to lunch one day. Because he had identified
himself as the author of Patton's Principles, I eagerly accepted his
invitation, having coincidentally read the marvelous book a few weeks
earlier. Williamson had served in the army for many years as Patton's
most trusted legal adviser.

Williamson told me many stories about serving with Patton, and how
truly extraordinary a motivator the general was. Most of the Patton
quotes in this book come from Williamson's own memories of his
service with the great general. Williamson told me about how he himself
had lost his leg to bone cancer, and how the doctors had erroneously
forecasted his death twice. His inner strength, he said, often came from
the inspiration he received in his days of serving with Patton.
"Frequently, General Patton would stop at my desk," recalled
Williamson, "and ask, 'How long you

been sitting at that desk? Get up and get out of here! Your brain stops
working after you sit in a swivel chair for 20 minutes. Keep the body
moving around so the juices will run to the right places. It'll be good for
the brain! If you sit in that chair too long all of your brainpower will be
in your shoes. You cannot keep your mind active when your body is
inactive.' "

That one principle—an active mind cannot exist in an inactive
body—became Bobby Fisher's secret weapon in winning the world
championship of chess. Who would have guessed that swimming
underwater would make you a better chess player? Certainly not the
overweight, worn-out chess "genius" Boris Spassky.

Sometimes, all you need is the air that you breathe to motivate yourself.
Going for a run or a walk or simply deep breathing gives the brain the
fuel it feeds on to be newly refreshed and creative.

Paint your masterpiece today

Paint your masterpiece today

Think of your day as a blank artist's canvas.
If you go through your day passively accepting whatever other people
and circumstances splatter on your canvas, you will more than likely see
a mess where art could be.

If the mess troubles your sleep, your next new day will begin in a state
of fatigue and mild confusion. From such a state, your canvas will be
splattered all the more with shapes you don't like and colors you never
chose.

Thinking of your day as a painter's canvas will allow you to be more
conscious of what is happening to you when you flood your mind with
nothing but Internet gossip, commercials on the radio, the latest murder
trial, your spouse's criticisms, office politics, and pessimistic musical
lyrics.
If you'll allow yourself to step back far enough to realize and truly see
that your daily canvas is filling up with all these negative things, a
certain freedom occurs. It's the freedom to choose something better.

The more conscious we are of our freedom to paint whatever we want
on our canvas, the less we go through life as a victim of circumstances.
Many of us aren't even aware of our own victim status. We read
whatever's on the coffee table, listen to whatever's on the car radio, eat
whatever's handy, scan whatever's on the Internet, talk to whomever
calls us on the phone, and watch whatever's on the television—often
too passive to even click the remote control.

We must be aware that we have it in us to change all that. We can paint
our day our way. The best time management—or "day-painting"
—course I ever took was taught by Dennis Deaton. His seminar's main
point is that we can't manage time—we can only manage ourselves.
"Clear the clutter from your mind," Deaton says, "and remove the
obstacles to greater success."

While most time management courses feel like courses in engineering,
Deaton has captured the spirit of the artist in his teaching. His
prescriptions for managing your day all stem from goal-creation and
living the visions you create.

Wake up and visualize your day as a blank canvas. Ask yourself,
"Who's the artist today? Blind circumstance, or me? If I choose to be
the artist, how do I want to paint my day?"

Upgrade your old habits

Upgrade your old habits

Super motivation is much more difficult to achieve when we are held
back mentally by bad habits. Trying to move toward the life we want
while dragging along our bad habits was described in the Scottish rock
group Del Amitri's song lyrics, "It's like driving with the brakes on, it's
like swimming with your boots on..."

But here's the catch: Bad habits simply cannot be broken. Nor can they
be gotten rid of. Ask the millions who continue to try. They always end
up, in the words of Richard Brautigan, "trying to shovel mercury with a
pitchfork," because our bad habits exist for good reasons. They're there
to do something for us, even if that something ends up being
self-destructive. Down deep, even a bad habit is trying to make us
operate better.

People who smoke are trying, even through their addiction, to do
something beneficial—perhaps to breathe deeply and relax. Such
breathing is needed to balance stress, so their smoking is a way in which
they are trying to make themselves better. Bad habits are

like that—they are based on a perceived benefit. That's why they're so
hard to just "get rid of."
That's why habits must be respected and understood before they can be
transformed. What created the habit must be built upon, not killed. We
must go to the beneficial impulse that drives the habit, and then expand
on that to make the habit grow from something bad into something
good.
Let's take drinking as an example. I've known people who used to be
drunk all the time who are now sober all the time. How did they do it?
Couldn't we just say that they just got rid of their drinking habit? Not
really. Because, without exception, the recovered people I know
replaced their drinking with something else.
Taking all of one's courage, relaxation, and spirituality from a bottle of
alcohol is a very damaging habit. But to simply eliminate it leads to
even worse problems: shakes, DTs, fear, dread, paranoia. A total void.
People who join Alcoholics Anonymous, however, replace their "false
courage"—once found in a bottle of alcohol—with real courage found
in the meeting rooms of AA. The completely artificial sense of
spirituality formerly found in a tumbler of spirits is replaced by the true
and deeply personal spirituality found in working the 12-step program
of enlightenment.

The superficial but highly emotional relationships the
alcoholic had made in his favorite bars are replaced by real friendships.
Replacement is powerful because it works, and where bad habits are
concerned it's the only thing that works. I've known people who quit
smoking without intending to. They took up running, or some form of
regular aerobic exercise, and soon the breathing and relaxation they
were getting from the exercise made the smoking feel bad to their bodies.
 They quit smoking because they had introduced a replacement.

People who diet have the same experience. It isn't staying away from
fattening food that works—it's introducing a regular diet of delicious,
healthy food that works. It's replacement.

Subconsciously you don't think your bad habits are bad! And that's
because they're filling a perceived need. So the way to strengthen
yourself is to identify the need and honor it. Honor the need by
replacing the current habit with one that is healthier and more
effective. Replace one habit, and soon you'll be motivated to replace
another.