FOUNDATION

The Journey Begins

This book is about change, about how to influence yourself to make lasting and positive changes. It is not just about refreshing your memory and telling you what you already know. Now, my journey into the realm of influence is a little different from most. It's not psychology or psychiatry, although we do pay attention to their cutting-edge findings. My field is military interrogation. Military interrogators get paid to get the information our country wants as quickly as possible to use it against whomever we consider the enemy.

Interrogations are conducted with subjects that are not happy to talk to us (not unlike our inner selves sometimes ...). They curse at you, spit, reject, deny, withdraw, lie, and play mind games to avoid surrendering the information we want. How do you get someone who wishes the most painful and excruciating death upon you to essentially betray what they hold dearest and help those whom they were raised to hate?

You do so by understanding how people construct their inner world, their sense of identity, their values, and their view of the world. You do so by sidestepping all the false walls, the masks, the defense mechanisms and go straight to the core of what makes them "tick" – their values, motivation, and beliefs about themselves and the world – and use it to our advantage.

We get trained to do in a few minutes or hours what may take therapists to do in years: to open you up like a book and read your deepest secrets. Our goal is to exploit weakness, which means that we gain a unique insight into what makes us both strong and weak.

Perhaps you're asking yourself how we sleep at night getting paid to do this. Well, some sleep better than others. And while I firmly believe in the mission (we do this to keep our country safe), I realized at some point that I'd rather use this knowledge to help people grow and be their best.

After practicing my craft for several years, I became one of the senior trainers at the U.S. Army's interrogation school. And while I will not teach you here how to interrogate, I will teach you what I've learned about human nature and the possibility of lasting change. I will also teach you how to deal with others without letting anyone drain your power.

Essentially, I will teach you to do the opposite of what we do as interrogators. The pinnacle of our triumph is to "break" our subjects; that is, to break their will to resist giving away their secrets. What we'll address in this book is how to become unbreakable; that is, how to strengthen you to avoid being broken by life, by other people, by fear, and by our own pain.

This book doesn't address the individual as a machine to be programmed and reprogrammed. That is a simplistic approach that doesn't work in the long run. We are living, breathing, dynamic organisms with a spiritual core.

You may have attempted to change something in you, whether a habit, diet, depression, insecurities or simply achieve more success. You may have resolved that things will be different from now on. You might have been able to sustain some momentum for a few days. But then it happens! We crash and burn yet again. Why?

This little book will show you why. Somewhere deep within us, we somehow know that we have the ability to create massive and lasting change, in an instant. I've always been amazed how a single traumatic experience can scar us so deeply, sometimes for life. We don't visualize a trauma or phobia for 21 days, we don't pray about it, we don't "fake it till we make it."

A single event can have such a profound impact on our behavior, our emotions and our sense of identity. We don't forget to have the nightmares. We don't need sticky notes in the mirror to remind us to feel afraid. We don't need to listen to MP3s while we commute. The brain has a powerful ability to influence itself in "permanent" ways. It's time to learn how to tap that ability consciously.

This book has a peculiar style. It is written in such a way to deliberately assist you in codifying the information for easy assimilation and use. It uses "parentheses within parentheses;" it seems to go off a tangent and then comes back to the initial topic. This is done because (a) some learning must be put in place before additional learning can be properly assimilated, (b) to set the necessary emotional tone for proper assimilation, and (c) so we can tell our brain how and when to access the new learning.

Accordingly, it is highly recommended that the book is read in order, from beginning to end. The last part of the book feeds off the first. The intended effect of the book will be significantly diminished if pages are skipped. Also, take your time when pondering the questions posed throughout the book. It will maximize what you get out of it.

As students, we've all experienced having memorized the test material, only to go through the frustrating experience of temporary amnesia. How many times have we remained quiet during a confrontation, only to come up with the best comebacks ... 24 hours too late? In these instances, our inner resources (memory, creativity, etcetera) are somewhere "floating" in the mind. But because we did not wire our brains to access them when needed, they did not surface at the right time.

We must not confuse understanding with change. Our minds want to understand. We get a sense of empowerment when we understand. But understanding doesn't necessarily lead to change. Beyond those "aha" moments, we must seek to anchor our changes into our future. This book will show you how.

Still, understanding is useful and can support the change. Therefore, let's look at some of the major "laws of change" before we proceed to make them.

Laws of Change

Before we immerse ourselves in addressing the long laundry list of changes that we want in our lives, it is useful to understand what interrogators have noticed in trying to change others, and how these "laws of change" can be applied to self-work.

First, we look at what we want to change. Where does the urge to change come from? Our social programming may have told us that we need to be thin, hard-charging, successful, or more "spiritual" (especially when our blueprint of spirituality doesn't fit in with who we really are).

What drives our desire to change? Are we changing because we think we must, and in the process going against our own core? It's not that we can't make changes that go against who we really are. Unfortunately, we can! Our very social conditioning is a testament to that.

But a violation of our core leaves us empty, always feeling that something is missing. It is this very feeling that keeps us looking for the next book. We must dig deep into our core to find out if the changes we want to make will really make us happy and fulfilled.

Next, we need to identify what actually needs to change. How many car batteries have we wasted before we realized the problem was the alternator? How many hours and money have we spent trying to fix something, only to realize later on that the problem was something else?

One of the gravest mistakes we can...