Power is perhaps the most important principle when it comes to habit change. In order to change your habits, you must focus on your desired outcome and exert a serious effort. The more disciplined you become, the easier it is to change your habits.
Remember that you’re responsible for how your life turns out. Whether your habits make you or break you, you’re the one who must deal with the long-term consequences. Since habits wield power over your results, you must wield power over your habits.
In the game of chess, it’s generally a bad idea to try to attack your opponent’s king right out of the gate unless your opponent is a complete beginner. If you want to win, you must be smarter than that. Chess has an early game, a middle game, and an endgame. In the early game, you want to get off to a strong start and try to gain a slight advantage. In the middle game, you employ tactics to capture your opponent’s pieces and put yourself in a superior position. It’s only in the endgame that you go after the king directly, and even then you may need to continue weakening your opponent for a while before you’re ready to declare checkmate.
A common mistake people make when seeking to change entrenched habits is assuming that they must tackle such challenges alone and in private. That simply isn’t true. The principle of love reminds you to take advantage of your ability to connect. Enlist the help of others to dramatically increase your changes of success. Don’t let pride get in the way of results. Reach out and ask for help!
It’s a virtual certainty that other people have already navigated the changes you wish to make in your life. Instead of painstakingly figuring out your own solutions from scratch, take advantage of the collective wisdom of others. Seek out role models who’ve already achieved what you desire, and request advice or mentoring. Look for good books on the subject, and apply what you learn from them. Ask for help and support from friends and family. Find someone to coach you through the process of change, even if you have to pay for their time.
To apply truth to your habits, take a moment to assess the habits you’re already running. What are your best habits? What are your worst? Do you have any addictions? Do these habits serve you well or hold you back? Do they help you align with truth, or do you feel compelled to lie about them? What habits are you hiding? What habits are you most proud of?
Grab a piece of paper and brainstorm two lists: a list of your positive habits and another list of your negative habits. How do you know if a habit is positive or negative? Use your mind’s predictive powers to imaging what long-term, cumulative effect each one will have if you maintain it for the rest of your life. How will it benefit you? What will it cost you? What does the long-term outlook suggest? If you could snap your fingers and change this habit immediately, would you do so? Be brutally honest with yourself. Then accept any unpleasant truths you discover, even if you feel powerless to change them.
Habits are memorized solutions. When your mind figures out how to get something done, it saves the solution, which is reinforced whenever you apply it. Driving a car, eating a meal, and reading written text are all memorized solutions. It took you a lot of effort to learn these skills, but today you can replay these known patterns instead of starting from scratch every time.
Habits are your mind’s approach to time management. It would be extremely inefficient for you to consciously decide how to spend every minute of every day. Your conscious mind has better things to do than solve the same problems over and over, so it delegates known problems to your subconscious mind in order to recall and apply the memorized solutions.
We naturally recognize intelligence as beautiful. As you witness how elegantly the principles of truth, love, and power operate in your life, you may even consider it a spiritual experience. It’s almost like discovering a new law of mathematics or physics. Suddenly you start seeing it everywhere as part of the underlying structure of reality.
When you see an object fall to the ground, you may not understand the laws of physics. When you insert a battery into a child’s toy, you may not know how electricity works. And when you pet a dog, you may not understand biology. Whether you’re aware of them or not, ever-present laws still operate at all times. Similarly, when you successfully achieve a goal you’ve set, fall in love with someone, or learn a new skill, you’re following the underlying laws of personal growth. You’re aligning yourself with the principles of truth, love, and power, whether you realize it or not.
With truth, love, and power on your side, you work with the natural flow of life instead of struggling against it. This doesn’t mean that life becomes effortless. It means that your efforts are well positioned to produce the desired results. First, your goal are rooted in truth, so they’re wisely set. Second, you maintain loving connections to keep you motivated. And third, your actions are focused and productive.
Flow isn’t a passive state. It doesn’t mean letting go and simply allowing your life to happen to you, as if you’re gently floating down a stream being pulled along by the current. That isn’t intelligent behavior. If you live like that, you’ll eventually get washed out to sea. Animals in nature stay busy when necessary; otherwise they die. Your own cells also work hard to keep you alive; they remain active even while you sleep. Flow is a state of action.
A fascinating quality of intelligence is that it seeks its own improvement. Perhaps the smartest choice we can make is to attempt to become smarter, and growth is the mechanism through which this is achieved. It is intelligent to grow.
By improving your alignment with truth, you can gain access to new truths. By improving your alignment with love, you increase your connectedness. And by improving your alignment with power, you become more powerful. Since intelligence is the combination of truth, love, and power, you can also see that as you increase your alignment with these three principles, you effectively become more intelligent. This is precisely how you grow as a human being.
Growth is rarely linear, so you can expect plenty of diversions and setbacks along the way. But as long as you strive to increase your alignment with these principles, you will certainly grow as a result. You won’t be the same person tomorrow that you are today.
The path for intelligent human beings is to master the art of conscious, creative self-expression. This is far more important than acquiring money and possessions, which can never compensate for a lack of conscious growth. Your creativity is the very mechanism by which you’ll achieve everything you could possibly want, including financial abundance, well-developed talents, fulfilling relationships, and meaningful contributions. When you commit to creatively sharing yourself with the world, it’s much easier to meet your needs and satisfy your desires.
Self-expression requires both a medium and a message. Your medium is the collection of creative outlets you use. For example, I (Steve Pavlina) express myself creatively through writing, blogging, and speaking, so those are my media. Your message is the most powerful truth you wish to share. My message is to share conscious growth with others, and that includes the content you’re reading in this book as well as what you’ll find on my Website.
