Chapter Sample #4 (Self-Help)
   —  by Bob Olson, Ghostwriter

INTRODUCTION

You Are Courageous

Congratulations. The first thing I do with my coaching clients, and therefore want to do with you, is acknowledge your courage for taking the first step toward a new empowering future. By simply buying this book, you have already indicated strength of character that is common among successful people.

Buying this book indicates that you are willing to make changes in your life. That is courageous because most people resist change. Most people like life to remain predictable. Change spawns fear. So anyone who picks up a book like this, or calls a life coach for assistance, has immense courage—the courage to take a hard look at their life with the intention of making changes that will generate a lifestyle of increased success.

You Are Successful

I also want to remind you that you are already a successful person. You have accomplished a level of success in your life that deserves praise and celebration. It is important that you acknowledge your current and past successes to recall that feeling of success, that feeling of self-empowerment. The work we will be doing together will have you creating such successful experiences more steadily and with more predictability.

Instead of having a good day or a bad day in a random and haphazard fashion, and allowing each day to be externally determined by the stock market or mood of your boss, I am going to teach you how to generate a lifestyle where you can begin taking charge of each day and creating successful experiences regularly.

Whether you realize it or not, you are a talented, intelligent and hard-working person with certain qualities and characteristics that you have already used to generate success. If you are like most people, however, these qualities and characteristics have led you to success rather randomly. Everyone likes to believe they had some role in creating the successes in their life; but the truth is, while we may have aimed our intentions at success, we have erratically stumbled upon most of our achievements.

Formulas, Strategies & Universal Principles

What this book offers you is a more formulaic approach to success. I am going to share with you formulas, strategies and universal principles that go one step further than making success less random; they make success a lifestyle. By actively using these principles in your daily life, you elevate yourself from an identity-based success to a higher “cause” of success. Your daily actions will deliberately lead you to that which you want to have, do and be in life.

This is not another book that will focus on the theories or philosophies about your life. We are going to examine what is really happening in your life. There is a lot of research today on how children are trained to live a “scheduled” life. Kids are constantly on the go, from the classroom to after-school programs to soccer practice to violin practice. Kids are constantly scheduled. And, as adults, we frequently manage our lives the same way, with a lot of busyness but not a lot of productivity.

What we are going to be working on throughout this book is actually shifting those habits, having you be less busy in life and more productive. Our work together will be focused on aligning your actions, conversations and beliefs with who you say you are in the world and with those things you want to produce and create in your life.

Stamina Required

While it takes courage to consider such changes, it also takes stamina to follow through with making these changes in your life. One of my concerns for presenting this material in book form is that some people won’t have the stamina to follow through and actually do the work required without a coach present to hold them accountable. You need to do the work. All I can do is share with you these formulas, strategies and universal principles that can literally change your life so that you can generate a lifestyle of ongoing success. You, however, actually have to implement them.

Some of the work will be fun. You will enjoy the exercises that shed new light on your current behavior, helping you understand why your life may not be the way you want it to be. On the other hand, some of the work may give you the experience of feeling bad about yourself, feeling remorse or regret, like “Gee, I wish I had been doing these things with my life; look at all the time I have wasted.” These are feelings that I hear frequently. If you notice yourself having that experience, just let yourself have it. Work through those feelings. This is your life that we are talking about; it is understandable that you may feel some sadness or regret about years of “quiet desperation,” that state of mind to which Henry David Thorough so eloquently referred in his book, Walden.

No Blaming Or Feeling Blamed

A potential pitfall for people who do this work, however, would be to feel blamed or to blame others for your past behavior. We are not concerned with the past in this work other than to bring light to what has not worked so we can change it.

One of the things we are going to talk about is responsibility. In our culture, during the 1980s and 1990s particularly, we became heavily steeped in victimology; there was a lot of victim talk. Why would anyone want to take responsibility for what is happening in their life when there are so many other people or places to point the blame? You can blame your current life situation on the government, the economy, your parents, your boss, the stock market; the list is almost indefinite. There are a lot of things that you can find fault with in life, but blame is a self-defeating addiction.

By taking responsibility for your life, you gain the power to change it. When you make excuses or blame others for your life circumstances, you take that power away. In order to create the life that you desire, you need to begin accepting that you are the only person in control of your destiny.

Automatic Responses That Resist New, Helpful, Information

As mentioned above, humans don’t like change. That is another way of saying that we like our world to be predictable. One of the behaviors that ensues from our desire for predictability is an automatic response to link anything new with something that is familiar to us. So we often relate to new things that come before us with automatic responses such as, “I already know that,” or “Oh yea, I’ve heard that before.” It is less often our ego that triggers this response and more often our need for predictability in life.

Unfortunately, when we allow ourselves to automatically believe that we already know information that is being taught to us, we close our minds off to learning anything from that new information. I can only assume that you bought this book to learn something new that will assist you in altering your life for increased success. If this is true, then it is critical that you shut down your defense to new ideas so that your automatic response of “I already know that” is idle.

I once attended a business seminar where one of the attendees got up in the middle and walked out. He told the business consultant who gave the seminar that he already knew all the information being taught. A year later, the same man who walked out of the seminar hired the business consultant to help with his failing business. It was a classic case where the seminar attendee recognized familiar information and automatically assumed he already knew everything the business consultant would be teaching. If he had stayed beyond the first half of the seminar, he would have discovered the most brilliant ideas, techniques and secrets the consultant shared with us that day.

On the other hand, some people resist anything that is new and have an automatic response to block it out—not because they have heard it before; but rather, because it is unfamiliar to them. This is an automatic response that will literally delete new words or phrases in the text from your vision while you are reading. Resisting new words and information by ignoring them in this way will defeat your ability to transform your life. I have taken the utmost care in choosing the most appropriate words to use in teaching this material. But if you simply skip over words you don’t recognize or understand, you cheat yourself from the lessons they teach.

At the same time, I may use some familiar words, such as “responsibility” or “discipline,” which may trigger automatic responses that cause you to cringe from overuse or abuse of that word in your past. Be aware of such responses and feelings that you might have to words, and be open to replacing such words with new empowering meanings and associations. I try to avoid certain words as much as possible for this very reason, but sometimes a word is still the best word for the job despite having been so mishandled in our culture

Instead of falling victim to the automatic responses you have to new information, old information and mishandled words, replace each automatic response with a new one that asks, “What is this telling me that I don’t already know or have not yet tried in my life?” Coaches call this being “coachable”: you don’t resist the material, you don’t diminish the material, you don’t relate to it like you already know the material; you actually relate to it like it is new, useful, information.

If someone is coachable, it means they are willing to “play.” The formulas, strategies and universal principles in this book are to be used on the playing field of your life—not kept on the sidelines, but actually put into practice. The only way this is going to happen is if you accept what I share with you in this book as material that you don’t know or have not yet tried in your life.

Finally, it is also essential that you actually implement the assignments recommended in this book. Reading this book alone will not help you generate a lifestyle of increased and ongoing success. Opening your mind to the material and then doing what it suggests truly can, and will, make that happen.

Ontology: Stop Asking “Why?”

One concept to intellectually distinguish before we begin is that we are going to examine your life from a perspective called “ontology.” The entire conversation within these pages is taking place in the context of what’s called “ontological work.” As opposed to other sciences—including psychology, theology, or any variation of philosophy—ontology does not ask questions for which there are infinite answers, such as the question “Why?”

We are acculturated toward wanting to know “Why?” Why do I get mad in this circumstance? Why do I procrastinate? Why do I spend time doing these things that I don’t want to be doing? “Why?” is the question of our culture and it is unproductive.

The questions we will be asking that come from ontology are more How and What questions. How am I managing myself such that this result is getting produced? What am I doing that has led to this result in my life? What structures do I have in place, and what structures do I not have in place, such that my life looks like this? These are the questions of ontological work, as opposed to the Why questions that our culture has taught us to ask.

We can ask Why and make up reasons forever. It is a never-ending pattern that locks us into an infinite, circular, guessing game where the answers too often place the responsibility for our lives outside of ourselves, thereby prescribing no behavior to create change. The drawback with asking Why is that the answer usually leaves us powerless to change our current reality. Why questions keep us inactive. Ontology, on the other hand, places responsibility for our current reality on us, thereby empowering us to take action that will result in the changes we seek.

Psychological Illnesses & Disorders

I do think that Why questions serve a purpose when there is a need for psychological healing. If you start with How and What questions before psychological wounds are healed, ontology is usually less effective. Why questions that are used to understand your psychological wellness—to understand why you think the way you think, why you react the way you react to things, or why you have certain triggered responses—is immensely valuable and can help someone get psychologically well when they are not.

For instance, if someone suffers with chronic depression or an addiction, their mental condition does, in fact, take their power away. The cause of their current reality really is external—the chronic depression or addiction is affecting their thoughts and behavior—and they need to heal from that illness or disorder before they can best benefit from the principles in this book that require control of one’s thoughts and behavior.

This does not mean that someone who is challenged with a psychological illness or disorder cannot improve their life using the formulas, strategies and universal principles in this book. It simply means that it may be more difficult to implement these steps with any degree of disciplined practice. While such a person might not be ready to actually put these ideas into practice, they can begin a “change process”—that being distinguished from a “transformation process.” And this change process can help to create a lifestyle that is better aligned for success.

Yet when someone who is psychologically well spends their time and energy wondering or pursuing Why, that disempowering process serves to keep them stuck in a circular pattern of infinite possibilities. I have seen skilled and competent people lose years of their lives in the endless pursuit of why.

That fact is there are going to be things that happen in our lives that are outside our control: an accidental injury, an illness, the death of a loved one, a delayed flight or flat tire that causes us to miss an important appointment, or a hurricane that demolishes our home. We have the choice to give those events meaning and move on, or contemplate for the rest of our lives asking Why these things happened to us. It really is that simple. But too often we forget we have the power to make that choice. Habitually, yet unconsciously, we stall our lives seeking answers that don’t exist.

Other People’s Behavior

Some of us also become fixed on asking Why other people behave the way they do. My friend is dating a woman whom he sees as emotionally unavailable because she does not communicate her love the same way he does. He would like her be more communicative and reassuring of her love for him. He feels her reserved expression of love inhibits their intimacy and the depth of their relationship. Unfortunately, as long as he continues to focus on her behavior to deepen their relationship, and wonder why she can’t be different, he will likely not have a different experience.

What my friend could do is ask himself what it is about him—what is it that he is doing, saying, being—that is keeping this dynamic going? When we focus on how we can change, rather than how we can get other people to change, it gives us new power and options to achieve new results. Changing the focus to what we are doing or not doing to cause our current reality makes us conscious of our ability to generate different choices, and therefore, different outcomes.

Creating A New You: Transformation Process vs. Change Process

The context for this book is not about changing your behavior; it is not about going from “radically disorganized” to “a little bit disorganized” to “on the verge of organized” to “organized” to “highly organized and effective.” This book is not about that process since that is a “change process.” A change process suggests that we want to improve upon something we are currently doing that needs improvement.

This is where most people falter in creating the life they want to live. They continue doing the same things that brought them to their current reality, with only a few changes. Success does not work this way. We cannot keep doing the same things and expecting a different result.

Instead, what we are going to cover in this book involves a “transformation process.” A transformation process is about creating a new way of being, totally reinventing you. You want to recreate yourself by actually stepping forth into a new clearing of unknown territory and reinventing yourself as someone you don’t currently know yourself to be.

What becomes possible when you relate to yourself anew is a transformation, so that who you have been up until this point—your thoughts, feelings and behavior for managing your life—becomes unknown to you. A phrase that comes to mind is, “I am unrecognizable to myself from the person I was a month ago, a year ago or a decade ago.” Transformation is about reinventing yourself, and there are fairly simple actions one can take to make this transformation from who you are into who you want to be.

This doesn’t happen by practicing to be a little bit better. Using psychology, you get a little bit better by improving over time. Using ontology, you transform by going from “X way of being” to “Y way of being.” You actually become a different being. This is not necessarily an overnight process; this isn’t about time. Still, who you will know yourself to be will become completely unrecognizable from the past, so much so that you will no longer reference the past as if you forgot the way you used to be in the day-to-day living of your life (until someone reminds you).

Does it sound scary? Does it bring feelings of fear into your being? Of course it does because it involves change. But there is nothing to be fearful about. These transformational changes are not mind-altering changes that affect you like amnesia. You don’t forget the past. You simply do not reference the past in a way that prescribes your behavior. This is a lifestyle transplant, not a brain transplant. The transformation comes from your rebirth, not your death.

The point to it all is that you want to be more like the you who generates success and less like the you who stumbles and stalls unconsciously through life. The transformation process you are about to learn teaches you how to create a new lifestyle that leads you to ongoing success in your life. People who have successfully overcome problems of obesity, for instance, finally learned that obtaining and maintaining a healthy weight does not come from dieting, it comes from creating a lifestyle of proper exercise and nutrition. Again, we are not talking about a personality change. We are talking about a lifestyle transformation. The personality simply grows into the new lifestyle.