Speaker 1: 95% of who we are by the time we're 35 years old is a memorized set of behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that function like a computer program. So then a person can say with their 5% of their conscious mind, I want to be healthy, I want to be happy, I want to be free. But the body is on a whole different program. People grab their cell phone, they check their WhatsApp, they check their text, they check their emails, they check Facebook, they tweet something, they do Instagram, they check the news, and now they feel really connected to everything that's known in their life. And then they go through a series of routine behaviors. They get out of bed on the same side, they go to the toilet, they get a cup of coffee, they take a shower, they get dressed, they drive to work the same way, they do the same things, they see the same people, they push the same emotional buttons, and that becomes the routine, and it becomes like a program. So now they've lost their free will to a program, and there's no unseen hand doing it to them. So when it comes time to change, the redundancy of that cycle becomes a subconscious program. Most people then wait for crisis or trauma or disease or diagnosis, you know, they wait for loss, some tragedy to make up their mind to change, and my message is why wait? You can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or you can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration. I think right now the cool thing is that people are waking up. If you're not being defined by a vision of the future, then you're left with the old memories of the past and you will be predictable in your life. How you think and how you feel creates your state of being. By closing your eyes and mentally rehearsing some action, if you're truly present, the brain does not know the difference between what you're imaging and what you're experiencing. So then you begin to install the neurological hardware in your brain to look like the event has already occurred. Now, your brain is no longer a record of the past, now it's a map to the future, and if you keep doing it, priming it that way, the hardware becomes a software program, and who knows, you just may start acting like a happy person. And then I think the hardest part is to teach our body emotionally what the future will feel like ahead of the actual experience. The hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before, period. And the moment you decide to make a different choice, get ready because it's going to feel uncomfortable. So if you think 60 to 70 thousand thoughts in one day, and we do, and 90% of those thoughts are the same thoughts as the day before, and you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, your life's not going to change very much because the same thought leads to the same choice, the same choice leads to the same behavior, the same behavior creates the same experience, and the same experience produces the same emotion. A habit is a redundant set of automatic, unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that's acquired through repetition. So if you think about it, people wake up in the morning, they begin to think about their problems. Those problems are circuits, memories in the brain. Each one of those memories are connected to people and things at certain times and places. And if the brain is a record of the past, the moment they start their day, they're already thinking in the past. Each one of those memories has an emotion. Emotions are the end product of past experiences. So the moment they recall those memories of their problems, they all of a sudden feel unhappy, they feel sad, they feel pain. Now, how you think and how you feel creates your state of being. So the person's entire state of being when they start their day is in the past. So what does that mean? The familiar past will sooner or later be predictable future. So if you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, and you can't think greater than how you feel, or feelings have become the means of thinking, by very definition of emotions, you're thinking in the past. And for the most part, you're going to keep creating the same life. I think that the bigger thing is that we keep firing and wiring those circuits, they become more hardwired. So you have a thought and then the program runs. But it's the emotion that follows the thought. If you have a fearful thought, you're going to feel anxiety. The moment you feel anxiety, your brain's checking in with your body and saying, yeah, you're pretty anxious. So then you start thinking more corresponding thoughts equal to how you feel. Well, the redundancy of that cycle conditions the body to become the mind. So now, when it comes time to change, a person steps into that river of change and they make a different choice. And all of a sudden, they don't feel the same way. So the body says, well, you've been doing this for 35 years. Well, you're going to just stop suffering and stop feeling guilty and stop feeling shameful. And you're not going to complain or blame or make excuses or feel sorry for yourself. Well, the body's in the unknown. So the body says, I want to return back to familiar territory. So the body starts influencing the mind and it says, start tomorrow. You're too much like your mother. You'll never change. This isn't going to work for you. This doesn't feel right. And so if you respond to that thought as if it's true, that same thought will lead to the same choice, which will lead to the same behavior, which will create the same experience, which produce the same emotion. The stronger the emotional reaction you have to some experience in your life, the higher the emotional quotient, the more you pay attention to the cause. The moment the brain puts all of its attention on the cause, it takes a snapshot. And that's called a memory. So long-term memories are created from very highly emotional experiences. So what happens then is that people think neurologically within the circuitry of that experience and they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions. And so when you have an emotional reaction to someone or something, most people think that they can't control their emotional reaction. Well, it turns out if you allow that emotional reaction, it's called a refractory period, to last for hours or days, that's called the mood. I say to someone, hey, what's up? You say, I'm in a mood. Well, why are you in a mood? Well, I had this thing happen to me five days ago and I'm having one long emotional reaction. If you keep that same emotional reaction going on for weeks or months, that's called temperament. Why is he so bitter? I don't know. Let's ask him. Why is he so bitter? Why are you bitter? Well, I had this thing happen to me nine months ago. And if you keep that same emotional reaction going on for years on end, that's called a personality trait. And so learning how to shorten your refractory period of emotional reactions is really where the work starts. So then people, when they have an event, what they do is they keep recalling the event because the emotions of stress hormones, the survival emotions are saying, pay attention to what happened because you want to be prepared if it happens again. So as you become familiar with the thoughts, the behaviors and the emotions of the old self, you're retiring that old self as you fire and wire new thoughts and condition the body into a new emotional state. If you do that enough times, it'll begin to become familiar to you. So it's so important, just like a garden. If you're planting a garden, you've got to get rid of the weeds. You've got to take the plants from the past year and you've got to pull them out. The rocks that sift to the top that are like our emotional blocks, they have to be removed. The soil has to be tenderized and broken down. We have to make room to plant a new garden. So primarily we learn the most about ourselves and others when we're uncomfortable. All organisms in nature can tolerate short-term stress. You know, a deer gets chased by a pack of coyotes. When it outruns the coyotes, it goes back to grazing and the event is over. And the definition of stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance, out of homeostasis. The stress response is what the body innately does to return itself back to order. So you're driving down the road, someone cuts you off, you jam on the brakes, you may give them the finger and then you settle back down and the event is over and boom, now everything's back to normal. But what if it's not a predator that's waiting for you outside the cave, but what if it's your co-worker sitting right next to you and all day long you're turning on those chemicals because they're pushing all your emotional buttons. When you turn on the stress response and you can't turn it off, now you're headed for disease because no organism in nature can live in emergency mode for that extended period of time. It's a scientific fact that the hormones of stress down-regulate genes and create disease, long-term effects. Human beings, because of the size of the neocortex, we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone. We can think about our problems and turn on those chemicals. That means then our thoughts could make us sick. So if it's possible that our thoughts could make us sick, is it possible that our thoughts could make us well? The answer is absolutely yes.