One of the most powerful lessons I've learned and would like to instill in you is that you are responsible for your success. No one else is. Not your parents, your community, your government, or your friends. It's all up to you. While that may seem harsh, if you reframe it a little, it's liberating.
While it's nearly impossible to succeed without the help of others, once you embrace the idea that you are the driving force behind your own situation, you realize the only person holding you back is you.
The life you live right now is the life you have created for yourself so far. If this life is not what you want, you have to start making the decisions and taking the actions necessary to create the life you desire.
The first decision is to realize that the past doesn't define you. What has happened has happened. If you got fired, dumped, divorced, bankrupted, injured, sick, or born into a family of whackos, guess what? There are countless stories of people overcoming those same circumstances to create wonderful lives.
Look at the past as your school. This school has taught you some important lessons that you can take into the future. The key is to look back on the past without emotion. This is not always easy to do, but imagine you are kind of an experience auditor peeking into the past of a client. Your job is to analyze objectively what happened and why it happened and to extract the most positive lesson possible from the experience.
Maybe, because of self-doubt, you allowed a situation to worsen until something bad happened. Maybe you let a relationship go on for way too long or you put off making an important business call and you lost the account. What happened can't be changed, but recognizing and taking responsibility for not letting that self-doubt control you again will fortify you as you move forward in creating your new future.
If you are unhappy in your current state of life, you can come up with all kinds of excuses, but not one good reason for not creating the life you want.
When I discovered this, it was huge for me.
I was raised in a middle-income family where money was a source of constant worry and argument. My parents spent much of their time under extreme financial tension. Like most people, they were never taught how to manage money, so when they had it they spent it until they were out of control and deeply in debt.
Since happiness is a direct result of the level of control you have in your life, you can imagine the level of unhappiness in a household that was in perpetual financial turmoil.
Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that this is not by any means a condemnation of my parents, whom I love dearly. They loved me and worked very hard to provide for my sister, brothers, and me. They were simply raised in a way that was typical of the post-Depression era. Money was never discussed except to lament how little they had.
Work was described to me as something everyone "hates," and there was never any discussion of the possibilities the world offered. The attitude was that you could not control your destiny beyond deciding if you wanted to drive a truck or wait on tables. My parents and their friends were far more bowling alley than board room.
Success seemed to be reserved for people on television, who all seemed like the heartless banker from It's a Wonderful Life. The rich were people who had sold their souls for money and would throw you out on the street to keep it.
This would probably be a more predictable story if I said that I was inspired by my parents' despair and resolved never to be in that situation. That's partially true. Because money was such an issue, I developed kind of a "hippie" attitude that money was not important and the desire for material possessions was bourgeoisie. In a nutshell, I was clueless about money as well.
Remember, this was the early and mid-1970s. I bought into the idea that I was not going to be rich, but I did not agree to being miserable at my job. My martial arts training provided me with a great outlet for my self-growth. I resolved to teach martial arts for a living. Still, I had no fantasies of growing rich as a result of my teaching.
I just loved to teach and train and, as a martial artist, I was accorded a level of respect and inclusion that was very satisfying to an 18-year-old. Since I had been programmed to believe that financial success was out of my control, I chose instead to control at least how I spent my day. I figured that if I were not going to make any money, I might as well enjoy myself. I chose quality of life over financial possibility, which, as you know now, is short-term gain for long-term pain.
Since classes were at night, I slept as late as I wanted each morning and then trained all day before wandering in to the karate school at about 5 p.m. to teach. It was like being a surf bum in a gi (karate uniform). I was indeed a karate jock and it was fun, for a while.
It was not until I opened my school-almost a decade later-that I started to envision that I could be successful. At that time I began to give private lessons to a doctor, Richard Phares, whom I mentioned earlier. Dr. Phares had already been a millionaire for over 15 years by then. He was an eccentric fellow and loved to sit and talk with me about his views on the world, which included the process of wealth building.
No one had ever discussed these subjects with me before. At the time, I was riding my ten-speed bike to the school because I could not afford a car. He was driving his big car, and it was the first Mercedes I had ever been in. That was when my thinking started to change and my vision of the future began to expand.
Dr. Phares exposed me to a lifestyle of wealth and opulence that I had never dreamed of. At the time, I was getting a lot of local press because of my success with the U.S. kickboxing team in Europe, and I had a TV show, so I was pretty high profile. I was the local karate star. Though I had no money, I was an accomplished athlete who was seen on television every week. I guess that made up for my lack of net worth. Dr. Phares seemed to enjoy introducing me to his associates as his personal instructor, the "world champion black belt."
We met with his wealthy friends and went to his million-dollar home for barbecues with his family. They seemed like normal people to me, not heartless, money-hoarding villains. They donated to charities and volunteered in the community. The main difference was that they openly discussed business and business strategies.
This exposure began to reprogram my thinking with regard to money and what my potential really was. Until that point, I never thought of such a life because I had never seen it or experienced it. It is hard to create a taste for something you have never seen or felt.
It was also about this time a friend of mine came into my office and said, "You want this? It's boring." He threw me a six-cassette audio seminar by Roger Dawson, called Power Negotiating. That was the first of what must be by now thousands of audio and video programs I've learned from. Learning methods of business and how to succeed through these audio programs while expanding my perspective through Dr. Phares' world accelerated my reprogramming and created a strong desire to grow as a person, a teacher, and a businessman.
I tell you this because it was so powerful for me that I can only hope it is as powerful for you. In order to change your outer world, you must change your inner world. I had to change my programming and references in order to begin the process of changing my reality.
By immersing myself in study and seeking out people who had been there already, I began to destroy my self-doubt. I learned how to speak, to sell, to have a conversation, to negotiate, and to succeed.
I began to realize that I was 100 percent responsible for reaching the level of success I desired. I realized that even though Dr. Phares could show me how the rich live and Brian Tracy could teach me how to get there, only I could make it happen. If it's to be it's up to me became my mantra.
I started to develop a "prosperity consciousness." This is a mindset, or heightened awareness, of the great possibilities the world presents. In this realm, the world became a huge menu of opportunities. The opportunities had always been there, but I couldn't see them before. My programming while growing up led me to "poverty consciousness"-the mindset that you will always struggle for money and privilege. "We can't afford that" was the mantra of my parents.
I knew it would be a long, tough road and that no one was going to do it for me. As daunting a task as that was, I also began to realize that, for the first time, I was talking to myself as though it could actually happen. To think that I could actually burst out of the chains of mediocrity and become a success was so radical a thought that it shot right through me.
Once I allowed myself to conceptualize that I could be a success and then followed that with the conscious decision to go for it, my life changed. My outer world immediately began to evolve into a world of opportunities that I had not seen before. It was as though I had been seeing the world in black-and-white, and suddenly the color was switched on. This is the power of making the decision to be a success and then taking full responsibility for achieving it.
The very important truth you must face is that only you can control you. You cannot control the economy or other people or how you were raised. You can only control you. If you do not like what you see in the mirror, you cannot break the mirror to change what you see. You have to change what the mirror reflects. You have to change from the inside out. This is an important realization in transforming your beliefs, which is a critical step in reducing and then eliminating self-doubt.
This is also why, in the first year of a martial arts student's training my emphasis in their training is 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical. I have to change how they see their potential to be a black belt before I can physically train them for black belt. Our life changes, too, must start with how we think. We must change our internal programming.
Chapter Exercise
What circumstances from your past are defining you now? (Loss of job, divorce, injury, dysfunctional family?)
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Has anyone else ever triumphed over the same kind of circumstances?
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In your role as an experience auditor peeking into your own past, analyze it without emotion and extract the most positive lesson possible.
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Name some positive people you could associate with who would expand your perspective on life and your future.
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John Graden is a fun, exciting, and inspirational speaker, author, and trainer.
A martial arts master teachers, he is the author of five books including The Impostor Syndrome: How to Replace Self-Doubt with Self-Confidence and Train Your Brain for Success, Mr. Graden has been profiled by hundreds of international publications including over 20 magazine cover stories and a comprehensive profile in the Wall Street Journal.
Presentations include: The Impostor Syndrome, Black Belt Leadership, The Secret to Self Confidence, and How to Create a Life Instead of Making a Living, John has taught his proven and unique principles of success to thousands of people on three continents since 1987.
From keynote presentations for thousands to one-on-one coaching sessions, John Graden is a dynamic speaker, teacher, and media personality who brings passion and entertainment to his presentations.
Dale Carnegie
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