Five Questions That Will Change Your Life
My doctorate is in Cognitive Behavioral Psychology. Those are real fancy words that mean I learned how to help change the way people conduct conversations with themselves. Changing the way you talk to yourself can totally revolutionize your life, but learning to do it can take some time and guidance. I've boiled the process down to five simple, mind-changing questions you can ask yourself today.

The Question That Changes Your Attitude

A few Saturdays ago I went to the local bank to do some routine transactions. As I walked out of the building, a young guy in a ragged, old pick-up truck turned into the parking space next to my new car, ripped off the mirror with his car as he rumbled by and kept going! I yelled at him and he just waved at me, oblivious to what he'd just done. I came home and was just a little bit irritated.

I got on my tennis shoes to take a jog to run off my frustrations when my eight- year-old daughter Claire ran into the room, yelling that something had happened to my six-year-old son Jared. Quickly I went into the room to find my son on the floor, white as rice and completely despondent. He was not moving and his eyes were rolled back in his head. I was sure I was losing him. My wife ran into the room and soon was screaming; she had come to the same conclusion. She thought maybe he was choking on something, so she reached down his throat to dislodge whatever might be there. When she did, he suddenly came out of it.

As it turned out, he had been bouncing face-down on his stomach on a large exercise ball. He'd bounced so hard that he knocked himself out cold. After a little while we realized what had happened and that he was going to be okay. Relieved (and still pretty shook up), I decided to take that jog. As I went to run, I passed by my car without the mirror, a sight that had me livid a short while ago. But things were different now. I looked at the car and said, "If my boy is okay, you can blow up that car."

When someone is emotionally healthy, their "personal truths" (how they see the world) are aligned with facts. You can demonstrate this for yourself by asking yourself which of these two statements is facts:

(1) "Losing my car mirror is awful," or
(2) "It's unfortunate that I lost my car mirror, but far from awful."

When I got a glimpse of what awful really is (losing my boy Jared), I got realigned FAST! Keeping a good attitude is simply telling yourself facts about your situations.

In our time there have been two great discoveries about how our minds function. First is the realization that individuals can change the way they think. It is this choice to change the way you think, more than anything else, that changes life.

The second great discovery is that we attract into our lives not only what we love but also what we fear. Thoughts that receive our attention, good or bad, fuel our unconscious engine, driving our future and the events that happen to us in the real world. There is a huge mind-matter connection, which simply means that what you think, what you say to yourself, what you believe impacts your life in powerful ways. Be careful to fuel your mind with facts.

THE QUESTION: Am I telling myself facts?

When I went to work with the University of Miami football program many years ago, they had just experienced their first losing season ever. Sports Illustrated actually ran a cover story that the University should get rid of football altogether. If that wasn't bad enough, they were in the middle of a losing streak to Florida State!

We started at a very simple place: I told the coaches and players to get a clear picture of what they wanted the program to look like, and then to work every day on moving closer to that picture. The process I used with them is one I use often: eliminate everything that is not that picture and work on the program, not in the program.

Next, we made a choice that we had no opponents; just energy that demanded us to be accountable. I told the players that sometimes the energy was greater than at other times, and that sometimes it just happened to be dressed in shoulder pads and a helmet. What we had to do was to be the best we could be every day and respond with the very best we had on every play. Our approach had nothing to do with the losing streak, Sports Illustrated, Florida State or anything else. In fact, we conducted our day-to-day business as if all that did not exist. The result was a thirty-five game win streak and a National Championship.

Let's apply that same approach to what's going on today in the world. I personally do not think, for example, that the economy is bad: I just think there is energy that says the opportunity has changed and we have to look for it. You will never find the opportunities in life by just sitting around labeling the energy you encounter as bad. There is no bad energy.