The root cure is your identity, the root cure is your identity,
and I've watched it, so and you, people come to seminars or events and are like,
“well, I do the morning routine, I take a cold shower, I meditate,
I write my goals down, I do a gratitude list, and I'm still not winning”.
It's your identity, it's your identity.
I think major part of life is identity, so, as you know, that I talk about this so often,
but you're going to be consistent with your identity, period, end of story.
Now, there's a thermometer which takes a temperature,
that's how most people are in their life, they take the temperature,
“how do other people feel about me?” They take the temperature, “ok,
I'm 75 degrees or I'm 90 degrees”. The winners have a thermostat,
we all have a thermostat, which is different, at least in our country
a thermostat is sitting right there on the wall sets the temperature of the room.
Right now it's probably 75 in here, what does not matter is the external conditions.
Most people are thermometers, they take the external conditions, that's what I get.
Winners are thermostat setters and are conscious of changing
the temperature setting. So we all have this identity, our identity
is our the thoughts, beliefs and concepts that we hold to be most true or
worth about ourselves. No matter what you do,
you're going to get your thermostat setting. So what happens for most people is
they think they're 75 degrees, let's just say of happiness or money,
they start becoming happier, 80, 90, 95 degrees of money or happiness,
somehow it seems coincidental, they turn the air conditioner on of their life
and they get it right back down to their identity setting up 75 degrees,
every single time. If it's money like,
“well my car broke down, no, it's this”. No, you're 75 degreer,
who was getting ninety degrees of money, you found a way to cool your life back down
to the thermostat setting. The reverse is also true,
you're starving, you're unemployed, you think you're never going to eat again,
you’ll eat again, you’ll heat it up to seventy five degrees.
The key of your life is your ability to change that thermostat setting
from 75 to 90 to 100, 200, 300 over your lifetime and you will get it.
So it's not the external conditions, so for me, everything I do
is dedicated to changing that thermostat setting. And you have multiple ones,
you have a faith, you have a happiness, you have a relationship one, a money one,
and so I change that, that's how I changed my life
by changing my thermostat setting, every time. If your wellness is important to you as a being
that morning routines which I teach in my book and goal setting
and those things are like symptomatic things you can do.
The root cure is your identity, the root cure is your identity.
And I've watched it, so and you, people come to seminars or events and are like,
“well, I do the morning routine, I take a cold shower, I meditate,
I write my goals down, I do a gratitude list and I'm still not winning”.
It's your identity, it's your identity. And so, I mean, without getting
into another two hours, like, what do you do with these people?
Because that's complicated stuff, changing identity.
Very complicated stuff, so some of it is intention based,
we'll go through what their intentions are because when they go,
“oh, I am good”, you'd be surprised how many people beat themselves up
to the power of their associations. And then here's a big one, because
we've all heard these things. We set up short term games
that are very short term like, “this week or this day if you do X”,
and we do a linkage routine where we link a performance
or an achievement or an effort to their identity.
So if you'll change the things you do in very small spurts,
you can change your identity little by little, by little, by little by little.
If that's, “I’m going to make ten contacts, I'm going to apologize to these five people”.
You begin to change your identity through very short, sporadic behaviors,
you'd be amazed, I do it myself often. This week I'm texting fifteen friends,
ask them to call me back and all I'm doing is going
to tell them I love them. “Hey, man, I've been
thinking about you, I love you, that's a hard word for a man to say,
I love you brother, I just wanted to check in on, you know, these are hard times”.
Just sort of like how we started this out before we were on when we were talking
about friends of our dads who would call, I do that as a friend of my friends often,
and so it's short, sporadic steps that change identity every single time.
It could be, I can say, “I'm going to set up a game of discipline with myself
where I'm going to get up fifteen minutes earlier tomorrow morning”.
And I do it and I inventory it, I'm going to get up that morning
and I'm going to work out by 7:00 a.m. and I do it and I inventory it,
depends on the person and where they're lacking. But if you're listening to this and watching it,
you can ask yourself where those areas are.
Is it that you don't believe your disciplined? Is it that you don't believe you're worthy?
Is it that you don't believe you're lovable or loving?
What is it with you and then work on that identity setting.
I lived completely unaware of who I was, unobservant of who I was
for so many years, thinking I'd get around to it. The happiest people I know are very aware,
they're self-deprecating. I’ve realized I'm a very average, ordinary person.
I grew up like you, I thought there wasn't a lot of happiness around
me so it must be in those beach houses, it must be on those jets,
and by the way, those things they do make you happy.
People say material things don't make you happy, that's just a lie,
and you’ve ever bought a beautiful suit like you're wearing, makes you happy.
For how long? I don't know.
Does it fulfill us though? Which is a completely different emotion.
Well, I think I talk about happiness a lot because,
well, first off all that is what everybody wants. We think we want the car, but really, it's how
the car will make us feel. We think that car will
make us happy, we want the jet, we want the relationship because of
what we think, we want those emotions. And so I think I talk about it a lot
because I’ve seen it out all my life. I was building my first big mansion dream house,
and I met my wife as I told you when we were five years old,
so it was a family project. And we walk in one day, I'm having
a bad day, I'm mad at everybody, business isn't going good,
appointments get flaked out, I walk in the house and they're building it, I'll never forget this,
they were in the kitchen building the kitchen, this huge, great room I walked in and I am
pissed, yelling, veins are sticking out and all the guys working in my house were,
in Southern California, you know this as well, the vast majority of people that were
working on my home were from Mexico,
whether they were there legally or not, I don't know,
but they were working and there was about 15 guys working at my house,
all making minimum wage all, all left their families at one point,
and they're playing mariachi music, they're laughing, they're dancing,
they're joyous as they're working. And I stopped myself with my wife,
it'll make me too emotional to talk too long about it,
and I looked and I thought, if life is measured on happiness,
these guys are killing it. They're building my mansion,
my veins are sticking out of my neck, I'm miserable, they're making
minimum wage, it's 100 degrees, they're working in my house, building my kitchen,
and they're singing and dancing and loving each other and having a blast,
happy to be here, and I'm miserable and this is my damn house.
What the hell is wrong with me? And that was a real turning
point for me where I am, “what do they know that I don't?”.
And what they were doing is, I was always projecting forward,
it was always the future, I never lived now.
I didn't always live in the past, that kind of comparison is not my thing,
but I never lived now, they were living right now, because they don't even know what their future is.
What a great gift to live right now and be grateful for that moment,
that work, that song, that buddy of theirs working next to them.
And I started to just slow down my appreciation for the moment.
And that’s really changed my life, and I can't tell you that I
still don't revert back because I do, but I do it much less because I am self aware.