by Effortless English AJ Hoge
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1.
Number 1 was to develop your own personal health and energy. It’s really the foundation, without
that, hard to do anything else.
2.
Step Number 2 was to develop your own purpose, your own personal purpose. And this
might grow and change over time but it’s something that gives you passion, or several
things that give you passion. And that’s going to give you a lot of drive and motivation in
your life to do anything. Those are the two very, very general ones that are the
foundation, the core, for everything else.
3.
Alright, and then, of course, in Number 3 we learned how to understand deeply, right?
That it’s not enough just to quickly think about something, you’ve really got to
understand yourself and the situation and others very, very deeply before you start
trying to start making a lot of changes and doing a lot of actions.
4.
Whatever change it is that you want in your life, you have to attach a lot of negative painful
emotion to not changing. Make it terrible and
really think about it constantly all the time, every day. Oh, if I don’t change, oh, it’s going
to get worse and worse and be terrible. And, uh, and I’ll be a horrible person and it’ll
suck and oh my god, right? And just make that emotion stronger and stronger and
stronger. And at the same time, dream a little bit about your goal. And think about how
wonderful and amazing it’ll be when you do make the change.
5.
Step 5 is to destroy the old patterns first.
Destroy the old pattern.
Break and interrupt that old behavior or behaviors that’s stopping you from making the
improvement you want.
6.
Step Number 6 is create empowering beliefs and a vision.
Create an empowering belief structure and vision. In other words, we’re now going to
add in something very positive and empowering, right?
So, what’s Step Number 6? Very clear, very simple…create new empowering beliefs, a
new empowering vision of the future, and new specific behaviors to replace the old
habits. Now when you get those specific behaviors, it’s not enough just to identify them.
You’ll write them down. But then what you need to do is every day, several times a day,
you want to imagine yourself. See yourself actually doing those things.
7.
Step Number 7 is condition it.
Condition it. Now conditioning, or to condition,
So you’ve got to celebrate every time, even if you only do this new behavior a little bit.
Even if you only do the change a tiny little bit.
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1. To change, to make big changes in your life it requires a lot of energy. You need energy to break old
habits. You need energy to establish and create new positive strong habits. You need energy to
overcome difficulty. Sometimes you’re going to face difficulties. Sometimes you’re not going to feel like
doing something that you really need and want to do. And if you have the energy, you can make yourself
do it. But if you’re tired, you can’t, or you won’t probably. So energy is vitally important.
2.
Step 2 is you must develop a personal mission or missions. So what does that
mean? What is a mission? A mission is really a reason. It’s a purpose. It’s your
purpose, your life purpose.
step number 2 is develop your personal mission. Develop your
personal purpose, the reasons in your life, the reason you’re living your life, at least
for now. Don’t try to be a perfectionist. You don’t need to come up with something
perfect. Just come up with a couple things that are really, really important to you.
See, we don’t make changes unless we have a strong reason to do so. Like we
might say I want to be healthy, I want to be healthy, I want to be healthy, I want to
lose weight, I want to lose weight. But until we have a really powerful reason to do
it, we’re not going to do it. If we have weak reasons, if it’s just like, oh I’d like to lose
weight or I’d look a little better, that’s probably not going to give us enough focus and
passion to actually take the action in order to get that result. It just doesn’t work that
way, right? When we have powerful reasons, a powerful why as Tony Robbins says,
then we find that change is much, much easier.
So you need a powerful why, a powerful reason, a powerful purpose in your life.
When I say to develop a general mission, what I’m saying is you need to develop a purpose in your life, or
purposes, that are not dependent on any specific job or situation or relationship,right?
So you need to develop a couple of these yourself. And let me tell you why.
Because your mission is your fuel, okay? If Step 1, your health and energy, if that
was the engine, well you’ve got to put something in that thing to make it go. And
your mission will give you that passion. And the reason that’s important is that
number one if you’re trying to be a leader, people follow passion. People crave
passion. They want passion.
So if you’re passionate about something, people tend to listen to you. Even if you’re
full of shit, okay? We have plenty of examples out there of people who are totally full
of shit, meaning they’re totally wrong. And yet lots and lots of people follow them
and listen to them simply because they’re super passionate about their topic. Now
we don’t want to be full of shit but we do want that passion, because the opposite is
also true. There are also a lot of people out there who are very knowledgeable, who
have a lot of very beneficial information who could really be great leaders and really
help a lot of people. But nobody listens to them because they don’t have passion,
right? They’re kind of flat. And we don’t respond to that emotionally.
So you’ve got to have passion.
3.
Step Number 3. Understand yourself, understand
the situation and understand other people as deeply as possible.
It’s to understand deeply.
Well the first thing you need to understand is yourself, right? You’ve got to
understand yourself, your feelings, your thoughts, your motivations, your
psychology…all of the stuff going on inside your head. This is true for a change
you want to make personally in your life. It’s also true if you’re trying to lead
another person. If you don’t really understand what’s happening with yourself,
you’ll have a very difficult time making effective changes that last, that are long
term.
The second thing you have to understand is the situation, what’s happening with
yourself and the environment. What is the situation now? You need to
understand it as much as possible before you start trying things.
And finally you need to understand other people, other people who are involved
in this situation, this problem, this challenge, this goal that you want to
accomplish.
Whatever it is, for you maybe it’s those things and other things, you need to
understand it. Write them down. Really know what it is so you can change it.
You’ve got to understand yourself and the situation deeply.
So that’s what you need to do. You need to start looking at people who have
achieved the highest level that you want. And then start examining, what are
their beliefs. What are their motivations? What methods did they use? Did they
use grammar translation or did they try something else and use something else?
This is how I developed my own teaching method.
You’ve got to understand deeply.
Question very deeply. Think deeply, not just really quickly. This is such a major
problem for so many students. They don’t really think. They think, I want to
understand, I want to improve my English. And so immediately they jump into
doing a lot of work that’s the same as what they used to do. They start studying
vocabulary books. They start studying TOEFL books and exam books. And
they’re using a lot of energy. And they’re really passionate about it. They’re
really focused. And they’re working and working for hours and hours every day.
But they’re doing the same old things and they get the same old results.
They don’t get what they want because they didn’t stop first to really examine
what they had done, what their motivations were, what successful people are
doing. So you’ve really got to do this. You’ve got to ask a lot of questions. So
that’s Step 3, understand deeply yourself, the situation and other people.
4.
Whatever change it is that you want in your life, you have to attach a lot of negative painful
emotion to not changing. Make it terrible and
really think about it constantly all the time, every day. Oh, if I don’t change, oh, it’s going
to get worse and worse and be terrible. And, uh, and I’ll be a horrible person and it’ll
suck and oh my god, right? And just make that emotion stronger and stronger and
stronger. And at the same time, dream a little bit about your goal. And think about how
wonderful and amazing it’ll be when you do make the change. And this emotional
leverage is…it’ll change everything. In fact, just this step probably could help you make
most of the changes you need to make. I’m going to give you more good stuff that’ll
help you, y’know, develop this even better. But this one is super, super, super powerful,
so do it. Don’t minimize. Don’t make the problem seem like it’s okay. Make it painful.
Alright, you must feel it.
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The fourth step is to get emotional leverage, get emotional leverage.
To make a change you need emotional leverage. It means strong, powerful, emotional
reasons to change.
You might do this with your own English level, for example. You might say, “Well, yes, I
want to speak, y’know, super great, fluently, wonderfully…but my speaking’s not so bad
right now.” And then you can compare yourself to people who speak worse than you.
And you can kind of feel better about it and you don’t feel so bad, right? This is normal.
5.
Step 5 is to destroy the old patterns first.
We don’t want to feel uncomfortable. We don’t want to feel pain emotionally about
these issues in our life. And yet that process of making ourselves feel more
comfortable, that’s what prevents us from changing. See, as long as I felt comfortable
with the extra 20 pounds, never would I lose it. I could tell myself all these great
reasons why I should but I never would.
So how did I do it? And I’ve lost about 15 of them now, so 5 more to go. But how did I
start that process? I did the exact opposite. I connected massive, massive, massive
pain and discomfort to not changing, right? So what I started doing is I’d get in the
mirror and I’d look and I’d have like shirt off and I would grab the fat and I’d just look
down. And I would kind of make it look even bigger, y’know, like put my stomach out.
And then I would look at it and I would just make myself feel disgusted. I would like,
look at this. This isn’t me. This is disgusting. And I would imagine that fat just like all in
my body, really slimy and smelly and disgusting, right? And it wasn’t a fun process but
this is what I would do.
And then I would start imagining like, okay, if I continue living the way I live, what will I
be like in five years from now. And then I would imagine myself like with 20 more
pounds, even heavier. And then I would think what about ten years from now? And I
would imagine 40 or 60 or 80 more pounds. And then I would start imagining all the
terrible consequences of that, y’know, less energy. And my students wouldn’t respect
me. Maybe you would but I was trying to make more pain in my mind connected to that
fat. You see how this works? What you actually want to do is make it worse than it
actually is. Attach a massive amount of emotional pain, discomfort, fear, anger, all of
things to not changing, to the current situation.
And I know it doesn’t sound like very much fun. And it’s not. But by doing this you’ll
suddenly get a lot of energy to make that change. When I went through this process
and I kept doing this, in my mind, I reached a point finally where I’m like, ”Damn it! Fuck
it! I’m going to change.” Right? There’s no way. I’m not going to end up like a big
super fat huge guy in ten years and there’s no way. That’s not me. And I got kind of
angry at myself. And I got angry at the situation. And I got a lot of emotion about it, a
lot of painful, negative emotion about the fat and about not changing.
Think of it as like a disc, like a hard disc on a computer. And what you’re doing is
scratching it, right? It’s got some saved behaviors, some saved routines. And the first
thing you’ve got to do is scratch it and scratch it and scratch it. Tony Robbins talks
about this. Scratch that old behavior until it can’t be played again. You can no longer
play those old routines. You can no longer access those old habits. This is very, very
important.
6.
Step Number 6 is create empowering beliefs and a vision.
Create an empowering belief structure and vision. In other words, we’re now going to
add in something very positive and empowering, right?
Then you identify some beliefs that you want to have or
need to have. And you write them down. A good way to start is just put “I am…” I am,
and then write out what the belief is. I am a fantastic English speaker. I am a confident
English speaker. Whatever you need to do. Okay, so that’s the second part of this is to
identify the powerful beliefs that you need.
And then finally, third is you need to identify the specific behaviors, the exact very
specific behaviors that you need to make the change happen.
So, what’s Step Number 6? Very clear, very simple…create new empowering beliefs, a
new empowering vision of the future, and new specific behaviors to replace the old
habits. Now when you get those specific behaviors, it’s not enough just to identify them.
You’ll write them down. But then what you need to do is every day, several times a day,
you want to imagine yourself. See yourself actually doing those things.
7.
Step Number 7 is condition it.
Condition it. Now conditioning, or to condition,
So you’ve got to celebrate every time, even if you only do this new behavior a little bit.
Even if you only do the change a tiny little bit.
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