Life Coaching

Finding Your Real Inner Drive

Everything on earth has a purpose and so do you. Once we tap into it, we’ll get immense inner drive, fulfilment and joy.

Today’s world is changing more rapidly than ever before so it’s very important to find that thing in ourselves that is constant, doesn’t change and is always available. That’s our purpose and once we find it, it’ll give us certainty and a sense that life is happening for us and not to us.

Goals alone are not enough. It’s common to achieve them and think: is that all there is? The purpose of goals is not to achieve them, it’s what they make of us as people, who we become. And ultimately, there has to be a meaning to the person we become or we’ll never get the drive to get the edge.

We must answer the question “Why am I here?”.

And before deciding, let’s remember the three most important decisions that we’re constantly making:

What is driving you today?

Is it our drive to prove someone wrong, is it our parent’s will, is it our fear of pain, is it our sense of competition, is it our desire for happiness?

We’re all driven by something, and usually we don’t choose that consciously, but what if we take control of it now?

What if we let our lives to be driven by something much more empowering such as a sense of purpose? A sense that there’s something out there for us to do, someone he have to become. And we don’t even have to know what it is, but we need to trust that every day more of it it’s going to come out.

Is it pain-driven?

As we already know, pain and pleasure are the main drivers of our lives. And although a sense of purpose or associating pleasure can override the pain, let’s take a look to how our brain tries to discover the source of pain and creates those associations in the first place.

It follows this three steps:

1. What’s unique in this situation when I feel this pain?
2. What was happening (what’s the event or what did I do) at the same time I felt the pain?
3. What’s consistent about it?

Eg: A kid touches a burning stove.

1. The unique thing is that I was the stove was warm
2. I felt the pain when I touched it
3. The first time isn’t consistent, but if he tries again and feels the pain one more time, it’ll be.

This simple mechanism can create false -or generalised- associations, if we choose bad answers for those questions.

Eg: Associating marriage to death. After getting married, a man started beating physically and emotionally his wife and eventually his kid. The mother who’s feeling extreme pain and fears for her life and her kid’s life, chooses these answers:

1. The unique thing is living with a man and being married to him
2. The event was trusting him
3. The consistency is that every week with him has the same painful results

That woman ended the relationship but afterwards had trouble finding a new partner and the reason was because she’d associated pain to men and marriage in general instead of to that particular man and marriage. And that trusting was the source of it, so trusting was equal to death.

How to know our life’s purpose?

We decide what it is.

We discover it and decide “that’s it”. Probably later on we’ll refine it but right now this is what I’m here to do and as long as I’m doing it, I know I’m on track.

For most of us, the meaning for our lives is here today and it’s preparing us for a greater meaning in the future if we just use all of our life experience, the pain and the pleasure, to become more.

By living by our purpose, we’ll be delivering all along the way. Not only when we achieve something but every single day.

Why people don’t succeed or “win” at the game of life

There are 7 things that a lot of people do that prevent them from being successful in life:

Seven strategies to succeed

Essentially, by doing the opposite of the things that make people fail, we get the 7 strategies to succeed:

Finding your purpose

Sometimes not getting our dream gives us our destiny. As in the film Field of Dreams where doctor Graham fails at his dream of being a baseball player and therefore discovers his purpose of becoming a doctor.

Life is about two things who we are and what we do. Discovering that sense of meaning will give us a path to who do we want to become and what do we want to do.

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The Power of Compounding

Our financial goals are only important if our health, relationships, energy, emotions, time, etc. are where we want them to be (or getting there). We don’t want to be “the richest man in the graveyard”.

First we have to differentiate wealth from financial freedom:

Financial freedom is having enough money so we don’t have to work live our life. We can work because we want to but not because we have to.

Wealth is something we can have right now. Until we feel abundant, that there’s more than enough, we won’t feel rich (no matter how much money we have).

What’s wrong is always available, so is what’s right.

Tony Robbins

Money, freedom, wealth, abundance is always available, so is poverty, limitation, fear, etc.

Feeling wealthy is just a matter of realising how abundant we are and train ourselves to be grateful.

How to achieve your next financial goal

These are the 4 steps that we need to take to achieve our next level:

The power of compounding

No matter how good we are, there’s a limit of what we can earn when we we trade our time for money. It’s when we invest (in others who are adding value) that we can trade our money for more money in the future.

Compounding happens when you invest money and reinvest the earnings with the initial investment. Money well invested generates earnings. That money plus the earnings generate bigger earnings that reinvested again and again compound and grow exponentially.

For example, investing $100 a month at your child’s birth at a 10% rate of return results in:

• $6,000 when the child turns 5
• $60,500 when the child turns 19
• $205,000 at age 30
• $1,5 million when he or she is age 50
• $4,3 million at age 60
• And $11,6 million at age 70!

Starting now is the key, because although in the beginning it grows slowly, in the future, each year makes a massive difference.

The best way to invest is in stocks, since they have long-term dependability (they have grown consistently on average over the years) and short-term flexibility (they’re much more easy to buy and sell than real estate).

The three bucket asset allocation (by John Templeton)

As humans, we tend to buy and sell based on our emotions, therefore it’s important to plan our investments and decide on the percentages in advance.

We should invest at least 10% of our income. Then we have to decide, depending on our needs and risk tolerance, how to split that into our three buckets:

Pay yourself first

The best way to save money is to never see it.

If you struggle to save, make it automatic but we must always pay ourselves first. As soon as we receive a pay, 10% goes to those buckets and then we pay bills, rent, buy things, etc.

Why people fail to become wealthy and how to succeed

This are 12 things that will make us fail at mastering finance:

1. Not defining what wealth means to you
2. Making wealth a moving target
3. Defining wealth in ways that make it impossible to achieve
4. Never starting
5. Never making wealth an absolute must
6. Not having a realistic plan
7. Failing to follow through a plan
8. Making someone else (a.k.a. “experts”) responsible for your decisions
9. Giving up when faced with major challenges
10. Failing to conduct life as if it was a business
11. Allowing other people’s emotions to affect the implementation of your plan
12. Not getting quality coaching

So, by doing the opposite we have a blueprint for mastering finance:

1. Define what wealth means to you, exactly what will it take for you to feel wealthy
2. Lock that definition firmly in place. Don’t keep raising the bar.
3. Make sure your definition is achievable
4. Create a plan that is achievable
5. Make it a must for you by listing the reasons you must be wealthy
6. Finalise your plan and work out the details
7. Follow through on your plan by taking immediate action toward its attainment
8. Make yourself responsible. Let experts coach you, but don’t abdicate your responsibility
9. Don’t give up when the going gets tough
10. Make your life a business, and expect a year-end profit
11. Don’t let other people’s emotions control or cause you to deviate from your asset allocation
12. Get good coaching

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Your Call to Action

Emotions are what define our lives to ourselves. Everything that we want to do and achieve is to get more of some emotions and less of others. Even success, wealth or abundance are emotions!

Emotions exist for a reason: they are signals for us to take action.

There’re various ways of dealing with them, but only one will move us forward (and it’s not commonly used):

• Avoiding: it’s going to make us play safe and therefore not fully enjoy life. Eg: not getting in a relationship to avoid feeling hurt.
• Enduring: it’s going to take a lot of energy with us and eventually we could get to a point where we can’t endure it more and emotionally explode.
• Denying or disassociating: it just closes us up to life, we become flat and prevents us from moving forward.
• Competing: using it as a flag to show others how _______ we feel. In this case we can either get attached to that emotion and the identity it gives us or create more of it so we can keep competing. Eg: “You think you’re lonely? You haven’t seen my day to day, it’s way worse than you can imagine!”
• Learning from them and utilising them*: understand what’s trying to tell us, learn from it and apply it. This is the only way we can move forward and get less of that emotion in the future.

*Sometimes it can happen in the opposite order: using it first and then learning from it. Eg: using anger or frustration to train harder, using sadness to write, using guilt to make a beautiful act, using jealousy to get better at something… But there’s a difference between doing an action to get rid of the emotion (or distract ourselves) and using it. From using it we always learn something.

Where do emotions come from?

They com from the rules we have and the meaning we give to events. What we feel is not based on what we experience, but rather on our interpretation of it.

And that choice is always ours.

What do emotions mean?

For the purpose of simplicity and ease of use, Tony groups all the negative emotions in 10 types.

Also, instead of negative emotions, we’ll call them action signals. Because that’s all they are; signals for us to take action to reevaluate our perception or our procedure. They’re telling us that we need to make a change in order to get what we really want.

Here are the 10 types of action signals, with their description and the message they convey:

The 6 steps to master our emotions

This are the 6 simple steps to get rid of any negative emotion (action signal) by using it and learning from it:

The way we get better at this is by doing it. We don’t need to practice, we do it full out, we learn from our experience and we’ll get better.

💡 TIP: Kill the monster while it’s a baby. It’s much easier to deal with this emotions when they’re little than when become huge.

The 10 emotions to cultivate daily

The best way to get what we want is to focus on it. Emotions are like our personal garden, it’s not enough to remove the weeds, we need to plant and cultivate what we want to harvest. If we cultivate enough good emotions there will be no room for the negative ones.

This 10 emotions, if we cultivate them on a daily basis, will put us in a state where the behaviour to do what we want will come automatically.

These are the 10 emotions of power:

1. Love and Warmth
2. Appreciation and Gratitude
3. Curiosity
4. Excitement and Passion
5. Determination
6. Flexibility
7. Confidence
8. Cheerfulness
9. Vitality
10. Contribution

We can create beliefs that are very useful when dealing with emotions. For example:

• “People always do the best they can with the resources they have”
• “There’s always a way if we’re committed”
• “The best is always yet to come”
• “This too shall pass”
• “I can’t be alone, there’re 7.5 billion people in this planet”

Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning we gave it. If we don’t like the way we feel, choose to create a new meaning.

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