A SOURCE OF SELF-SABOTAGE

Even more insidious[40] are mixed neuro-associations, the classic source of self-sabotage. If you've ever found yourself starting to accomplish something, and then destroying it, mixed neuro-associations are usually the culprit. Perhaps your business has been moving in fits and starts, flourishing[41] one day and floundering[42] the next. What is this all about? It's a case of associating both pain and pleasure to the same situation. One example a lot of us can relate to is money. In our culture, people have incredibly mixed associations to wealth. There's no doubt that people want money. They think it would provide them with more freedom, more security, a chance to contribute, a chance to travel, to learn, to expand, to make a difference. But simultaneously, most people never climb above a certain earnings plateau because deep down they associate having " excess" money to a lot of negatives. They associate it to greed, to being judged, to stress, with immorality or a lack of spirituality.

One of the first exercises I ask people to do in my Financial Destiny™ seminars is to brainstorm all the positive associations they have to wealth, as well as all the negative ones. On the plus side they write down such things as: freedom, luxury, contribution, happiness, security, travel, opportunity, and making a difference. But on the minus side (which is usually more full) they write down such things as: fights with spouse, stress, guilt, sleepless nights, intense effort, greed, shallowness, and complacency, being judged, and taxes. Do you notice a difference in intensity between the two sets of neuro-associations? Which do you think plays a stronger role in their lives?

When you're deciding what to do, if your brain doesn't have a clear signal of what equals pain and what equals pleasure, it goes into overload and becomes confused. As a result, you lose momentum and the power to take the decisive actions that could give you what you want. When you give your brain mixed messages, you're going to get mixed results. Think of your brain's decision-making process as being like a scale: " If I were to do this, would it mean pain or pleasure? " And remember, it's not just the number of factors on each side but the weight they individually carry. It's possible that you could have more pleasurable than painful associations about money, but if just one of the negative associations is very intense, then that false neuro-association can wipe out your ability to succeed financially.

What happens when you get to a point where you feel that you're going to have pain no matter what you do? I call this the pain-pain barrier. Often, when this occurs, we become immobilized—we don't know what to do. Usually we choose what we believe will be the least painful alternative. Some people, however, allow this pain to overwhelm them completely and they experience learned helplessness. Using the six steps of NAC will help you to interrupt these disempowering patterns. You will create alternative pathways so that you're not just " wishing" away an undesired behaviour, or overriding it in the short term, but are actually rewiring yourself to feel and behave consistent with your new, empowering choices. Without changing what you link pain and pleasure to in your nervous system, no change will last. After you read and understand the following six steps, I challenge you to choose something that you want to change in your life right now. Take action and follow through with each of the steps you're about to learn so that you not only read the chapter, but you produce changes as the result of reading it. Let's begin to learn...

HOW TO CHANGE ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE:

THE SCIENCE

OF NEURO-ASSOCIATIVE CONDITIONING™

" The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread[43], but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably[44], thought and act."

—ORISON SWETT MARDEN

If you and I want to change our behaviour, there is only one effective way to do it: we must link unbearable and immediate sensations of pain to our old behaviour, and incredible and immediate sensations of pleasure to a new one. Think about it this way: all of us, through the experience of life, have learned certain patterns of thinking and behaving to get ourselves out of pain and into pleasure. We all experience emotions like boredom or frustration or anger or feeling overwhelmed, and develop strategies for ending these feelings. Some people use shopping; some use food; some use sex; some use drugs; some use alcohol; some use yelling at their kids. They know, consciously or unconsciously, that this neural pathway will relieve their pain and take them to some level of pleasure in the moment. Whatever the strategy, if you and I are going to change it, we have to go through six simple steps, the outcome of which is to find a more direct and empowering way to get out of pain and into pleasure, ways that will be more effective and elegant. These six steps of NAC will show you how to create a direct highway out of pain and into pleasure with no disempowering detours. They are:

NAC MASTER STEP 1