This Week's "Change That Up" Tip...Barriers

Want to know the key to achieving your dreams and goals and realizing a true life of significance? Altering your beliefs about yourself. As motivational speaker Ed Mylett so perfectly sums up, there’s a governor on our lives, and it’s our identity -- what we think we’re worth; what we think we deserve.

A good person in any endeavor will only take what he thinks he deserves. In other words, a good person will not take more from the table of life than what he thinks he’s worth.

And that’s where our self-imposed governor on our identity comes into play. Think about it like a thermostat. Say you’re a 75-degree person. If things start heating up in life -- you start experiencing more success, your life gets going -- you unconsciously find a way to cool things back down…to get back to where we’re comfortable.

On the flip side, when things take a turn for the worse -- when you’re broke, when you’re struggling -- you grind and find a way to heat them back up to the point we think we deserve. Over time, you always find yourself in that 75-degree comfort zone.

BUT, if you want to alter your life, is to alter that governor of self-identity -- to start to believe that you’re worth 85 degrees of life, 90 degrees of life or 95 degrees of life. And there are TWO ways that you can do that.

1. Put yourself in circumstances that demand you to get outside your comfort zone. Said differently, you throw yourself out there past where you are comfortable -- you make yourself do something that an 85-degree person would do, and you knock it out of the park. When you do that repetitiously, you begin to believe in that new level of identity.

2. Surround yourself with people who operate at a higher level than you. For example, if you’re a 70-degree athlete, and you start training with other athletes who operate at an 85-degree level, you’re going to level up. As Ed Mylett says, “Your identity, through osmosis, goes up.”

The take-home point is that both your behaviors and associations are key to altering your beliefs about yourself, which are the path to getting (and giving) more out of life.