Harness the power of decision

In review, let me give you six quick keys to help you harness the power of decision, the power that shapes your experience of life every moment that you live it:

1. Remember the true power of making decisions. It's a tool you can use in any moment to change your entire life. The minute you make a new decision, you set in motion a new cause, effect, direction, and destination for your life. You literally begin to change your life the moment you make a new decision. Remember that when you start feeling overwhelmed, or when you feel like you don't have a choice, or when things are happening " to" you, you can change it all if you just stop and decide to do so. Remember, a real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken new action. If there's no action, you haven't truly decided.

2. Realize that the hardest step in achieving anything is making a true commitment—a true decision. Carrying out your commitment is often much easier than the decision itself, so make your decisions intelligently, but make them quickly. Don't labor forever over the question of how or if you can do it. Studies have shown that the most successful people make decisions rapidly because they are clear on their values and what they really want for their lives. The same studies show that they are slow to change their decisions, if at all. On the other hand, people who fail usually make decisions slowly and change their minds quickly, always bouncing back and forth. Just decide! Realize that decision making is a kind of act in itself, so a good definition for a decision might be " information acted upon." You know you've truly made a decision when action flows from it. It becomes a cause set in motion. Often the effect of making a decision helps create the attainment of a larger goal. A critical rule I've made for myself is never to leave the scene of a decision without first taking a specific action toward its realization.

3. Make decisions often. The more decisions you make, the better you're going to become at making them. Muscles get stronger with use, and so it is with your decision-making muscles. Unleash your power right now by making some decisions you've been putting off. You won't believe the energy and excitement it will create in your life!

4. Learn from your decisions. There's no way around it. At times, you're going to screw up, no matter what you do. And when the inevitable happens, instead of beating yourself into the ground, learn something. Ask yourself, " What's good about this? What can I learn from this? " This " failure" may be an unbelievable gift in disguise if you use it to make better decisions in the future. Rather than focus on the short-term setback, choose instead to learn lessons that can save you time, money, or pain, and that will give you the ability to succeed in the future.

5. Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach. Once you've decided who you want to be as a person, for example, don't get stuck on the means to achieving it. It's the end you're after. Too often, in deciding what they want for their lives, people pick the best way they know at the time—they make a map—but then don't stay open to alternate routes. Don't become rigid in your approach. Cultivate the art of flexibility.

6. Enjoy making decisions. You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever: the very next person you stand behind in line or sit next to on an airplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all of the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place.

If you really want your life to be passionate, you need to live with this attitude of expectancy. Years ago, I made what seemed like a small decision, and it has powerfully shaped my life. I decided to do a seminar in Denver, Colorado. That decision caused me to meet a lady named Becky. Her last name now is Robbins, and she is definitely one of the greatest gifts of my life. On that same trip, I decided to write my first book, which is now published in eleven languages around the world. A few days later, I decided to conduct a seminar in Texas, and after working for a week to fill my own program, the promoter didn't pay me for the event—he skipped town. The obvious person to talk to was the public relations agent he had hired, a woman who had similar woes. That woman became my literary agent and helped to get that first book published. As a result, I have the privilege of sharing this story with you today.

At one time, I also decided to take on a business partner. Choosing not to investigate his character in advance was a poor decision on my part. Within a year, he'd misappropriated a quarter of a million dollars and had run my corporation $758, 000 in debt while I spent my life on the road doing more than 200 seminars. Fortunately, though, I learned from my poor decision and made a better one. In spite of advice from all the experts around me that the only way I could survive would be to declare bankruptcy, I decided to find a way to turn things around, and I created one of the greater successes of my life. I took my company to a whole new level, and what I learned from that experience not only created my long-term business success, but also provided many of the distinctions for the Neuro-Associative Conditioning" * and Destiny Technologies™ that you'll be learning in this book.

" Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

HELEN KELLER

So what is the single most important distinction to take from this chapter?

Know that it's your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny. Before we learn the technology for changing how you think and how you feel every day of your life, I want you to remember that, in the final analysis, everything you've read in this book is worthless... every other book you've read or tape you've heard or seminar you've attended is worthless... unless you decide to use it. Remember that a truly committed decision is the force that changes your life. It's a power available to you in any moment if you just decide to use it.

Prove to yourself that you've decided now. Make one or two decisions that you've been putting off: one easy decision and one that's a bit more difficult. Show yourself what you can do. Right now, stop. Make at least one clear-cut decision that you've been putting off—take the first action toward fulfilling it—and stick to it! By doing this, you'll be building that muscle that will give you the will to change your entire life.

You and I both know that there are going to be challenges in your future. But as Lech Walesa and the people of Eastern Europe have learned, if you've decided to get past the walls, you can climb over them, you can break through them, you can tunnel under them, or you can find a door. No matter how long a wall has stood, none has the power to withstand the continued force of human beings who have decided to persist until it has fallen. The human spirit truly is unconquerable. But the will to win, the will to succeed, to shape one's life, to take control, can only be harnessed when you decide what you want, and believe that no challenge, no problem, no obstacle can keep you from it. When you decide that your life will ultimately be shaped not by conditions, but by your decisions, then, in that moment, your life will change forever, and you will be empowered to take control of...

THE FORCE THAT SHAPES YOUR LIFE

" Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion."

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

She had been jogging for only about half an hour when it happened. Suddenly a dozen young boys began to sprint in her direction. Before she had time to realize what was happening, they pounced upon her, pulled her into the bushes and began to beat her with a lead pipe. One boy continually kicked her in the face until she was bleeding profusely. Then they raped and sodomized her, and left her for dead.

I'm sure you've heard about this tragic, unthinkable crime that happened in Central Park several years ago. I was in New York City the night it happened. I was appalled not only by the savagery of the attack, but even more so to hear who the attackers were. They were children, from the ages of 14 to 17 years old. Contrary to stereotypes, they were neither poor nor did they come from abusive families. They were boys from private schools. Little League players, kids who took tuba lessons. These boys were not driven crazy by drugs, nor were they racially motivated. They assaulted and could have killed this 28-year-old woman for one reason and one reason only: fun. They even had a name for what they had set out to do; they called it " wilding."

Not more than 250 miles away in our nation's capital, a jet airliner crashed on takeoff from National Airport during a blinding snowstorm. It hit the Potomac Bridge at the height of rush hour. As traffic snarled to a halt, emergency rescue services were immediately dispatched to the scene, and the bridge became a nightmare of chaos and panic. Firemen and paramedics were overwhelmed by the destruction, and dove again and again into the Potomac to try and save crash victims. One man repeatedly passed the life preserver to others. He saved many lives, but not his own. By the time the rescue helicopter finally got to him, he had slipped beneath the icy surface of the water. This man gave his life in order to save those of complete strangers! What drove him to place such a high value on other people's lives—people he didn't even know—that he was willing to give his own life in the process?

What makes a person with a " good background" behave so savagely and without remorse while another gives his own life to rescue complete strangers? What creates a hero, a heel, a criminal, a contributor? What determines the difference in human actions? Throughout my life, I have passionately sought the answer to these questions. One thing is clear to me: human beings are not random creatures; everything we do, we do for a reason. We may not be aware of the reason consciously, but there is undoubtedly a single driving force behind all human behavior. This force impacts every facet of our lives, from our relationships and finances to our bodies and brains. What is this force that is controlling you even now and will continue to do so for the rest of your life? PAIN and PLEASURE! Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.

So often I hear people talk about changes they want to make in their lives. But they can't get themselves to follow through. They feel frustrated, overwhelmed, even angry with themselves because they know they need to take action, but they can't get themselves to do it. There is one elementary reason: they keep trying to change their behavior, which is the effect, instead of dealing with the cause behind it.

Understanding and utilizing the forces of pain and pleasure will allow you once and for all to create the lasting changes and improvements you desire for yourself and those you care about. Failure to understand this force dooms you to a future of living in reaction, like an animal or a machine. Perhaps this sounds like a complete oversimplification, but think about it. Why don't you do some of the things you know you should do?

After all, what is procrastination? It's when you know you should do something, but you still don't do it. Why not? The answer is simple: at some level you believe that taking action in this moment would be more painful than just putting it off. Yet, have you ever had the experience of putting something off for so long that suddenly you felt pressure to just do it, to get it done7 What happened? You changed what you linked pain and pleasure to. Suddenly, not taking action became more painful than putting it off. This is a common occurrence that many Americans experience around April 14!

" A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary."

SENECA

What keeps you from approaching that man or woman of your dreams? What keeps you from starting that new business you've been planning for years? Why do you keep putting off that diet? Why do you avoid completing your thesis? Why haven't you taken control of your financial investment portfolio? What prevents you from doing whatever it takes to make your life exactly as you've imagined it?

Even though you know that all these actions would benefit you—that they could definitely bring pleasure to your life—you fail to act simply because in that moment you associate more pain to doing what's necessary than missing the opportunity. After all, what if you approached that person, and they rejected you? What if you tried to start that new business but failed and lost the security you have in your present job? What if you started a diet and went through the pain of starving yourself, only to gain the weight back eventually anyway? What if you made an investment and lost your money? So why even try?

For most people, the fear of loss is much greater than the desire for gain. Which would drive you more: keeping someone from stealing the $100, 000 you've earned over the last five years, or the potential of earning $100, 000 in the next five? The fact is that most people would work much harder to hang on to what they have than they would to take the risks necessary to get what they really want from their lives.

" The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you."

ANTHONY ROBBINS

Often an interesting question comes up in discussions about these twin powers that drive us: Why is it that people can experience pain yet fail to change? They haven't experienced enough pain yet; they haven't hit what I call emotional threshold. If you've ever been in a destructive relationship and finally made the decision to use your personal power, take action and change your life, it was probably because you hit a level of pain you weren't willing to settle for anymore. We've all experienced those times in our lives when we've said, " I've had it—never again—this must change now." This is the magical moment when pain becomes our friend. It drives us to take new action and produce new results. We become even more powerfully compelled to act if, in that same moment, we begin to anticipate how changing will create a great deal of pleasure for our lives as well.

This process is certainly not limited to relationships. Maybe you've experienced threshold with your physical condition: you finally got fed up because you couldn't squeeze into an airline seat, you couldn't fit into your clothes, and walking up a set of stairs winded you. Finally you said, " I've had it! " and made a decision. What motivated that decision? It was the desire to remove pain from your life and establish pleasure once again: the pleasure of pride, the pleasure of comfort, the pleasure of self-esteem, the pleasure of living life the way you've designed it.

Of course, there are many levels of pain and pleasure. For example, feeling a sense of humiliation is a rather intense form of emotional pain. Feeling a sense of inconvenience is also pain. So is boredom. Obviously some of these have less intensity, but they still factor in the equation of decision-making. Likewise, pleasure weighs into this process. Much of our drive in life comes from our anticipating that our actions will lead to a more compelling future, that today's work will be well worth the effort, that the rewards of pleasure are near. Yet there are many levels of pleasure as well. For example, the pleasure of ecstasy, while most would agree is intense, may sometimes be outweighed by the pleasure of com- fort. It all depends on an individual's perspective.

For example, let's say you're on your lunch break, and you're walking past a park where a Beethoven symphony is playing. Will you stop and listen? It depends, first of all, on the meaning you associate to classical music. Some people would drop anything to be able to listen to the valiant strains of the Eroica Symphony; for them, Beethoven equals pure pleasure. For others, however, listening to any kind of classical music is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Enduring the music would equal a measure of pain, and so they hurry past the park and back to work. But even some people who love classical music would not decide to stop and listen. Maybe the perceived pain of being late for work outweighs the pleasure they would get from hearing the familiar melodies. Or maybe they have a belief that stopping and enjoying music in the middle of the afternoon is wasteful of precious time, and the pain of doing something frivolous and inappropriate is greater than the pleasure the music could bring. Each day our lives are filled with these kinds of psychic negotiations. We are constantly weighing our own proposed actions and the impact they will have upon us.