Our mind is like an interpreter, constantly summing up what we experience and giving us a biased version of events.
Mind the Gap is a reminder to create a space between what happens to us and the meaning we make of it.
We can make new meaning of defining moments in our childhood or early years by consciously examining the unconscious meaning we originally made of them.
Negative thinking is our brain’s default mode (a full 70 percent of our thoughts are negative). You can, however, retrain your brain for positivity with a daily gratitude practice.
Changing our thoughts requires looking at what our unconscious thinks is true so that we can choose the meaning we make of things.
When you master the Mind the Gap key, you take charge of the meaning you make of things that happen to you, so that even the greatest setback can become a springboard for something positive, empowering, and affirming.
Choose Results over Reasons
Your reticular activating system (RAS) determines your customized version of reality, and that version does not match anyone else’s.
One way to ignore your RAS’s version of reality is to cultivate beginner’s mind.
Use the Choose Results over Reasons key to make choices that get you closer to your goals.
When you are about to make a big change, your protective brain can send you into fight-flight-freeze mode and make you think you should just do nothing.
Your protective brain is your default mode because of ancient survival instincts, but you can choose to put your risk-taking brain back in charge when it’s time to take bold action.
Set Your Go Big Goal and Rewrite Your Story
A Go Big Goal is a goal that feels exciting and energizing, and also just a bit out of reach.
We can turn our wishes into Go Big Goals when we write them down and commit to them. Written goals have a 42 percent higher chance of being achieved than goals that are not written down.
Internal motivations are more powerful than external motivations, so it’s important to identify those for your Go Big Goal.
A done decision is a decision that is detailed and time-bound and has a positive emotion attached to it. It’s the opposite of a hopeful decision, which has none of these elements and usually remains just a wish.
We have an internal mechanism (the killjoy thermostat) that wants to take us back to our set level of happiness. We need to be on the lookout for this and push past the instinct to stay at the set level.
The upper limit problem is an unconscious habit of self-sabotage that can kick in when we are reaching for new heights of personal and professional success. It takes the form of getting sick, losing things, or experiencing a run of bad-luck events.
“Just do it” only gets you 10 percent of the way to your goal. The other 90 percent of the journey requires mindset training and core strength.
When we find ourselves stuck in stories that do not help us move forward and reach our goals, we need to ask, “Why am I so attached to that story?” and choose a more empowering one.
Creating a personal mission and vision statement helps us stay fired up and do more of the work we love (our genius work) and remember why it matters to us. It helps to keep it somewhere we can see it often (such as the bathroom mirror, phone, or both).
Change Your Thoughts with T-BEAR
Thoughts, Beliefs, Emotions, Actions, Results
To get different results, you’ll need to change your thoughts and beliefs.
T-BEAR is an acronym that helps you remember that your thoughts lead directly to your results, because thoughts become beliefs, which have emotions attached to them, which cause you to take action (or not take action) and get the accompanying results.
It’s always easier to see T-BEAR at work in other people’s lives than in your own.
You are in charge of your mind and your results.
Bust Your Limiting Beliefs
A limiting belief is like a sapling that you plant in your mental backyard. If you unconsciously water it every day by seeking evidence that it is “true,” it will grow into a huge oak tree.
A core tenet of NLP is that no one is broken. We may, however, have buggy programs (limiting beliefs) that are no longer serving us, which we need to delete.
A competing commitment is an unspoken commitment to a different outcome that may hold you back from achieving your stated commitment.
The three most common potholes that prevent people from overcoming limiting beliefs are taking too few action steps, not wanting the goal enough, and having competing commitments.
Accelerate into the Turn
Setting goals and reaching goals are not the same. It takes a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors to stay on track.
When you are going through tough times, make sure to do more, not less.
You have a source energy you can always draw from, but you need to know how to find it.
Know how to reconnect with your joy so you can get back to taking massive action.
Identify the core desired feelings (CDFs) behind your goal so you can focus on them, stay fired up, and use them to guide your choices.
Take the Donuts
The flip side of being a high achiever is often being terrible at self-care.
“Take the donuts” is a reminder to not only accept help but also seek it out.
Don’t ignore emotional pain or fatigue. When ignored, pain “goes into the basement to lift weights and comes back stronger.”
Having self-compassion makes you more resilient and a better leader.
Learning to be vulnerable helps you connect better with others and also makes you a better leader.
Meditation and other self-care practices are inval-uable tools when you are under duress.
Practice Be-Do-Have
If you want something different from what you have right now in your life, the fastest path to getting it is to use the mindset key Be-Do-Have, which is the opposite of how most people approach their lives (Have-Do-Be).
Ask yourself who you want to Be, then start doing the things that person would Do, and if you take massive action around the Do, soon you will have the things that person would Have.
It’s easier to act your way into thinking differently than to think your way into acting differently.
Don’t get stuck on all the “hows” of reaching your goal. Just take massive action.
Use the Mindset Keys in Everyday Life
It will be tempting to start teaching these mindset keys to others, but sometimes it’s better to shut up.
The mindset keys work for people who want something different in their life, or are pursuing a big, ambitious goal, and have something real at stake in achieving it.
In offering advice on using the mindset keys, do not tell others what they “should” do (no shoulding). Instead, speak from experience.
Try explaining the mindset keys to a child, as the act of explaining will help you gain even better understanding of what you learned, and kids often grasp new concepts faster than adults.
“Just do it” gets you just 10 percent of the way to your goal. The remaining 90 percent of getting to success requires having mindset core strength.
Look for examples in books and popular culture of how people are using these mindset practices.
