You’ve suffered from social anxiety disorder and tried to treat it for years. The problem and infatuation with removing anxiety go hand-in-hand. What you resist persists sometimes making problem-solving ineffective.

From a young age we’re tricked to believe in emotional regulation. We believe adults are mature, stable, and happy because of emotional control. “Stop crying and being a baby.” “Don’t be angry.” And of course my dreaded, “Don’t be a scaredy cat.” Emotional regulation has lead to your search here today as you try discover the cure of your social anxiety.

What are the affects of battling your anxiety? What’s the secret to better socialize and start living a meaningful life?

The Hidden Danger of a Social Anxiety Disorder

“Cowards die many times before their deaths.” – William Shakespeare

”To understand the world one must not be worrying about one’s self.” – Albert Einstein

Social anxiety affects you on the outside. You’re in a conversation looking at someone, but really you’re looking within, monitoring what’s going on. “Am I getting more anxious? Is my nervousness dropping? What do they think of me?”

A battle with a social anxiety disorder is life-limiting. Imagine yourself at a banquet of delicious meats and foods on the table with anxiety sitting beside you. If you battle anxiety, both hands grasp the knife and fork for weapons as you focus on slicing anxiety to death. Anxiety sometimes gets hit only to morph into a more intense form. You swing harder only to tire yourself out – all the while you miss a delightful moment of treats.

Your battle with anxiety consumes plentiful amounts of energy that diverts your mind and body from activities, daily tasks, and relationships meaningful to you. If someone was to choke you right now, of all the things you could do (look out the window, scratch your head, laugh), you’d be obsessed with one: breathing again. Fighting anxiety is like being choked as it narrows your repertoire of behavior. There’s a banquet to enjoy in life instead of fighting anxiety.

In conversation you can focus on learning what someone does for a career, how your friend spends free time, or listening to make someone feel heard to live out a value of being friendly, but instead you fight anxiety. This makes a social anxiety disorder an awkward problem. If you have the disorder as characterized by a resistance to anxiety, you’re not present in the conversation and people notice it.

How Anxiety Experts Deal with Anxiety

”If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.” – George S. Patton, World War II general

“Fear is natural. Be with it.” – Thomas Leonard, founder of CoachVille

I picked up a social anxiety disorder at 14 years old. I’m now 26 years old and don’t consider myself cured. “What?! You can’t teach people then you jerk!”

The moment you consider yourself treated from social anxiety or other forms of anxiety is when you’re vulnerable. It’s the same mind-trap as wanting to banish anxiety.

Stephen Hayes, co-creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), was a psychologist when he developed a panic disorder. In an interview I did with him, he applied advice from cognitive therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), but they felt to him as if he had spat into a hurricane.

Here’s one example. CBT uses the term “cognitive restructuring” to be more rationale about anxiety-inducing situations. Shifting a thought of “I’m going to look like an idiot at the party” to “I’m extremely nervous at this party, but I’ll leave in one piece tonight and probably make some new friends!” wasn’t very helpful for him. You may have tried the same restructuring that helped in the short-term only to find the spit flying back at you soon after.

One day Dr Hayes just became an assistant professor when he was in a department meeting watching the professors angrily fight with each other. He raised his hand to ask a question, but couldn’t make a sound come out of his mouth. After 30 seconds, no sound was made and the meeting resumed.

“That event,” says Dr Hayes, “is not what created my anxiety disorder.” If you get humiliated talking to a hot blonde, it doesn’t mean you’re doomed to a lifetime of anxiety, but it can start an internal battle where you fight the internal experience of anxiety. You start to project the experience where you see yourself fainting and dying in the future.

Imagine a young boy freely running around a playground. Suddenly he falls into a dark, dirty hole called “anxiety”. It’s not his fault he fell into the hole. How the hole got there doesn’t matter because it’s just there.

The child is scared of the black ditch because one day he heard bad creatures live in the dark. Afraid of this, he quickly decides to escape by digging. 10 minutes later he looks up to see no progress made so he digs more dirt out and digs faster. Sweat beads down his forehead.

One hour of strenuous digging later, he glances up with his glassy eyes only to see he’s further from freedom. The child is now more afraid than before.

Has digging hard (attempts to conquer anxiety) freed you? I doubt it has because you’re reading this article hoping to cure a social phobia. Have a pad and pen handy because in this article I’ll ask you to do a lot of tough and fulfilling work that’s counter-intuitive to what you’ve done most of your life.

How to End Suffering Forever

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” – Seneca, 1st century Roman philosopher

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.” – The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Neibuhr

Anxiety sufferers believe anxiety causes pain and must be gone before they can live a meaningful life. Self-talk of social anxiety sufferers include: “Before I can talk with that girl, I need to feel confident”, “I need to be comfortable to get on stage and speak”, and “I can’t make friends as long as I’m a nervous wreck”.

You may believe you can’t make friends or chat with cute girls until this yucky thing that is anxiety disappears. That’s what you’ve been lead to believe by self-help gurus who pronounce you have to think and feel a certain way to achieve a goal. Georg Eifert and John Forsyth, co-authors of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Anxiety Disorders, wrote something worth burning into memory: “Feeling good is not a requirement for living good.”

When you believe you must feel good to live good, you battle anxiety. The truth is: anxiety doesn’t cause pain – your struggle with anxiety creates undue pain.

Suffering forms from pain and nonacceptance according to Linehan, author of Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder. Ultimate suffering is suicide, an attempt to end pain from nonacceptance. You suffer when you don’t want to be hurt, when you don’t want to be anxious, when you don’t want to fear.

You don’t need to be fearless to have a great social life. You don’t need to be fearless to contribute. You can be fear-ridden and live a meaningful life. “You don’t need to think this way or feel that way to be free of social anxiety,” said Dr Hayes. “Instead of wanting social anxiety to disappear and then you can be with yourself and others, it turns out you can go directly and quickly to the end if you compassionately hold your insides.”

Anxiety does not mean something is wrong you – it’s the approach of battling anxiety that causes suffering. Sexual abuse is one unfortunate event in life that causes trauma yet it doesn’t always lead to being broken or living a sexually suppressed life. Victims of sexual abuse can feel anxiety in sexual situations yet live as they please. Psychological health is not the absence of trauma, pain, and negative experiences.

The difference between a free outgoing person and someone shy is not the experience of anxiety, but if the anxiety is held onto, battled with, and pushed away. Escapism constricts your social life because your internal experiences are inescapable. You cannot run from yourself. Drop the mindset of “curing anxiety” altogether. “I’ve learned to never say no to anxiety,” said Dr Hayes in my interview with him. “If anxiety wants to show up, it’s perfectly welcome to do so.”

My question to you is: are you willing to make room for anxiety to be in your life?

Why Doing What You’re Anxious About Works

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” – Carl Gustav Jung, founder of analytical psychology

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” – Fr. Alfred D’Souza in Happiness Is A Journey

Do the thing you’re anxious about and anxiety will rot away. That’s a truth of fear and a better lesson self-help teaches, yet the underlying message is to conquer fear and anxiety.

Firstly, fear and anxiety differ. Fear promotes action in the present while anxiety anticipates the future. You can fear being punched in the head by a muscle-jacked boyfriend if you approach a hot girl and he pushes you, but worrying about being punched by that guy before you approach is anxiety.

Fear and anxiety reduce when you experience what you’re afraid of. Neither emotion is worse than the other. A skydiver will likely fear his tenth jump less than his first and a guy who approaches a hundred women will be less anxious than if he had approached none. This is exposure and it works at living with anxiety.

You didn’t learn to ride a bike by reading or thinking about it. You crashed, you fell, you got hurt. There’s no other way than direct experience to ride a bike.

“Exposure therapy” has you repeat contact with what you fear in a safe environment until the fear is extinct or minimized. If you’re petrified to leave the house, it might begin by putting your head out the window, sitting on your verandah, or walking around the garden. If you’re afraid of cafes, day one could be to order a coffee, day two is to order a coffee while holding eye contact, while day three also gets you to ask how the barista’s day is going.

How can you use exposure to step into your social phobia? List three steps on a pad. It could be: 1) go to a mall and sit down, 2) make eye contact with 10 people who pass you, and 3) say “Hey” on the tenth person.

You may feel your heart increasing right now with just the thought of exposure. Don’t battle it. The battling is what causes suffering. Be mindful of your increased heart-rate and shallow breathe. Be okay with it. Continue to write your three steps.

The discomfort experienced signals your evolution. Something different is happening in your life right now! Remember Jung’s words: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” Whenever I feel discomfort, I acknowledge a transformation – an evolution – is occurring inside me that’ll produce a different a result to what I’ve had in the past.

Be careful making exposure another cure to social anxiety. Cognitive therapies use exposure to reduce anxiety and treat symptoms, but ACT uses it with the purpose of getting you to be okay with feeling anxiety. That’s a big difference.

Anxiety is natural so it makes sense to not suffer with attempts to conquer it. Bootcamp students get a great feeling experience from exposure therapy. We might go to a bar or club with no intent but to be there. The student says “Hey!” to a group and keeps walking. The goal is to be okay with feeling afraid of meeting people so you can live a purposeful life. The belief you shouldn’t be afraid of new people only increases suffering.

If you do what you worry about to remove anxiety, is that another short-term tool to battle anxiety? I suggest you use exposure not to reduce anxiety, but to experience anxiety, feel how it’s normal, and believe a purposeful life is possible with it. Anxiety is natural so be with it.

Lesson: make doing what you’re anxious about a feeling experience that enriches life.

How to Free Yourself From the Fight with Social Anxiety

“One cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” – Albert Einstein

“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.” – Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War

Creatures relate to things based on their attributes like speed, color, and size. Humans do too but we can abstract these perceptions. We often do not take a fast beating heart for what it is: a fast beating heart. If you’re heart is thumping hard, you may infer you’re about to have a panic attack. Once you learn to categorize something within, it seems like a thing. Anxiety to you seems real and dangerous.

In the past century since Darwin’s work, we’ve categorized anxiety as an unhealthy emotional affect of worry. Anxiety is seen as bad due to the surge of pop-psychology books in the 80s, positive-thinking tapes in the 90s, and now blogging in the 21st century where anyone can chant self-help advice. Western society teaches you to master your emotions, control your thoughts, and move from unpleasant states through manipulation.

Answer these questions to do with categorizing emotions:

• Is “joy” good or bad?
• Is “sadness” good or bad?
• Is “anxiety” good or bad?

You probably answered “good”, “bad”, and “bad”. But is it bad to be sad when your friend dies? Is it bad to be anxious when you’re in a new environment and meet someone you don’t know?

The self-help myth and belief that anxiety is bad cause you to try cut it out like a parasite from your body. You read endless articles on dealing with social anxiety, post in forums desperately seeking help, and beg for anything to alleviate you of this disease. All this makes you more anxious.

You fight anxiety because of the belief and categorization it’s bad. You can also take this control approach because it’s an adaptive method to survive in the external world.

You fear climbing a high cliff for survival and pain reduction. Bruce Chorpita, Professor of Psychology at UCLA, and David Barlow, Professor of Psychology at Boston University, in a 1998 study called The Development of Anxiety confirm a control approach to make life right is important to healthy well-being. Nothing is unhealthy about avoiding an unchained dog growling loudly or taking an aspirin to alleviate a headache.

Problems arise when control is used at an extreme level as rigid thinking and behaving do not work. Not approaching a cute girl because you’re nervous does not work. Calling in sick because you’re afraid to give a presentation does not work. Saying you’re not in the mood to go to party does not work when you’re really staying home to avoid your fear of dancing. It’s once you avoid crossing a bridge because your friend jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge that control doesn’t work.

Anxiety and other feelings like anger typically understood as “bad” are not bad. They typify human experience. The belief you need to think and feel positive all the time is inhuman. Emotions don’t have an off and off switch. Our emotional spectrum of fear, sadness, happiness, anger, and disgust (Darwin’s five emotions) makes you human. Those who accept and experience the five emotions and their lesser ones without defense are healthy.

Here’s a quick exercise to do in this moment. Try to make yourself happy. Give yourself a minute. Now try to make yourself anxious. Give yourself another minute to create this state.

Did you make yourself happy or anxious? You didn’t directly create the emotion. You induced either by remembering a happy or anxious memory, which created the emotion. You experienced something that triggered happiness and something else that lead to anxiety. Emotions like anxiety naturally arise from experience and cannot be easily controlled like a power switch.

One point I must make clear is regulating actions of an emotion is completely different to emotional regulation. It’s okay to accept the one second of anger when your son doesn’t wash the dishes, but it isn’t okay to abuse him about it. You have the power to control the action-side of anger by breathing to gain clarity, thinking about the need that caused your anger, and being assertive.

A Breakthrough Model for Social Freedom

“He who is brave is free.” – Seneca

”Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.” – Voltaire, 17th century writer on social reform

You now know to not resist anxiety, but if you try to not think of a pink elephant, you’re stuck thinking about a pink elephant. What should you do instead of obsessing about the pink elephant that is anxiety?

Before we can answer this, let’s first understand what you were trying to achieve by removing anxiety. Here’s a quote from my special member’s only report The Only Cure to Social Anxiety, available in part three of Big Talkers, where for the first time this breakthrough model of social freedom is revealed and simply applied to socializing:

You’ve heard the terms “social anxiety” and “fear”, but what words are their opposite? You probably think terms like “calmness” is the opposite to “social anxiety” and “confidence” is the opposite to “fear”.

You’ve been “working on yourself” for a few years now and banish fear in pursuit of confidence . You try to erase anxiety in pursuit of calmness. Such actions are driven by the belief that an opposite – more ideal – state of anxiety exists. This belief drives your fear in social situations.

You can see this traditional model to deal with social anxiety below:

Continuing on in the report:

What if I told you an opposite term didn’t exist? What effect would that have on your belief system and actions?

If social anxiety and fear had no opposite, you wouldn’t pursue another state. You wouldn’t seek out calmness to move away from it’s polar opposite of social anxiety. You wouldn’t seek out confidence to move away from it’s polar opposite of fear.

With anxiety and fear being their own states with no opposite, you couldn’t make them transform or disappear into another state. They would simply exist because it’s natural.

What does the new model look like then?

If anxiety is a natural experience to be held, the other end of the “confidence spectrum” becomes freedom. You’re free to experience what you feel!

Freedom is not an alleviation of barriers, but complete acceptance of them. You don’t have to like the barriers. You don’t have to like anxiety, but it’s your choice if you drop the tug-of-war rope with anxiety and allow it to be there.

The problem is not anxiety, but the desire to avoid anxiety. Attempts to move from social anxiety towards confidence, calmness, even freedom – whatever it maybe – snares you in the same trap of fighting anxiety. This new model of socializing and living happy aims to not push you from social anxiety towards social freedom, but to move you to accept social anxiety, which is freedom.

You can quickly comprehend how free you are by asking: “Where’s my focus when anxiety arises?” The free person sees what’s important to them (value-based living) while the anxiety sufferer battles with anxiety (desire to avoid social anxiety).

A girl who thinks everyone analyzes her is not socially free – she will be afraid to speak and socialize. A girl who says what she feels and speaks her mind even when she’s afraid is socially freer than the first girl. Social freedom is therefore not an absence of social anxiety, but the absence of a desire to avoid social anxiety. The later girl lives a freer social life because he knows anxiety and fear is okay to exist. How can you too live a free social life once and for all?

How to Live a Meaningful Life and Treat a Social Anxiety Disorder with ACT

“Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?” – George Bernard Shaw, recipient of the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” – Ambrose Redmoon, rock band manager and writer

You don’t decide to feel anxiety – you decide to live a meaningful life. Pain exists either way. The push-pull of fear and love is expected if you move towards what you care about like friends and social freedom. Your decision is not whether you feel anxiety, but if you want to reflect on your past and feel proud. How do you go about this? You use the ACT formula.

The ACT formula below is part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. CureTogether.org, a place where patients of almost any health problem come together to share their self-experiments, found Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to be one of the most effective yet hidden solutions for anxiety treatment.

There are three components to start living a meaningful life when you suffer from social anxiety: Accept, Choose Directions, and Take Action.

Accept. Follow the serenity creed by accepting what you can and can’t change. If you get anxious around attractive women because you’re short and you think women find shortness unattractive, as erroneous as that belief is, you can’t change your height and need to accept it.

By accepting your height, you don’t resign to the thought you’ll forever suck with women. It means you end your struggle with what is. This creates space for you to do something productive like learn the many other things women want in men.

Acceptance is your willingness to openly live. It is not resignation to your anxiety, a feeling, or one decision. It is a choice you make to approach life each day. There may be a law you hate, but you accept it and openly live with it. Acceptance transforms your suffering into plain pain. Acceptance ends your battle with social anxiety.

Besides, how has resistance to anxiety gone for you? You struggle with the internal battle doing things like screen phone calls, skip parties, and shop at the least busiest of times. The anxiety temporarily subsides but then it explodes straight up again in another situation.

You’re not a bad or messed up person because of your battle with anxiety and use of strategies to deal with it. You’re just using ineffective methods. Can you see how resistance is not working for you and why this first step of “Accept” is important for you?

Choose Directions. Where do you want to be one year from now?

Viktor Frankl was a man confined to life-threatening barriers yet used choice, acceptance, and values to survive and live a valuable life. Frankl was a prisoner of war transported between Nazi camps relentless as the other. Prisoners were stripped naked, called a number instead of their name, starved, placed in gas chambers, and put in dehumanizing moments.

Fellow prisoners committed suicide to avoid the suffering of another day with the Nazis. Some prisoners lay in bed refusing to get up as they submitted to Nazi beatings. Statistic experts estimate there was a 3% chance of survival.

Frankl noticed, however, a common thread amongst those who endured the pain: they had reason to live. What did Frankl do? He stood outside to give a psychotherapeutic speech on concentration camps, studied and helped fellow prisoners, and did what he could to give life purpose. Surviving prisoners imagined reunion with families or completion of a valuable project back in their home country. No Nazi could steal these visions from the prisoners.

Freud said man is driven from sexual instincts but Frankl developed Logotherapy and says your deepest desire is purpose. Carl Jung echoed similar sediments saying, “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

Again I ask you… Where do you want to be one year from now?

You may struggle to head in a direction because of your language that describes anxiety. It’s typical for anxiety sufferers to be low on life consumed with the anxiety battle. I’ve heard and said things like, “I can’t go to parties until my anxiety is fixed”, “I’d do public speaking, but I’m afraid”, and “That girl is hot and I’d like to talk to her, but I don’t want to embarrass myself”.

Why have you previously wanted anxiety to be gone? To be less anxious? How uninspiring! You know at some level that less anxiety through techniques, anti-depressant medication, or some other remedy doesn’t create a richer life.

How would it feel if your tombstone had written on it:

“[Your name] battled anxiety for 14 years. He dedicated each day to researching techniques, taking medication, and doing what’s possible to dodge anxiety-inducing situations. He had few friends, never volunteered to help the less fortunate, and never married. He was never able to lie down on the beach with the sunset and cool breeze blowing through his hair because he never conquered anxiety.”

Write your tombstone if you died today. We’ll get to the second part of this tombstone exercise soon.

In the meantime, here’s another useful exercise for change to this new model of social anxiety. Spend five or more minutes now writing your list of Life Costs of Anxiety Avoidance. This list is to include as many costs as possible of what you’ve not had because you’ve avoided anxiety. Common life costs of my students battling social anxiety include:

• No partner ever
• No fun at social events
• No promotions at work from weak behavior
• Abuse from strangers for awkwardness
• The frustration from not voicing needs
• A disbelief great goals can be achieved

To further help you choose directions, ask yourself,“What values do I hold?” These values can be outside of relationships because anxiety affects your entire life. You can avoid going to university from your anxiety of being afraid to meet fellow students.

Values are different to goals because a goal can be achieved while a value may never end. You achieve a goal of making friends but you can’t complete the value of being friendly. Values are a path you go on. You may like to think of a value as an intention.

Example values are below along with questions to stimulate value-extraction and the problem of anxiety avoidance to show its affect on what’s meaningful:

1. Example: Loving brother/sister and parent. Questions: What type of brother/sister/parent do you want to be? How do you want to be around family? Problem: I’ve avoided talking about the elephant in the room (what everyone knows is there, but ignores) and prevented a deep connection with family because it’s scary.
2. Example: Great friend. Questions: What does it mean for you to be a great friend? What is it about friendship that’s valuable to you? Problem: Skipped my anxiety by not approaching people and accepting invitations to events that’s lead to few friends and low-quality relations with current friends.
3. Example: Help people with my career. Questions: What do you care about with work? What work do you like? Problem: I’ve stayed at home to avoid my anxiety that comes from meeting with clients and co-workers.
4. Example: Learn new skills. Questions: What would you like to learn? Why learn or undergo training? Problem: Stagnation and unfulfillment from a non-acceptance of anxiety to do with failure.

Take 10 minutes to list various values. Your answers are extremely important and guide you to purposeful living. But don’t let the importance of values bog you down because you can shape your answers later on. Hold values playfully to do this exercise because life and purpose is fun.

If you haven’t located your values, go inside the pain where you struggle the most then flip it over by saying, “What would I have to not care about to not have this pain be hurtful?” If your pain is social anxiety, you may not have to care about being with people, contribution, and loving others. Values reside in fear.

Your Life Costs of Anxiety Avoidance list motivates you to step into anxiety while your list of values motivate and direct you where to go.

Take Action. Once you accept what you can and can’t change and choose directions valuable to you, action is the last step. Act on your values.

You likely already act on your values. Your values are better clarified by what you do. If you avoid your anxiety, you probably value avoiding anxiety. With anxiety, however, it muddies up what’s meaningful to you.

A commitment to take this third and last step of action is itself a value that shows you care about your life.

Spend 10 minutes now to build an action plan that puts you on a path aligned with your chosen directions. (I told you I’d ask you to do plenty of life-fulfilling exercises.) In your action plan, list the first action-step to get you started, which is critical to build momentum and finally live meaningfully.

If you value family, a step could be to phone family members to organize a date for dinner by the end of next month. If you value being friendly, maybe a step for you is to get How to Win Friends and Influence People and Big Talk. Put together a concrete action plan to get going.

Unless you do something different, whether it’s follow ACT or some other treatment plan, you will not generate different results in your life. When you follow these steps, you’ll shift from emotional regulation to emotional acceptance. You’ll go from anxiety reduction to a fully functional being with values and goals meaningful to you.

The “cure” to social anxiety disorder isn’t accepting anxiety to remove it. That’s the same trap. Forget curing anxiety altogether even though it will likely reduce. Live aligned with your values and meaningful goals. It’s not easy. You either be friendly or you do not. There’s no “I tried to socialize” or “I tried to be nice to people”.

Your willingness to live meaningfully is a choice you make through action. Feelings and thoughts come and go, but where you travel is a decision made daily with your feet. Will you join me at the banquet beside anxiety?

Recommended Resources

1. Fellow Aussie Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap, has a good overview of ACT I recommend you read if you want to further explore this therapy.
2. For a complete step-by-step guide to go from anxious and lonely to effortlessly making friends, get my Big Talk course.
3. Another good resource (saying so myself) is Big Talkers, particularly part three where you’ll access my interview with Dr Stephen Hayes quoted in this article.

Question of the Day

What will you do this week to live a more meaningful life instead of fighting social anxiety?

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. 14 Social Skills Resources for an Amazing Social Life
2. On Achieving Goals – Part 2: How to Be Self-Motivated
3. On Achieving Goals – Part 1: Defining What You Truly Want
4. The Decision Tree of Effective Leadership to Create Freedom and Independence
5. Review of Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

NLP practitioners have a set of rules known as “NLP presuppositions” that form the foundations for the technology. They are beliefs that govern NLP. The presuppositions give you the foundation to understand how you perceive the world and presents you with the opportunity to change your reality. It is not that the presuppositions have been proven, but rather they give us opportunities and freedom to produce for effective living and better communication.

While few people agree on exact NLP presuppositions, the following presuppositions, in no particular order, are the ones I have frequently stumbled upon. They appear to be widely accepted. Though the presuppositions are simple, and hence can appear idealistic, think of how they can be applied to your life to change your reality:

1. The map is not the territory

This could be the most important presupposition to understand. “The map is not the territory” means we are separate from reality. The menu is not the food. The road map is not the city. The map of the world we have in our minds is not the real world.

We short-change ourselves of our full potential when we believe our mental map of the world is the territory we deal with everyday. If you take your assumptions of people’s behaviors, your position in the world, how people perceive you, or anything as reality – when it is merely your mental map painted from abstract understandings – you cheat yourself from what you can become.

Instead of interacting with the world, you interact with your map. How you treat people and yourself is dependent on the map you hold. Your map can be quickly, and more effortlessly, changed than the world it attempts to describe.

2. Every behavior has its appropriate context

You may get angry in sporadic outbursts because it gives you the space you need from people. You may be a passive person because of its benefits, such as the praise you receive from parents and teachers, which make you feel it is a good behavior. You may be scared of snakes because when you were little a snake-bite hospitalized you for two days.

Unfortunately, the behaviors, phobias, and ways to communicate we have learned from experience – that served us well then – limit our potential. We let the past dictate our future. Instead of using old ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that served their purpose in old contexts, you need to adapt new thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are most beneficial for the present moment and aligned with who you want to become.

3. People already have their needed resources

This is the weakest of the presuppositions. It is has been reinterpreted and misused from its original intention given by Milton Erikson when he said patients in therapy have the resources to handle their present problems, not all problems.

Unfortunately, and fortunately, you are human. While you may have the resources to solve personal problems, it does not mean you are capable of solving them right now. You need to know the resources you have and how to use them. You need to learn the skills, go through the experiences, discover a book, or whatever it may be, to awaken these resources within you.

You already have the ability to visualize, feel, hear sounds, communicate, and experience other sensations. These innate human abilities are the framework for personal change. In this article, and anything I share with you, I hope to give you the ability to use your resources better to create the reality you want in your everyday awakening life by showing you how to put your frameworks to more effective use.

4. Experience has a structure

You have five senses that give you an experience: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. These five senses hold the potential to change your identity and reality. Because your senses give birth to the experiences you live every moment of life, each habit or skill arises from your senses.

Pleasant-filled and pain-ridden experiences each have their own structures that use the five senses. Recurrent painful memories typically are large, bright, and up close. Painless memories of previously painful moments are typically seen in black-and-white, a single frame, and at an objective distance like in a photo – or even possibly combined with humorous music. Knowing the experience you want and understanding the structures that give off the experience, helps you establish an empowering pattern.

5. If one person can do something, anyone can learn to do it

This presupposition is modeling, doing what someone else does. It forms the foundation of NLP where individuals observe successful persons then mimic what makes them successful. Someone who wants similar success to a person they admire are to learn and do what makes the person successful, which leads to their own success. Successful individuals for centuries have modeled successful predecessors.

6. Change what is not working

The old saying, “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got” is so true. This presupposition encourages people to stop doing what does not give them the results they want. If you want something new, you have to start doing something new.

It is sick to see parents use unhealthy ways of disciplining their children. Every action by the child gets a consequence placed around it. To the parent’s disbelief, the child continues to push those consequences. The parent thinks it’s the child’s problem, but the parent is too ignorant and stuck in habitual behavior to realize that what he or she is doing is not working.

7. A positive intention exists beneath every behavior

You might yell to be heard. Fight to establish justice. Smoke to feel relaxation. Retreat to feel comfortable. Remain in bed to avoid the pain of what awaits you. These are all positive intentions.

However, a positive intention does not mean the behavior is correct, healthy, or the best option. Rather, knowing a positive intention or fundamental human need exists behind behaviors and communication enables you to act resourcefully. When you see positive intentions, you are more able to separate the problem from the person and update your map.

8. You cannot not communicate

I have come across many people who think it is possible to not communicate. The idea that you cannot communicate is one of the top communication myths.

You always communicate and will always continue to communicate. Your nonverbal communication illustrates the thoughts and feelings inside of you. While your thoughts remain hidden, a snicker in your smile, a wink in your eye, or a sigh of relief communicates a message without you needing to verbalize a message.

9. The meaning of communication is the elicited response

You just gave a brilliant presentation to a board of directors about a new project. Or so you thought. They rejected your idea. Why? There could be many reasons, but the underlying concept I’m painting here is the message received differs to the message sent.

People’s responses show you their meaning of your communication. When you understand the difference between sending communication and receiving communication, you open yourself to intimately understand people. You become aware that people need to verify their understanding of your message, which allows you to adjust future communication with them.

This presupposition encapsulates another NLP presupposition: failure does not exist, only feedback exists. Every piece of feedback you receive is treated as an achievement because it takes you one step closer to what you want. If something does not get you the results you want, it only means you need to correct what you are doing. You need to change what is not working. You will eventually create the reality you want by having the effective flexibility to change.

10. The more choices, the better

The fewer options an individual has, the unhealthier the person. Individuals limited in behavior feel victimized by circumstances that “give no options”. You may consider yourself to be absent of any psychosomatic illness, but there will be unhealthy areas in your life where you feel limited and powerless.

People stuck in negotiations are limited by their constraining choice(s) because choice correlates to power, influence, and change. The more choices you have personally, socially, and professionally, the more control you have over your reality. The better map you develop, the more choices you give yourself to create your desired reality.

11. The mind and body are inseparable

It was previously believed the mind and body are separate entities. Today, researchers, medical experts, and philosophers discover evidence each day about the mind and body influencing one another. Your thoughts and emotions affect your body and vice-a-versa.

Do not underestimate the influence your mind has on your body and the influence your body has on your mind. There is endless amounts of research that proves the strength of the two-way communication between the mind and body. Fields of study now heavily integrate the two entities that once seemed separate.

Body psychotherapy deals with the subconscious mind and body. Your experiences show in parts of your body. One particular example is bottled emotions manifest themselves in pains throughout the body. Emotional pains arise in predictable places over the body. A sore left knee signifies a fear to move forward in life.

Last night, I purged my thoughts and emotions, which remained inside of me for years, to my parents. I woke up the following morning with my worst ever headache. 18 hours later as I write this, I still have a headache, something that has never lasted more than 30 minutes for me.

12. Action develops understanding

Regardless of the number of books you read, people you talk to, or universities you attend, you will not understand what you seek to learn until you do. It is only when you do can you fully comprehend what you intellectualized.

There you have 12 neuro-linguistic programming presuppositions. These presuppositions are given to you as frameworks. They are rules to change your reality. Live by them and soon you will be in a reality that once seemed a dream.

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Review of Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life by Brian Tracy
2. Change Your Words to Change People: Persuasive Power Words
3. Why Problem Solving Doesn’t Solve the Problem and the Real Solution to Permanent Change

As I drove, the open car park gave me an invitation to have a little fun with my car. If landscapes could talk, this one was whispering into my ear that I should spin the wheels. “Besides, it’s late at night. No one is around and you’re feeling great. It’s an open car park with no danger. Do it!” Like a vulnerable teenager succumbing to peer pressure, I accepted the invitation.

The car became an extension of my body as it began to mimic my ecstatic mood. I put my foot down hard on the accelerator as I spun the wheel left around the first corner. As the rear tires lost their stability and the car went side-ways, I entered the next turn and spun the wheel right. The sound of screeching tires was water fertilizing my increasing smile. Smoke filled the rims of my tires and a shot of adrenaline filled my body.

Following the two consecutive drifts, I straightened the car and approached a set of traffic lights on the main road that would take me home. Had this been during the daytime, about seven cars would be in front of me before the upcoming traffic lights.

My friend who had left before me had passed through the traffic lights three seconds ago so the lights were still green. Keeping in the mood, I put my foot down on the accelerator to catch the green light. I would safely make it. I turned around the corner with a soft screech of the tires. 20 meters in front of me on the side of the road were two police officers beside their vehicle. Lucky me.

The police pulled me over. Opposite to what you might be thinking, I was not concerned. I was still in my elevated state. I smiled. I wound down my window and an angry officer came charging at me, yelling, “What the hell are you thinking? What the hell is going through your mind?” I paused momentarily, unaffected by his aggressive state. I said smilingly, “I’m just happy, I guess.” Not a smart response. Not a smart response at all.

It hit me I was out of it. I knew I should have said something else. I gulped. My mind rushed to think of some communication techniques I could use as a life boat to save me from drowning in the conversation. The moment was intense and all that came to mind were some techniques on getting out of a speeding-ticket. I thought to myself that I will give the techniques a shot. I had annoyed the officer enough. Surely it couldn’t get worse.

As I was thinking how to approach this difficult situation, I was still happy. My happy mood seemed to pour fuel on his already raging fire. “Bloody hell mate! I could just give you a ticket right now!” My smile began to lower. I no longer made eye contact with the officer. The officer’s raging mood began to infect me. He was making me feel angry. It was as if my body was overcome by an emotional virus from the officer who was the virus’ host.

I thought of the techniques to get out of a speeding-ticket and realized I was already beginning to use them. It was too late to make the officer feel safe as he approached the car, but I needed to no longer act oblivious to my mistake. I needed to show respect as officers are in a clear position of authority and often experience disrespect throughout their day that only makes them more determined to convict guilty citizens. “You’re right,” I replied. “I was stupid and careless.”

The officer was still enraged and continued to threaten me with a ticket. I knew he could easily write me a ticket, but he was not writing one possibly because officers hate the paperwork created from citizens breaking the law. I kept myself aligned with the officer’s reality by remaining in a “Yes I’m wrong, stupid, and shouldn’t have done that” mood. I continued to play psychological judo, and match my mood with his own, until two minutes later he said to drive away. And oh, no ticket!

I drove off – though feeling pleased I had beaten a reckless driving ticket – in an irritated state. The officer had destroyed my happy mood. It took two minutes of talking with the officer to completely transform my happy state into a joyless, gloomy mood, which I remained in for another two hours until I went to bed.

Emotional Contagion: When Two Minds Infect One Another

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou, poet and actress

“Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.” – Mark Twain, highly quoted writer

“You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel.” – Anonymous

“I am involved in all of mankind.” – John Donne, 16th century poet

My story I described is probably a perfect depiction of your reality with emotions. Everyday you interact with people in different moods. Sometimes you are happier than people; other times they are happier than you. Whatever the case, emotions transfer between people. This is a fascinating peculiarity with emotions. Have you ever noticed how we feel in our interactions is not only dependent on our internal state?

• How did you feel when someone really annoyed began talking to you? You became more annoyed.
• How did you feel when someone unhappy began talking to you? You began to be unhappy.
• How did you feel when a depressed person shared their misery with you? You felt depressed and miserable.
• How did you feel when a charismatic person talked to you? You felt his energy and you began to feel happier.

Psychologists call this phenomena “emotional contagion”. It is a psychological and physiological process – a transference of emotion that can occur from mimicking body language. Elaine Hatfield, a professor at the University of Hawaii, in a study with John Carlson and Christopher Hsee, had college students watch a videotape of a man describe two very emotional experiences: his life’s happiest and saddest events. While the college students watched the tape, they were taped so the researchers could record the students’ emotional responses. The students were also asked what feelings they experienced for each story at the end of the video.

The researchers found that students showed and expressed the recorded person’s emotions. The student’s felt happy when they watched the man describe his happiest event. The students felt sad when they watched the man describe his saddest event.

Hatfield and her two colleagues, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson, in their co-authored book Emotional Contagion, say the psychophysiological phenomena occurs from automatically matching facial expressions, vocalics, postures, and movements. Hatfield says, “People tend to experience emotions consistent with the facial, vocal, and postural expressions they adopt.”

When you empathetically listen to a friend, true empathy puts you in their shoes to experience the discussed events. The friend describes an argument with an ex-partner, the yelling, the misunderstandings. You can vividly see what your friend talks about. The experience lets you feel the pain your friend feels. Well-known psychologist Albert Bandura says the shared experience results in a shared feeling. That is the price of listening: not only can you catch a cold, but you can catch an emotional cold.

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Review of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
2. Dirty Tricks of Psychology for Mind-Reading and the Roots of Empathy
3. The Complete Nonviolent Communication (NVC) Process for Compassion, Understanding, and Peace
4. Review of Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
5. The Greatest 15 Myths of Communication

Carl Rogers, a pioneering psychologist in the 1950s on human relations, said love, genuineness, and empathy are three essential pieces to constructive communication. Many studies since then support Rogers’ theory. When we fail to love people, it is hard to communicate in a way that supports ourselves and people. Love is the core of powerful communication. Think about it for a moment and I’m sure your experiences will confirm that love is the heart of effective communication.

It is unfortunate we are not taught how to love people. Instead of learning how to love, we learn to fight. Instead of learning how to love, we learn to defend ourselves. Instead of learning how to love, we learn to get our point across and debate. It is no wonder society is deprived of the core energy – love – that drives humanity.

This article will help you love people more. It is not about falling romantically in love with someone, though the advice can help you in that sense. You will learn how to love people to empower your communication. I will give you a logical eight lesson plan that you can easily follow. Loving others will bring an abundance of love among many great things into your life.

What is Love?

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.” – Sophocles, 496-406 B.C.

“What most people need to learn in life is how to love people and use things, instead of using people and loving things.” – Author Unknown.

“Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” – Bible, New King James Version, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.

Love is a tough subject for anyone to address. Not many people agree with a common description of love. As Haddaway’s classic hit is titled, “What is Love?” Some say it is a willingness of sacrifice, some say it is blindness to flaws, while others say it is unexplainable. Some say it is an intense devotion or affection, but that can be neediness.

Just hearing about the subject of “love” makes me cringe. Love is twisted by society – not only by younger generations who are often picked on in this area – into a form that destroys its pure meaning. People think they are in “love” because they feel attraction or have been in a relationship for many years, but this does not comprehend pure love.

I’m not particularly fond of most material on love because the subject tends to be categorized into romance. “Do nice things like give gifts and the person will love you.” Romance does not describe love – not even an act of love because romance by itself can be superficial and manipulative. Love is beyond actions. Love is beyond reactions. You don’t wait for love to be created. Something deep works in pure love.

Psychologist Robert Sternberg attempted to explain love in his triangular theory of love. The theory is applicable for interpersonal relationships. It categorizes love using three scales: 1) intimacy, 2) passion, and 3) commitment. Variances in the three scales produces types of love. It is only when all three are present that a pure form of love, known as “consummate love”, can develop. Consummate love is the ultimate form of love an individual can desire.

A more applicable description of love to the style I am writing about in this article is explained by Susan Hendrick and Clyde Hendrick in their love attitude scale:

1. Eros love is based on physical appearance. It describes superficial love.
2. Ludus love is a game based on conquest. Pick-up artists (PUAs) often experience this type of love. PUAs love to conquer women. When one succeeds at getting a woman into the bedroom, he quickly loses interest in her.
3. Storge love is gradually built from similarities and friendship. The transition from friendship to love is often unclear.
4. Pragma love is more rational than other types of love as it is based on practicality. An extreme form of Pragma love is prostitution where financial gains rationalize attachment.
5. Mania love is very possessive and unstable. Strong feelings of insecurity, neediness, and jealously are experienced.
6. Agape love is selfless, unconditional, and often spiritual.

Agape love most accurately describes the type of love we wish to have towards family and friends. We want to unconditionally love those with whom we desire to effectively communicate; not just when these people do something nice for us or when we are in a good mood. Agape love does not change when the mood or circumstances change. Agape love remains when the person you feel agape love for does something mean to you. It is unconditional and withstanding – almost divine. It is our goal in this article to develop an agape form of love.

The Role of Self-love

The selflessness in agape love we wish to develop is one beyond sacrifice. It is beyond confining boundaries and a lack of concern in fulfilling one’s needs. Selflessness is about focus, attitude, and action towards others while retaining self-love. It is not about sacrifice and ignoring your needs.

Rarely are selfless actions self-less. Selfish actions misinterpreted as “self-less” fail to remove the self from the action. Unselfish actions that overlook the giver’s needs builds emotions like resentment that destroy the selflessness in the action. When the person ignores his or her own needs or desires, the person feels invaded and discounted. The person being self-less may be a people-pleaser quietly harboring dangerous amounts of resentment that will kill a relationship.

Unhealthy selfishness worsens by its supposed solution of selflessness. Selflessness in an area you lack resources can lead to unhealthy selfishness. Neediness comes from poor self-love. There is nobody more unloving than one void of self-love. Desperacy for love diminishes the love you give and receive.

Be selfish in the healthy sense before you are selfless. Ignore your parents and teachers that say selfishness is wrong. Greediness is different to healthy selfishness. In mathematics and life, you cannot give what you do not have. (Most people, however, wait to be loved by others.)

To give love you must firstly have love. You can only be truly selfless when you love yourself. It is in selfishness and the selflessness of agape love that we get our first lesson on how to love someone:

1. Love yourself to love others

If you are not into religion, the most reliable source for love is from yourself. You do not need to approve of everything about yourself, but you do need to accept yourself. You will always have flaws you dislike. Accept it. Only by loving yourself can you love others.

Give-Take Relationship of Love

As babies, we were entirely dependent on our parents or guardians. We would cry to be feed, cry to be warmed, and cry to be loved (some adults have hardly changed). We wanted to receive without giving. The only thing we gave was emotional warmth and love, yet that was out of our control, accidentally created from people’s perceptions towards us. Perhaps the only true thing we gave as a baby was regurgitated food.

As we began to age, we became more “independent”. We were able to feed ourselves, make ourselves warm, and put a shelter over our heads. Rarely does our growth extend beyond this independence or dependence. We are still that crying baby who wants everything without giving.

On the rare occasions we give, we do so in hope of receiving something of equal or greater value in exchange for our gift. Our giving comes from reciprocation. A part of this problem comes from our teachers and parents advising us to avoid people who take advantage of us. We get conditioned to not be conned by someone who fails to return a favor.

The principle of reciprocation is a double-edged sword that can empower you. It states that humans have an inherent desire to return favors. When something is seen as a favor, not an obligation or expectation, we react by reciprocating something to the person of equal or greater value. By giving we usually receive more than what we gave. Give love to others to receive things you cannot comprehend.

Unfortunately, when we do give and do not instantly receive, our giving stops. The expectations we create are the demise of our giving. Our expectations, which exceeds results, makes us dissatisfied. If you think you need to receive love from others in order to give love, you are living reactively. The more you get, the more you want. Neediness disables a person from loving people.

Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People says most people interpret love as a feeling, a reaction from events. We are driven by Hollywood to think love is a product of a circumstance – a feeling out of our control. People who live reactively to their environment blame others and situations for a lack of love.

Covey says “proactive people make love a verb”. They create the life they want. The greatest lovers in the world are people who live by their value of giving love instead of reacting to the moment. It is through loving that love is created. This is our second principle:

2. Simply start loving to love

We live in an interdependent society reliant on people, as they are on us, so we need to give. When we love others, they in turn love us, but not necessarily in the same form as our love. It is much easier to love someone who first loved us. The purpose of loving yourself is to create love in your life so that you can love. An active creator of one’s personal universe does not wait for the right circumstances – the person does what he or she wants done.

Agape love is not dependent on firstly receiving love. Agape love does not have limiting conditions. It gives without receiving. Mildred Norman Ryder, also known as the “Peace Pilgrim”, nicely said, “Pure love is a willingness to give without a thought of receiving anything in return”. This gives us our third lesson of loving someone:

3. Give love without any expectation of receiving love

I know people fear giving love and receiving none in return. Rejection is scary, but protecting yourself blocks the flow of love into your life. The need to receive love in exchange for love is needy, approval-seeking, and destructive. Reduce your need for someone’s approval to empower yourself to love the person. Remember, agape love is unconditional. Loving someone without the expectation of being loved in return, takes you one step further towards radical personal responsibility and unconditional love.

Daniel Goleman in his revolutionizing book Social Intelligence, which looks at the science of human relationships, emphasizes the need to go beyond ourselves. When we overcome self-absorption, we can connect with people and love them. “When we focus on others, our world expands,” says Goleman. “Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection – or compassionate action.”

Scarcity and Abundance of Love

The worry of giving without receiving comes from scarcity. We fear being conned, taken advantaged of, and receiving unfair treatment. Scarcity assumes love is a limited resource. It means there is a finite amount of love in the world so you had better keep what you need to yourself. No wonder we keep what we can to ourselves because our survival becomes dependent on it.

Extend your self-love to others. Self-love is one step forwards to an empowered giving of love compared to the limitations of giving it from guilt, ego, and scarcity. “Love wasn’t put in your heart to stay,” said the singer Michael Smith. “Love isn’t love until you give it away.”

Though scarcity can work against us when loving others, it can also work for us. The principle of scarcity states that we value a resource more when it is rare. Knowing love is scarce in the sense it can be lost, will make you value it more. This gives the fourth lesson to love someone:

4. There is no better time to love than now

Those who have lost loved ones know the value of love. Some people are too late to express their love. They regret failing to communicate their love to someone no longer with them. Do not become someone who devalues what is in their life until it disappears. A love-filled person knows their love in a person’s life counts.

Transforming Pain Into Pleasure

Change your perception of scarcity into abundance to start transforming pain into pleasure. If you struggle to feel grateful to transform this aspect of your life into pleasure, something that always helps me is to think about the meaning of “appreciate”. To appreciate is to increase in value. Therefore, to be grateful for everything in your past and present, you increase your feelings of value towards your experiences and the world around you.

You need to overcome feelings of anger, blame, and resentment before you can feel grateful and love those who hurt you. When you experience these limiting feelings, you fight an uphill battle that discourages you from loving the person who “caused” you these feelings. Remove the pain to experience the gain. The elimination of emotional pain gives us our fifth lesson on how to love someone:

5. Remove blame and resentment to make love possible

Anger is not bad – it signals a problem. When you blame someone or feel they cause your anger, that is a sign you lack radical personal responsibility. It is a sign you are reactive rather than proactive. Men who complain that women are “bitches” and women who complain that men are “jerks”, are two examples of people who lack personal responsibility. Once you accept radical personal responsibility, you no longer blame others and possess feelings of anger towards people.

Will the acceptance of radical personal responsibility remove all anger? No. It is not about the removal of anger, but about removing the victim mindset that people cause your pain. You will feel anger towards someone sooner or later, but that is just a sign you lack personal responsibility. Every second you decide how to respond to the world. Use the part of you that has you behave beyond everyday annoyances to help you accept radical personal responsibility.

Resentment comes from blame, but it needs a mention by itself because of its destructive capabilities. Resentment is an unusually powerful emotion that builds in size when you fail to forgive someone or take radical responsibility. Learn the art of forgiveness to erase resentment. We think we hurt others with an attachment of resentment against them, but we only hurt ourselves.

Love is Not Liking

When I teach people to love others to improve their communication, they often complain they cannot love, forgive, or even like certain people in their life. They think there is something unique in their history that excludes them from being able to love. While this hints that the person is yet to forgive, they may mistake love for liking.

Love is not liking. You can dislike someone you love. Jewish philosopher Martin Buber saw that love is a choice while liking is more reactive. We don’t really choose what we like, but we can choose who and what to love. Love is not a series of feelings, but feelings often accompany love. Hollywood tricks us to believe that love is a reaction out of our control. You can make the choice to love people and want the best for them just like you make the choice to love yourself because that is best for your wellbeing. This gives our sixth lesson:

6. Want the best for people and constantly remind yourself that loving is not liking

See the Abundance of Love

Here is a useful exercise to help you love people you resent. It will make you grateful for everything in your past and present, and create an abundance of love in your life. This exercise will create our seventh lesson:

7. Be grateful for everything in your past and present

Think of the significant positive and negative main events in your past. Summarize them on a piece of paper in separate rows. If you have a painful memory of how your parents brought you up, you could summarize it as, “I dislike my upbringing by my parents”.

Once you have listed the significant events, write down what you are thankful for about the event besides its summary. Identifying a lesson in a problem is difficult – and you may need to think about it for sometime – but it does exist – it always exists. What do you appreciate about the “negative” or positive event? If you disliked how you were raised by your parents, you could be thankful for:

• The independence they created in you
• Your new knowledge on how not to raise children
• The desire they gave you to lovingly raise your children

People who value lessons and opportunities, instead of being absorbed in pain and problems, are sometimes accused of delusion. Negativity and pain is no more real than positiveness and pleasure. Hate is no more real than love. You decide to be grateful for everything in your past and present. You decide to be loving. You decide to communicate well.

Being grateful for everything in your past and present removes pain. It makes you aware of the abundance in your life that you previously ignored. Now we have our eighth and last lesson on how to love someone:

8. See abundance and you will be exposed to an abundance of love

Love is everywhere. It is in our past and present. It will reside in our future – more so if you follow the advice in this article. “Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,” says Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan, “they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture.”

It is your choice to see the abundance of love because it is real. It is also your choice to use your biological gift of compassion and love to bring an abundance of this precious energy into your life. “Only when we give joyfully, without hesitation or thought of gain,” said love expert Leo Buscaglia, “can we truly know what love means.”

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Review of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
2. 101 Conversation Starters People Love
3. The Complete Nonviolent Communication (NVC) Process for Compassion, Understanding, and Peace
4. Why People Remain Quiet, Shy, and Non-Assertive: The Benefits of Passive Behavior and Communication
5. Why Smart People Have Poor Communication Skills – and What to Do About It

In the first three parts of the course you learned the power of apologizing, common mistakes and barriers in apologizing, and how to correctly apologize. We have nearly covered all you need to know for a successful apology to heal relationships from pain. In this part, it is time to learn the art of forgiveness to build the roof of emotional freedom to protect, empower, and encapsulate what you have learned in this course.

Let’s look at how apologizing and forgiveness work together. Up until now in the course, we have focused on apologizing and emotional healing. What do you do if a person is unwilling to forgive? Are there certain communication skills you can use to help the person forgive you or should you move on instead and accept the person’s unwillingness to forgive you as their problem? How can we forgive others and start experiencing more happiness, success, and enjoyable relationships as a result of forgiveness?

The Ugly Duckling: Dealing With Unforgiveness and the Odd One Out

There once was an ugly duckling who felt unrelated to his brothers and sisters. His difference frustrated him. While his brothers and sisters were a lovely white color, he was the odd one out with gray-colored feathers. To make him more different, he was large and clumsy. One day the duckling had enough of being rejected so he ran away from home.

One year later, the once ugly duckling – now a young swan – saw many white swans swimming in a pond. The young swan admired their beauty, waiting to be rejected like the other times in his life. To his surprise, the swans welcomed the young swan as part of their group. They declared him to be the most beautiful swan of them all.

Over the years I’ve come to notice that while there are laws and principles that govern how to get the most out of communication, quite a few times an ugly duckling exists. This ugly duckling is the exception to the group. I will read, learn, apply, change, and reapply skills in my life; yet there always appears to be the exception when a skill doesn’t work – a reaction doesn’t take place, for example, or words aren’t received the right way.

There are skills you can use to get a desired response, to get people doing what you want, and to build healthy relationships, but the skills often have an exception like the ugly duckling. Psychology is about categorization and understanding, but even psychologists know they cannot categorize humans. With the complexity of human behavior, it is impossible to establish unbreakable skills that work every time. The ugly duckling for you right now could be the person who is unwilling to forgive you or the circumstance where you are unwilling to forgive.

There will always be people who never accept your apology and refuse to forgive you. If you have planned, taken responsibility, used good timing, explained yourself, and sympathized (as taught in the earlier lesson on how to correctly apologize) and the person does not forgive you, move on. You can only do so much. I still encourage you to put the following skills to use that will help the person find forgiveness, but be prepared to move on and not expect anything in return. Life is too short to be burdened by people’s miseries and resentment.

Provided you’ve done everything in your power and the person is yet to forgive, the person’s unforgiveness is his or her problem. He or she will be burdened by the grudge more than you. Moreover, if you move on, the person maybe willing to accept your apology at a later time.

Where’s Your Awareness?

It is easy to blame others for not doing something they should have done, but this is an illusion. We all think, feel, and behave the best we possibly can at any point in time. Whether you lose a peaceful attitude as you lash out in an argument or miss an easy goal in soccer, hockey, or football, you always achieve your best. You may feel you could have done better in past situations, but the truth is: you did your best.

I once struggled to agree with this principle. When I learned this the first time, I was astounded and felt compelled to disagree with it due to my conditioning from sport coaches, family, and others who use to tell me, “Come on. You can do better than that!” This is partly true.

Your best performance is based on your present level of awareness. A sports coach who revs up his players about not doing their best is still right, yet this is misinterpreted. The sports coach who yells at his players stimulates a new awareness that they are not trying their hardest. While the players underperformed, they still did their best. What the coach does is create a new awareness in the players, which allows them to do better than their prior performance.

Applying this law of awareness to our communication and relationships, we have different perceptions, understandings, and experiences – which forms our current awareness – than one another. This creates conflict as someone gets frustrated over someone else not having similar awareness.

Forgiveness and healing is impossible if one’s level of awareness is not high enough. No one can act beyond their present awareness. Awareness applies in being conscious of the fault at hand and knowing the art of forgiveness. A greater awareness can be created from learning the skills and mindset one must have to forgive, which leads to problem identification and a solution.

Someone may not forgive you because they are unaware of the secret art of forgiveness you are discovering in this article. By shifting their awareness, you can transition them into forgiveness, opening their mind with what could occur from emotional healing.

Effects of Not Forgiving

Forgiveness is not limited to religion (though religious individuals probably see a lot similarities and power with the advice in this article). Forgiving others and giving an effective apology to be forgiven creates emotional freedom – one reason forgiveness is seen by many in spiritual terms.

The root of evil, negative actions, grudges, anger, resentment, hatred, and envy begin with unforgiveness. It may seem religious to you, but rejecting someone else’s apology and not forgiving them leads to these effects. Anger is not bad, for example, but you can easily feel angry by resenting something from the past.

Should not forgive someone over one issue, there is enough potential in the resentment and anger generated from that problem to damage your life. That’s right. Just one, single, solo, individual, lone grudge is enough to ruin someone’s life. You can live in anger, misery, and resentment because one grudge causes other things in your life to crumble around you.

To demonstrate how one issue can damage a person’s whole life, I’ll use an example many people struggle to handle: their upbringing. You may have never talked about this problem with anybody your entire life. You may have been abused by your parents at an early age or perhaps they made some wrong decisions that negatively affected you. Let’s say you have experienced such a problem from your parents.

The mistake they (or your mother or father alone) made hurts you deeply, generating severe emotional pain. You hold this mistake against your parents. Even though you forgive everybody else – and your parents on other problems – you cannot forgive your parents for this one problem. Though you are now someone who forgives everyone because you have learned from this course that you need to forgive others, you have been unable to forgive your parents for how they raised you. As a result, you constantly live in anger and resentment. One issue is enough to make your entire life unhappy.

You cannot afford to let this happen by not forgiving others. Do not be that person who cannot forgive. Clear your mind by clearing the other person’s slate of mistakes. Forgive every person, on every issue, every time – or suffer the negative effects of resentment. To do this, there is one principle in the secret art of forgiveness I live by that changed my life and will change yours as it allows you to forgive others over issues you thought were insurmountable.

The Secret Art of Forgiveness – Whose Canvas is It?

I believe there is one true life-changing secret in finding the art of forgiveness. There is one mindset that changed my life forever and allowed me to start forgiving, healing pain, overcoming problems, letting go, eliminating the blame-game from my life, and truly getting on with life.

Are you interested in creating a master piece by forgiving others? Are you ready to begin painting your life and taking control of how you feel? Are you willing to no longer let the past mistakes of other people make you angry, frustrated, and resentful? Are you interested in teaching others how they can apply this secret art of forgiveness so they can forgive you?

When you do not forgive, you probably think your resentment hurts the person who hurt you. You hold unhappiness and painful memories against people who inflicted pain on you in an effort to reciprocate their damage.

The art of forgiveness lies in knowing your hurtful attachment to the past does people no harm – it only hurts your wellbeing. Throw your grudges on the ground by acknowledging that what you do to make people unhappy only makes you unhappy. The gun you fire is off target and the recoil blasts into your face. You are not messing up somebody’s piece of art; you are scribbling on your masterpiece. Once you acknowledge the resentment you hold hurts you more than it hurts others, you change your life.

You can only forgive someone when you make the choice to be happy instead of right. If you see the person as having done wrong and you are right, you will forever be tied to painful emotions. The art of forgiveness is not about who is right and who is wrong – it is about making the choice of happiness over righteousness. Only then do you become free from a painful past. You will at last paint your life the way you want.

Forgiving a person does not “let them off the hook”. It doesn’t mean you accept or condone the person’s behavior, or trust the person. What forgiveness does mean is a clean future in the face of a dirty past. In part three of this course I said:

“If another person holds the bitter memories and resentment of your mistake against you, the person has not forgiven. It is almost humanly impossible, however, to forget another’s mistake. Forgiveness heals the past releasing ill will against the person. Not forgetting provides a memory of the pain that guides future actions. Forgiveness and forgetting are closely knit together, yet define entirely different things.

“An apology is successful when it is accepted and the mistake no longer is held against you. The person may not forget your mistake, but he or she forgives you and no longer resents you for the mistake or uses it to manipulate you. Resentment, frustration, anger, gossip, bitterness, ill will, and other outward manifestations of hatred are erased upon a successful apology. Someone with these emotions possibly signals the person has yet to forgive.”

Forgiveness is not easy, but by acknowledging the only person you hurt with resentment is yourself, you relinquish pain and relish the happiness you were born to experience – which may lead the person to forgive you for your mistakes.

If someone is yet to forgive you, make sure you have entirely forgiven them then communicate that you thought you were hurting them by not forgiving, but you only hurt yourself. What you are doing with this technique is educating the person in an indirect manner about the art of forgiveness so your passive advice is not rejected. It will increase the person’s awareness of forgiveness so they more likely accept your apology and forgive you. “To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love,” said Robert Muller, a well-known advocate of world peace. “In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.”

More Materials to Create the Art of Forgiveness

The information I have given so far is enough to help some people forgive others, apologize, and encourage others to forgive, but here are additional sources and tips to find the art of forgiveness:

• Check out the many powers of apologizing. Doing this will create massive amounts of pleasure to motivate yourself to apologize, forgive, and free yourself from resentment.
• “I know what you said Josh, but I can’t forgive my enemies. What do I do?” You only hurt yourself when you fail to forgive. You don’t have to forget the past, but you need to release resentment. Cry about it to purge resentment. You hurt enemies more by forgiving them than bottling up your resentment. Nothing makes your enemies more satisfied than seeing you beat yourself over an issue you inaccurately think hurts them. Oscar Wilde was quoted in saying, “Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.”
• We are full of mistakes. Acknowledging this helps you see someone’s mistake as them being a typical human. A mistake-filled life is natural so we all need forgiveness to heal our past.
• Are your expectations of the person too high? Expectations determine satisfaction. If your expectations in the person are too high, you set yourself for a hard fall. Unreasonable expectations lead to unreasonable circumstances where it can be difficult to forgive the person for not meeting your expectations.

As you apply parts of the course, the skills will become more natural to you. Where you once would hide beneath your pride, guilt, or resentment as you fail to apologize and forgive, you will now create emotional freedom. Even when an ugly duckling arrives in your life, you can now forgive and encourage others to forgive.

People you apologize to will feel loved by you from the open communication. You will experience happiness and inner peace, freeing yourself from guilt, anger, resentment, and other forms of bitterness. You will at last take advantage of the powers of apologizing. Put away your pride, bring out your apologies, and forgive people.

Links to all four parts of this course, “Freeing Yourself From Mistakes and Pain: A Four Part Course On Apologizing and Emotional Freedom”:

1. Power of Apologizing
2. Barriers and Mistakes in Apologizing
3. How to Correctly Apologize
4. Finding the Art of Forgiveness: How to Forgive and Be Forgiven

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. The Power of Apologizing
2. How to Correctly Apologize
3. Barriers and Mistakes in Apologizing
4. The Heart of Effective Communication: How to Love People
5. Getting Over a Relationship Break Up

The second part of this course reveals the common barriers, problems, and mistakes we face when we apologize and ask for forgiveness. Learning the correct actions and methods to apologize is not enough – it helps your understanding and success if you also know what not to do.

You are also going to discover something called a “non-apology apology”. That is no typo. I’m certain you have heard a non-apology apology given by a politician. You likely have used this poor habit to escape a situation where you wanted to avoid an apology.

Barriers to Apologizing

You know how important apologizing is after reading the first part of the course, but let’s assume you still cannot bring yourself to apologize. The benefits of apologizing have not built enough reason for you to pursue the pleasure and avoid the pain of an apology. Maybe you are experiencing excessive workloads and stress. Maybe you don’t have the courage to confront the person face-to-face. If this is the case, I encourage you to build your confidence and throw away your pride. You will be glad you did.

As explained in part one, we often avoid an apology because of fear. The primary fear I think people have when apologizing is the idea that apologizing puts down your protective shield, which leaves you vulnerable for an attack by the other person. You fear the ramifications of your actions. People with this fear think the problem is best left in the dark because an apology puts the problem under a light to amplify the issue.

A part of this fear may actually be real because the topic you should discuss could be bottled inside of you and your would-be conversational partner. An apology could open a bottle of soft drink. Depending on the severity each of you have been shaken, a lot of fizz could spurt out. Anger, confrontation, and frustration will shoot out when either of you are shaken up and previously unopened to the other person.

Be humble, calm, and lose a self-centered approach to control this fear. If the fear is minor, you simply tell the person your fear and why you have it before giving your apology. That itself can open up communication.

When you apologize, it helps to remember that being scared of confrontation with the person comes from wanting to protect yourself. You fear responsibility for your actions. However, don’t expect the person to treat you like an angel. After all, you screwed up otherwise an apology would be unnecessary.

Another likely barrier to you apologizing is a fear that it signals weakness. You think the person receives a superior power over you. “I’m better than you! I win! You apologized!” Yeah right. A failure to apologize communicates to yourself that you are weak weak because there is an imbalance between your courage and your ego.

When you admit a mistake and ask to be forgiven, your self-centeredness lowers, your courage rises, and balance exists with you and the other person. Weakness and vulnerability is a misnomer about apologizing. “It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity,” said Stephen Covey, author of the bestselling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. “A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.”

Your goal in apologizing is not to keep your pride alive or to let the other person “win”. Aim to develop a good relationship. There is no winners or losers. The two of you play on the same team and must work together towards a quality relationship.

The Most Common Mistake: A Non-Apology Apology

We are taught early in life to say “please” and “thank you” to please mum or dad. Most of us never understood the full intent behind gratitude. At the same time, we are taught to apologize by saying, “I’m sorry” because our parents made us. We miss the true reason for an apology.

From a young age we continue to shy away from true apologies by using a bad habit called a non-apology apology. A non-apology apology is a forced apology to the offended person, because it’s the right thing to do, without any realization or belief about one’s mistake. It’s an extension of the forced apology our parents made us give when we were young – except we say the non-apology apology to please the other person.

If you’re after some examples of non-apologies, look no further than politicians. These adorable people are filled with this poor apology. One example is Bill Clinton’s remarks regarding the Lewinsky scandal. President Clinton confessed his relationship with Lewinsky was “wrong”, but failed to experience guilt. It was said about his talk that Clinton aimed to protect what he had done. We see Clinton detached from his sorrow when he said, “It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine: first and most important, my family; also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people.”

Another non-apology I came across was in the NFL. Detroit Lion’s president Matt Millen used an inappropriate term for gays when he confronted a fellow NFL player. “He made an inappropriate remark,” said Millen, “and I reacted inappropriately. I said something I shouldn’t have, which was wrong, and I apologize for that. And I apologize to anybody that I offended with that remark.” That is filled with non-apology apologies.

Another example I found of many was Pierre Boivin, Montreal Canadiens’ President, when he apologized for fans booing the American national anthem. Boivin said, “We apologize to anyone who may have been offended by this incident.”

It is a growing trend to say sorry on the condition you hurt someone – instead of admitting your mistake regardless of someone’s pain that compels you to apologize. The non-apology apology requires someone to be hurt and implies offended people are partially to blame for their reaction. Some more examples:

• “I’m sorry for not mowing the lawn even though it does not require cutting.”
• “I apologize if I hurt anyone.”
• “Please take my apology if you were offended by what I said.”
• Jim Buzinski over at Out Sports is trying to discourage the non-apology apology. He has plenty of good examples of this mistake in his article, Apology Not Accepted.

To show you the delicacy of apologizing, see this apology: “I’m sorry I lied to you. I feel guilty that I’ve let you down.” All you do is insert an “if” into the first sentence (“I’m sorry if I lied to you”) to destroy a good apology with a non-apology apology.

We use non-apology apologies to take the heat off ourselves to keep the offended person quite. It puts the onus on those we upset by implying the victim is wrong. There is no remorse and sorrow like an unregretful child apologizing. A non-apology apology is said to please a person while protecting yourself. You shy away from guilt and responsibility with a non-apology apology.

An awareness of these common barriers and mistakes will have you ready to successfully apologize. Knowing what not to do will guide you with what to do.

You are now ready to improve your relationship by learning how to correctly apologize to heal the damage that set the two of you apart.

Links to all four parts of this course, “Freeing Yourself From Mistakes and Pain: A Four Part Course On Apologizing and Emotional Freedom”:

1. Power of Apologizing
2. Barriers and Mistakes in Apologizing
3. How to Correctly Apologize
4. Finding the Art of Forgiveness: How to Forgive and Be Forgiven

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. The Power of Apologizing
2. Top 15 Dumb Mistakes People Make in Relationships
3. How to Correctly Apologize
4. 16 Email Mistakes You Must Avoid: Email Etiquette
5. Finding the Art of Forgiveness: How to Forgive and Be Forgiven

To begin the course, what is your reaction to learning about apologizing and forgiveness? Take a few seconds to think about it.

Once you’ve answered that simple question, you’re probably unwilling to learn more if you’re like most people. This is the unfortunate reality we face with most new topics we learn. We assume a shallow understanding of a powerfully deep topic. A closed mind literally steals our ability to grasp new powerful information to change our lives.

Why do people avoid learning about apologizing when it has tremendous powers? I believe many people think like this for three reasons:

1. They think they know how to apologize. Just like the many people who have yet to start learning effective communication skills, so are these people with apologizing. They think they have the necessary skills, but in reality their thoughts blind themselves from opportunities to improve their lives and relationships. Don’t trick yourself into thinking you “know it all”. When you say you know what is right, you use the number one technique to destroy learning: ignorance. You close your mind because it’s too full to accommodate further information.
2. They think it isn’t relevant enough. These people think apologizing is not worth it and a waste of time to learn. Like point one, you need to be aware of, and willing to learn, what topics such as apologizing can really do for your life.
3. They are too lazy. These people cannot be bothered to learn. Hopefully, you don’t fit in this category. But if you do, there’s nothing I can do about it. It is your choice and your life. Don’t blame other people for the events in your life because of your decision to avoid responsibility for who you become.

These excuses to avoid emotional healing are sadly limiting because we always make mistakes. Mistake after mistake. It doesn’t stop. Your mistakes will never stop. I’m not only talking about physical accidents, but mistakes we make with our relationships. We say things that hurt others. We can be ignorant in loving our family. We can be emotionally blind to those in need.

Take a momentary leap of faith to expand your awareness and grasp the powers of apologizing and forgiveness to free yourself from mistakes and pain. Accept a level of awareness and openness to change. Having done this, you have two decisions to make in dealing with your mistakes.

Firstly, you need reduction. You will never eliminate mistakes, but you can reduce the number by learning more about yourself and developing your communication like you’re doing with my newsletter, articles, and this course. Characters in Soap Operas are the worst role models to learn from to improve your communication because the characters continue to screw up, fight, make up, and repeat the process (it is drama after all). Communicate more effectively to avoid relationship blunders that create emotional pain.

Secondly, you need to cope. Because of the first, you will always be making mistakes that hurt people. Learn to live with your mistakes as they will always exist. Coping can be ignorance or passive acceptance, but for our purpose it is learning to better manage ourselves with inevitable events.

Because the first decision of reduction is an ongoing process achieved through continual learning, this course focuses on the coping component of emotional healing. One of the best ways to do this to experience a more enjoyable life is through an apology. A successful apology is not just saying “sorry” – it is a radical movement from pain to empowerment.

What Happens When You Fail to Apologize

A large barrier faces each of us in emotional healing: the difficulty of an apology. We get ensnared in thoughts about ourselves by holding onto pride. We can be selfish and not willing to admit our most obvious mistakes. Pride eats away at us as we argue or, at the other end of the continuum, ignore the mistake to defend even an obvious wrongdoing. Pride ensnares us in its cage of lies as we defend our self-centered minds, ignoring guilt that would restore harmony.

It has happened to me. I once had too much pride and selfishness to apologize to a loved one I hurt. When I did want to apologize, I couldn’t bring myself to face the person. The result was a hurt relationship and less happiness for me because I ignored the guilt that could have lead me to apologizing, forgiveness, and emotional restoration.

In shifting the focus on apologizing away from you, what does avoiding an apology do to other people? They feel hurt that you are unwilling to communicate your mistake. They lose trust in you as you hide behind your mistake. They become angry towards you, wondering why you will not tell them the truth. They may begin to counter your lack of apologies by not apologizing themselves as the relationship goes downhill with the two of you get caught in a power struggle.

Communicate your mistakes. Show your guilt. Tell the person how bad you feel. A mistake you make is like a scratch on the skin – by not apologizing you deepen the wound and rub salt into it. Stop hurting the other person and yourself, and learn to apologize. There is real power in apologizing and emotional healing.

Powerful Benefits in Apologizing

If you feel I haven’t given you enough reasons to start apologizing already, here are more reasons and the amazing power of apologizing:

1. The healing process begins when you apologize. This is the most powerful benefit of apologizing. People hold grudges and resentment against those who fail to apologize and admit their mistakes. By apologizing, you put yourself on the same wavelength as those hurt by your mistakes. You see the wrongdoing they see in you. Their resentment diminishes as they become more capable of moving on and freeing themselves from the past.
2. While emotional healing in other people can be initiated from apologizing, it can also start self-healing as you feel free from your past burdens. The next time you apologize, notice how free it feels to admit your wrongdoing. It is liberating to set yourself free from guilt that would otherwise plague you for days, weeks, and sometimes years to come. Don’t let yourself become a person who’s past weighs them down until the day they die.
3. When you admit your mistakes and reveal your weaknesses, people are more willing to copy you. People feel safe when you admit your wrongdoings. Their courage builds to practice the power of apologizing because they see it is the better choice to follow. Apologizing produces guilt in people for the better. They may become aware of their mistake, which produces guilt and possibly leads them to an apology. Apologizing has a chain-reaction effect.
4. We are all extremely flawed. If we were cars, we’d breakdown every 50 miles. We always make mistakes regardless of our intentions to do good. Apologies are necessary to balance our lives.
5. If someone hurts you, it is justice to have them apologize to you. For some reason this is not the case when we hurt someone. The hurting person desires your sympathy as much as you desire their sympathy when they hurt you.
6. Apologizing gives back what you took. You restore the victim’s feeling of worthiness and self-esteem. They no longer feel burdened nor responsible for your mistake. This benefit of apologizing is especially true in children.
7. By having complete responsibility for your actions, you possess an enormous amount of self-control. You don’t become a victim of others. You stop blaming people for what you can control. You become your own person. You create your own destiny.
8. A sincere apology shows effort in a relationship. It shows you care for the person. That’s an entire different approach to avoiding mistakes in an attempt to “secretly get by”. By not apologizing you sweep dirt under a rug. An avoided problem is likely to reappear and bite you when you least expect it – at the worst possible time.
9. You build courage and become a confident person. When apologizing and asking for forgiveness, you rise above the destructive compulsion to avoid remorse. You no longer cover up your behavior, you have brought it into the light. This takes courage! Your new-found courage will roll into other areas of your life as you begin to address other difficult issues you have avoided in the past.

Who would have thought there is this much power in apologizing! In fact, there is a lot more to emotional healing than what has been discussed. There is true power in freeing yourself from the past with emotional healing. Be sure to read the rest of this free course to receive the many powers of apologizing.

Links to all four parts of this course, “Freeing Yourself From Mistakes and Pain: A Four Part Course On Apologizing and Emotional Freedom”:

1. Power of Apologizing
2. Barriers and Mistakes in Apologizing
3. How to Correctly Apologize
4. Finding the Art of Forgiveness: How to Forgive and Be Forgiven

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Barriers and Mistakes in Apologizing
2. Finding the Art of Forgiveness: How to Forgive and Be Forgiven
3. Review of Voice Power by Renee Grant-Williams
4. Review of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
5. Change Your Words to Change People: Persuasive Power Words

Few of us realize our habitual behavior. We remain blind to the patterns that take us to our desired destination or the future we want to avoid. Author Robert Fritz, developer of the Technologies for Creating, has developed a field of study called “Macrostructural Patterns” explained in his book that demystifies habitual behavior to help you create what you want in life.

The core behind what Fritz teaches is that human behavior, like physics, flows along the path of least resistance. Just as water flows through a river along its path of least resistance, so does human energy. Though the path of least resistance can carry you in unruly directions – as it so often does – it can empower you to effortlessly flow towards your goals.

Fritz says we fail to change because we fight our habits with willpower, positive-thinking, affirmations, and other similar self-help techniques. We also try to remove what we do not want instead of creating what we do want. We get stuck in problem solving instead of creation.

Many golden gems in the book will change how you approach problem solving for life in general to a new empowering direction. When you change the structure of your behavior by making primary and fundamental choices to behave in a way that is consistent with your vision – while acknowledging your present reality – you create lasting change.

The book is not about creativity, painting, and similar artistic works; it is about harnessing your innate human potential to create the life you want. Being human means you were born to create. From better managing emotions to eliminating destructive health patterns, The Path of Least Resistance provides you with simple methods to create your desired life.

Though Fritz’s book is simple and the concepts are few, when you read the book I advise you to let the italicized sentences sink into your mind as you pause to think deeply about what is written. There are a lot of “higher level concepts” shared that leave you to ponder their application in your life. These concepts are by no means New Age or based on pop psychology, as Fritz emphasizes in the book, but based on the “tradition of the arts and sciences”.

Once you make a fundamental choice aligned with your vision, while knowing your present reality, you will create what you want with less effort. Your new path of least resistance will lead you to your desired destination so you cannot but get the future you envision. People, processes, and circumstances align themselves once you decide to become the creative force in your life.

If you feel circumstances mold your life; if you have tried to change yourself, but reverted to your old way of behaving; if you have ever wanted to create a life you want The Path of Least Resistance is for you. You can grab your copy of the book now from Amazon by clicking here.

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Review of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
2. Review of Influence by Robert Cialdini
3. Why Problem Solving Doesn’t Solve the Problem and the Real Solution to Permanent Change
4. Review of The New Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
5. Review of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey