Relax…It is not all your fault! Self-Improvement an internal and external approach by Michael Altshuler, The Results Coach™

Here’s a couple of questions that have burned inside of me for some time…“with so much great content out there and so many experts sharing solutions to the problems we all face, why is it when we know where the information is, or we have already read the information on how to change, why is it that we are not applying what we know? Everything we ever wanted to know about how to make our lives better exists out there in the world of Self-Improvement. Experts have provided us with many of the answers on a wide range of topics. The question remains…why don’t we apply what we have read and know to our lives?”

What I have discovered in pursuit of the answer is that there are many factors that hold people back from putting sound principles and strategies into their lives. They fall into two basic categories: internal and external challenges. Internal ones are naturally the ones that we deal with inside our heads and relationships that we have ability and responsibility to work on. (This is where we are at fault if we don’t change!) The second important challenge are the external tools that are available to us such as books, tapes, videos, etc. are they the most effective vehicles at helping us learn and apply important information that will help change our lives?

The majority of the internal challenges come inside our heads in the form of our comfort zones. We typically don’t go outside of what is comfortable. Going outside our comfort zone creates fear. Fear creates resistance and that’s what keeps us from changing. Picture a rubber band as one of your bad habits. Now, stretch the rubber band creating a lot of tension; this represents the tension you would feel as you move towards developing a new, empowering habit. This tension will constantly be pulling at you, trying to pull you back to your old bad habit. Now, what does the rubber band want to do when you let go? It wants to return to where it started (the old bad habit). That’s why it’s important to stay with a new and empowering habit for at least 21-30 days the time it takes to develop a new habit. This is the time it takes for that (rubber band/bad habit) to lose its elasticity and to help keep you on target with your new habit.

To show how this works, try this simple exercise. Clasp your hands with two fingers past the pinky and two between the thumb and forefinger. How does that feel: strange, uncomfortable, different, unnatural? Those are all the feelings that we have when we make any change. You feel like you want to go back to the old way. Right? You want to go back to what feels good. We have developed grooves or habits over time and it takes a considerable amount of effort to change those bad or self-limiting habits that are preventing us from having what we want in our lives.

So what can you do about the comfort zone? First you need to recognize and understand the comfort zone limitation. We have to acknowledge consciously that we are limiting our ability to have what we want. We need to look honestly and consciously at where we have been as well as where we need and want to go. We have to think and act differently in order to get different results. When we go to make changes, we are going to create fear. When we acknowledge that consciously and say… “Fear is not going to hold me back from what I want to become or achieve.” It’s at that point we can begin to make the changes we so greatly desire.

This brings us to Freud’s theory about pleasure and pain. Every action we take (or don’t take) is out of the need to avoid pain or gain pleasure. We work hard to avoid pain or to gain pleasure with pain being the greater of the two emotions and it’s important to know what we link pleasure and pain to. Everything has a payoff. If we are in a place that isn’t where we want to be, we have to get to a point where the pain of where we are is greater than the pain that we associate with changing. Take dieting as an example, when our current physical state becomes too painful, we diet. The problem is that we don’t take full advantage of the pleasure/pain principle and that’s why we fall off the wagon.

To understand how to make the pleasure and pain theory work for you, start by creating new neuro-associations. Do this by making new connections in your mind as to what you link pleasure and pain to. You need to add massive pain to your existing behavior in order to change it. If you smoke, you need to have three devastating pictures of what you will become if you do not change. In addition, you have to add concrete images of the pleasure that will come from making the change.

It is simple, but not easy. Associate pleasure to the new behavior and pain with the existing self-limiting behavior. Going back to our dieting example, when we lose a little weight, we revert back to our old, bad habits because the pain has lessoned, so we have to do is associate more pain with the old habit of over-eating and more pleasure with the new habit of eating right. We need to believe 100% that we will experience massive pain if we don’t change our ways. We need to see, feel, taste, smell… the pain. We need to believe and find incredible pleasure in the new behavior.

Great. That is the part of change that is our responsibility. What about the part that has not been under our control (the external challenges)? We have information available us to improve our lives in every possible aspect. We can address any challenge in our lives and we can create new opportunities. The external challenge we face comes in the form of the tools used to provide us with the roadmap and motivation to change, such as books, audiotapes, seminars and now e-learning. For the most part, people rely on books and audiotapes.

In a study done by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, they found that as adults, we retain about 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 50% of what we see and hear, and 90% of what we say and do. Books (10%) and audiotapes (20%) alone are not enough to provide us the tools to change.

Again, it takes 21 to 30 days of repetitious, and constant activity to develop a new behavior/habit. If we can only remember 10 to 20%, we are limited in what we can apply to our lives. What most of us need is to be able to pull out the essential key points of what we read and then find a way to see and hear or even better to say and do it.

Today we live not in an informational world; rather we live in an information overload world. Now ‘less is more’. We have so much coming at us and that means what comes to us in bite size chunks will be more easily embraced and remembered. One of my favorite quotes is ‘inch by inch anything is a cinch, yard by yard anything is hard’. Fortunately, today there are learning tools that present life-changing strategies, and ideas in bite-sized chunks, easy for us to digest, stay focused on, and most importantly, act upon.

So now when we ask ourselves why can’t we make the changes in our lives that will bring us the happiness and success that we want. The answer is we can, if we effectively address the internal and external challenges that confront us. You’ll need to take responsibility for the internal component. But, you can relax on the external part. There are now ways to get the condensed version of the important information you desire from the leading experts in the world; but remember, it’s up to you to take action on these time-tested, life-changing principles.

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About the Author:

Michael Altshuler is a leading expert in Sales and Personal Development. He was in the top 1% in his industry with personal and managed sales of 64 million dollars. Michael is also the creator of a revolutionary product called Mem-Cards(tm), which takes the best ideas, strategies and principles from leading personal and professional development books and puts them on cards. To learn about the best-selling titles and authors available on Mem-Cards(tm), please e-mail: info@mem-cards.com or call toll-free at 1-877-CARDS4U (1-877-227-3748).