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1.) Give way to the powers of gratitude, generosity, and happiness.
2.) Create a link between ‘love’ and ‘health.’
3.) Practice 5-sense Affirmations (TM).
4.) Let things go.
5.) Believe.Give way to the powers of gratitude, generosity, and happiness.
These are three of the most powerful healers in the entire world. When you feel grateful, your world accommodates new. When you act generously, the world gives back. When you’re happy, you infect others with your attitude and the world conspires to help you spread this feeling further.
As for happy — Pat Croce, in Lead or Get Off The Pot, taught me a trick that has proven useful in countless circumstances since — it’s super simple, and it’ll instantly make you happy.
Happiness Trick: Smile as big and goofy as you can for 60 seconds (preferably while staring in the mirror so you laugh at yourself.)
Create a link between ‘love’ and ‘health.’
We know that people who are in love live longer. We know that we are more likely to die in older age after we lose a spouse. Intrinsically, we understand that the human soul needs to be nourished by love. Extrinsically, we protect ourselves from others and avoid getting hurt — we create a layer that exists between us and others.
Break down this layer — allow yourself to get hurt — let others show their true colors, and stay true to your own. Most of the time, other people act in unkind ways as a measure of defense, rather than to cause harm. They feel threatened, so I’d suggest you remind yourself of this when others hurt you.
Seek out love, and create many strong relationships. You don’t have to be a very outgoing person to find people with whom you can form a strong bond. Take an interest in others, especially when they are different than you are. On the other hand, as you open yourself to others, you’ll find out that there are people all over the world just like you… and the possibilities of friendship will exponentially grow.
We desire to share our lives, to remember things together, to story-tell, and to share hardship. We find inspiration through example, happiness with laughter from others’ jokes, and calmness in another’s embrace.
Strangely, we don’t schedule time to spend with others as readily as we schedule time to work. Yet work is unnatural for the human body, unless of course you’re alternating sprinting and lifting all day.
Invest in love, and you’ll find your health improves. Long after any experience is the memory of the moment — find someone to share your life with, and then find someone with whom you can exponentially improve your health.
Practice 5-Sense Affirmations:
Your conscious thought process affects your subconscious mind, and vice versa. Since most people are programmed to think less of themselves than what’s possible, we need to reprogram your thought process. We are going to reprogram your subconscious mind with conscious thought linked with conscious feeling.
Instructions: Pick 3 things you’d like to be able to do. Write them down.
For example:
- Speak fluent Spanish
- Make an extra $10,000 per year
- Spend 50 minutes exercising per week
Next, write down your goal in this format:
- I’m proud and happy to be able to speak Spanish fluently.
- I’m proud and happy to be making an extra $10,000 per year.
- I’m proud of myself for exercising 50 minutes per week and happy I have my ideal body.
What we’ve done is associate emotional ‘trigger words’ that help us to ‘layer’ thought with speech. Thoughts create feelings, and speech is audible, so now we’re using 2 senses. Let’s take this a step further.
Now, imagine exactly where you are, when you will reach this goal (make it lofty), and everything you see around you. The next time you read these goals, you might think of something like this before you do:
There I am… standing in front of the ocean while I’m supposed to be at work, but my boss doesn’t care. I’ve been doing such a great job that he just gave me a $10,000 per year raise, but I think he got the better end of the deal. Ever since I got in great shape, I swear I work twice as fast… Man, I wish I had known it takes less than an hour a week to make an extra $10K per year, look great, and feel like I’m slacking off at work while doubling my productivity.
(then, your mind wanders and you start thinking about the breeze on your skin, the sound of the ocean, and the mist jumping up at you from the water….)
You return to where you were in your thought process, only this time in Spanish:
Que suerte que puedo hablar en Espanol ya! La verdad es que no pensaba que iba a tener la oportunidad de hablar un idioma nuevo en tan poco tiempo… Wow, solo fueron 30 dias, y mira donde estoy. Que sentimiento!
(English translation: What luck that I’m able to speak Spanish already! The truth is that I never thought I’d have the opportunity to speak another language in such a short period of time… Wow, it’s only been 30 days, and look where I am. What a feeling!)
Practicing affirmations this way, with 5-senses, is much more powerful. Your mind and body link — you start to chase this feeling in your surroundings, and you start to choose opportunities accordingly. Before you know it, your subconscious mind is working on your goals for you.
Practice 5-Sense Affirmations and reach every goal you set, but never be reasonable.
Let things go.
My father gave me this advice recently, just after his retirement:
“The longer I live the more I realize it’s not about what I can accomplish or do in life, it’s about what I can let go of…”
This echoed, and then it made sense. Think about it… if you can identify points of stress, then let them go and become proactive in a way that is healthy, you can accomplish so much more. You’ll be able to think in a clear-headed way, your body will have its optimal level of energy, and you’ll be confidant you did the best you could, no matter the end result.
Let the past go, learn, and move forward — aggressively.
Believe.
Repeated studies have shown that unless both the Physical Therapist and the patient both believe the patient is going to heal, s/he will not.
Crazy, right?
This is an important fact that clearly proves the necessity of working on belief system. Let’s discuss belief system outside of Physical Therapy.
Belief system is your reality, almost all the time. It affects:
- How you feel
- Who you are
- What you can accomplish
- What you can’t do
- What’s possible
- Who’s important in your life
- Your happiness
Belief system, or the way you think about things, is incredibly important. Perspective is everything. If you think that there are billions of people in the world, so how can you compete, you’re stuck; if you think that since there are billions of people in the world who are thinking the same self-defeating thing, so you can compete, you’ll be soaring.
If 1% of people in the US are millionaires, that either means that 99% are not or that 3 million people are… your choice.
If you think your life sucks, it will. If you think you’re fat, you’ll act accordingly.
You are not limited, except to your own beliefs. Somewhere along the line, someone in a position of authority made you think less of yourself, but that’s wrong. You may not have passed ‘their’ test, in ‘their way,’ but you are incredibly capable at your own skill-set, in your own way.
Every person has incredible potential — people make unusual comebacks all the time, and it’s hard to believe. Others fall victim to circumstance.
Identify all of your limiting belief systems and write them down. Now, talk your way out of them. Then, write down affirmations as if you’ve already accomplished everything that was holding you back. Finally, tell a story about it.
Here’s an example:
- Limiting Belief System #1: You can’t be wealthy and have a high quality of life.
- Limiting Belief System #2: You can’t be thin; your whole family is fat.
- Limiting Belief System #3: You can’t be attractive to the opposite sex.
Solutions:
- #1: Instead of focusing on trading time for money, think about only taking on opportunities where you get paid for your ideas. Now, they have value over time, instead of only during the moment you worked.
- #2: Abandon disbelief. Give yourself 30 days, and commit to taking before and afters. Then decide.
- #3: Create a new rule for talking to women — say something interesting and be yourself. Most importantly, learn to ask questions and listen.
Affirmations:
- I’m so proud of myself for figuring out how to offer my knowledge of health in book format, rather than always in-person. It really makes me happy that I’m able to reach more people, but also have more free time.
- I’m proud of myself for making my family happy by becoming the healthiest one of us and leading by example.
- I laugh every time I think back to when I was nervous around women. I used to spend so much of my energy trying to “use the perfect line,” when I really just needed to be able to hang out. Stoked.
Ok, let’s put it all together, and let’s reinforce the belief process. Be sure you believe this, with all that you can – close your eyes, focus, and tell yourself this story:
I gasped for air and nearly flung out of bed – glanced at my alarm clock while springing out of bed and onto my feet – 7:40am… I’m freaked out now — “Wasn’t I supposed to train Marty at 7 today?”
Hang on… I just realized that I stopped my early morning appointments 3 months ago… ever since I wrote that book, things in my life have been totally different. I’m exercising regularly, teaching my friends and family cool new moves I know, and I’m feeling fulfilled. I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that my family is really grateful for me helping them with ‘their’ health now… since they used to always try and help me.
You know what? It’s hard to be worried about losing weight when you constantly notice more people interested in you… I used to be so self-conscious, and exercising was really only about looks before…. but now I just ‘feel good,’ and I find myself smiling everywhere I go. Women walk up to me and want to say hello — it’s a lot easier when you can just hang out and be yourself.
