Inch by Inch Progress and the Lost Art of Consistency

Your mind has a certain perception of what level of success you should have, and whether you like it or not, your mind will constantly play games with you to keep you at the level of success it thinks you should achieve.

This is one of the freakiest, hard to deal with barriers that you will ever encounter.

To truly transform and experience “deep identity level change” you will have to fight and force and continually manage it the entire way through.

One of the biggest games your mind will play is making you remember and focus mostly on the events in your life it thinks are in alignment with the level of success that you’re accustomed to – therefore allowing itself to be lazy and avoid working through the complexities of adjusting to a new set of beliefs.

So for example, if you don’t think that you’d be able to easily figure out the complexities of gaining massive success, your mind will literally screen out and forget all the good things you’ve done – in order that you don’t get any “big ideas” about what you’re capable of, and submerge yourself into a new reality that would be taxing for your mind to have to think through.

Let’s say that you go out to a club one night with the goal of meeting and talking to every woman in the place (a phenomenal idea – good thinking).

You chat up ten groups of girls that night, six of which are really cool to you and four of which somewhat blow you off.

If your mind doesn’t perceive you as being a guy who could deal with the status that comes with having attention from women, it will cause you to focus on and remember only the girls who blew you off – basically pummelling you with evidence that you can’t do the new things that you’re trying to do.

Your friends will ask you “How did your night go?” and you’ll remember all the approaches that didn’t go your way. They might even remind you – “But didn’t you have a good time with that one girl?” and you’ll say “Oh yeah… Well, whatever…”

You might also hang out with a guy who has the type of skills that you could learn from, and literally not be able to see how well he’s doing or rationalize that his skills are purely because of his looks or something else you don’t have.

It doesn’t matter if this is in direct conflict with your personal desire to get good with women.

Your mind’s agenda is different than your own.

Of course, it’s fundamentally important that you force your mind to continually re-focus on the positive that’s happened (even if it's just ONE INCH of progress) – which can be done by journaling daily, talking about the good things that happened with friends who are supportive, or just regularly taking stock of how far you’ve come.

Did you get a conversation going? Did you get a few laughs? Did you at least get out of your house and actually live life while most people sat at home and watched TV?

Whatever it is, you’ve got to focus on that. No matter how small it might appear.

Once your mind is conditioned to do this on its own then you’ve reached your goal and it’s no longer something you have to do consciously – although if you find yourself falling back into old patterns you’ll have to bring back the fundamentals and re-adjust.

You might say, “Why can’t I just look at my successes and failures realistically and focus on them with equal weight?”

But without a focus on the positive you really have nothing to build on.

You’re not trying to be a scientist here.

You’re just getting into a headspace where you feel like the man and your mind is no longer resisting behaviours that you know are more attractive.

Emotionally and neurologically, you’re trying to force your mind to anticipate a positive response from new behaviours so that they become natural and smooth.

To approach confidently and without constraint your mind has to anticipate a positive response from it, like “This makes more sense than wandering around the club aimlessly or clustering in a group with my friends… This makes more sense than approaching timidly or self-apologetically, like I have some big reputation or self-image that I have to protect…”

You’ve got to force your mind to register it’s “OK” to take on a new set of foreign behaviours (even if they’re in severe in conflict with your social conditioning), and to trust in a fresh set o f bearings for a positive response.

By doing this you scramble your mind’s attempts to self-sabotage you, and then you rewind and reground yourself at a later point once you’ve got the new reality locked down.


Tyler