Your Mind Is Controlling Your Life (Here’s Why)

The biggest challenge is the mind, because most of you think you are your mind. Most of you think you are your thoughts. See, what is your most stressful thought? Are they about your health or the health of your children? Are they about cash flow in your business? Are they about your parents? Is it about death? Is it about, are you enough? Here's my question: are these thoughts your thoughts? These are not your thoughts. They're just thoughts. See, most of you think you are your mind. Your mind is a tool you're supposed to use. If you don't use it, it will use you. And we're here to make that change. So to do that, you have to understand there's different parts of what you think of as your mind or brain. In the Indian tradition, they have some different terms for it. The mind, the intellect, they call it buddhi there, it's always dissecting, it's always reducing things from what they really are. People make up phrases like, "No one loves me." Well, love is not a thing for starters. It's a process. Are you being loving or you're not being loving? It's not a thing that you can walk away with. You try to keep it, hang on to it, or not give it back because you think someone's going to control you, then you're in your mind. And the mind will never make you happy. The mind is like technology. It's a tool. I can use it to strategize. I can use it to do things in my business. I can make things happen. Your mind is really useful. But when you think you're your mind, that means you think those thoughts are your thoughts. Now you're screwed because those thoughts have been around for thousands of years, whatever thought you wrote down. So if I told you 100 years ago that there's going to be these invisible waves traveling around the Earth, and you're gonna have a box, and you can click on that box and you could see people on the other side of the Earth and talk to them in real time because the invisible waves are going to come into your box, what would people have thought? You're insane. Are there invisible waves that come through your box? Absolutely. If someone said 100 years ago, we're gonna have a loop to the moon and back, they called you a lunatic. That's where the term lunatic comes from. So thoughts have always been here, and what determines which thoughts you have is not you, but how you use your antenna, your physiology. If you have cable or satellite and you turn one channel, it takes in a different frequency. All the frequencies are available, all the thoughts are available, but But when you turn one channel, you get comedy. You turn another channel, you get horror. You get another channel and it's, you know, epic films. You get another one, it's a drama. If your body is collapsed, you're going to turn to a very different channel than when your body is high energy. The higher energy frequencies bring different thoughts. Did you ever notice when you're really pissed off or really frustrated, you can have pretty lousy thoughts? The first thing you got to realize is those thoughts can come and go. They don't have to be owned by you. When you start thinking they're yours, you make them real. Write this down: problems need energy to live. Some things you just give too much energy to. You don't have to even change them, you just don't have to give so much energy to it. So most of us are overachievers, we push through everything. Yes, and there's some things you don't need to push through, you just need to stop giving them energy and they'll go away. So I can have a thought— I have all kinds of crazy thoughts— and I go, look at that crazy-ass thought. I don't go, that's my thought. If it's my thought, it's me. If it's me, what do I got to do? Most of you think you are your mind. Now, the mind is useful, but the mind— jot it down— the human brain is always doing 3 things. It's distorting, deleting, and generalizing. What does that mean? In order to give you cognitive space, what we've learned to do is have shortcuts. I don't have to think things through in every possibility, so let me generalize. When this and this happens, that's what it means. That's really helpful. In most cases. There's some cases where your generalizations are, that always happens in my relationship, and now you got problems forever because once you start believing it, you'll make it happen. So if we want to have a different experience, we got to go beyond just the mind and distortion, deletion, and generalization. We got to know that— have you ever heard somebody say, you always do that, and what's your first response? No, I don't. What the hell are you talking about? And you're right, you don't. You may even do it a lot, but you don't do it all the time. That's a generalization. Now, there's more than the intellect though. There's also identity. Identity is we all have a way of defining ourselves. Some of you, I'm an overachiever. Some of you, I'm a lover. Some of you, I'm a spiritual being. Everyone has different ways of defining self, and you probably have multiple ways of defining yourself. But whatever way you define yourself, whatever categories you create, creates possibility and it creates limitations. And when you start defining other people by certain identities, it also affects the way you interact with them. So we have to look if we can expand our identities, because if you keep it limited, your life is limited. If you want to know the power of identity, it's more powerful than willpower. The most powerful way to influence them so there's lasting change is to enhance your identity and expand it so it's not limited to whatever it's been in the past. Not to change it, but to expand it. How many of you used to smoke cigarettes and no longer do? See, if I said, do you want a cigarette? And you don't smoke, you'd You're not going to say, "What brand is it?" You're going to say, "No, I'm not a smoker. I'm not one of those." When you shift identity, it takes no effort whatsoever to stay consistent because this— write this down— the strongest force in the human personality is the need to stay consistent with how we define ourselves. If you are a person and you define yourself as a loser, you're going to find a way to lose. Because even though it's painful, it's who you are. Whatever it is that's your identity, it will control your entire life. And you already walked in with an identity, and my goal this week is to help you expand it massively so whatever was a limit isn't a limit anymore. It's comfortable within you. With an expanded identity, you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to try anymore. It's just who you are. When it's who you are, the game changes. When did you decide who you are? Most of those decisions were made a long time ago, and many have not been updated. Most of you would laugh at somebody using a phone from 10 years ago because it has no texting. You think, what a joke, why would you use a computer from 20 years ago? You'd laugh. But most of you are using a model of the world that you designed, an identity you designed 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Identity is deeper than the mind. The third element is memory, and a lot of your decisions are based on memories, but your memories are myths. You know why I know that? Because I've dealt with tens of millions of people in every country in the world, and I can tell you tell me the story of what happened, and I ask your mother or your brother or your girlfriend, and they'll tell me a different story. Both because we all perceive things differently through our five senses. Like somebody has a car accident, they interviewed four people, and often they get three different stories about what happened in the car accident. Most of you answer things through memory, but there are two parts of your brain, and there's the part of your brain known as the remembering self versus the experiencing self. The experiencing self is right here, right now, experiencing things. It doesn't have a bunch of expectations. It's just having the experience. So if we were here right now and there's a beautiful concert going on and somebody was playing this beautiful music and you're enjoying yourself, the experiencing self is enjoying it. But then all of a sudden somebody drops a bunch of dishes. Smash! Right in the middle of it, people go, "Oh my God, what the hell? They just destroyed the whole thing!" We tend to remember things that are painful because our brains are wired for negative focus to protect ourselves. So they go, "Yeah, you know, that concert wasn't so great." No, 99% of the concert was fucking awesome. But they'll remember that one thing. Much of what you remember has nothing to do with what actually happened. It's your brain trying to protect you through those memories. But I want you to know, your memories change your history. The way you look at your history, whether you're a victim or a victor, that's an identity you develop, and often based on looking at your memories, not your actual experiences. And then finally, there is a fourth one that's talked about, at least in Indian terms, you know, they call it chitta, but it's consciousness. How many believe there's a higher level of intelligence than you that at times has guided you in your life? How many feel like there's something more than you? To think that there's nothing more than our own minds and brains is a little bit egotistical, wouldn't you think? Like, I'm all there is in this creation? That's species hubris. It's absurd. It's like saying, you know, Webster's Dictionary is the result of an explosion in a print factory. It all came together in order and shit like that from an explosion. Well, it was really nice, but There's probably some consciousness in there. I have this little thing that when I'm talking to somebody, there's several things that are going on. I look at them and I can know in seconds, and I want to give you my shortcut so you can use it for you. If you have emotional fitness— now I'm not talking about intellectual fitness or emotion, like, you know, a lot of people have learned different styles of approaching, but fitness is a state of readiness, right? Not emotional intelligence. That's really nice. That's abilities. You can have the abilities and not use them. I don't give a shit about your emotional intelligence. I don't care about your capabilities. I care about what you're actually delivering. Who's with me on this? Say aye. That is like fitness, a state of readiness. Of course you have muscles. Are they ready? Have you trained them so that when they happen, you're able to use them?