Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life (32 page)

USING YOUR BRAIN:
THE TECHNIQUE

What proactive steps can you take to keep your impulses under control? Simple: change
where
you think. Literally. Certain parts of your brain are prone to instinct and impulsivity, while other parts are prone to reason and contemplation.

The amygdala is the part of your brain that’s wired for quick emotional processing based on your body’s immediate needs. Its job is to make the quick fight-or-flight decisions required in survival situations. It tells you to run when you see a bear in the woods, then actually gives you the boost to take off running.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is your frontal lobe, dedicated to reasoning and contemplation. It is emotion-neutral, and its main purpose is problem-solving. This part of our brains allowed the cavemen to develop the tools that eventually moved them out of the cave and toward a more agrarian lifestyle.

Now, here’s where we often go wrong: we choose the wrong part of our brain for the wrong task. Suppose your boss tells you at five
P.M
. that he wants your report on his desk by morning. You get pissed at your boss, tell him to shove it, and get fired. Thank
you, amygdala. Your frontal lobe would have taken a breath, gone into your boss’s office after things had cooled down, reasoned with him, and come up with a viable solution. Maybe you’d have worked out an extension till midafternoon, or possibly you’d have gotten another coworker with you on the job.

On the same note, suppose you saw a bear in the woods and stopped to think about it. Chances are you’d become bear dinner before ever arriving at a conclusion about what to do. So you see, both parts of the brain have a specific and necessary purpose. Success is a matter of knowing what part of your brain to use when, and, most important, how to control which part of the brain you are using.

I’m going to make this really easy: in most situations, you’ll want to use your frontal lobe. Unless you are in
immediate life-threatening danger
, you should always be using the more rational, contemplative part of your brain to process and react to the world around you. The amygdala is often the first to respond, just on instinct, but you can reroute the action to the more reasoncentric frontal lobe.

Believe it or not, you achieve this by arguing with yourself and your emotions.

Let me explain. Active strategies such as classifying, debating, deliberating, and delaying get the frontal lobe engaged, thus changing the center of activity in the brain from impulse central to rational city, which is where we want to be.

Here’s the step-by-step:

1. You’re overwhelmed with emotion, and your first instinct is to lash out and do something rash and dramatic. The second you feel this way, STOP! Literally stop everything you are doing and stand still in your tracks.

2. Take five deep breaths. Deep breathing helps release stress and calms the mind. Yogis say that you can’t hold any tension in the body when you’re moving through a breath.

3. Now, carefully contemplate and ruminate on the possible results of your decisions and actions,
before
you actually commit to
them. This will allow you to move from a “go” state, where you are impulsive and reactionary, to a “know” state, where you are able to take a long-term view and act in your ultimate best interest.

All of life’s answers and solutions may not come to you in one enlightened moment of meditative contemplation. But you can be certain that if you take that enlightened moment, you won’t end up doing massive damage by making a rash decision, like telling your boss where to stick it or bingeing on Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at one A.M.

BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE

Effective emotion regulation is vital for healthy life management and adaptation to the changes and curveballs that
will
come our way. I can promise you, shit is going to happen. Hence the bumper sticker. No matter what you do to try to take control, you can’t control Life. What you
can
control is how you handle it.

In fact, many of life’s hardships and struggles happen for good reasons. The key is to find that often-elusive silver lining. And that, in a nutshell, is the best way to manage negative emotions. This silver lining approach to life actually has a fancy scientific title. It’s called cognitive reappraisal. It’s a coping strategy that involves monitoring and evaluating negative thoughts and replacing them with more positive thoughts and images. When we reframe painful or frightening events with a positive meaning, we decrease their negative emotional impact (stress, depression, sadness, etc.). According to this theory, it is how we think about, or “appraise,” the meaning of our experiences that gives rise to our emotions, good and bad.

This may sound very similar to logotherapy, which we discussed in
Chapter 7
. That’s because it is. But there’s one major difference. In logotherapy, you create a purpose for a catastrophic event as a means of grief management. There’s no silver lining. In cognitive reappraisal, you emphasize the positive aspects of
an event and deemphasize the negative. This much broader technique applies to nearly everything in your life, because nearly everything has pros and cons. In other words, you’re looking for the blessing in disguise.

This business parable that someone once shared with me perfectly illustrates my point. Two men enter into business together as partners in a shoe company. One of the men goes to Africa to expand his horizons. Upon arriving there, he realizes that none of the natives wear shoes. He is utterly beside himself, and sends word to his partner: “Just arrived in Africa. No one wears shoes here.” The next day, as he is packing his bags to head home, he receives a telegram from his partner: “That’s WONDERFUL! An entire country of people who need our product, and we are the first on the scene. We are going to be rich!”

Now, you could have looked at this situation from either perspective. But which one is going to get you where you want to go? You know it before I write it here. I guarantee that if you always look for the positive, things will work out more positively.

Here’s another example, one that I had a hand in. On
Losing It
I worked with a dad named Mark Vivio who had fallen upon very hard times, physically, financially, and emotionally. It all started when a bridge he had built to connect two parts of his property collapsed. When the bridge went down, Mark went down with it, and subsequently he tore the ACL in his knee. His family rushed him to the hospital, where they discovered in the course of prepping him for knee surgery that he had a life-threatening heart condition that would require multiple surgeries. By the time I met him, he’d had thirteen. The surgeries left Mark unable to work, which forced him to close his roofing business.

All of this in one year!

Mark was devastated when I met him. The collapse of the bridge, which he referred to as “the downfall of man,” seemed symbolic of his life falling into irreversible ruin. His depression was debilitating to him and was tearing his family apart.

This is where cognitive reappraisal comes in handy. How
can we frame this series of events so as to take something positive from it? Well, if Mark hadn’t built the bridge, it wouldn’t have collapsed. If it hadn’t collapsed, he wouldn’t have injured his knee. But if he’d never injured his knee, he would never have discovered his heart condition and most likely would have died within the year.

Does undergoing multiple heart surgeries suck? Totally. Does being incapacitated suck? Completely. Does losing your business and not being able to support your family suck eggs? Unbelievably. It’s fair to say, however, that had the bridge never collapsed, Mark probably wouldn’t be alive. So no matter how awful his woes, widowing your wife and leaving four kids without a dad is way worse.

Ultimately, Mark was able to realize that he had been given a second chance. And that motivated him to reclaim his health, which will keep him around for years to come. Although Mark’s roofing business had supported everyone, he never really loved the work. Finding himself at a crossroads, he reinvented himself to pursue a career as a state trooper, something he’d wanted since being a kid.

He could have let all those sad events crush him. He could have thrown in the towel and lived out the rest of his life in quiet desperation. Instead he brought meaning to these hardships and allowed them to catapult his life to new levels of happiness and health.

CRUSHED OR AWAKENED?

On
Losing It
, I met a woman whose husband of thirty years had cheated on her, and they had divorced. She was lost, confused, mortified. In truth, she had outgrown the marriage years before his infidelity. They weren’t in love anymore, but they cared for each other and stayed together for the sake of the kids and because “that’s just what you do.”

When I met her, about two years after they finally divorced, she was still reeling from the upheaval. I began teaching her the techniques of cognitive reappraisal by getting her to think of positive possibilities to her newfound “freedom.” How could she use this painful event to help catalyze a new beginning for herself?

What about the marriage had left her unfulfilled? I asked. Why did she settle in her personal relationships? What kind of person did she want to spend the rest of her life with? How good would it feel to be in love again? How often in the marriage had she put everyone else’s needs in front of her own? How could she take this opportunity to start prioritizing her own well-being? Well, she did renew her lease on life, and now she’s happily dating the man of her dreams. Had her husband never cheated on her, she never would have found a man who brings her true happiness.

One last one …

A friend of mind got laid off from his office job. He was devastated. He panicked. How would he make money? Who was he without his job? What would people think? But eventually, when he calmed down and thought things through, he realized he’d hated his job, and maybe this was the universe’s way of telling him not to waste any more time just surviving when he could be thriving. He’d always loved sports and wanted to work in fitness. He applied for student loans, got a part-time job as a trainer, and went back to school to become a physical therapist. And now he has a very successful and fulfilling practice in Manhattan.

We will all face challenging circumstances from time to time. But the way we think about and process these situations can increase or decrease the suffering we experience and can determine what we make of the hand that’s dealt us.

Always
look for the deeper meaning. I promise you that even the most trying hardships hold beautiful lessons, and we can always be better and stronger in the long run, no matter what may knock us down momentarily. The key is to be brave enough to stay open, look for the lesson, and do the hard work of self-exploration that leads from breakdown to breakthrough.

———

Once you have reassigned the emotional associations of your life’s struggles from negative to positive, it’s time to take the next step, putting it all together and creating the life you want. In this next chapter you’ll learn how to move from awareness to transformation. Now that you’ve stopped your self-sabotaging behaviors, you need to follow up with strong decisions and productive actions. Let’s get to it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MAKE IT HAPPEN

The Art of Conscious Choice-Making

O
kay, this is the last chapter in our travels together and perhaps the most powerful action step. It will require you to utilize all the previous lessons this book has taught you synergistically, to piece the passages of music together and play the entire song. You’ll need the passion that you cultivated in Step One because your dream will be driving your choices. Then you’ll need to muster the awareness and self-esteem that you established in Step Two in order to bring consciousness and faith to the process. And finally you’ll need the same methodical discipline that you have been practicing throughout Step Three.

We’ve talked a lot about specific ways you can move toward the life of your dreams. But ultimately your future is determined by your choices—it’s that simple. Creating your own future is within your capability and grasp. You are already doing it, for better or worse.

We are all, right now, living the life we are choosing.

So if you’re unhappy, it’s because you’re making the wrong choices.

I’m not talking about one momentous
choice
that either catapults you to success or plunges you into failure, ruin, and regret. I’m
talking about
choices
—plural. The ones you make daily, hourly, from moment to moment, the ones that you haven’t mindfully planned out. You might think that once you’ve organized your daily routine and environment, life will run smoothly and efficiently along the tracks, just as you want it to. But there’s more to it.

We make hundreds if not thousands of choices every day that dramatically affect the direction and expression of our lives, from whether to brush our teeth in the morning, to what health insurance to buy, to how we speak to our coworkers, friends, and family, to what we eat for dinner. More often than not, the unconscious decisions end up wreaking havoc.

A bad choice that’s made consciously can be acknowledged, learned from, and then tweaked to bring a better future outcome. But a bad choice that’s made unconsciously goes unfixed and often leaves you feeling defeated, powerless, and victimized. Bad choices are insidious because once you become a victim in your own mind, you give up responsibility and control. But you need that control to make your dreams a reality.

A contestant on
The Biggest Loser
went through all the right motions to get on the show. Once on the show, he was totally focused on hitting his targeted weekly weight-loss goals so he could stay on campus and continue getting healthy. I meticulously planned out his goal pyramid with him so he would know exactly what actions to take to make his dream of weight loss, health, and possibly winning the contest a reality.