John Assaraf explains the concept of rewriting and rehearsing personal "stories" (money, health, relationships, career) to produce a desired future. He advocates writing present-tense narratives of the ideal life, repeatedly exposing the brain to them via reading, recording, visualization, meditation, affirmations, and spaced repetition to form neural patterns and automatic behaviors that align beliefs and actions with the new story.
Chapters
There's an inner size I talk about called Back to the Future. Interesting name, isn't it? A few years ago, I met a guy by the name of Dr. David Krueger, and he's a psychiatrist. And he and I were talking about stories that we have. Everybody has a story. We have a money story. We teach about winning the game. We teach about your money story and the Winning Game of Money program and how to reprogram your brain for a stronger money story. And we have a story around our health, our relationships, our career, our businesses. We have a story about everything. And then we go about living that story over and over and over again. And very few people think about the fact that we are repeating the same patterns in many cases of our parents or even of our own lives from the time we were 20, 30, 40, 50, 60. Well, what if you can go to the future and you can think about, if I could change my story today that would get me to the future that I want? What would the story say? And in the book, I've given you some inner sizes and some exercises to start writing out your story. Now you may think, what do you mean, write out my story? I learned many years ago to write out my money story, my life story, my relationship story, and I've always started in this fashion. I am so happy and grateful for the fact that I am living the life of my dreams and I am traveling all over the world, first class, and I am able to give to the charities that my wife and I and children love. And I'm able to. And I write down in present tense, everything that I'm doing, feeling, experiencing for health, wealth, relationships, career, business, finances, fun experiences, charity. I write down a page or two pages that is a story that I want my future to be like. And then I type it out. I usually write by hand. I type it out, and then I laminate it. Then I'll record it, and then I'll listen to it over and over and over again. Now, you may think that sounds silly. Why would you do that? Why? Because any information that you get in through the senses, through your ears, through your eyes, that you touch, that you feel, activates neurons in the brain. When those neurons are activated and they wire together, if you repeat it often enough, your brain says, hey, you're investing a lot of time and energy on this stuff. Let me start to put some automatic processes to make that story real. And this is where winning from the inside out comes to play. This is why, using meditation and visualization and mindfulness and affirmations and emotional management techniques, subliminal programming all work. If you can get the information into the brain and you have spaced repetition backed with emotion, you are going to develop the neural patterns that will activate something called automaticity. All right? Or automaticity is when these neurons activate automatically. And then your perspective changes, your beliefs start to change, your behavior starts to change. The filters by which you see the world and the lens by which you see the world start to match up with the story. One of the first things we do in our Win the Game of Money program is we help people program a new money story so they can then earn the money they want and live the life of their dreams. Why? Because it works.
