What will determine your success is your desire, and our body’s ability to transform, adjust, and adapt when it is pursuing something that it truly loves is extraordinary. We have that passion, the willingness to suffer for things that we love. So why haven’t so many people been able to transcend and unleash that ability? What’s holding them back from doing what they want to accomplish? On today’s podcast, host Paul Blanchard talks about how to create what you truly desire. If you’re somebody who wants to unlock the longevity of what you’re passionate about and start to get some traction, this episode is a must-listen.
It’s Time to Buckle Down
It’s Power Session time. We are ready to rock. I’m excited. For those of you who have never attended a Power Session before, we’ve been a coaching and training company for the last several years working exclusively with The Og Mandino Principles as the official Og Mandino Company. We develop proprietary software, tools, principles and practices that help you get out of your own way. We’ve always heard about that. Everybody talks about that. It always comes down to mindset, which is this mystical word that has been created to sell you stuff that a lot of you don’t need.
We want to be able to measure mindset. We want to be able to measure the scientific pieces, the elements of how your brain is working. It’s not a philosophical thing. It’s not these ideas. Ironically, it’s not what you think it is. It’s the things that you don’t realize you’re thinking that can create the biggest challenges as the gifts that you don’t realize you already have that can give you the biggest opportunities. Habit Finder is focused on unlocking those things and showing you ways to look at the world differently.
As I’ve said many times, I don’t care about getting you to think the way I think, I just want you to stop thinking the way you think. Not entirely because not everything in your life is what you don’t want, but the things that you don’t want are directly tied to how you think. If you don’t change how you think, you’re never going to get different results. You might be able to change things temporarily. We’ve all been able to stick to something for a couple of days, a couple of weeks or a couple of months depending on how deeply ingrained the habit is and what buttons it pushes in terms of our psychology. We want to create long-term shifts and fulfillment and abundance in both income and impact. Thanks so much for being here. Let’s go ahead and get rocking and rolling in the Power Session.
Looking for The Answers in Life
I am excited to be with you, as I am every week for these Power Sessions. These are some of my favorite things that I get to do. I’ve been doing them for years as a coach. I can count on one hand the number of Power Sessions I’ve had to miss. This is one of my favorite things to do to come right here in our Power Session laboratory together and talk about something that we hope that if you’ll implement, just one little tweak because that’s all it takes. Little tweaks, little calibrations. There are a lot of us making over course corrections. We’re making overcorrections in our life. It’s like when you overcorrect in the car, you’ve got to re-correct. That’s one of the most common ways of rolling over and creating catastrophic results in what you’re trying to create. We want little tweaks.
First, I want to tell you a little story. Before I tell the story, I want you to think of someone who has been trying to look for answers in their life. I want you to think of someone on your team, someone in your family, someone that you network with, someone that you’re connected to that has been trying to figure out why they haven’t been able to figure it out.
That has been trying to find that piece that is going to help them unlock the longevity of what they’re passionate about, being able to feel like they’re getting traction, and I want you to tag them. I want you to share this out because I’m going to talk about the thing, the singular element that will determine your success or your failure, the singular element that you will want to investigate and inspect constantly for calibration to success.
If you will come back to this piece every day, it alone will make a massive difference in your awareness and the application of that awareness to create success in your life. This is, as my father would call it, the fulcrum. This is what holds everything together. The balancing point, the pivot point. The fulcrum is what we’re going to be talking about. I’m not promising that I can tell you how to solve all of it.
If you know where to look, you can start compounding solutions. If we’re out there searching randomly like we’re on some scavenger hunt, we’re going to find a lot of random pieces and little bits of information that give us these nice dopamine hits and these nice little euphoric moments of a-ha. As far as being able to compound and sequentially put them together to create trajectory, to be able to create direction. That’s what I want to provide.
This is a Lifetime Committment
It’s going to be a lifetime of calibration, a lifetime of adjustments with what I’m going to be able to talk to you about, but you’re going to want to look here first and foremost. Let’s give us an opportunity to have this and share it out with people who deserve to find out where is the most important place to be looking when it comes to your personal and professional development.
Your passion for wanting to make an impact on this world. Your desire to serve others and make this world a better place and make lots of money. If you don’t want all those things, then you’re in the wrong place. If you do want those things, but you’re not necessarily comfortable with saying them all out loud, you’re in the right place. If you want those things but feel like some of the other things you’re supposed to want are contradictory to those things, you’re still in the right place.
Let’s dive right into this because we’re talking about the pivot point of your direction, the pivot point of your success, the pivot point of your passion, and your willingness to suffer for things that you love. That’s what passion is. Where we get confused is how we have defined, analyzed and consider what we love. What do we love? If we love something, it is unbelievable. The physiology, the neurology, the psychology of the body, its ability to go above and beyond. Its ability to be relentless. It’s the ability to be able to be consistent, to transform, to adjust and adapt when it is pursuing something that it truly loves is extraordinary. Why haven’t many more people been able to transcend? Why haven’t many other people been able to break loose and to unleash?
What is it that’s holding them back because of all of them that I’ve talked to feel like they love what they want to accomplish? They love being able to serve people. They love being able to grow their team. They love being able to help other people be successful. They love having no debt. They love having more income. Many believe that they love and I’m going to swap that word out to what’s underneath that, to what the kindling. You think of a fire, you’ve got to start with the kindling first before you can ever have a fire. What is kindling? What is the pilot light of love? It is desire. What we’re going to talk about, pulling the cover of love back in terms of your direction in life, what’s going to calibrate, what is going to determine your success is your desire.
What you desire will determine what you achieve in this life, period. End of story. What you desire will determine not the opportunities that you are provided. Everyone wants to talk about the opportunities that are provided. That is a limited understanding. Life is not about the opportunities you’re provided. It’s about the opportunities you notice that you are provided. Those are two different things. If any of you are playing the victim card, “I didn’t get the same opportunities as so and so.” It is because you didn’t notice the opportunities you were provided. The universe has this incredible way of balancing itself out. Some call it karma and energy and all kinds of different things, but that’s what it comes down to. It’s present in the Laws of Physics. It’s present in our Chemistry. It’s a balance of things.
The balance of opportunity is that we are all given equal opportunity. They may not look exactly the same. It is our ability to adjust, increase awareness, and notice those opportunities that matter. What allows us to be able to see opportunities is our desires. Our desires will dictate what we see and what we don’t see in life. When you desire someone, you notice things about that person that you don’t notice about someone you don’t desire, as simply as I can put it.
When you desire an outcome, you have things in your brain working to magnify, to distract, and to engage that particular piece at the expense of other things. When there is desire, there is always fallout. That’s why it’s important that we are clear about what we desire. If we’re experiencing an unnecessary amount of pain, unnecessary amount of depression and unnecessary amount of anxiety, and I stress unnecessary because all of those things are part of every human life on earth, period.
Our ability to be able to interpret them appropriately is going to determine whether we are experiencing unnecessary levels of them though. We’ll want to understand that if we are experiencing unnecessary levels of pain, unnecessarily levels of depression or anxiety, that we are likely desiring things that we don’t desire or we may be desiring things count in a counterfeit way, meaning they’re good ideas, but there isn’t true desire.
What Desire Means
Let’s talk about desire before I give you the two pieces you’re going to want to value. The shift that we want to create in your perspective, the snow globe that we want to shake up in terms of your perspective and desire. First, for those of you that follow me and have heard of me before know that I love words. I love etymology. What does the word desire mean? It means to be longed for. Something we long for is something we desire. We could stop right there and I find that very interesting. Long for, not something we short for.
A lot of people talk to me about what they desire that they’re only willing to short for. Once they get out there and the first thing goes wrong or something doesn’t meet our expectations or they didn’t realize how hard it was going to be, that’s when they get exposed as short for-ing it. Don’t short for things. If you short for things, you don’t long for things and it’s not a real desire. That’s the first thing. Let’s get clear about whether we truly desire something or not. Whether we long for it and to long, when you break down that word, it means far to a great extent in space.
It’s out there. It requires some faith. It requires persistence. It requires passion. To long for something, to desire something because it is far to a great extent of space, but many of us are professing to long for things but continue to live short for things. If you want to get what you desire, you can’t live short for them. We want to play the long game. Hopefully, that gives you a little bit different perspective over that.
Let’s talk about the fulcrum of desire. What I want you to do if you’ve got something to take notes on. I want you to draw a T on your paper. Across the top and then down the bottom, a big giant capital T. This is going to be our fulcrum. You got the top of the T that’s where the balance is. You’ve got the middle of the T, that is the desire. It’s pivoting on desire, but we generally have two sides of something we’re balancing.
The Two Sides Of Desire
We have two sides of desire and this is what I want you to start to evaluate. This is where you are going to root out your challenges and start to get traction on them. To be able to find a perpetual meaning, a permanent, a forward thrust that never ends in your life where you get traction. Not that you don’t struggle. Not that you don’t have hard times. Not that you don’t fall, but there’s a massive difference between a fall and a fail. Og Mandino, the greatest salesman in the world, right off the bat. In the very first of the ancient scrolls, the secrets to success said the key to all this is to prevent failure because if you can prevent failure, you can fall without failing, which means you can stand back up and continue going.
Imagine running a marathon. If you fall down, you have to go back to the starting line. You’re on mile sixteen, you’re exhausted. You’re not lifting your feet up as well as you can. You trip, you got to go start at the beginning. How many of us have felt like that in our lives? If we can prevent failure, we can fall and stand back up and we’re still at mile sixteen. We’re still right where we were. The next step forward we take is still a perpetual and progressive step forward. We’re not compensating. We’re not making up for things. On this T, you’ve got desire. Under the T, write desire for the vertical line. On the horizontal line, on the right-hand side, I want you to write embrace. That is the right side of the fulcrum, to embrace. On the left side of the fulcrum is escape.
We’ve got our desire because not all desires are good. A lot of our desires, if you understand anything about the human brain, where we’ve got about 50,000 to 80,000 conscious thoughts a day, but another 1 million to 2 million unconscious thoughts a day. Meaning there are desires ingrained in your neurology you are not fully aware of, but you can find evidence if you evaluate the way that I’m going to teach you.
If you evaluate, you’ll be able to find evidence of unconscious desire, secret desires, real intentions, the ones that you may not even be willing to admit to yourself that are holding you back. It starts with this fulcrum. The fulcrum of desire. You’ve got to engage and escape. Let’s talk a little bit about what this is. Anything you desire in life. You can take the actual outcome. You can take the product of the desire.
What Do You Desire?
I desire a loving relationship. I desire a Ferrari. I desire a beach house. I desire a charitable organization that donates $6 million a year to troubled youth or whatever it is. You can take the outcome and you can apply either side of this fulcrum to it. You can pursue anything you desire with the energy of trying to escape or the energy of trying to engage.
They are the opposite. They’re antithetical. They are juxtaposed. They’re opposites of each other. Meaning you cannot be engaged and escape. You cannot escape and be engaged. Your desire has to choose one or the other. Let’s talk a little bit about escape. This is going to also be avoided. If you are trying to pursue something to avoid something. We’re talking about the primary drivers. Every person’s going to have a mix of these things, but I’m talking about the tip of the spear.
I’m talking about the engine. I’m talking about the primary driver of your desire. If it is to escape, you may have some embrace in there, but the dominant force is escape. If you are embracing as the dominant force, you might have a little bit of escape. We’re human. We have our days. We’re not constant. We can’t sustain constancy. That’s why we’re given the wonderful option of consistency, which has a rhythm and up and a down, a fast and a slow and all those different things.
We want to be able to understand what is the primary driver. The primary driver is escape. We loop ourselves into this revolving door of life where we feel like we’re going somewhere until we get to the end of the journey and pop back out where we started. When we feel like we’re going somewhere, we’ll get to the end of the journey and pop back out where we started. That’s escape. That’s avoid. That’s when we’re trying to do something so that we can get away from something.
Jeanette asks, “Can you engage to escape?” It’s a great question. Energy-wise, you can’t. It’s impossible to sustain and engaging energy while addressing the energy of wanting to escape. What’s ironic about the question, Jeanette, is the best way to escape something is to engage something. However, you cannot engage with the motivation of escaping because motivation, that impelling force, that external force will override everything intrinsic. Everything that we’re being drawn into, everything that we want to get pulled into in terms of engagement. It’s similar to a lot of people I work with as influencers and coaches and leaders who want to inspire people, but they don’t want to offend people.
When they’re putting equal amounts of energy into inspiring people, by making sure they don’t offend people, it dilutes their message and they get neither. They don’t offend anybody, but they don’t inspire anybody either. In fact, at this age, they probably still offend people because everyone finds some reason to be offended these days. We want to understand which one are we going for. That doesn’t mean we have to offend people to inspire them. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to have an awareness of what we’re trying to get away from. It doesn’t mean we don’t have things we’d like to change or be different and yes, I use engage and embrace interchangeably. You have to embrace something to engage it. To embrace something means to accept it, be able to deploy it to be able to engage it.
Escape
We embrace it first and then we engage it. I typically talk about those things interchangeably and we’ll come to that, but I want to talk about escape. We are naturally wired as human beings to want to escape. In our evolutionary brains, in the systemic amygdala of our brain, it’s built on basic principles of fight or flight. Those are dictated by comfortability. In other words, those are dictated by the familiarity of the brain. Something unfamiliar we’re taught to run away from because it could kill us. That was relevant thousands of years ago, but not so much now. When we want to grow, when we’re moving beyond being able to be hunters and gatherers, we’re becoming innovators and inventors and connectors and all these incredible things that are at our fingertips in 2020.
We are going to need to defy our evolutionary makeup, not in terms of being able to it. We don’t have thousands of years to pull that off, but we can change the way we interpret it so that we can change the way that we engage it, which can change the way that it plays itself out. This is one of the areas where it gets the best of us because our brains want life to be as easy as possible because our brains want life to be as easy as possible. Our brain is constantly wired and problem-solving and thinking of ways to create habits, which are neural pathways so that it has an automated source.
Many of you have looked into automation in this day and age. I could automate my emails and automate my text messages and automate this and that and automate payroll and automate whatever. It’s amazing. My life is much easier where your brain is trying to do the same thing. If you can automate it, then it doesn’t require as much data. It doesn’t require as much bandwidth to be able to get through the day. Less bandwidth means fewer calories burned means less energy required means longer survival. It makes a lot of sense on a biological level, but on a metaphysical level, on growth and becoming more as far as how we’re wired on an intrinsic level, on a mathematical level, it doesn’t make sense.
What Causes Us To Escape
We are naturally wired to lean towards escaping. Escape stress, depression, avoid disappointment, avoid this and escape that. It becomes all about a game of escape and avoids and then we wonder why we never feel like we’re progressing because escaping and avoiding never was progress. It can’t be. We want to become aware of what we’re trying to escape in life and what we’re trying to avoid.
What is our brain and sometimes us trying to make easier? We want life to be easier and less stressful. We look at the things that are causing that and we try to escape them. It causes us to run in circles like a dog chasing its tail, that revolving door. Ironically, we never are able to escape them. We’re able to outrun them for a time, depending on your stamina and your speed, but it’s time to stop escaping and avoiding in life.
One of the toughest things to do is when we’re trying to escape something bad. I’m trying to escape depression. I’m trying to escape anxiety. I’m trying to escape debt. These things seem to make a lot of sense to escape to so we support our instincts. I want to get out of debt. The majority of people who want to get out of debt never do. There’s something about that desire because it’s an escape.
Anyone I’ve met that has gotten out of debt and stayed out of debt, that’s an important qualifier. Gotten out of debt and stayed out of debt. They were able to break this vicious cycle of trying to escape and avoid debt and being able to engage something that drew them into a space of abundance, discipline, and awareness that the debt naturally went away. Getting rid of the debt, became an outcome, not a destination. It’s important that we understand the difference between outcomes we want to create and destinations we’re trying to go to.
Embrace What You Can’t Change
Understandably, it is difficult when we’re escaping something bad because then it makes it hard to understand that we are an escape mentality. We are in an avoid mentality. It’s why you see so many people leave destructive or abusive relationships and right back up in another one because they escaped it and went right back into another one. They changed the scenery, partner, person, but they didn’t change the intent. They didn’t change the desire, the escaping and the avoiding that only leads you right back into what you’re trying to get away from versus the other side. To engage and to be able to embrace. To embrace comes from the Proto-European root of a cap, which means to grasp. You could say that to embrace something is to grasp something.
I want you to think of embrace as to grasp it, to hold it, to be able to use it, to wield it like a sword. To be able to fight for what you are passionate about, to be able to get where you want to go. To avoid an escape is about letting loose of anything you’ve got and let go all of it so that you can increase speed to outrun things, to be able to get away from it.
Escape and avoid, to hide, to be quiet, to silence your voice, to play small. Those are all games that work well in escaping and avoiding, but to engage means to grasp, to embrace, to take on what currently is and be able to work with all of your faculties, to be able to work with all of your gifts, with what currently is. If there’s something you want in life, and want as a premature version of desire, at least for the sake of this conversation, you want something, let’s find out if you truly desire it. I can give you a simple formula for being able to evaluate this. To evaluate whether you are on the engage side or the escape side, and then you’ll want to learn the principles, practices, and processes of how to do that.
Rewire Your Brain
In fact, everything in the Habit Finder curriculum, everything that people spend tens of thousands of dollars on. The hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of organizations we’ve worked with and we’ve taught comes down to what are the principles that rewire the brain that teach it the habits of engaging in life, embracing principles. Adding value to the world rather than escaping and avoiding and surviving and sticking with what’s familiar. Everything in that is what we teach. If you’re looking for the answers, first, you’re going to need to find out what elements of your life you think you desire, but you don’t or it’s at least not the primary desire. Here’s how to tell. Let’s take something you desire. If you’ve got something you truly desire, you will naturally find the steps to accomplish it and the fulfillment that comes from doing so.
I want you to write that up. Truly desire, in the next column, you will find the baby steps and the boundaries to have the fulfillment that comes from that pursuit. When it’s something you truly desire, you’ll find the steps in the boundaries and you’ll find fulfillment. That’s an indicator that you are in alignment, consciously and unconsciously, that you truly desire it. Another indicator is you’ll accomplish it as a worthy desire. That’s an important qualifier. Something that inspires you. Something that is abundant, something that adds to your courage, something that drives you to embrace structure, to accomplish. When it is a true desire, you will always find the steps. You will always find fulfillment. When you have something you think you desire, put fake desire. True desire, steps and boundaries, fulfillment. Fake desire, or counterfeit desire, you will have obstacles and you will have pain.
Desire vs. Need
If you think you desire a successful business, but all you seem to find are obstacles and pain, what have we learned? You don’t truly desire a successful business. It is not your primary desire, at least. There is nothing that causes more pain in this life that I’ve seen in my industry and my business than something you think you desire that you don’t. You think your desire that but there are unconscious, sometimes suppressed elements that have fragmented that desire.
Maybe you do desire. Using some arbitrary numbers. Maybe you have a 40% desire for that to engage it, to embrace it, but you’ve got 60% of a desire to escape from something. You’ve tangled them together and hope that you could pull it off to be able to make the journey. All you need is 51% of desire in engagement and embracing. That 49% of escape and avoid can be conquered. The more you tip those scales, the quicker and more efficiently you’ll be able to accomplish it.
I want you to think about some of your goals. I want you to think about what you’ve tried to accomplish in life. If you thought you wanted something and you currently think you want something and you experience more obstacles than inspired steps and boundaries, you’ve experienced more pain than you do fulfillment, then there is something wrong with your fulcrum. There is something there that you will want to seek out in terms of your secret desires and your real intentions. Being able to find out what’s going on in your mind that you may not be fully aware of or fully able to admit about what you’re trying to do. The most common, and we talk about this all the time, is I love helping people as long as they’re not idiots.
If the core of your desire is to build a business that is to serve people, and you’ve got a qualifier like that, what are you going to be doing? You’re going to be avoiding and escaping idiots, which is going to withdraw from the inspired steps and boundaries that will give you the fulfillment of a successful business. Those are a couple of basic examples. If any of you have felt this resistance of, “I was convinced I desired this, but you’re right. I’ve experienced way many obstacles and challenges. Take that one out because challenges are going to be on either side. I experienced what felt like way more like obstacles than steps and boundaries, way more pain than fulfillment.” There is some other competing desire on the other side of the fulcrum or it’s not something you desire, which is also a reality.
You could have been taught that it was what you were supposed to desire. You were supposed to love spending time with your children, but you don’t. That doesn’t mean you have to settle for not spending time with your children. It means that you can’t learn to spend time with your children if you don’t admit that that’s where you are and then learn the principles that can help you engage in new patterns.
If you’re trying to avoid admitting that that’s where you are, that’s going to be a major challenge. What we often find as we diagnose this is its peripheral things. It’s the fringes that make the biggest difference. It’s how you listen to people. It’s how you plan out your day. It’s how you connect with yourself. It’s the blueprints you create in your mind. It’s the interpretations you make about the way your life is showing up.
Look at Your Real Intentions
It’s the things that you face versus pretending you don’t think. Those are the things that we’re looking to embrace. You are the people we are looking to engage and embrace and help tip the scale, tip this fulcrum to be in your benefit. None of us could do it 100% of the time, but if you can do it a little bit more than you are now, your life will feel completely different. Start by taking a look at your real intentions, your secret desires.
If there’s noise competing there that is resulting in more obstacles than steps and boundaries and more pain than fulfillment, we can help. Let us know. At least go to HabitFinder.com and take the assessment and then make the next few investments. I know there are many of you on here who have made those investments and many of you have felt phenomenal experiences and great results from applying those things. If any of you have not yet, I ask you to be patient. Remember where we started. Desire is something we long for. It is long. Stop living for what is short for. Stop looking for the shortcuts, the avoid and escape.
That’s why we also spend much time talking about joy and the journey because if you don’t know how to find joy in the journey, longing for something, the long game sounds like torture because we’ve been convinced that it’s at the finish line that we get the payoff. Join the journey. Every step, every celebration, every confidence, sense of accomplishment of those baby steps we take adds to our hearts and our character and who we are. Our ability to serve and bless those around us and the opportunity to be able to grow our businesses and be massively successful at the same time. Those are not opposing forces, but they come from being clear about whether you are trying to engage in life or escape. I look forward to being able to continue to serve you any way that we can.
Thanks for being on. Thank you for sharing this out with people that you know deserve to read this. Go to HabitFinder.com, take your assessment. If you’ve already done it, meet with one of our specialists, find out what we can do to continue to serve you, to continue to keep you engaged in this path. One thing we know with hundreds of thousands of people in many years is that if you will apply the principles we teach, it is not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.
We can’t expect it to show up at a certain time, but it sure helps to be on a path that is inevitable. Og talked about your path being inevitable. He talked about it challenging and taking away, setting you on a path that will imprison your future. We want to teach you how to set that future free and it comes down to these things. Thanks. We look forward to seeing you next time. Take care.