The iLifeChange Experiment is a 40-day mental and spiritual exercise program designed to strengthen our four highest powers of our mind. The sole objective of this program is to upgrade and integrate our motivational O.S. – the operational system behind our actions and decisions.

It is like a Chilla-Nashini, but done at home. Over a six-week period, we amplify the active ingredients that drive meaningful and lasting change – our highest four faculties – in order to reshape our motivational system.

This program is a practical application of the new science of Neuro-TetraDynamics. The term ‘Neuro’ refers to our unique nervous system as human beings, while ‘Tetra-Dynamics’ refers to the four powers that this nervous system is capable of expressing.

Why do this? Because meaningful and lasting life changes require ‘root cause’ solutions. Quick-fix, superficial attempts at reformation of one’s life do not work, precisely because they leave intact ‘the engine’ that is responsible for much addictive behavior and self-sabotage in the pursuit of the good.

The iLifeChange Experiment is a deep-seated life change solution that realigns the engine of your motivations in the pursuit of the highest good, at the ground level of your being.

This 40-day program happens live over a period of 6 weeks via video conferencing technologies. Hosted by John Angheli, here we participate in a 40-day collective masterminding experiment for ‘breakthrough thinking’.

Because we are a non-profit organization, the ticket to this event is just $795! So register now and make meaningful changes from the depths of your being.

There’s a Dirty Little Secret That Few People Talk About,
When It Comes to Making Changes…

Open almost any academic journal or blog article inside the social sciences, and you will not find a more common way to start an essay than to proclaim in one form or another that,

“We live amidst times of unprecedented change…”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this opening statement. And from this premise, the author will inevitably make the argument by the end that “society needs to change” or that some institutional “systemic change is needed”… etc.

But here is the dirty little secret that very few ever talk about when it comes to change:

We all like to talk about ‘change, change, change’, precisely because we find it so hard to do it ourselves.

As psychotherapists say, ‘It’s psychological projection’…

There’s so much talk about the worries of ‘climate change’, or ‘political change’, or ‘social change’, precisely because we feel helpless about how we can personally change. (So why not try to change the world outside of us instead?)

Like the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy observed two centuries ago,

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”

(By the way, Tolstoy did not live to see that, in fact, a few decades after his death, Russia’s generation of unchanged people did eventually come to ‘change their world’. In 1917, they established the very first communist state, the Soviet Union. And the rest is, as we say, ‘bloody history’…)

But let’s consider then this question…

Realistically, how likely is an average person to change their life, by design?

I mean, beyond the clichés, platitudes, and tired expressions about making life changes – how capable are we to really do it?

Because here are the actual facts on the matter:

Surveys show, for instance, that 98% of people who make New Year’s Resolutions never complete them, and for most people, resolutions fizzle out in just one week. Of the people who set formal goals, 93% also failed to reach them.

But let’s take this life change proposition one step further. Let’s go beyond the New Year’s Resolutions or the fashionable goal-setting workshops on offer… (for one may argue that they’re just decisions made based on the mood of the moment, so of course they don’t really work).

But what if you had a Huge Reason – a Do or Die Reason instead? How likely are we to change then?

Well, here is a shocking fact – there was a major research, as covered in the book, ‘Change or Die’, that tracked the success rate of people who had a near-fatal heart attack.

As a result, doctors intervened with the urgent recommendation to change one’s diet. The patients were given all the information they needed about what to eat and what not to eat. And they were also warned that if they don’t follow this new diet plan, they will most likely die.

So with this real ‘change or die’ setup – how many people do you think are able to change their diet for the long term?

As research discovered, in the long term, only 1 in 10 people could! The other 9 in 10 could not, even though making this change had death itself as the ‘great motivator’.

The majority failed in just a matter of weeks.

So even with the most extreme of motivations – based on medical advice and willpower, 90% of people are not able to change.

Furthermore, consider that changing something like what you eat, is relatively simple to control. Food is a tangible… It’s a material good that you can quite easily regulate. You just need to buy the better foods, and have them available on call. (After all, no one forces you to put bad food in your fridge.)

So if 9 in 10 cannot make this life change, how much more difficult is it then to actually change how you think, or how you speak, or how you feel?

How much more slippery is it to change intangible things like these upon which our entire quality of life depends?

For, while it seems like almost everyone has some advice for what changes we need to make to live a healthier, more fulfilling life – armed with all these ‘facts and suggestions’ – the odds are very, very small indeed that most of us will do anything with them. Ever.

But you probably already know this from your personal experience.

The truth is that while everyone talks a ‘good game’ – the dirty little secret that few acknowledge is that…

Mastering Yourself Is the Most Difficult Thing in the World.

Yet nevertheless, it’s also the most necessary thing. For it’s on this change alone, that all other changes can be properly made.

Which begs the question – what can we do about it?

How can we empower the changes we want, for good?

As leaders, is there something more that we can do to positively influence changes? (and not just engage in empty talks)?

Change the ‘Operating System’ of Your Soul

To answer the questions above, I want us to consider something different… i.e.

Genuine life change begins only when we go to the root cause of all life change efforts.

That is, when we address the way that we are motivated in the first place – in what strikes us as meaningful to do, to think, and to be.

After all, all change efforts come down to the question of how motivated you are to do or not to do something.

Are you afraid to do something? Don’t have the ‘self-esteem’ to execute it? Don’t have the energy? Perhaps you can’t be bothered?

There’s a crude saying that, ‘when someone places a gun to your head, then almost all things appear as possible to do’. What you and I can or cannot do, this can change enormously in the context of ‘deadly threats’, doesn’t it?

So the power of fear is a powerful driver for change… We know this much.

But what really drives us when we are powered by freedom instead?

What happens when we live in a free society – where we can freely elect what are to be our choices, without external coercion?

I’d like for you to consider that under this condition, what ultimately drives us is the map of happiness that we have deep within.

Under a condition of freedom, what we freely choose to do (or not to do) is based on what we believe at a gut level will bring us to ‘happiness’.

This is by no means a new idea. Philosophers observed thousands of years ago that happiness is the ultimate compass that we have for how we orient our lives.

Whether we are conscious of this fact or not, we all get up each morning and choose to do what we actually do, as a means towards this implicit end.

This is why, if you question any person about their choices – i.e. “why did you do that?” or “what did you do that for?” – and you probe deeper and deeper, we all end up saying the same thing, “because I believe it would make me happy” (or another synonymous word).

Therefore, if we fundamentally address what we believe happiness is and how happiness comes about, we fundamentally influence our choice of actions.

Our deep-seated beliefs about happiness are arguably the most important ideas that we have in our psyche. These fundamental ideas orient and frame our entire life.

Why? Because happiness is the grounding for our entire range of motivations. It is the fountainhead – the emergent framework upon which all other ideas rest.

As such, it’s useful to think of this internal map as being like the ‘operating system’ software that computers use.

In case you’re not familiar, the operating system (or the O.S.) – this is the overarching software that commands, manages, and organizes the entire range of electronic components (or the hardware) of a computer.

(On PCs, this software is known as Windows; on Apple computers, it’s macOS; while on most mobiles and smart TVs today, it’s Android.)

The operating system is the foundational software upon which all other applications then build on top of – whether this application is a word processor, a video editor, a dictionary, a game and so on.

The OS, in fact, determines what kind of applications can or cannot run in the first place. This is why when you purchase any kind of software or app, the appropriate OS must first be there; otherwise, the application will not run (and sometimes not even be recognized).

The Two ‘Operating Systems’ Of Your Soul

The internal operating system of a human being is founded on their beliefs about happiness.

The core, unconscious ideas that we have about happiness trigger our entire range of motivations that instinctively guide us towards:

• what success and failure mean;
• what we think is of value in this world, (inclusive of our own self);
• what love is; what freedom is; what hardship means and how we are to respond…
  and so on.

This foundational human operating system manages and integrates all dimensions of self. It determines how we organize our lives in order to find fulfillment, practically – i.e. what is happiness for the body, the mind, and for the social-spiritual dimensions of self.

In short, the decisions and choices that we make or don’t make in life build on top of this hidden operating system. And like with computers that have a dated operating system, you cannot run certain ‘life changes’ (i.e. new applications) without the supporting OS behind it.

In the feature documentary, we covered that there are two main operating systems that we have when it comes to our pursuit of happiness (i.e. the belief system from which we make decisions):

In the above scenario, if one is aesthetically grounded – that is, their happiness in life is to maximize pleasure – when a doctor says that in order to live longer, one ought to give up rich foods, for instance, inevitably this creates a major dilemma.

On one hand, there’s the pleasure of living for longer in the long term, but on the other hand, this conflicts with the short-term happiness of pleasurable food today.

So from this point on, one’s motivation is in continual conflict. For if happiness is pleasure, to purposefully exclude the very things that brought enjoyment prior is, like Johnny Carson put it, a recipe for wanting to kill yourself…

When the operating system (O.S.) is aesthetically grounded, the system is set to crash. That’s because with this new change, one’s pursuit of happiness now pulls in two different directions.

In systems theory, it’s called the oscillation dynamic – a yo-yo-like effect of running away from one pain, then into another pain, and then back again to where one started… Mapped across time, this most often plays out something like this:

1. When the heart attack experience happens (painful now) –> this instigates the desire to change one’s diet (pleasurable future);

2. The new diet causes hunger pangs (painful now) –> this instigates the desire to eat junk foods (pleasurable future);

3. Eating junk foods causes one to feel their heart problem (painful now) –> this instigates the desire to return to a healthy diet;

4. And so this ‘figure 8’-like loop goes on indefinitely… From (A) to (B) to (C) to (D) and then back to (A).

But now let’s consider what it would be like to have an ‘Ethical O.S.’ by contrast:

What would happen if a person had connected at a gut-level, a belief/ a knowing – that their happiness emerges whenever he or she pursues their ethical growth and self-actualization instead?

Well, if this is the case for how they process their happiness, then this person could give up the pleasure of rich foods long term – because their happiness could now emerge from the formation of greater self-control or temperance in life, instead.

In the above scenario, the decrease in short-term pleasure would be offset by the happiness of virtue formation. And so this person would be able to stick with these new changes, long term.

Upon an Ethical O.S., the application of running a new, less pleasant tasting dietary change, (i.e. the new software app), this can now install congruently. That’s because on this O.S., one’s happiness is not only not diminished, but can instead be further enhanced.

The Ethical Happiness framework is superior to the Aesthetic because it enables countless positive changes while still being able to enjoy pleasures in the right order.

For here, one is no longer chained to the pull of pleasures and their unruly wants. With an Ethical O.S., one is able to manage their own pleasures, and in certain cases, be empowered to choose against them – if this is of greater benefit to one’s personal well-being, or their family, their community, their world.

It is only with this framework, as Mahatma Gandhi put it, that we can become the change we want to see in our world.

It is with an Ethical O.S. that we can be the kind of role model, where we influence through our example and excellence – and not just through mere ‘techniques’ and ‘hacks’.

Which brings up the question, ‘How do we do this?’

“How can you update the aesthetic O.S., to a genuinely ethical view of life?”