Why are world-class athletes and entertainers the primary practitioners of mental training techniques? What can we learn from them?
Which of your goals are so demanding that you feel compelled to practice visualization and mental rehearsal?
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Whom can you influence with the ideas from this lesson in the next forty-eight hours?
Lesson 6 Assignments
1 | Complete a visualization script for one of your top five three-year goals.
2 | Invest ten to fifteen minutes a day in reading the script and imagining that your goal is already a reality.
3 | Collect visual reminders (pictures, quotes, sketches, etc.) for each of your top five goals and place them where you will see them daily.
Lesson 7
Choose a Maximum Energy Lifestyle
Neglect is a silent killer.
In this lesson, you will learn to
• Make health-producing choices
• Develop a positive mental attitude
• Control stress
• Exercise effectively
• Eat for energy
• Sleep for success
• Relax and rejuvenate
Boundless energy is not an accident. Individuals who experience a continuous, revitalizing flow of energy make different choices than those who consistently operate from an energy deficit. You can increase your return on energy and your return on life by becoming highly sensitive to the lifestyle choices you make. Remember, your level of energy equals your level of health. If you are short on energy, you are short on life. Every area of your life will be compromised by a depleted supply of energy. More than any other factor, a lack of energy will cause you to underachieve and underperform. As Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, said, “Fatigue does make cowards of us all.” When you are run down, drained, or otherwise out of balance, your choices suffer. You become more oriented around the short term; you think more about what is expedient than what is in your long-term best interests. You act defensively and reactively.
God designed your body intricately. When you manage it wisely—by eating right, avoiding harmful substances, getting enough sleep, and exercising regularly—you will have better health and more energy. But, as the book of Isaiah explains, the ultimate source of energy is God. “Those who trust in the LORD will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31, NLT).
Abundant levels of energy are the indispensable prerequisite for individual achievement, success, and peace of mind. Fortunately, becoming a high-energy, high-output human being need not be a gamble. The causes of vigorous energy have been thoroughly researched and well documented. Superior levels of vitality come naturally from implementing the causes of maximum energy outlined in the rest of this lesson.
Top Ten Energy Leaks
10. Alcohol. Alcohol is an extreme carbohydrate and contains a lot of calories. It’s also a depressant, a diuretic, increases appetite, slows metabolism, and can damage the organs.
9. Caffeine. Don’t panic; you can still have your coffee as long as you limit yourself to a cup or two per day. Caffeine is a diuretic. It also stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar. When too much insulin is released at once, the body’s blood-sugar level plunges rapidly, resulting in cravings.
8. Irregular sleep, whether too much or too little. Aim for between seven and nine and a half hours of quality sleep each night. Go to bed and wake up at consistent times each day.
7. Ineffective exercise. Whether you exercise inconsistently or not at all, you’re not giving your body the workout it needs. Another pitfall for some people is overexercising and undereating. Find the right balance.
6. Eating just three times per day. Forget the old paradigm of three large meals. Eating smaller amounts five or six times a day prevents binging, stabilizes blood sugar, and cranks up your metabolism.
5. Skipping breakfast. Breakfast is the most strategic meal of the day, and skipping it is devastating to your energy for the rest of the day. From an energy standpoint, you cannot recover if you blow off breakfast.
4. Boredom. This is the opposite of passion and can occur when you feel in a rut in your career, your marriage, or your faith. If you’re felling bored, look for a creative new approach.
3. Overeating. Large meals overburden your digestive system, stealing energy from goal-directed activity. Even overeating healthy foods causes excess insulin production, encouraging fat storage and leaving you feeling sluggish.
2. Dehydration. Your body is more than two-thirds water, and your brain is 85 percent water. Even if you’re just one percent dehydrated, your energy level drops off.
1. Negativity. Harboring unhealthy emotions like fear, anger, worry, and guilt—or any sort of “stinking thinking”—will drain your energy. If you’re going to plug any of these leaks, plug this one first. Before you can strengthen your body, you must strengthen your mind. Every thought and feeling has an energy consequence.
And, of course, smoking, which is outrageously obvious and offensive to your energy goals.
Seven Keys to a High-Energy Lifestyle
1. Write down a goal for how long you want to live healthfully and productively.
Obviously, your life is in God’s hands. However, you do have control over many choices that can significantly affect your life expectancy and overall health. With that in mind, I encourage you to set a goal to live at least to the age of ninety. Then begin to organize your lifestyle around health habits that are consistent with that goal. The best way to do this is to take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the center. On the left side, write down everything you can do that will help you live to at least age ninety. On the right-hand side, write down all the negative habits or activities you may be tempted to engage in that would hurt your chance of living a long life. Once you complete the list, begin to eliminate all the negative health habits one by one, and begin introducing or reinforcing the positive health habits.
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Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
—Viktor Frankl
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2. Develop an ultra-positive attitude!
Your attitude is the habitual way you think. Over the long haul, the quality of your life will be determined by the quality of your attitude. A maximum-energy lifestyle requires that you choose a positive mental attitude. This is not something that happens to you; it is a deliberate choice that ultimately becomes a habit. The more positive you are, the more energy you will have. You become positive by deciding in advance that you will always choose the most resourceful response to any given set of circumstances. This means that even if you are justified to do otherwise, you will always take the high road, choosing to act in a manner consistent with the goals you want to reach and the person you want to become.
Difficult, trying times reveal just how positive you really are. Think about it. What’s the virtue in being positive when you’re on a roll, when everything is clicking for you and going your way? Your potential for business excellence, excellence in your marriage, and excellence in your family life demands that you master the skill of staying U.P. (ultra-positive) even when—and especially when—everyone else isn’t.
When you’re ultra-positive, you’ll be more creative, productive, energetic, attractive, and most importantly, receptive to God’s will. Here are seventeen practical strategies to get you started.
Do you experience these consequences of stress . . . yet?
a. Make the decision to stay U.P.
Nothing of consequence happens until you promise yourself that you’ll become the most positive person you know. Raise your standards! Everything else flows from this key decision to separate yourself from the 99 pe
rcent who blame, whine, gossip, and predict doom and gloom. Life is short. Take a stand.
b. Start U.P. and end U.P. every day.
One of the simplest ways to transform your attitude is to begin and end each day with what we in The 1% Club call Positive Mental Nutrition Feed your mind with inspirational, spiritual, and/or motivational ideas for ten to fifteen minutes immediately upon awakening each morning and right before drifting to sleep each evening. As mentioned in lesson 5, during these two time periods, your mind is extremely susceptible to programming, so make sure your inputs are positive, healthy, and goal directed. Read, visualize, affirm, pray, and rewrite your goals!
c. Summarize each day’s victories, large or small, in writing.
This one practice alone can transform your attitude and generate quantum leaps in self-confidence. Start logging your accomplishments each evening in a notebook or hardbound journal or on your computer. What a positive habit!
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Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.
—Epictetus
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d. Increase your physical exercise.
Another pillar of ultra-positive living is consistent, moderate exercise. This includes aerobics to burn fat and improve heart health, weight training to tone and strengthen your muscles and elevate metabolism, and flexibility exercises to stay loose and limber. Face the facts: When you’re in terrific shape and feel better about yourself, you feel better about your life. You’re positioned to live up to your full potential. We’ll discuss this in more detail later in this lesson.
e. Break up the big four.
Negative thinking leads to negative emotions, which in turn trigger more negative thinking. The vicious cycle becomes engaged. The top four negative emotions include fear, worry, blame, and guilt. These terrorize your potential and immobilize your efforts toward becoming ultra-positive. When you begin experiencing results you didn’t want or expect, it’s easy to get scared and start thinking more about potential losses than potential gains. This mind-set triggers worry, or what I call reverse goal setting, where you vividly imagine what you don’t want. To transfer the burden of worry, you will often blame someone or something outside of yourself. Alternatively, you may exaggerate your role in the negative events and experience guilt. Consider negative emotions to be lies from the enemy. Deal with them directly by refusing to entertain the thoughts that fuel them. This is a point very much worth reinforcing: Invest your time in thinking about what you want instead of what you don’t want.
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[Jesus said,] “That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or even enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?”
—Matthew 6:25-27, NLT
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f. Forgive someone, including yourself, daily.
Harboring grudges and hostility against anyone, including yourself, tends to attract more circumstances to be upset about. Practice forgiving somebody every day for real or imagined transgressions. The better you become at forgiveness, the more positive you can become as a human being. If you skip this one, I’ll forgive you.
g. Quarantine negativity if you can’t dissolve it.
Carve out a particular time and place to worry (worry time) and to complain (issue time) each week. This is extremely effective because then the rest of your week isn’t diluted with the minority of negative circumstances that can infect otherwise healthy days. When you cut the spontaneity out of negativity, you severely weaken it.
h. Focus on God. He’s U.P.
Remind yourself of everything you know to be true about God. God is all-powerful. God is love. God is sovereign. God is always with us. God is absolute truth. God never changes. And so on. Thinking about God is good!
i. Schedule four-minute positive injections every two hours.
Think of these as positive pit stops. Review your goals or mission. Practice affirmation or visualization. Pray. Read the Bible. Relive a positive memory. Write a thank-you card or send an e-mail of appreciation to someone important.
j. Simplify and declutter to stay U.P.
Complexity is negative. Simplicity is positive. Room by room, drawer by drawer, try tossing out one tiny item of clutter every day for thirty consecutive days. My 1% Club clients love this one, and so will you, because doing even a small task will help you feel more positive. Break your jumbo-sized goals into subgoals and milestones, and then splinter them into even smaller pieces if necessary to spur you into action. Renegotiate or downsize existing commitments to lighten your load a bit for the next thirty days.
k. Get to bed sixty minutes early for ten straight days.
Fatigue, especially chronic fatigue, invites negativity and cowardly thinking. During periods of intense or prolonged stress, extra sleep will help your brain remain an ally in the war against mediocrity. Cut something out of the evening schedule, and drift to sleep with visions of victories dancing in your head. Your body, mind, and spirit will thank you.
l. Take a twenty-four-hour mental fast.
Become ultra-positive one day at a time. You can rid your attitude of toxic thoughts through the practice of mental fasting. (Make sure to read my book The 4:8 Principle if you want to master this unconventional and very powerful mental technique.) During your fast, abstain from all complaining, criticizing, excuse-making, gossiping, and worrying whatsoever! Start with a sixty-minute fast, and gradually build up to disciplining your mind to repel all negativity for a full day. Focus on progress. Repeat as necessary.
m. Stay U.P. and watch your favorite funny movies.
Laughter is fabulously positive. Research indicates that people who laugh more actually have more fun. Is that surprising? Consider building your own comedy library on DVD. Watch often. You’ll stay healthier, more creative, and less stressed—and that’s a great alternative to the medicine cabinet.
n. Have a counterattack plan ready.
Become hypersensitive to your thought life. Since you can be negative only when you’re thinking negative thoughts, you can quickly become positive by thinking positive thoughts. I referred to this earlier when I explained the principle of substitution. The split second you notice any negative thought running through your mind, replace it emphatically with something like “I am responsible” or “I trust God” or “I can do it.” Repeat, repeat, repeat! Be ready with a positive comeback before the heat of the moment. Make negative, limiting thoughts unwelcome in your mind.
o. Re-engage an old hobby to stay U.P.
Involve yourself in a positive activity that used to be important to you but may have been squeezed out of your life due to other priorities. This will be both therapeutic and rejuvenating. Consider it a gift to yourself.
p. Intentionally cultivate ultra-positive company.
This one is mandatory. It’s next to impossible to become or stay U.P. when the people you live or work with are petty, negative thinkers. Nothing equals the influence of your habitual associations. Be purposeful about which people are close to you. As you become more positive, you will attract more positive people in your life, and that’s good.
q. Help someone else stay U.P.
Donate your money. Donate your time. Volunteer. Simply serve someone less fortunate or contribute your talents and gifts to a worthy organization. Helping those who need help reduces self-centeredness and puts your own challenges into a much more positive perspective.
The key to staying U.P. is to remember that every sit
uation can be positive when you view it as an opportunity for growth and self-mastery.
Now let’s look at the next way to develop a high-energy lifestyle.
3. Control stress.
We experience negative stress when we feel out of control of the sequence of events in our lives. It’s like being in a fast-moving car without a steering wheel. We experience stress when we live inconsistently with what we have identified as most important to us. Most of all, we experience stress when we recognize that we are living far beneath our potential.
The inability to deal effectively with stress has been linked to cancer, asthma, headaches, depression, cardiovascular disease, the common cold, ulcers, hypertension, chronic fatigue, and immune-system suppression, to name but a few conditions. Mounting research indicates nearly 80 percent of all illness can be linked at least partially to psychological stress.
Stress is a subjective condition. What causes some to get stressed-out causes others to get excited and creative. Some people thrive on change, while others avoid change and the stress that goes with it at all costs. Big things cause stress for some while the accumulation of little things is stressful for others.
Ask yourself this question: “Have I ever been stressed-out when I wasn’t thinking stressful thoughts?”
I can guarantee you have not. It would be impossible. The bottom line on stress is this: The way you interpret your circumstances triggers a stress response. The meaning you place on a certain event makes it stressful, not the event itself. Start paying closer attention to the way you habitually describe mistakes and unpleasant situations to yourself and others. Finding a positive angle on a negative situation goes a long way toward minimizing stress. The very act of searching for something good redirects your attention and keeps you in a productive, resourceful state.
Success Is Not an Accident Page 18