How to train your mind to truly “think different”.
Tired of hyped-up promises? We are too. So let’s get real about what it actually takes to change a life from the roots.
Our next iLifeChange live event
A 40-day at-home intensive to re-form the way you are motivated, by daily strengthening the four highest faculties toward the total good.
The iLifeChange Experiment
The iLifeChange Experiment is a 40-day mental and spiritual exercise program designed to strengthen the four highest powers of the mind. The sole objective of this program is to upgrade and integrate our motivational O.S. — the operating 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 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 do not work, precisely because they leave intact the engine responsible for much addictive behaviour 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 six weeks via video conferencing. Hosted by John Angheli, we participate in a 40-day collective masterminding experiment for breakthrough thinking.
Because we are a non-profit organisation, the ticket to this event is $795. Register now and begin making 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”… and so on.
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, 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 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 of really doing 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 fail to reach them.
But let’s take this life-change proposition one step further. Let’s go beyond New Year’s resolutions or the fashionable goal-setting workshops on offer. One may argue that they are just decisions made from the mood of the moment, so of course they do not really work.
But what if you had a huge reason — a do-or-die reason instead? How likely are we to change then?
Here is a shocking fact. There was a major research case, 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. They were also warned that if they did not follow this new diet plan, they would 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 the 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 tangible. It is a material good that you can quite easily regulate. You just need to buy 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 to change how you think, 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, the odds are very small indeed that most of us will do anything with these facts and suggestions. 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 this:
Mastering yourself is the most difficult thing in the world.
Yet nevertheless, it is also the most necessary thing. For it is 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 we can do to positively influence change, and not just engage in empty talk?
Change the “Operating System” of your soul.
To answer the questions above, I want us to consider something different.
Genuine life change begins only when we go to the root cause of all life-change efforts.
That is, when we address the way 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? Do you not have the self-esteem to execute it? Do you not have the energy? Perhaps you cannot be bothered?
There’s a crude saying that when someone places a gun to your head, then almost all things appear possible to do. What you and I can or cannot do 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 our choices are to be, without external coercion?
I would like 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 by which 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 toward this implicit end.
This is why, if you question any person about their choices — “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 believed it would make me happy.”
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 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 is useful to think of this internal map as being like the operating system software that computers use.
In case you are not familiar, the operating system, or the O.S., is the overarching software that commands, manages, and organizes the entire range of electronic components, or hardware, of a computer.
On PCs, this software is known as Windows; on Apple computers, it is macOS; while on most mobiles and smart TVs today, it is Android.
The operating system is the foundational software upon which all other applications then build — whether this application is a word processor, a video editor, a dictionary, a game, and so on.
The O.S. 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 O.S. 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 toward:
- what success and failure mean;
- what we think is of value in this world, including our own self;
- what love is, what freedom is, what hardship means, and how we are to respond.
This foundational human operating system manages and integrates all dimensions of self. It determines how we organize our lives in order to find fulfilment, practically — what happiness means for the body, the mind, and the social-spiritual dimensions of self.
In short, the decisions and choices that we make or do not make in life build on top of this hidden operating system. And like computers with a dated operating system, you cannot run certain “life changes” — new applications — without the supporting O.S. 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, meaning the belief system from which we make decisions:
The Aesthetic
Where we believe our happiness emerges from pleasure, or from making life feel good.
The Ethical
Where we believe our happiness comes from self-actualization, or by integrating Being values through our choices.
Whether you have primarily an Aesthetic or Ethical O.S., this will determine the entire range of applications that you can or cannot run in your life.
For example, just consider the prior case where a heart-attack survivor is given the instruction by their doctor to eliminate certain foods from their diet, and why 9 in 10 fail.
If the existing operating system is primarily aesthetic, how likely is a change effort to stick? After all, someone is asked to give up foods that previously brought pleasure, and instead asked to eat things that are somewhat unpleasant.
This reminds me of the joke once told by Johnny Carson:
“I knew of a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex and rich food. He was really healthy, right up to the day he killed himself.”
If a change effort contradicts what we fundamentally believe at our core to be our happiness in life, we can only go so far, and only for a certain time.
Like an internal elastic band that we stretch against our core beliefs, the further we stretch ourselves into the realm of the unpleasant, the stronger the pull to snap back becomes.
And by belief I do not mean what we say with the mouth, but what we believe at a gut level, and what manifests in our actions. We demonstrate our actual beliefs by how we act, and not really by what we say.
This is often a tricky thing to understand, so let’s put it this way. Imagine a good friend of yours gave you a call, and he emphatically told you that you have a wild, man-eating tiger in your bathroom. He then requests of you, “Please, believe me.”
The true test for whether you believed this or not is not whether you said, “Yes friend, I believe you.”
The real proof of belief is whether you rang wildlife services and refused to go anywhere near the bathroom. If you actually opened the door to check whether a tiger is in there, you did not really believe. Deep down, you believed he was probably pulling your leg.
Belief, as such, is that gut-level truism you and I have about reality.
In the same way, our deep-seated operating system about what happiness means is not revealed by our words, but by our actions and what our life choices have to say about it.
So if we return once more to the “Change or Die” scenario we started with — about the man who had a heart attack and was told by his doctor to change his diet — we can infer and predict the following.
The oscillation dynamic.
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, inevitably this creates a major dilemma.
On one hand, there is 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 before is, like Johnny Carson put it, a recipe for wanting to kill yourself.
When the operating system is aesthetically grounded, the system is set to crash. That is because with this new change, one’s pursuit of happiness now pulls in two different directions.
In systems theory, it is 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 like this:
- When the heart attack experience happens — painful now — this instigates the desire to change one’s diet, which represents a pleasurable future.
- The new diet causes hunger pangs — painful now — and this instigates the desire to eat junk food, which represents pleasurable relief.
- Eating junk food causes one to feel the heart problem again — painful now — and this instigates the desire to return to a healthy diet.
- And so this figure-eight-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 with a belief, a knowing, that their happiness emerges whenever he or she pursues 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 — the new software app — can now install congruently. That is 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 one’s own pleasures, and in certain cases, be empowered to choose against them if this is of greater benefit to one’s personal well-being, family, community, or 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 example and excellence, and not merely through 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?
Tetradynamics and how to make meaningful changes.
As featured in The Great Aha! documentary, back in 2009 when I was out on Ben Lomond mountain, it dawned on me that:
Ethical happiness is not just a higher mode of being, but a mode of being uniquely available only to humans and the faculties we uniquely have.
What does this mean? Let’s put it this way.
The standard view for how humans and animals process our world, as taught in the social sciences, is through the stimulus-response model.
In brief, it states that when a stimulus is presented to an animal, this stimulus, or event, produces a particular response in the animal, which in time conditions the same tendency in the future.
This is the basic mechanism for why we do what we do.
The stimulus-response model is composed of four basic animal faculties: sensation, perception, emotion, and motor powers.
So, as the diagram below shows, we first notice a stimulus in our environment with our Sensory Faculty — let’s say by seeing and smelling a hot dog. This raw sensory data then enters our Perception Faculty, which interprets what these light patterns and smells represent, perceiving the data as a whole, as a hot dog.
The perception of the hot dog then enters our Emotion Faculty, from which we derive a feeling as to whether this object leads to relative pleasure or pain. If pleasurable, emotion gives us the impetus to move toward the hot dog. If painful, we get the impetus to move away from it. If somewhere in between, we remain indifferent.
From this emotional push, we then proceed to act with our body. We engage our Motor Power Faculty. If a hot dog means pleasure because of its taste or because of hunger, we stretch out our hands and grab it. If we are neutral, we walk right past it. If we are repulsed by it, we may complain about it.
Furthermore, if this is the very first time in life that you encountered a hot dog — the “x” sensory object — the way you perceived, felt, and responded to this — the “y” response — automatically, without any conscious control, links up in the brain. So that if sensation “x” happens again, you are more likely to behave in exactly the same way as before, with the “y” response.
With further follow-up stimulus-response events of the same kind, the neuron links thicken and form strong cable-like connections between these two instances, making it less and less likely to respond in any other manner.
Classical conditioning and the tragedy of automatic response.
This is a very simplified explanation, of course, but in essence, this is the science and practice of classical conditioning. The physiologist Ivan Pavlov demonstrated this in action with an ingenious, simple experiment.
Pavlov set up a test where several dogs, on a leash, awaited their next meal. The dogs would see and smell the food coming. They would perceive these sensations as food. They then anticipated the pleasure that food would bring about, and so the dogs’ motor response was to salivate in eager anticipation.
But as these dogs were salivating and engaged in this whole stimulus-response arc, Pavlov also blew a whistle. At the next meal, he blew the whistle again. And so with the meal thereafter.
Once a few experiences like these were repeated, the food was not given at all, and only the whistle blew. And sure enough, the dogs were now fully salivating, even as the whistle had nothing to do with a hunger response.
The entire stimulus-response arc got neurologically linked to the whistle, so the same pleasurable response became automatic.
Furthermore, these dogs now had a permanent new disposition to associate pleasure with the sound of a whistle, which they could not change.
As such, because we are also members of the animal kingdom and have the same faculties, we can also be conditioned by linked-up events and stimuli that bring us pleasure.
Think of what advertising does. In essence, it links a product with pleasurable ideas and imagery. And when this advertisement is repeated over and over again, the consumer forms a new stimulus-response-like chain in the mind: beautiful woman + product = new desire.
Linking happens through the quality or the number of pleasurable associations, or both. You can create links with very strong pleasurable sensations, or through repeated experiences of pleasure, or strongest of all, through many strong pleasures repeated many times.
Thus, someone who is addicted to drugs, for instance, inevitably experiences strong pleasure while intoxicated and has done so often in the past. The stronger this connection occurs at a neurological level, the more compelled or addicted this person is to repeat that action and the less able they become to stop themselves.
This can be very troubling, especially because it interferes with other pleasures in life, such as good health, good friends, a good job, and so on.
At its core, this is also the reason why our efforts to make changes are often difficult and why most people fail in their attempts. Our past conditioning with pleasure, or the absence of pleasure through suffering and pain, can shape and determine our destiny at a neurological level.
Thus, herein lies one of the great tragedies of human existence:
We are forced, or enslaved, to follow the path of our past conditioning, despite what we would consciously want to do otherwise.
This is also, in a nutshell, the mechanism of Aesthetic Happiness as an operating system in action. In this mode of operation, we organize our lives so that we can experience more and more pleasurable connections — whether we elect this consciously, or as most often happens, are driven unconsciously by our stimulus-response mechanism.
This works out okay at times, and at other times leads to uncontrollable compulsions that conflict with other pleasures we also want, like with the case of a drug user, for instance.
This is also our default or base mode of being. We share this operating system with other evolved animals as well. And so we can simply live out our lives like animals and be mere creatures of conditioning.
Psychologists like B. F. Skinner and his behaviourist school turned this idea into an entire field of science and practice, for both humans and animals. In many circles, this is also the dominant theory about human nature, and it is applied in countless arenas — from therapeutic practice to education, politics, economics, and beyond.
The stimulus-response model may restrict us, but it does not define us.
But what is not commonly known — and what is sometimes even actively suppressed — is that we as human beings are not mere animals. Unlike all other animals, the makeup of a human being is uniquely different.
Unlike all other animals, we have the power to break free from the bonds of conditioning.
Humans are the only animals on the planet that have the power to consciously change their own stimulus-response mechanisms.
Unlike all other animals, we do not have to live out our lives as our environment has programmed us neurologically. We have the ability to create our own stimulus-response mechanisms by choice.
We have the power to direct and create any number of stimulus-response mechanisms that we choose, through self-initiated design. We can live beyond the influence of these mechanisms, so to speak.
Most importantly, it is through breaking free from our conditioning that we truly express the essence of being fully human. This ability to transcend the Aesthetic Realm is our unique gift or potential.
And what enables us to do this is the Four Faculties Framework.
The Four Faculties Framework: unique to humans.
We human beings have four additional faculties that no other animal in the world possesses. These faculties enable us to dismantle the stimulus-response bonds and achieve a breakthrough. These faculties are:
Imagination
We can imagine new alternatives in our mind and what we could be doing instead.
Awareness
We can become aware of the mechanism, observe it, and stand as if outside it.
Reason
We are able to reason whether this conditioning is good, or whether it detracts us from a higher good.
Will
We are able to choose a higher meaning for the long term, despite the short-term pleasure payoff.
We can break the bonds of our conditioning with these faculties because:
- We can imagine new alternatives in our mind and what we could be doing instead.
- We can become aware of this stimulus-response mechanism, how it operates, and stand as if outside of it, observing it in a detached way.
- We are able to reason as to whether this conditioning we made is a good thing, or whether it detracts us from a higher good.
- We are able to choose a higher meaning for the long term, despite the short-term pleasure payoff — thus the perspective of sacrifice in human culture.
The four faculties of our fundamental freedom.
It is with these four faculties that we can break apart stimulus-response links. Thus, we can leverage these four faculties to change how we feel about things, and thus drive new actions that can support us by design, rather than by environmental default.
These four faculties are, in essence, the four active ingredients behind any and all change efforts.
Whenever a change effort works — whether through counselling or self-initiated effort — it is because one or more of these faculties were leveraged in the process.
This is our higher Four Faculties Framework, which for simplicity I have called our tetradynamics — tetradynamics coming from the Greek words tetra, meaning four, and dynamos, meaning power or faculty.
Animals do not have these higher four faculties. As such, whenever the stimulus-response link is established within an animal, the animal is limited by its conditioning, like with the whistle-salivate response in Pavlov’s experiment.
That is, an animal:
- cannot imagine a different alternative, like enacting something different as a response;
- has no self-awareness that this conditioning process is even happening;
- cannot reason that this is a conditioned response, and perhaps an inefficient one;
- cannot will into action a new response, and so it behaves in line with the conditioning entrained upon it.
Another way to say this is that a dog cannot take responsibility for the conditioning it is subject to. Animals are not response-able. They are not able to change their conditioned links by choice.
By contrast, a human can and often does, because a human being is of a higher order. This is why Shakespeare wrote:
“Oh, what a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty…”
Our Ethical Happiness O.S. is built on this Four Faculties Framework, on this Tetradynamic.
For what ultimately these four faculties create for us are passageways into the transcendentals — the properties of our Authentic Being: goodness, truth, beauty.
And what is ethics but our deep yearning to integrate more goodness, truth, and beauty into our lives and into our world?
These four faculties connect us with the realm of the Ethical because:
- with our faculty of Imagination, we connect with Beauty;
- with our faculty of Reason, we connect with Truth;
- with our faculty of Will, we connect with Goodness;
- and with Awareness, we connect with our Being.
The highest powers of the human soul.
It is these four faculties that form our best virtues. These faculties are the means by which we can become more reasonable, more loving, more creative, more courageous, more self-controlled, and so on.
And what else do we mean by the idea of making life changes, other than to become more fully ethical? That is, to change in order to move further upward into our ethical potential in being, so that we are able to express more beauty, reason greater truth, and choose the higher good.
These four faculties are so magnificent and unique in the history of the universe that, technically speaking, in the tree of life, these four faculties set the human being in an entirely new order of creation.
The difference between animals and humans is not merely trivial. The fact that we have these four faculties gives us four more faculties than animals have at their best. This is an order difference as large as the one between plants and animals themselves — a difference as large as the one between a cat and a cactus.
Therefore, to treat a human being as merely an animal to be conditioned — whether in politics, education, therapy, and so on — is a grave error and injustice. It is like the equivalent of treating an animal as if it were a mere plant.
The difference between a human being and other animals is not trivial, as we have been misled to believe. We desperately need to update the map that says we are merely animals to be trained with pleasure and pain. For this kind of donkey motivation of carrot and stick has turned so many into asses. Think of Pinocchio and his trip to Pleasure Island.
Perhaps this is why the father of psychology himself, William James, lamented that:
“Compared to what we ought to be we are only half awake…”
The great miseducation of today.
As astonishing as this insight is, these four higher faculties have never really been seriously researched by our social sciences.
Because these four higher faculties connect us with a transcendental order, and thus with what this could imply about human nature, these faculties have often been ignored, or they are only superficially dealt with and distorted so they fit into the human-as-mere-animal worldview.
Just consider how much time you have spent in education being informed about what makes humans unique and special in our world.
And consider how much time you spent being educated about how similar our nature is to that of other animals, or that humans are even worse animals.
As Professor Martin Seligman, one of the leading thinkers and activists in the field of psychology today, wrote in his book Flourish:
“Where were the scholars who would help guide us about what makes life worth living?”
Yes, humans walk on the moon, send robots to Mars, smash atoms to take quantum photographs, compose and perform Beethoven symphonies, design and build Vatican buildings, write and produce Lord of the Rings films, and so on — yet academic ideology still preaches the mythology that humans are really just slightly different from baboons.
From primary school and thereafter, mainstream education has conditioned us to think that we humans are nothing more than a naked ape. That we are just an upright walking ape which happens to be a bit cleverer because of its opposable thumbs, and we just happen to speak.
In most corners of the world, this miseducation is the standard, government-approved, and enforced teaching. Worse still, this toxic ideology has created a whole new generation of people who secretly, and not so secretly, wish that all humans would perish so that Earth would be returned to nature instead.
This is why in most academic circles today, it remains an unassailable dogma that our sciences ought to help by appealing only to our lowest faculties and animal nature. This ideology drives the sciences themselves.
And of course, the proof is in the results:
- Since waging war on mental health in the Western world, this war has mostly seen increased mental problems, not fewer. There are more classifications of mental illness, many more cases of it, more drug discoveries, and many more people taking drugs.
- Most tellingly of all, those on the front lines of mental health and social improvement, in their own lives, often do worse than the statistical average, not better. It is as if we are happy to get fitness advice from someone who sits on a couch all day.
So coming back to where we started: how can we not have the problem of mass sedation, as it stands today?
When this is the cultural norm, when this nihilistic view of human nature dominates, why wouldn’t an average person want to tune out this view of life and get “out of the mind”?
Has not this old, nihilistic view of human nature run its course?
Has not this social experiment been done enough, that we can predictably see where it is going next?
Aim above what man is, so he can become what he should be.
Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist behind the classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, once shared this little gem of wisdom:
“If you take man as he really is, we make him worse. But if we overestimate him… looking at him as being high, above, we promote him to what he really can be.”
We, as leaders, need to do the same if we want to become the best versions of ourselves and help others reach their best selves. We need to direct our four highest faculties toward:
- The highest levels of truth that our faculty of reason is capable of.
- The highest levels of beauty that our imagination can conceive.
- The highest levels of goodness that our will can enact.
- The highest levels of being that our awareness can embody.
For in each one of these avenues, when genuinely pursued, we can discover ever-new wellsprings of inspiration and meaning.
This has been tried and tested throughout 5,000 years of written history. The cultures that meditated on what is good, true, and beautiful went on to build in stone a Notre Dame or a Taj Mahal. The ones that did not went on to create dark ages.
In this time of cultural uncertainty and unease, it is time to take back our common sense of what makes humans great once more.
Like Francis Bacon, the founder of modern scientific methodology, put it:
“Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing — for where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced.”
Here at the Center for Motivation Research, we have made this our primary mission: to strengthen the highest powers of the human soul. For this very purpose, we created the iLifeChange program.
And as we come to the end of our reading here, I would like to extend to you an invitation to join us in our next iLifeChange Experiment.
We guarantee that this program will be like nothing else you have experienced before. Take this program for a test-drive and use the full “love it or leave it” guarantee.
Begin the iLifeChange Experiment.
A 40-day intensive for strengthening the highest powers of the human soul and re-forming the way you are motivated.