Most people want to change their life.

Everyone strives to feel accomplished and fulfilled. Therefore they spend enormous amount of effort to become a better version of themselves.

That is why you fight for a better position at work, you spend more money on education and try to learn new skills.

But there is a reason why you won’t achieve your goals and you’ll keep struggling in the long term.

Most people think that reality is a physical game. Therefore they keep trying to change the outside world without working on their inner side.

They try to change the mirror, their reflected image rather than themselves.

That is why you may feel like you are in a constant battle with life. It’s easy to get stuck in a career you hate…or to get overwhelmed by negative emotions and mental patterns.

It’s like treating only the symptoms of a disease and wondering why it doesn’t go away.

The first step is to understand how important perception is in shaping your reality.

For most people their perception is mainly based on the input information they are consuming. Environment, mental conditioning, media. These factors shape your belief system, leading to the decisions you make that create your physical reality.

If your mind is filled with beliefs that interpret reality as terrible, your life will feel that way.

If all of the information you perceive from friends and family is that you need to become a lawyer, this what you’ll do without question.

The society, we live in, is a behavior system.

It reinforces its ideas on you, without you even noticing. This happens through its channels of conditioning information – Schools, Universities, Mainstream Media.

That is why there is an outgoing war for your attention.

You start your day looking at your phone. Your mind receives around 10 Million bits of information per second. Over 99.999% of it is processed subconsciously.

Than you go to work or school, where you are conditioned with information from your superiors. And at the end of the day you watch the news or scroll your phone again before bed. That’s life for most people.

This is a quote from the book Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.

“It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.”

Okay…but how do I actually change?

Taking Back Control Over Your Life

The first step to radically change who you are is responsibility.

You’ve been told constantly that the outcomes in your life are determined mostly by:

• Your circumstances
• Authoritative figures
• Luck

As a matter of fact, that’s true, if you believe it and allow it. Instead of this choose decisions over circumstances. Rather than being a victim you have the power to chose the trajectory of your actions and the response to situations.

I know this might sound too metaphysical for you, but…If you believe that you are powerless and nothing depends on you, the universe will only approve and confirm your belief. When you take back your responsibility, you will be presented opportunities.

You are an energy investor. Every day you make investments of your attention. The things that you invest in the most, create your reality. If your life sucks, it’s because of the thousand bad decisions you made over the past years. They could be conscious or subconscious .

Up until the age of 18, you were programmed and conditioned. That’s how upbringing works. Between the age of 20 and 28, you have to reconsider what you want to keep and what you want to change about you. That is the time when your brain is still flexible and you can reprogram it.

So how do you build your mental reality?

If you ask people if they want to achieve financial freedom, let’s say, they will say: “Yes, of course! ” Who doesn’t want that, right…But if you ask them whether they are willing to build a business that will lead them to the financial freedom, they will hesitate. “That happens to other people”

So we need to align our perception of what is possible with what we want. Otherwise it will remain only a vaige desire, a dream.

If you don’t challenge your belief system, you will remain in your comfort zone. Your mind will be programmed to automatically reject any idea that is outside of it.

Focused Attention

Once your belief system is aligned, focus your attention on creating your intended reality.

If your intent is financial freedom and business is the vehicle to achieve it, now you have to learn the necessary skills to build that business.

Your brain will literally change itself physically based on what you learn and think about.

When you have a vision, you will start noticing opportunities you would’ve previously ignored. Every conversation you have, every YouTube video you watch, will give you hints that can help you achieve your vision faster.

Your previous life sucked because you went with the flow without aligning your attention. It is pretty damn dangerous because you are letting society assign you a particular place in its structure.

Goals

Our brains are goal oriented machines.

Now that we have a belief system and a vision to follow, we need to create the actual steps that will lead us to our intended reality.

Setting the right goals will help you:

• Game like hierarchy
• Learning through Building ( direct feedback system )
• Challenge / Skill ratio ( breaking the big goals into smaller ones )

Goals make you addicted. Your brain will release dopamine when you are on the pursuit of a concrete achievement. In fact the pursuit itself is more awarded than achieving the goal itself.

This is important because it rewires yourself to become the person who is able to achieve that goal. This is what we call discipline.

Most people think of discipline as a muscle to be trained. In reality discipline is just a side effect of identity.

vision, intent ( attention ) and goals → identity

identity → maintaining your identity through repetition = discipline

When I used to work in a office, I didn’t need to put any effort in “building” my discipline muscle. Waking up at 7:00 and going to work was an automatic process.

An employee has a vision – his job position. A set of goals – tasks that the boss gives to him.

The same way a professional footballer doesn’t need to force himself to go to a training everyday. That’s part of his identity, that’s who he is.

So if you have to force yourself to do something, you need to reconsider if you are going in the right direction. If you’re sure that the direction is not the problem than there’s probably a technical issue. You need to change your plan for achieving that vision.

Keep Training Your Mental Muscle

Coming up with a self-assigned goal isn’t enough. You are risking to fall in the same viscous cycle we talked about.

Challenging your own assumptions

A huge par of building your mental muscle is becoming a skeptic.

Your mind is a prediction machine. It will predict a reality based on the information it was fed to that point.

We talked about how you have to follow your own vision rather than following someone else’s.

In order to escape the mental matrix for good, you have to be skeptic about your own ideas and values.

This means that you have to challenge not only your beliefs, but your own doubt as well.

Only by understanding every aspect of the argument you can build your own opinion.

An opinion which isn’t constant but developing.

Curiosity

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein

When you were a kid, you achieved one of the hardest things in life.

Learning to speak and learning to walk.

This is also the time when you learned a huge amount of new things in a short period of time.

The reason is because you were asking questions. You were curious.

Most people lose their curiosity gradually while growing up. They get lost and stop asking the important questions.

Becoming extremely curious is the only way to prevent yourself from stagnating in one place.

Every great thinker, achiever and inventor owes his success to curiosity.

I know it’s a cliche, but you have to dive into the unknown. You have to go out of your comfort zone. Otherwise the risk of staying in an unhealthy mental bubble is enormous.

First-Order vs. Second-Order Thinking

This is a nice concept that shows the difference between actively creating reality and living on autopilot.

The “first-order thinking” people are those who:

• Take the bare minimum approach to life. Quick money, quick pleasure, quick food, quick sex.
• Tunnel vision, “solving” a problem in one area only to create a bigger problem elsewhere, susceptibility to cognitive biases (e.g., confirmation bias, present bias).

The second-order thinkers see the big picture. They understand that:

The World is Increasingly Complex:

The future environment will be characterized by greater interconnectedness, faster change, and less predictability than the past. The future belongs to people that learn multiple skills and don’t serve single roles that make them replaceable

Agency and Influence:

The underlying belief is that individuals and organizations can effectively influence future outcomes by making better decisions today, rather than being mere passive recipients of fate. Humans are self-reflecting, self-correcting beings. You can always change your goal, your view or your technique.

For example, a first tier employee will complain and cry that the efforts doesn’t bring the results they used to be. A second tier employee will change its strategy and learn what is necessary to learn in the new environment.

Let’s sum it up so you’ll have a clear plan for the next 365 days.

1) Become aware of the fact that your physical reality is a product of your mental reality.

2) Become aware of the fact that you are constantly being fed with information that goes to your subconsciousness and shapes your mental reality.

3) Make an intentional decision about what you want out of life that isn’t based on external assignments.

4) Break your vision into goals. Break your big goals into smaller achievable goals.

5) Keep training your mental muscle every day with self-awareness. This includes:

• Challenging your own assumptions
• Exploring new ideas in the unknown

6) Become a strategic thinker. Every emotion, thought and action will determine your future.