Taking Charge of the Hbits that Create Your Life

The great basketball player Wilt Chamberlain once made the comment, be sure you're careful with habits that you form. Because they would be forming you for the rest of your life. Now, Wilt Chamberlain's really speaking the truth. Though he was 7'2" in a time when everybody else was 6'6", he could score 100 points a game, but you put him on the foul line and guess what? He was at best a 50/50 foul shooter. So what happens is you can see that habits got installed with or without Wilt Chamberlain's knowledge, and it ended up really messing up what could have been an even more spectacular career than Chamberlain produced. So let's unpack this. Let's start taking— what is this habit business? Okay, the brain creates habits when it finds a successful way of handling a short-term survival concern It does that kind of like whatever, you know, whatever comes its way. But when it locates something and it works, it starts consolidating it. It starts myelinating it. It starts insulating that particular circuit. And before you know it, that habit is created because it's also using the dopamine reward system. Every time you fire that habit and it works, you get more dopamine. It feels good. It locks in the habit. That's the good news. And it's also the bad news. Most of us grow up in a world and our habits have already been formed for us by history, by our families, by, by our ancient ancestors, all that stuff. And we come up and we have these preloaded programmings, habits that start running our show. And what happens, we don't even know. It's kind of like the, It's kind of like the illustration of the two fish talking, and it's going, oh yeah, yeah, I'm breathing water. And the other fish says, what water? The deal is, is that it's so ubiquitous that you don't even notice it's there. And what we want to do is start recognizing that where you are, the stuckness, wherever you are and whatever you're attempting to do with your life, what we want to do is say, Those are patterns holding you stuck. Those patterns, though, were created another time in another place, and they were good for you. They produce short-term survival. In my own case, I grew up in an enormously chaotic family. It was alcoholic, it was mentally ill and chaotic. I learned how to cope in that chaos. Okay, did it very well. I survived. I grew up. I became, you know, a young man and I started going out. And what I discovered is that I may have escaped my home, but home was still, I was still carrying it around. Is that I was born, I was built as a habit to deal with this uncertainty, with this chaos that my home was. And out of that, I kind of gravitated to chaotic situations. I was an advertising guy, I'd say, wow. Okay. And out of that though, if there was not chaos there, I, as a habit machine, would create the chaos because that was familiar pattern. And it wasn't until I mastered that element of myself that I started becoming a lot more in control of the creation of the the self that I am today. Okay. It took a lot of work though. The first thing I had to do is I had to actually notice the habits. I was living and breathing in these habits, much like the fish not recognizing he was in water. Okay. So the deal is these habits, some are pre-programmed. They just flow right into you. You learned them. They're successful for short-term survival. Then we start growing up. We leave that area and we This, this journey that we're on takes us into areas that were unknown. And what we do is we notice we carry those habits with us and we start creating the history, the past all over again. That can be good. That can be bad. Most of us discover that we reach kind of a plateau, a glass ceiling, and we keep bumping up against it. And we can't figure out what in the world the problem is. Well, you're stuck in habit. That habit is pulling you back. It doesn't want to let go because guess what? It's been reinforced by the dopamine a long time. And it's assured survival on a short-term basis. We're looking to something about changing ourselves and changing our positions. And we need to let go. Of those old patterns, but the old patterns don't want to let go because they're habituated, then becomes the thing that Wilt Chamberlain also said. Those habits, once formed, are going to create you. So the deal, my friends, is this, is what we have to be able to do is say, you know something, what does this look like in real life? Well, I have a client right now, okay, that now this isn't trading, And what he's discovered is he reaches particular thresholds and then he blows up, sabotages. And in it, his growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, what happened is he was always around his father and his father never approved of him. And it was kind of like, oh, well, I thought that was going to happen. You know, you're just making a mistake. A kid's going to make a mistake. Dad is supposed to help correct that mistake and build. Well, this was just more like the dad would say, I told you so. You're never going to make it. You're going to blow it up. The kid grew up under that world. He goes into the— he ends up going into the military. He gets thrown out. He gets a house. He loses the house. And what happened is this is confirmation to the dad's opinions, who, by the way, the young man still wants that approval. Almost always men want the approval of their father, and that's good news and bad news. Okay. Ultimately, the only approval you need is something that comes from within. However, with this young man, what he's recognizing is that these patterns have followed him all through his life, and he's beginning to see that he does not have patterns. He does not have habits. They have him. And now he's beginning to wake up. He's beginning to catch the patterns. He's catching those habits in action and going, oh, this, this is the habit. And what you will discover is that habit truly serves a purpose. The problem is that habit is no longer serving a long-term goal. So you're going, how do I, how do I learn to do this? How do I learn to deconstruct a habit circuitry, neural circuitry, so that it's performing better? It can release me from the bondage. And this guy finally said, Randy, in your work, what I have found is I found myself, I have now put my hands on the bars to the door that binds me to my past. Now, this young man's in a powerful position. He's witnessing now, he's observing that those habits have gone wild and they're no longer serving him. And what he's doing is he's recognizing that it is he and only he who can turn those habits around and build them into much more powerful ways. But to do that, He's gonna have to learn how to construct a self. And that first place, my friends, is with the very breath that you breathe. You know, I teach diaphragmatic breathing as something that you need to be doing all the time, not just when you're in the yoga stance, but you need to be diaphragmatic breathing because that diaphragmatic breathing regulates the motion, the way you— the reactions you have to all these uncertainties that happen in life so that it doesn't get to a point where it overwhelms you, that habit goes wild, takes over, blows you up. And then he's going, okay, if I do that, if I calm myself down, the second thing that happens is you're going to have to learn to observe. Okay, an observation you recognize is profound truth that just, oh my God, I had no idea. That you and your thoughts are not the same. And in particular, you and your beliefs are not the same. These are acquired beliefs. These are acquired thoughts from history. You've just been sitting there as the fool. Okay? Your job is to wake up. The incredible power that lives within you so that you can manifest the glory of being. That's what your job is. And you begin to recognize is that these old habits no longer serve that purpose. You're going, okay, I can regulate them so they don't take over. I can learn to observe them and recognize, oh my God, these aren't me, and begin to recognize they are aspects of of a self. They take over what I would call the governing committee of the mind. Okay, and it really comes down to, okay, what emotional programs do you want in together creating the mind that you engage the challenges of living with? That's the first big habit idea, is you go, okay, if I understand that the mind really is a space where a lot of the emotional programs that reside in you, and those are the ones that have got the habits, and there are some of them that are very powerful and are long-term benefit type things. You are going to learn how to pull them up from memory, okay? Not from hallucination, not from the imagination, but from memory of the time it did happen. And in that, you're going to start practicing and working with it. You're going to realize that, you know something, you can train internal resources to come forward and begin to take their place in the governance of the self. Because ultimately, what you are is a self. You are potential that has been organized, congealed, into a self, into a structure that you've been calling you. That's just one tiny part of what you are. You're so much more. My invitation is for you to consider taking this further. Go to the website, look around, and start saying, so there is actually a way of training the self that trains, deconstructs old habits patterns. Yes. And constructs the potential of a new pattern that engages life. And here's the deal. I'll put it to you this way. I grew up in a family that lost intergenerational wealth the generation before me. And my cousin and I were always trying to get the money back that was stolen from us, and we're going to get that money back. And what happened is that, that habit followed me through my adulthood. As I was trying to get the money back, I realize now I was not trying to create wealth. I was trying to get it back. Okay, and then while I did that though, I was not creating wealth. I was in the struggle of getting it back. And that's what I was like in my early 40s. And then I woke up one day and says, oh my God, this isn't even my story. This is the story of the Macmillans and the O'Connors. I don't even, I don't even like that story. And I started realizing that money really is a tool. It's a tool to be able to create new possibility. It's not who you are as a human being. And I began to see is that I've been using it as an indication of who I am. And all of a sudden I began to realize is that really it's an exchange of values. You know, people pay me because of the promise of what I can help them with. That's my value right there, in the help. Okay, not in the look at the money. No, the money comes as an afterthought. It just sneaks right in and there it is. So what I want you to do is go to my website and really start exploring. There's lots of opportunity there to get to really think differently. And there's also my book. I highly recommend it. It's really about waking up to the potential living right in front of your face and how you go about building it into a new self. Friends, that's what this journey is all about. Come join the journey and start creating the self that manifests the glory built in you. Have a great one.