Want to know one of my number one persuasive tools for connecting with readers?

I use the word ‘you’ quite often.

Why? Because you place yourself at the center of the universe at all times. You perceive and interpret almost every situation based on how it makes you feel.

To your benefit at times and your downfall at others, the concept of you has a dramatic effect on your life — so much so that basically everything you do is a reflection of who you think you are.

If you think highly of yourself, you’ll be confident. If you’re insecure and focused on your flaws, you’ll reinforce those feelings by not going after what you want.

Look at yourself as someone who rises to the occasion no matter the challenge and you will. Look at yourself as someone who always buckles when a challenge arises and that’s exactly what will happen.

You want to take your life to the next level, but you can’t just conjure a new sense of self out of thin air.

You have past experiences that have shaped the way you see yourself for better or worse and each time you try to change your life you draw on past reference experiences to tell you whether or not you’re capable. If you don’t have enough ‘evidence’ of success and competence it’ll be difficult to change on a dime.

So what do you do?

Step 1 — Drill This Belief into Your Mind

When you want to reinvent yourself, you’ll essentially have to fake it a bit and will yourself into becoming this new person.

When you start to gain momentum by making tangible progress, you’ll start to believe in yourself for real, but instill this belief in your mind to stand a chance of making it to that inflection point.

What belief? The belief that the concept of you is totally imaginary, made up, fluid, and can change at any moment.

You can just wake up one day and decide you’re going to be more confident, assertive, and achieve your goals.

You may not think you can because your concept of self is so real, but you can.

Like I said, you’ll have to trick yourself at first and it might not work right away, but keep orienting your thoughts in this direction.

You don’t have to be the same person anymore. From age 18–25 I ruined my life with drugs, alcohol, crime, and laziness.

From 25–30, I discovered my passion and built a business I love. How? By deciding I no longer wanted that old version of me to exist.

As unsexy as it sounds, that decision means everything — the decision that your past doesn’t dictate your future.

And I get that it’s no easy decision to make. Again, you have all that evidence in your past about why you’ll fail, but you also have evidence for why you’ll succeed.

Few people are so horrible at life that they have zero moments of confidence and triumph.

That’s why people still have hope for the future even when their current circumstances are bad.

They’ve had those glimpses and waves of motivation, confidence, and momentum.

You’ve had these glimpses and waves. You just have to find a way to hold onto them.

Step 2 — Do Whatever it Takes to Get the New Concept of you to Stick

Adopting a new mindset is one thing, but adopting new habits and behaviors will help your subconscious mind accept the new you.

Your behaviors send a signal to your mind about which direction you’re moving in. You’ll act consistently with a certain direction once you maintain it long enough. Do this long enough, and you’ll erase old identity patterns.

I used to always be the person who started projects but never finished them. Well, after five years of successfully publishing my writing that identity no longer makes sense.

You can follow this pattern yourself and it starts with finding the teeniest tiniest thing to start making things stick.

You might have to try over and over again to get it to work. You see this every year with new years resolutions. People always talk about how most people fail with their new years resolutions, but they never talk about the fact that some people succeed.

And that’s the thing to remember. Yes, success is abnormal, but there are still many many successful people. You have to create the irrational belief that you’ll be one of them and take increasingly bolder steps to get there.

Increasingly bolder, though. Don’t start too bold. Just make the firm decision to change and figure out the next step after that — the smallest step you can think of.

You can even count reading these emails as a step if you’d like. Trust me, I’ve been on your side of the computer screen before — reading all this inspirational content just hoping it would seep into my brain deep enough to help me change.

Guess what? It did.

I hope the same happens for you.

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