It is a common story. You try to change your habits. You try to eat less or work out more or get up earlier and go to sleep earlier, and still the same patterns continue to emerge. The same destructive mindset continues to haunt you and sidetrack you away from your goals. The same ugly voice in your mind gets your attention, and, before you know it, you are sabotaging your own success again. 

Don’t worry, it happens to everyone. We make every effort to make real lasting change but at the end of all our efforts, we are like an elastic rubber band just coming back to our original shape all over again. How do I stretch myself out of this shape once and for all? How can I make a fundamental change in my life? Is it even possible?

According to Dr. Bruce Lipton the first seven years of your life create a sort of programming that you can only alter by chronic repetition or hypnotism (or , in my opinion, psychedelics but I will get into that later). In other words, he is saying that by the time you are seven years old, your financial, emotional, physical and spiritual success and/or failure in life is already determined. You are already shaped into the elastic band that you will always be and it is not easy to change that

This on its own feels really limiting. If this is just the way it is, then this is the way it is. I guess there is really no way to change without going to some extremes, or is there? Well let’s look at the two options. 

First you could do some hypnotism. When you are in a hypnotic state, your subconscious mind is open to suggestions. Whether or not we realize it, the subconscious mind is the one that is guiding our decisions and, in those pivotal moments, shaping our destiny. So if we can simply convince the subconscious mind to believe, for example, that we are wealthy or that we are successful, creative, and free, then we will automatically push ourselves to that new destiny. Well, that seems super easy so why isn’t everyone lining up to get hypnotized. Well, it's probably because it is a bit more complicated than that. 

According to Kimberly Friedmutter, a celebrity Hypnotherapist, your subconscious mind knows more than you can ever dream. She even uses hypnotherapy to find lost items — I would be hypnotizing myself every day to find my phone in the morning. But seriously, with a bit of work and time, you can use hypnotherapy to change the fundamental story that has been holding you back. So let’s get out those old fashioned watches and get to it. The only drawback that I can see, is that once you are hypnotized, now you are able to be influenced by someone else’s emotions and issues, so you may just leave the hypnotists office with a whole host of other emotional and psychological problems that you didn’t enter with. In other words, I wouldn’t let just anyone talk to my subconscious mind. 

But you can always use the second method. And that does not require a hefty budget or a deep surrender to someone else's idea of what your perfect life should look like. This method may take a bit more time, but it will work and you will be 100% in control. This method is what I think of as learning the ABCs. 

When you are a kid and you learn the ABCs, you actually repeat it thousands of times. I know this because my 20 month old is already singing the ABCs (like 50 times a day). Luckily she is unbelievably cute because that level of repetition would be so annoying from anyone else. But right now, the ABCs to you are second nature. In fact you can imagine all the ABCs in perfect order almost immediately. That is the power of repetition. Do it everyday 50 times a day and eventually it becomes second nature. For a kid, it takes them about 3 or 4 years of this to learn the ABCs. But what are my ABCs?

The hardest part is actually figuring out what it is that you need to change. In Tibetan Buddhism, the word for demons is synonymous with the word for a thought form. Demons are actually just thoughts that you think so regularly that they become manifested. And these negative mind mantras (mantras are just a phrase that you repeat over and over) are the beginning of these demons. And, in order to harness the energy of these demons and get them to work for you, you need to alter the mantra. You cannot just stop the mantra altogether, you need to reverse it. 

In other words, if you always find yourself saying something like, “I don’t have time for that,” try changing that ever so slightly to, “I always have time to do the things I love to do.” Then you will start finding time for the things you love to do and not having time for the things you don’t love to do. Your life will in fact shape itself around your mantras. 

The key here is repetition and diligence. You have to learn how to catch yourself in your negative mantra and then shift it. Do this everyday for the next couple years and you will in fact make that fundamental shift. 

Our lives are really up to us. We just have to figure out how to reprogram ourselves to live the life that we really want. This is life hack 101.