Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life (12 page)

Write down your innermost fears and insecurities. This will help you make the connections between what you fear and what you live
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Look at your present circumstances, and list some of your current problems. Really ruminate on them. Take a deep inventory of your life. For example:

Did someone leave you?

Did your kids rebel against you?

Did your boss fire you?

Did your coworkers reject you?

These questions are just a few obvious ones about how we manifest deep primal fears. Your fear doesn’t have to be about your
deepest insecurities. The overall point is for you to look at how you create your reality, from the big to the small. Take my friend whose dog needed the expensive surgery, and it crushed his finances. I’m sure that his dog’s illness wasn’t one of his biggest fears—at least until it happened. But had he been more conscientious and responsible with pet insurance, he could have avoided taking that massive financial hit
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WHAT IN YOUR LIFE IS NOT WORKING FOR YOU?

List all the things that are currently out of whack in your life. I have listed a few more random examples in the event that you still aren’t getting it—even though I am pretty sure you are
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Did you get hurt in your exercise class?

Did you have a fight with your spouse?

Did you bounce a check?

Did you wreck your car?

Look at what you’re doing to contribute to those scenarios. How could your behavior be creating your existing problems?

Now I want you to break down all the interactions you have or don’t have with people on a daily basis, and examine how you approach every situation, person, place, or thing that intimidates, upsets, overwhelms, or scares you
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Do you get defensive?

Do you get cocky and arrogant?

Do you reject the rejecter?

Do you become overly controlling and determined to overcome the problem at hand?

Do you become anxious, impulsive, or flustered?

Do you do things to distract yourself that end up causing chaos (like rescuing several dogs when you are momentarily homeless)?

Do you rebel and cause more damage out of spite (like binge-eating to get back at your parents for not loving you unconditionally)?

Do you numb out and neglect necessary day-to-day responsibilities, like getting car insurance or pet insurance, or making doctors’ appointments?

Follow me? Recognize your part in creating the problems that keep sabotaging you. Remember how I recognized that my freak-outs were making it impossible for my business partner to keep me up to date about things (which is what I needed him to do to prevent me from freaking out). You are the only person who can end your own crazy cycles of self-destruction. Recognize them for what they are; take this time to pinpoint as many of yours as you can
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JUST STOP!

Once you have identified your contributions to the self-defeating patterns in your life, you have to stop them and implement replacement behaviors.

As soon as you see yourself starting to fall back into an old behavior, STOP. Take a step back or a deep breath—whatever you need to do to slow yourself down and become conscious of what you are doing. Before you act, put yourself through a little consciousness exercise. Think about your goal, and how the behavior you’re about to engage in will help or delay its achievement. How can you adjust your behavior and your attitude to better serve you?

If you know that when you feel lonely, you become insanely needy and pester your friends until they want to lose your phone number, then think of something you can do to counteract that
loneliness before it sabotages your relationships. Go for a jog to get your endorphins pumping, so you feel strong and capable. Pick up a hobby or project that you are passionate about, and lose yourself in it for a couple of hours. Consider adopting a pet (but not when you are out of house and home).

IT’S A REACH

When you are feeling vulnerable and fearing rejection, rather than rejecting the other person or situation and shutting down, try reaching out instead. If a guy flakes out on you for a date, don’t play games and not return his call for two days. That only breeds more game playing, which gets the two of you nowhere. Instead tell him that you really like him, but it hurt your feelings when he canceled, and it felt disrespectful. If he can’t respect that and change his ways, then you know he is not a person for you to be dating, and you can move on. Most likely he’ll apologize and tell you that he likes you as well and didn’t realize it hurt your feelings, and that in the future he will make efforts to keep his plans with you.

It’s scary to expose our feelings and open ourselves up, so it will take time to adopt these new behaviors. But you will realize that it’s the only way to build true intimacy and a fulfilled, enriched life. And even if you are rejected, you’ll survive it with the knowledge that you cleaned up your side of the street and did the right thing.

SWAP IT OUT

Maybe you’re the kind of person who, when anxious, obsesses and reacts impulsively in ways that only add fuel to the fire. If so, then think of something you can do in response to anxiety so you don’t make matters worse. Take a bubble bath, go for a half-hour massage on your lunch hour, try journaling, or do something comforting and gentle. But you must counteract the anxiety so that you can stop your problematic self-destructive behavior in its tracks.
You could do what my editor does—go kick and punch someone—but only in a contained environment, and only if you’re sparring. Take a kickboxing class or study martial arts. Not only will it help you feel empowered and strong, but it will also help you “kick” that anxiety to the curb.

In Step Three, which is all about action, we’ll get into things you can do to stay on track in a lot more detail. But I want you to start seeing now how all the advice I’m giving is tied together; I’ve crafted the plan so that you can rely on every part of it to help you get out of your own way and create the life you deserve.

ROLE CALL

Another way we limit ourselves is by boxing ourselves into roles we think we’re supposed to be playing. We are all the main character in the movie or novel of our lives, whether we like to admit it or not. At some point we assign ourselves a role based on the patterns we have been playing out since childhood: we’re the victim, we’re the martyr, the hero, the dumb pretty one, the smart ugly one, the nice guy who never gets the girl, blah blah blah. You know what I’m talking about.

Well, it’s time to throw those roles out the window. They’re nothing more than constructs that our imagination created from other people’s issues and that we internalized in childhood. Although they seem real in your head, they are NOT REALITY, and they limit our lives in unforgiving ways.

Your self-confidence comes largely from your self-image. And your self-image and your role in the world dictate what you expect of yourself and for yourself. If you have a negative story, then you automatically assume a negative future.

Your experiences and memories define your self-image. If you had a critical parent who was always driving you toward
perfection because inside he or she felt imperfect, you might have internalized their insecurities, so that you think you are never good enough. You approach your life believing that nothing you do will ever be up to par. This self-image begets more experiences of inadequacy, in a vicious cycle that continues in perpetuity. So here we are back with the self-fulfilling prophecies again. You achieve what you believe. There is no variation on this truth. If you embrace limiting stories, you will play out the same scenario for the rest of your life—
until
you wake up and say enough is enough.

It is the prison of your mind that causes your suffering, not the dead-end job or the loveless relationship—those are merely symptoms of your character’s story.

It’s not easy to change the way you see yourself. If you grew up experiencing loss, failure, or rejection, or believing that you’re lazy, or a loser, or whatever—it’s hard to break those beliefs because you don’t have any other frame of reference. But I swear to you, whatever limiting ideas you have about yourself are not true. At some early point you took on this story, for whatever reason, and it repeated itself because you believed it to be true.

There’s an anecdote I came across in a self-help book years ago that I have never forgotten, and it really underlines what I’m talking about:

A father and his young son are at the circus. The son sees a huge elephant shackled with flimsy, rusted chains. Turning to his dad, he asks, “Isn’t that elephant strong enough to break free from those chains?”

“Of course he is,” his dad answers. “It’s just that he’s been chained like that since he was too small and weak to break free, and now he doesn’t know the difference.”

I hate to say it, but buddy, you are the elephant in this story.

You CAN leave the job you hate. You CAN leave the alcoholic spouse. You CAN go back to school. Want to know what’s holding you back? Absolutely nothing but you!

WORKING IT OUT:
BREAKING FREE OF LIMITATIONS

Here are a couple more questions to help you break free from the limitations you may be placing on yourself without even realizing it:

WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

What is your role in your own life story, and how is it imprisoning you and holding you back? Are you fat because you think you’re lazy? Are you poor because you think you’re a loser? Are you staying in a dead-end job because you think it’s too late to change careers? Are you alone because you think you’re not special enough to find someone to love you? I have to stop before I scream, “Not true!” But you get the idea. Write down all the ways in which your self-definitions keep you from the life you want
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IS IT A TRUE STORY?

Is there any truth whatsoever to your story? Think long and hard about it. Are you physically incapable of walking out the door and filing for divorce? If you’re staying for the sake of the children, consider this: kids know when they are in an unhappy home. Ultimately, it may be better for them if you remove yourself from a bad marriage
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Are you really too lazy to start an exercise regime and lose weight? That’s doubtful. Are you really too much of a loser to earn money? Probably not. Are you
really
too old to go on job interviews or go back to school? Um, not unless you are like 103. Are you some kind of freak that no one on earth could ever love? NO!!

These are just examples. Whatever your self-imposed limitations may be, now is the time to identify them so you can kiss them goodbye. You need to tell a new story, preferably one where you are living a passionate, meaningful life, full of love and vintage muscle cars
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And don’t go telling me it’s complicated, because it’s not; it’s simple. All it requires are a few new ideas and a few courageous steps to put your life back on track. Will it be easy? Hell, no! That is a false promise I won’t make you. But it’s
totally
possible and utterly worth it. Seeing the fallacies that are at the root of your negative self-image is the only way to free yourself to live your higher calling
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