You ARE what you THINK
“You’ve got to BE before you can DO, and DO before you can HAVE.” – Zig Ziglar
It is said that 70% of multi million lottery winners will go bankrupt. Somehow, they got all those millions, and within a few years, will throw it all away.
Why?
The most common answer is that their identity did not change. They got this massive windfall that assumes an identity that knows how to guard those riches, and spends them prudently. But since they never had to develop an identity that was able to earn it, or never grew up in an environment that trained them to have all this money and be responsible to keep it, their subconscious made them spend it until things were back to the normal of “Just Over Broke”.
Understanding how to change your ‘Identity’ into one that creates success in anything you do, is the big dream that has tempted so many people in both the Self Help and the more professional field of Clinical Psychology. ‘Change your thinking’ they say, ‘and you will change what you do, and if you think and do the right things, you will increase the likelihood that you will acquire the good things that you want.’
In other words: BE * DO (over time) = HAVE
Of course not everybody agrees with this thought. They don’t like the thought that their own actions will determine what they get in life. Those who disagree often suffer from a victim mentality, where everything that happens is always caused by something or someone else.
So who is right?
Am I fully responsible for what I ‘HAVE’ in life?
Can we agree that the following formula is true?
‘Event times Response = Outcome’
or ‘E * R = O’.
An event happens, such as you are walking on the edge of the road, and an automobile is speeding towards you. If your response is to jump out of the way in time, the outcome is probably that you escape unharmed, are upset but grateful, and live to tell the tale. You did not control that this car was speeding towards you. You controlled the response; therefore, the outcome is only partially your doing.
However, any event is usually the outcome of a previous ‘Event times Response’ (let’s call this ‘Ep’ for ‘Previous Event’), and therefore the ‘event’ part is partially caused by you as well. In our example, the fact that you decided to walk on the shoulder of a dangerous road was your choice as well. So in our formula ‘E * R = O’ we can replace the ‘E’ with ‘Ep * Rp’ (Previous Event times Previous Response) giving us a formula that would look like Ep * Rp * R = O’. Now we can replace the Ep again with an even earlier Event times Response and you get it, the true outside ‘Event’ factor becomes smaller and smaller as there are more and more ‘Responses’ in this formula.
So maybe in the end, your ‘outcome’, that is where you are now in life, is for 80 or even 90 percent caused by your own actions, and only 10 to 20 percent by true outside events. Some ‘Self Help’ Guru’s will even state that you are 100% the cause of your own situation, and they might say things as ‘The Law of Attraction is that you attract 100% of what happens in your life by your own wants and actions’.
Some claim that due to the ‘Law of Attraction’ you are 100% responsible for everything that happens in your life
That is however an unethical statement, because if every Human being is 100% responsible for everything that happens to them, then the Jews would be 100% responsible for their own Holocaust. No, sometimes Evil, or just Bad Luck happens to people. And sometimes good fortune. Being born in America in an upper middle class family is a much better draw of fortune than being born the son or daughter of a North Korean laborer.
But let’s agree that at least 80% of your current situation, if not 90%, is ultimately the results of your own past actions and therefore thoughts. That is significant enough to determine what thoughts and actions make people successful, and what make them live below their potential wouldn’t you think?
And by the way, even although you might only be mostly responsible for your current situation, most people will agree that you are 100% RESPONSIBLE for your own Thoughts and Actions[1].
You are 100% RESPONSIBLE for your own Thoughts and Actions.
Therefore, exploring how to improve your own thoughts and actions is a good thing. In fact, it is something that you ought to do, as without that, you will live below your God given potential, and not doing anything to get better in what you do, is also a choice. Burying your Talents in the earth, to give it back to your Maker un-used is not a good choice for your life; especially not if you then went through life complaining that others have it so much better than you.
Success Habits
Accepting that we need to change our thought patterns into a success identity, so that we consistently perform actions that make us successful raises the question: What is a ‘success identity’?
What is it that makes some people take the right opportunities to move forward, while others seem to try hard but never make any progress?
This has actually been researched over and over, and although most self-help methods seem to focus on one ‘method that fixes everything’ (like using Yoga, or focusing on having great dreams with big Goals) the real answer isn’t simplistic, but certainly not too complicated either.
Let’s start with the one thing every self help strategy has in common:
AWARENESS -> PERSISTENT ACTIONS -> SUCCESS HABITS
Awareness of the shortcomings in thinking, followed by persistent actions to address the shortcomings, will ultimately develop success habits. For instance, once you become truly aware that you have become seriously overweight, and that this is mainly due to a heavy consumption of sugary products combined with a sedentary life style, you can now take ACTIONS (ban the sugar and take a personal trainer for regular exercise) which you have to PERSIST in – stick to the diet and exercise basically, until you have create a SUCCESS HABIT in this part of your life, better known as ‘I changed my lifestyle’.
We see this over and over. Once you realize that your lack of success in sales is mainly due to a lack of consistent follow up, you must start to consistently plan (and execute) your follow up activities, and there you go, sales starts to increase. Ultimately this consistent follow up becomes a systematic routine that you don’t even think about anymore. It has become a success habit.
So simple right? Yet so hard to do in practice. The formula of ‘Awareness -> Persistent Actions -> Success Habits’ makes it already clear where in practice will fall short.
You don’t know what you don’t know
Let’s start with the ‘Awareness’ part. If you don’t know what you don’t know, there is no way that you ever will even try to take the persistent actions needed to create success habits. For example, let’s say that you are always tired. Tired ‘to the bone’ so that your performance in almost everything is suffering. Yet until your doctor tells you that you have sleep-apnea, you will never fix it.
If you never learned that a relation needs constant work and attention, you will be surprised when the relation turns sour, and you will forever wonder what happened. Why did those wonderful feelings from the start slowly fade? Because you let it happen, without knowing that you did. Did the other person in the relation also let it happen? Most likely, but you are responsible for your own thoughts and actions, and the other person would probably have responded favorably to your directed energy at building the relationship. At least before it all turned sour. Becoming aware of pitfalls or what needs fixing is the start of every improvement.
You self-sabotage when you reach your deserve level.
Then there is the ‘Persistent Action’ part. Have you ever started a diet, and within a few days or week you were off the diet without ever reaching your goal? Taking Action was one thing, being persistent in it was an entirely other thing. Here is the bad news, you have a built in thermostat: A belief that tells you how much you can expect from and for yourself in a certain area of life. To put it in different words: you will work at something until your subconscious self decides that you have reached what you should reach.
This is a hard thing to accept. Let’s give an example to show how hard that is. If I believe that most people cannot be trusted, then I will work only so hard to surround myself with people that I can trust. In other words, I will look for non trust factors in the people I work with, and then decide that I cannot trust them and therefore give up trusting them. I will probably take measures that broadcast ‘I keep an eye on you’ to these people, and as a result I will now reinforce my thinking that people cannot be trusted. But I do not realize, that it was my deserve level, my amount of ‘I will be surrounded by trustworthy people’ that was the basis for me not taking the persistent action to find the truly trustworthy people.
See how difficult it is? For example in this case, successful people are absolutely aware that there are people that cannot be trusted. Yet since they believe that there are trustworthy people out there that belong to their team, they will keep giving people trust, albeit in a careful way, until they have their team of trustworthy people. Yes, they will also have lost some non trustworthy people, but for some reason they seem to attract trustworthy people faster. They showed trust by giving trust. They have decided that they deserve trustworthy people around them.
To put it simple: If you deserve a beach body, you won’t stop until you have a beach body.
One thing is very important here. Almost everybody in the western culture would like to have a beach body. It is not that we don’t want it. Only those that have decided that they deserve it will take the effort to have it.
So let’s summarize: Awareness doesn’t have much to do with Deserve levels (except for the fact that people with a higher deserve level will put much more effort in gaining knowledge to find out what is holding them back), but the ‘Persistent Action’ part has everything to do with Deserve level.
Knowledge of how to change and improve.
And of course, in everything we do, the knowledge on how to exactly do something is the great lever that allows for creating results faster. You can go to a gym, and do the same routine every day. But if you work with a trainer that constantly changes your routine, you will have much faster results.
That brings us to the first big conclusion:
- We need to know what makes us successful, or what stops us from being successful in the areas of life – the awareness
- We need to know what the best way is to take action to address it.
- We need a deserve level that is big enough to persist until we hit the level of success that we want.
It is not a linear, one dimensional problem.
Now let’s look at the facts. Some people have a wonderful marriage, but are always struggling to make ends meet. Other people have lots of material wealth, but burn through their relationships. Many Hollywood and Rock stars are great examples of the latter. In other words, you can clearly be successful in one thing, but not in another area of life.
This is exactly where so many self-help methodologies fall short. They will try to use one principle to become successful in every area of life. “You have to take full ownership of everything you do”, or “Get calm and at peace inside first”, “you must believe more that you deserve…” Not to even mention the ‘happiness in pill form’ or the great escape into materialistic shopping to fill the inside emptiness and lack of success in other areas.
That is not to say that these solutions are not working to some extent. But the real thing is that they do not provide the knowledge of understanding the different dimensions of thinking. They ignore the make up of your character. Or ignore the environment you are living in. Or ignore the simple fact that your body will influence your mind and vice versa.
What they also ignore is that some thought patterns are easier to change than others. It is for instance easier to change behavior by learning a new skill, than changing behavior by changing somebody’s values and view of life. Think about the years of therapy that it can take to help somebody overcome a damaged identity caused by being abused as a child.
The good news is that there is a model out there that addresses this multi dimensional problem. It is the Triple8 model for ‘Self’ that was developed to present a systematic approach to the ‘Awareness’-> ‘Persistent Action’ -> ‘Success Habit’ concept.
If you want to know more about this Triple8 model for ‘Self’ (developing the ‘BE’ side of the BE * DO = HAVE) equation, there are multiple videos and whitepapers about this topic on the http://midatlanticstrategicservices.com/ website
[1] Of course, most of our thoughts, and many of our actions are not done in a very conscious well thought through way, and might be the result of past experiences and upraising. Despite that, most people agree that you need to take responsibility for your own thoughts, and therefore actions.