``Unlimited Power'' by Anthony Robbins Albert Dorofeev Abstract This is a summary of the most important parts of the book ``Unlimited Power'' by Anthony Robbins. Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP is a very powerful tool for communication and this book presents the NLP and other concepts in a clear and practical manner. While reading the book the reader is acquainted with a number of important theoretical concepts and their application for a more efficient communication. The book is full of examples to motivate the reader to take the path to the personal excellence through the number of techniques and exercises. Abstract Here in this summary I am trying to highlight the most important, in my opinion, steps that the book presents. It is more a summary of action points as the author gives them than an overview of the subject. I certainly hope that I will be able to remember the whole of the book again by reading this summary. The modeling of human excellence. 1 The commodity of kings. People who have attained excellence follow a consistent path to success. Success is not an accident. There are consistent, logical patterns of action, specific pathways to excellence, that are within the reach of us all. There are seven fundamental character traits that have to be cultivated: 1. Passion. Passion is an inner force, a reason, a consuming, energizing, almost obsessive purpose that drives people to do, to grow, and to be more. It gives the power to tap one's true potential. 2. Belief. Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we will be. 3. Strategy. A strategy is a way to organize resources. One must use his resources in the most effective way. 4. Clarity of values. Values are specific belief systems we have about what is right and wrong. Greatly successful people almost always have a clear fundamental sense about what really matters. 5. Energy. Great success is inseparable from the physical, intellectual, and spiritual energy that allows us to make the most of what we have. 6. Bonding power. Nearly all successful people have in common an extraordinary ability to bond with others, the ability to connect with and develop rapport with people from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs. 7. Mastery of communication. The way we communicate with others and the way we communicate with ourselves ultimately determine the quality of our lives. All these traits feed on and interact with each other. 2 The difference that makes the difference. NLP studies how people communicate to themselves in ways that produce optimum resourceful states and thus create the largest number of behavioral choices. One of the presuppositions of NLP is that we all share the same neurology, so if anyone can do anything in the world, you can, too, if you run your nervous system in exactly the same way. It is possible to distill the lessons and patterns that successful people discovered through years of trial and error by observing what they think and do. Those patterns then can be learned and applied by other people to produce the same excellent result. John Grinder and Richard Bandler, the two men primarily responsible for the invent of NLP, found the three fundamental ingredients that must be duplicated in order to reproduce any form of human excellence. 1. Belief system. ``Whether you believe you can do something or you believe you can't, you're right.'' 2. Mental syntax. 3. Physiology. We learn by modeling instinctively. Conscious modeling can be done with much more precision. 3 The power of state. The difference between the time when everything goes right and the time when everything goes wrong is the neurophysiological state you are in. There are enabling states that tap great well springs of personal power and there are paralyzing states that leave us powerless. Our behavior is the result of the state we are in. To control and direct our behaviors we must control our states. There are two main components of state. The first is our internal representations, and the second is the condition and use of our physiology. Internal representations are what and how we picture in our mind and what and how we say and hear in our mind. Physiology combines posture, biochemistry, nerve energy, breathing and muscular tension or relaxation. Internal representations and physiology work together in a loop. Anything that affects one will automatically affect the other. To control our states we must control and consciously direct our internal representations and physiologies. The representations are based on our five senses: gustation or taste, olfaction or smell, vision or sight, audition or hearing, and kinesthesis or feeling. An experience of an even is not precisely what happened but rather a personalized internal representation. If we take control of our own communication with ourselves and produce visual, auditory, and kinesthetic signals of what we do want, outstanding positive results can be consistently produced. The circumstances of life must be presented to ourselves in a way that signals success to the nervous system to keep ourselves in a state of total resourcefulness. 4 The birth of excellence: belief. In the most basic sense, a belief is any guiding principle, dictum, faith, or passion that can provide meaning and direction in life. Handled effectively, beliefs can be the most powerful forces for creating good in your life. Beliefs that limit your actions and thoughts can be as devastating as resourceful beliefs can be empowering. Beliefs help you see what you want and energize you to get it. ``They can because they think they can.'' -- Virgil Where do beliefs come from? 1. Environment. People growing in a certain environment consistently model what they see. If you grow up in wealth and success, you can easily model wealth and success. If you grow up in poverty and despair, that's where your models of possibility come from. 2. Event, small or large, can help foster beliefs. Most of us have experiences we never forget and they form beliefs that can change our lives. 3. Knowledge. A direct experience is one form of knowledge. Another is gained through reading, seeing movies, viewing the world as it is portrayed by others. Knowledge is one of the great ways to break the shackles of a limiting environment. 4. Through our past results. The surest way to make you believe you can do something is to do it once. If you succeed once, it's far easier to form the belief that you'll succeed again. 5. Through the creating in your mind of the experience you desire in the future as if it were here now. Just like past experiences can change your internal representations and thus what you believe is possible, so can your imagined experience of how you want things in the future. They kind of belief you have, the amount of potential you unleash, the kind of actions you take and the kind of results you get are all linked in a circle. If you believe you are going to fail you will not tap into all of your potential. Subsequently, your actions will be half-hearted and the results will be dismal. The results then reinforce the belief you already had and you fall into a vicious circle. If your expectations are great and you believe you will succeed, you will probably use a great deal of your potential and then take energized, congruent, and assertive actions. In this case the results we'll be pretty good. This results will feed back to your system of beliefs reinforcing it. Sometimes it is sufficient to not have a limiting belief to succeed. People have been known to produce outstanding results simply because they did not know something was difficult or impossible. You reality is the reality you create. If you have positive internal representations or beliefs, it's because that's what you have created. If you have negative ones, you've created them too. The point is since you created them you can change them too. 5 The seven lies of success. Seven useful beliefs that can be used to build the belief system of excellence: 1. Everything happens for a reason and a purpose, and it serves us. 2. There is no such thing as failure. There are only results. 3. Whatever happens, take responsibility. 4. It is not necessary to understand everything to be able to use everything. 5. People are your greatest resource. 6. Work is play. If you can find creative ways to do your job, it will help you to move toward work that is even better. If you decide work is mere drudgery, chances are it will never be anything more. Bring to your work the same curiosity and vitality you bring to your play. 7. There is no abiding success without commitment. The bottom line is that you have to be willing to pay the price of success and do whatever it takes to reach your goal. 6 Mastering your mind: how to run your brain. We experience the world in the form of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory, or olfactory sensations. Our representations are based on these senses, especially on the three major modalities - the visual, auditory, or kinesthetic messages. There are two things we can change about our internal representations. We can change what we represent or we can change how we represent something. To change the representations we learn how they are built. The submodalities are building blocks that make the structure of the experience. Submodalities are like exact amounts of modalities, the measures. For example, visual modality has submodalities of color, brightness, size, dynamism etc. Another important distinction is an associated (watching from your own eyes and taking part in action) versus disassociated (watching a movie) image. By using submodalities distinctions you can radically change your experience of life. By experimenting with the submodalities of an experience we can find out what submodalities are the most important for us to determine the response the experience calls up. When you know which submodalities make you feel in a particular way about one experience you can use the same submodalities to change the internal representation of another experience to make yourself feel about it in exactly the same way. ?? Description of thechniques ?? 7 The syntax of success. We have strategies for everything. Certain sequences of specific stimuli will always achieve a specific outcome. The syntax tells us the order in which the stimuli have to be applied in order to unlock the brain's resources. Senses are the building blocks of syntax. Syntax is the way we put together the blocks of what we experience externally and what we represent to ourselves internally. * Ve - Visual external: what you see in the outside world. * Vi - Visual internal: seeing the representational picture in our mind. * Ae - Auditory external: hearing a sound from outsode. * Ai - Auditory internal: hearing a voice in your mind. * At - Auditory tonal: when the tone of the voice is important. * Ad - Auditory digital: when the meaning conveyed by the voice is important. * Ke - Kinesthetic external: feeling and touching objects. * Ki - Kinestetic internal: a feeling inside. The strategy of someone who gets motivated by seeing something (Ve), then saying something to herself (Aid) that creates the driving feeling (Ki) inside would be represented as: Ve - Aid - Ki. The strategies can be used for pursuasion, motivation, seduction, learning, selling, creativity, efficient management and so on. You just need to know what your strategy is in order to access a state on cue. And you need to be able to figure out the strategies others use so you can know how to give people what they want. 8 How to elicit someone's strategy. The key to eliciting strategies is knowing that people will tell you everything you need to know about their strategies. They will tell you in words, in the way they use the body, in the way they use their eyes. Before eliciting someone's strategies, we need to find out his main representational system. People who are primarily visual tend to see the world in pictures. They achieve the greates sense of power by tapping into the visual part of their brain. Visual people tend to speak quickly. These people tend to speak in visual metaphors. People who are more auditory tend to be more selective about the words they use. They have more resonant voices and their speech is slower, more rythmic and more measured. They tend to use hearing metaphors. People who are primarily kinesthetic tend to be even slower. They react primarily to feelings. Their voices tend to be deep. Kinesthetic people use metaphors from the physical world. Everyone has elements of all three modes, but most people have one mode that dominates. The message you are trying to deliver must be presented in a way compatible with the person's dominating mode if you want it to get through. Eyes are most expressive in representing the mode a person is using at the moment. By watching the eyes we can determine which of the representational systems the person is accessing: * VR - Visual Remebered is up and to the left. * VC - Visual Constructed is up and to the right. * AR - Auditory Remembered is to the left. * AC - Auditory Constructed is to the right. * AD - Auditory Digital (talking to oneself) is down and to the left. * K - Kinesthetic is down and to the right. Other aspects of physiology: * Visual: breathing high in the chest, speaking in quick bursts, high-pitched, nasal or strained tonalities, face becoming paler, head up. * Auditory: even breathing, even rythm and clear, resonant tonality od speech, balanced or slightly cocked head. * Kinesthetic: deep breathing low in the stomach, low, deep tonality and slow speech, face is flushing, head down and neck muscles relaxed. The pattern of the strategy elicitation is to follow the person through the process. First you have to put the person into the state where he is completely associated with the experience, for example, of being totally motivated. Then you have to get the person to reconstruct the strategy, the syntax of what he saw, heard and felt. Follow the steps of how one experience led to another .You have the complete syntax when the person comes to the feeling that makes him totally motivated. Now you have to go back and find out about the submodalities. Now that you have the syntax and the submodalities you can use this syntax to put the person into exactly the same state anytime by reproducing it. Understaning strategy is essential for motivating people, for success in sales as well as for countering your own limiting strategies. The strategies are invaluable tools in any communication, be it at work or in your private life. They give access to the most desirable states and help to eliminate the undesirable ones. 9 Physiology: the avenue of excellence. Physiology is the other half of the cybernetic loop. Physiology is the most powerful tool we have to changing states. Physiology is linked directly to the state so it works very fast, and it works without fail. You can create states by changing physiology in certain ways without changing any internal representations. If you stand up straight, if you throw your shoulders back, if you breath deeply from your chest, if you look upward - if you put yourself in a resourceful physiology - you can't be depressed. An important thing about physiology is that it directly affects the internal representations as well. When you think you cannot do something all you have to do is to pretend you can. Act as if you did it already. Put yourself in the physiology you would be in if you knew you could do something. If you are congruently maintaining the right physiology you will feel you can do the very thing you thought you could not. After all, when you change your internal representations the nervous system has to signal the body to change its posture, breathing pattern, muscular tension, and so forth. So why not just go to the source - bypass all other communication and change the physiology directly? We can change our states and empower ourselves to take action either by changing the pictures and dialogues in our minds or by changing how we are standing. An important corollary of physiology is congruency. Giving oneself contradictory messages is a subliminal way of pulling a punch. Developing congruity is a major key to personal power. When communicating you have to be emphatic - in words, voice, breathing, entire physiology. When body and words match, you are giving clear signals to your brain of the result you want to achieve. Mind responds accordingly. 10 Energy: the fuel of excellency. Six keys to a powerful, indomitable physiology: 1. The power of breath. Fully oxygenating your system is number one priority. Eliminating toxins is done by the lymph system with the help of deep breathing and muscular movement. The most effective way to breathe in order to cleanse your system: inhale one count, hold four counts, exhale two counts. 2. Eat water-rich foods. Eighty percent of the body is made up of water. Seventy percent of the diet must be made up of foods that are rich in water. 3. Effective food combining. Some combinations of food are simply poisonous to our bodies. The theory of food combining has been around for many years and was shown time and again to be effective. 4. The law of controlled consumption. Eat a little. That way, you'll be around long enough to eat a lot. ``Undernutrition is thus far the only method we know of that consistently retards the aging process and extends the maximum life span of warm-blooded animals. These studies are undoubtedly applicable to humans because it works in every species studied this far.''([footnote] Dr. Ray Walford, UCLA researcher, ``Informational News'' section of ``Awake'', December 22, 1982) 5. The principle of effective fruit consumption. Fruit must be eaten on empty stomach. The best way to start the day is to eat nothing but fruit at least until noon. 6. The protein myth. Most human beings adapt to whatever protein levels are available to them. The body uses glucose for the energy first. Then it uses starch, then fat. The last thing it uses for the energy is protein. There is no need for eating food for protein specifically. The ultimate success formula. 11 Limitation disengage: what do you want? Powerful tools are not much use if you do not have a good idea what you want to use them for. The difference in people's abilities to fully tap their personal resources is directly affected by their goals. Learn to set goals and determine outcomes. Follow thiese five rules in formulating your outcomes: 1. State your goals in positive terms. 2. Be as specific as possible. 3. Have an evidence procedure. 4. Be in control. Make sure your outcome reflects things that you can influence directly. 5. Verify that your outcome is ecologically sound and desirable. Here are the guidelines for creating a clear internal representation of what you want: 1. Start by making an inventory of your dreams, the things you want to have, do, be, and share. Remember that everything is within your grasp, don't place any limitations on yourself. 2. Go over the list you made, estimating when you expect to reach those goals. It is important to have both long term goals and the short term steps that will move you in the right direction. 3. Pick out the four most important goals for you this year. Write them down. Now write down why you absolutely will achieve them. If you have enough reasons you can do anything. 4. Review the key goals against the five rules for formulating outcomes. If the goals violate any of the conditions, change them to fit. 5. Make a list of the important resources you already have at your disposal. Come up with an inventory of character traits, friends, financial resourrces, education, time, energy or whatever other strengths, skills, resources and tools. 6. Focus in on times you used some of those resources most skillfully. Write them down. Describe what you did that made you succeed, what qualities or resources you made effective use of, and what about that situation made you feel successful. 7. Describe the kind of person you would have to be to attain your goals. Write about all the character traits, skills, attitudes, beliefs, and disciplines you would need to have as a person in order to achieve all that you desire. 8. Write down what prevents you from having the things you desire right now. One way to overcome the limitations you have created is to know exactly what they are. 9. Take each of your four key goals and create your first draft of a step-by-step plan on how to achieve it. Make sure you plans include something you could do today. 10. Come up with some models. Write down the names of three to five people who have achieved what you want to achieve, and specify in a few words the qualities and behaviors that made them successful. Imagine that each of these people is going to give you some advice about how to go best about accomplishing your goals. Write down one main idea that each would give you. 11. Create your ideal day. Describe it in detail. It's great to have all kinds of goals but it is even nicer to be able to design what all of them together would mean for you. 12. Design your perfect environment. Design the environment that would bring out the best of all that you are as a person. Where would it be? What tools would you have? What people would be around you? 13. Make a list of things that were once goals. This includes all the things in your ideal day that you can already do. Sometimes people get so fixated on the things they want, they fail to appreciate or use what they already have. 12 The power of precision. How to get what you want? Ask. Ask intelligently and precisely. 1. Ask specifically. Define precisely what you need, why you need it, and when you need it. 2. Ask someone who can help you. 3. Create value for the person you are asking. Creating value does not have to be tangible. 4. Ask with focused, congruent belief. When you ask, do it with absolute conviction. Express that in your words and in your physiology. 5. Ask until you get what you want. Develop the sensory acuity to know what you are getting and have the personal flexibility to change. Beware of the generalized, nonsensory-based words that have little or no specific meaning. Beware restrictive words (shoud not, can not, must) and unspecified nouns (``they''). Be precise in your communication. Always steer from a string of generalizations towards a string of specifics. Change direction toward the desired outcome and away from the problem. 13 The magic of rapport. Rapport is the ultimate tool to tap the most important resource you have - people. No matter what you want to do there's someone else who can help you accomplish your goal more quickly and easily. The rapport is created by discovering things in common. In NLP language - mirroring or matching. Our communication with people is divided as follows: * 7 % - through the words; * 38 % - through the tone of the voice; * 55 % - through the physiology or body language. While the words work on the person's conscious mind, the physiology is working on the unconscious. Because of that physiology is more effective in establishing rapport. What kinds of physical traits can you mirror? * Voice: tonality, phrasing, pitch, speed, pauses, volume, favorite words and phrases. * Posture, body language, facial expressions, hand gestures, head position, muscle tension. * Breathing pattern. * Eye contact. The foundation of mirroring - the three representational systems. Everyone has a primary system: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. Once you figured the person's primary representational system the job of mirroring is radically simplified since there is a number of traits that are associated with the representational system being used. Pacing and leading. Pacing is graceful mirroring, constantly adapting your physiology to the changes in the other person. Leading follows directly from pacing after the rapport has been established. You reach a point where you can initiate change rather than just mirroring. 14 Distinctions of excellence: metaprograms. Metaprograms are the keys to the way a person processes information. Metaprograms are internal patterns we use in deciding what to pay attention to. Moving toward something or moving away. Some people tend to be energetic, curious risk takers. They may feel most comfortable moving toward something that excites them. Others tend to be cautious, wary, and protective; they tend to take actions away from harmful or threatening things rather than toward exciting ones. External and internal frames of reference. It is important to note that this metaprogram is context- and stress-related. Sorting by self or sorting by others. Some people look at human interactions primarily in terms of what's in it for them personally, some in terms of what they can do for themselves and others. Matchers and mismatchers. Some people respond to world by finding sameness - they see what things have in common. Others - mismatchers - are of two types. One type sees how things are different. The other type sees differences with exceptions: he sees the differences first and then adds things they have in common. What it takes to convince someone of something. How do you know someone is good at a job? Do you have to a) see them or watch them do it, b) hear about how good they are, c) do it with them, or d) read about their ability? And this combines with how often does one have to demonstrate he's good before you are convinced? Possible answers: a) immediately, b) a number of times, c) over a period of time, and d) consistently. Possibility versus necessity. The people motivated by possibility seek options, experiences, choices, paths. The person who is motivated by necessity is interested in what's known and what's secure. The person who is motivated by possibility is equally interested in what's not known. Person's working style. Some people are not happy unless they are independent. Others function best as a part of the group - cooperative. Still others have a proximity strategy, which is somewhere in between. Peter Principle (all people are promoted to the level of their incompetence) is in part due to the employers' insensitivity to their employees work strategies. The crucial thing to remember is that the number of metaprograms you are aware of is limited only by your sensitivity, awareness, and imagination. Constantly look for more patterns and develop new sets of distinctions. For example, some people sort primarily by feelings and others sort by logical thoughts. Some people make decisions based only on specific facts. Others are convinced first by an overall concept or idea. Some people are turned on by beginnings while others are fixated on completion. There are people who sort primarily by food, by people, and by activities. There are two ways to change metaprograms. One is by significant emotional events. The other way is by consciosly deciding to do so. 15 How to handle resistance and solve problems. In any system the machine with the greatest number of options, the most flexibility, will have the greatest effect. A good communicator, instead of opposing someone's views, is flexible and resourceful enough to sense the creation of resistance, find points of agreement, align himself with them, and then redirect communication in a way he wants to go. You can persuade better through agreement than through conquest. Agreement frame consists of three phrases: 1. I appreciate and... 2. I respect and... 3. I agree and... One way to solve problems is to redefine them - to find a way to agree rather than disagree. Another way is to break their patterns. Behavior patterns are not indelibly carved into our brain. If we repeatedly do something that limits us we are just running a terrible pattern over and over again. The solution is simply to interrupt the pattern, stop what we are doing, and try somthing new. The pattern is interrupted by doing something totally unexpected, by using confusion or humor. 16 Reframing: the power of perspective. Nothing in the world has any inherent meaning. How we feel about something and what we do in the world are dependent upon our perception of it. In actuality, there may be an infinite number of ways to interpret any experience. We tend to frame things based upon how we perceived them in the past. By changing the habitual perception patterns we can create greater choices for our lives. Reframing is about changing our representation or perception about anything and in a moment change our state and behaviors. There are two major types of reframes: context reframing and content reframing. Context reframing involves taking an experience that seems to be bad and showing how the same experience is actually a great advantage in another context (ugly duckling). Content reframing involves taking the exact same situation and changing what it means (we are not retreating, we are just advancing in another direction). Six-step reframing process by Richard Bandler and John Grinder: 1. Identify the pattern or behavior you wish to change. 2. Establish communication with the part of your unconscious mind that generates the behavior. (refered to as part X.) 3. Separate intention from behavior. 4. Create alternative behaviors to satisfy intention. 5. Have part X accept the new choices and the responsibility for generating them when needed. 6. Make an ecological check. Reframing does not apply only to negative perceptions. There are very few things that cannot be reframed into something better. 17 Anchoring yourself to success. An anchor is a sensory stimulus linked to a specific set of states. Anchors have great power because they can instantly access powerful states. Whenever a person is in an intense state where the mind and body are strongly involved together and a specific stimulus is consistently and simultaneously provided at the peak of the state, the stimulus and the state become neurologically linked. Then, anytime the stimulus is provided, the intense state sutomatically results. The keys to anchoring: * Intensity of the state * Timing (peak of experience) * Uniqueness of stimulus * Replication of stimulus Anchoring is always going on around us. If you are not aware of it you will be mystified at the states that come and go seemingly without reason. To handle negative anchors you have to fire off opposing anchors at the same time. Another technique is collapsing anchors. You have to externalize both negative and positive experiences in your left and right hand and then use the modalities of experiences to cancel the negative one with the positive. The key to success is the ability to eliminate from your own environment triggers that tend to put you in negative or unresourceful states, while installing positive ones in yourself and the others. Leadership: the challenge of excellence. 18 Value hierarchies: the ultimate judgement of success. Values are your own private, personal, and individual beliefs about what is most important to you. The important thing about values is that they are adopted beliefs and change with the time. In fact, most of our values have been programmed through punishment-reward technique. Our values also change when we change goals or self-image. Eliciting someone's hierarchy of values is important to be able to motivate, direct and support them at the deepest level. To elicit the hierarchy of values you simply come up with the list of things that are important for you or another person. Then you rank the values in order of importance. It is crucial to determine as accurately as possible what the person's map really is. 19 The five keys to wealth and happiness. 1. You must learn how to handle frustration. The key to success is massive frustration. Look at almost any great success, and you'll find there has been massive frustration along the way. If you learn how to handle more frustration you will be able to achieve more. A simple two-step formula: 1) don't sweat the small stuff, and 2) remember, it's all small stuff. 2. You must learn how to handle rejection. To succeed, you must learn how to cope with a little word ``no'', learn how to strip that rejection of all its power. The best salesmen are those who are rejected most. They are the ones who can take any ``no'' and use it as a prod to go onto the next ``yes''. 3. You must learn to handle financial pressure. The only way not to have any financial pressure is not to have any finances. Handling financial pressure means knowing how to get and knowing how to give, knowing how toearn and knowing how to save. 4. You must learn how to handle complacency. Comfort can be one of the most disastrous emotions a body could have. 5. Always give more than you expect to receive. Most people start their life thinking about nothing but how to receive. Receiving is not a problem. But you've got to make sure you are giving so you can start the process in motion. The problem in life is people want things first without giving anything. 20 Trend creation: the power of pursuasion. In any trend creating ad or campaign you can clearly see steps that follow the precise framework set forward in this book. Power today is the ability to communicate and the ability to pursuade. The people in power are pursuaders. The people without power simply act on the images and commands directed their way. In the modern world persuasion isn't a choice, it's an ever-present fact of life. If you start looking at all the problems of the world you might notice that there is a common relationship to them all. All human problems are behavioral problems. If the source of a problem is not human behavior, there is usually a behavioral solution. The means to change massive numbers of people's internal representations, and thus massive numbers of people's states, and thus massive numbers of people's behaviors, is available to us now. By effectively using our understanding of triggers to human behavior and the present-day technology for communicating these new representations to the masses, we can change the future of our world. What we consistently represent on a mass scale tends to become internalized in mass numbers of people. These representations affect the future behaviors of a culture and a world. You can live your life one of two ways. You can be like Pavlov's dogs, responding to all the trends and messages that are sent your way. You can be romanced by war, lured by junk food, or captivated by every trend that pours through the tubes. The alternative is to try something more elegant. You can learn to use your brain so that you choose the behaviors and internal representations that will make you a better person and this a better world. You can become aware of being programmed and manipulated. You can determine when your behaviors and the models beamed out at you reflect your real values and when they don't. And then you can act on the things that have real value as you tune out the ones that don't. 21 Living excellence: the human challenge. Here is the final question to consider. In what direction are you presently going? If you follow your current direction, where will you be in five years or ten years? And is that where you want to go? If not, you can and you should change. Make excellence your style of life - here is your challenge.