There are five common regrets people express before they die. That’s the message of a new book written by a hospice nurse named Bonnie Ware. The first regret is perhaps the most potent.

Regret #1: “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me.” 

This is not surprising. It is the common advice given by seasoned, older folks to their grandchildren. It’s good for sure.

I’m just not so sure that simply living out loud by “Carpe Diem-ing” your way through life is the answer. Seizing every day can be a fancy excuse for letting go of your impulse controls.

Our American Dream Project research reveals a path to much deeper satisfaction than what you can get by just declaring your current emotion and following your bliss. If we look at people who are deeply satisfied with their lives, we get a much richer picture than just being jolted by the electricity of deathbed regrets.

It seems that deeply satisfied people spend a great deal of time reflecting on what being “true to oneself” really means. They come to a clear understanding of what choices make them feel stronger, happier, and give them a sense of inner dignity and self-respect.

Sometimes those choices require being quiet and patient, while in other circumstances our essential selves ask us to express our convictions, ask for what we want, and be impatient for things to change. Wisdom is the judgment to know when our personal integrity is served though silence and when our courageous voice is required.

Gaining that wisdom takes both self-examination and an openness to feedback. It requires us to reflect on what we do when we get what we deeply desire and what we do when we cause life to explode in our face.

Getting back to Regret #1, if we lived many decades into adulthood without investing our time and effort to gain self-wisdom, it seems to me we might be missing our essential reason for this entire experience we call human life.

These days, I am doing a lot of leadership coaching, as well as career counseling. It is always revealing because so much of our deep dysfunction comes from a lack of soul-awareness. We seem to be very aware of our superficial selves. I call this our “self-concept.”

A concept is an abstract idea. And we all have an idea about who we are and what we want. But research is clear that this self-generated idea of ourselves is seriously distorted. We see ourselves like we see the wavy pattern of a fun house mirror.

On the other hand, soul awareness is clarity about our “essential” selves. This is the you that is revealed when all our illusions of ourselves are shattered. People must often discover their essential selves through intense suffering. Concentration camp survivors are an extreme example. But personal suffering caused by illness, loss of a loved one, and betrayal all provide rich opportunity to see our own core. Most people begin to see themselves more clearly through meditation, reflection, and simply paying close attention to their authentic interests and reactions.

I’ve had a challenging personal journey that has given me ample opportunity to encounter my own inner “me-ness.” I can only report that it was the greatest liberation of my life. What I discovered is that when everything is lost—money, security, status, even love—we have infinite worth. Transcendent worth that is beyond all human expression.

My insight is that the way to be true to ourselves is not so much about quitting a dreary job and moving to Maui. It’s not so much about saying what we think in any emotional moment. It’s not about blowing up relationships that used to excite us but may have lost their zing.

Us being true is much more simple. It comes from knowing we have nothing to prove. There is nothing we can achieve that will validate our importance because our importance is beyond any achievement. There is no pleasure we can experience that will satisfy our longing for wholeness.

Instead, being true requires us to be attentive to the positive difference we can make moment to moment in our unique lives as we are living them. All of us have something unique to bring to the world we inhabit today. We have the capacity to make all work sacred and every human encounter enriching.

What I have learned is that we all have a difference to make right here. Right now. Our calling is to make our difference. As much as we can. As often as we can. When we do, we have no regrets. A friend of mine said our life’s purpose is to continuously discover and contribute our authentic best.

For me, that’s it. And that is very, very big.

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I love the movies. I see one nearly every week. Forty to fifty a year. I most often enjoy the wildly popular and well-advertised movies but also invest a little time searching for the just right independent film. The ones that have something to say worth saying.

I was sitting with Debbie and our youngest son waiting for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close when a preview started playing of a new Robert De Niro film in which he plays something of a homeless poet. I was stunned by the simplicity of a line he delivered to an artsy, confused, younger man. De Niro’s long-distance voice bellowed down a corridor saying “We are here to help each other…that’s the point.”

That was a nugget of pure spiritual protein. It flashed across my mind. There are really only two ways to live life. Help ourselves or help others. We can pretend we don’t have to make such a stark choice. If we choose to make ourselves the focus of our lives, we can appear to be nice, affable, and mesh well into the social machinery of life, but at our core fear is always the driver. When fear is our prime motive there are so many things to be afraid of. Fear of not having enough money, friends, recognition, good health, or happy children. We can be afraid it might rain on the weekend or whether a Republican or Democrat (you choose) might be elected. We live primarily for our own benefit if fear always lurks. Fear drains us. Our capacity for optimism, resilience, learning and loving are all diminished. Our daily opportunity to make our difference is flushed down the drain.

Of course the good news is we are free to choose love instead of fear as a prime motive. We can follow De Niro’s line that “We are here to help each other.” This doesn’t mean that we enable others’ weaknesses or that we become fools for any parasite that demands our help. Rather it’s a calling to create as much value as we can in every moment. The greatest way to create value is to develop our passionate talents, the ones that intrinsically motivate us to improve the quality of the lives of the people who make up the social universe of our lives. It also means that we view our work as a means to express our unique talent to create value for others.

My observation is that every extraordinary person we admire is driven by love rather than fear. It doesn’t mean they don’t have fears. It doesn’t mean they are without flaws. It doesn’t mean that everything they touch is a success. It just means that they generate perpetual passion for everyday life because their love faucet is flowing. The ways that we can help others is as infinite as our individual circumstance. We don’t need to mimic the life of anyone else or copy their calling. Rather it all starts with a conscious decision–am I a faucet? Or a drain?

I’ve been teaching how our prime motive ignites our careers this past week to live audiences. It’s at the core of “Turn Your Superpower into Your Career,” our soon-to-be-released online course. The audience was made of people ages 30-60, and one thing really struck me. Many people over 45 expressed how much they regret working in careers that are sucking all their energy. The message they want to pass along is that if you’re not pursuing your calling, you are being exploited. And that is soul-killing. It’s never too late to turn on your faucet.

If you have a story of following (or not following) your calling, please share it with us.

What does it take to live a better life? Action! Nothing will change until you do something. Sign up for ThoughtRocket’s daily challenges and see action ignite your life. Scientific research and practical inspiration are fused together in quick, powerful messages sent to your email three times a week. Click here to subscribe, or visit ThoughtRocket.com to learn more.

Yesterday I spent the morning with several hundred executives and managers talking about their personal health and happiness. Their interest and attention was intense. In the past ten years, global business has turned into a 24/7/365 war. Competition is ferocious and change roars at us in a never-ending torrent. The price we pay is being always overstimulated, first by external stress and second by internal churning over how to create some genuine harmony between our work, our relationships, and our spirits.

In many ways, it seems, we have become great at creating a hollow world with a shell of possessions, achievements and debt, and a core of empty anxiety. Strangely, we keep investing ourselves  by adding glitter to the shell, hoping it will compensate for the cold and drafty core. So many of us, it seems, are hypnotized by things that matter less, while the things that matter most are ignored.

I do not blame the victims of this crazy system. I feel nothing but compassion, and I do my best to offer the new tools of brain science, and the insight of the masses from new research on the causes of human happiness, to the thirsty runners daily sprinting in the race of business.

This brings me to yesterday’s insight.

One of the major skills we teach managers and leaders is how to more efficiently achieve tangible goals. Focus and feedback. These are major emphases of everyone’s workday in a high-performing workplace. That’s because getting the right things done is critical. “Mission-critical,” as they say.

But what strikes me is how ill-suited this skill is with our love relationships at home.

The people we love want us to listen and affirm them. They want us to be gentle, patient and encouraging. They want us to accept them for their intrinsic goodness, and constantly overlook their quirks and unpolished bits.

In many ways, the quality of our love rests on our ability to love, encourage, and root for the people we love in spite of their weaknesses. When we deeply love, we see through the stupid stuff to the genuine, tender goodness of our friends, spouses, partners and children.

At work, however, great management is all about feedback, direction, development and giving candid performance reviews. Too often, I see that the skills of hard-driving leaders are misemployed at home, and end up alienating loved ones.

But enriching personal relationships are not about results. They’re about the relationship.

It’s not about extrinsic performance; it’s about intrinsic connection.

When people at home are not doing what we want them to, instead of trying to manage them like an employee, we might consider investing in the quality of the relationship. Doing some very un-business-like things. Like wasting time together, listening without judgment, and genuinely affirming anything and everything you like or admire, down to the tiny personal details you refuse to take for granted.

Real life is not a business. Real life is love. It always has been. And, thankfully, always will be.

What does it take to live a better life? Action! Nothing will change until you do something. Sign up for ThoughtRocket’s daily challenges and see action ignite your life. Scientific research and practical inspiration are fused together in quick, powerful messages sent to your email three times a week. Click here to subscribe, or visit ThoughtRocket.com to learn more.

Smart Trust is a new book just released by two friends of mine, Greg Link and Stephen M.R. Covey. It makes a strong case that people who love one another produce more, enjoy more and love more because they trust each other. The same, they say, is true of business enterprise and governments. It turns out the happiest people live in high trust cultures. The problem of course is that much of the world and many, many people are not trustworthy. Self-interest trumps very, very often when the payoffs of betrayal overwhelm commitment and integrity. That’s why, the authors say, we need to be smart about whom we trust and what we invest our trust in.

I believe my friends’ case for trust. Imagine how great the world would be if we could trust each other. I know, miniature unicorns might also be fascinating pets if they existed. My experience is that real trust is extremely fragile. Even people with long track records of perfect behavior can let us down or even cut our hearts out. Our entire economy is built on financial Darwinism where “buyer beware” is the only sensible course of action. Remember how we all got scolded for buying houses with too-big mortgages because we trusted both the banks and system? And yet when it all blew up we were told we should have read the fine print and only a fool would trust a mortgage broker. Of course I wish we could de-regulate the economy, and when we quit selling things like e. coli-laced meat and tainted medicine, I’ll be the first in line.

But self-interest is a very hard thing to control with either self-control or a very slow and sloppy marketplace. So it turns out life is scary. Both personally and professionally. We get whacked by bad relationships and are often disappointed by  our bosses, co-workers, and all the rest. What are we to do if we can’t trust?

Well, it’s foolish to live in a state of perpetual cynicism. What I have found is that it’s most important to increase your self-trust. Our core beliefs must be that “no matter what happens, I can deal with it.” Life is terminal in the end. We all end up the same way. So in that sense we have nothing to lose by being bold in our thinking. We are wise not to require trust in others to thrive. Even if they don’t keep their commitments, you can be just fine. The quality of your inner life does not depend on others doing what they should. Whatever happens, you can recover, grow, and move on. One of the great purposes of life is learning how strong we can be. It’s true.

After going through a very, very rough period in my life, a friend said to me, “Wow, you have nothing left to fear. Every unthinkable, bad thing you never wanted to happen has happened and you’re still standing. What a gift!” His words struck me. The nature of human resilience is unlimited. Live with optimism. Act with courage. No matter how bad it gets, it can get better again if you get up and keep moving. You do have a unique Superpower that is your way of creating a better future. Trust Yourself.

Through great adversity we are almost ready to launch our “Turn Your Superpower into Your Career” course. This week we are asking 10 to 15 people to beta-test it online. If you want to follow our progress, join us on Facebook. And as always, if you have questions, email me at askwill@thoughtrocket.com

It’s 2012.  You are CEO of an important company.  What will you invest in?  No, this is not a made-up scenario.  It’s your life, and you are the Chief Executive Officer of it.  So what are you willing to invest your whole self in?

This past year I have invested much in learning about the future of work.  Why 81 percent of American workers say they want to change employers.  Why our economy seems to only create low-pay retail and restaurant jobs, or high-paying jobs for people with exotic technical training.  I’ve also interviewed many, many people who feel stuck in either a drab or dull place.  Here are some of their expressions:

“I am the sole contributor for income, and both of the things I have passion about, I fear would pay little.” –A.

“As a 48-year old, I find myself trapped in an immense identity crisis.   I do a lot of volunteering for the homeless.  I get immense pleasure from giving my time and energy to improve other people’s lives.  The trouble with this is that I was never able to earn a living that supported me. My foray back into the job market has proven dismal.  My ability to adventure further into entrepreneurship is blocked by my financial situation.”  –J.

”One of the best things about me has also been the worst thing about me, and that is I’m interested in so many things, and good at them, too. For years I’ve been working at jobs I hate as a walking, talking, ticking automaton.” –F.

“What percentage of businesses are successful?  Are we ready for constant failure?  Are we ok with not being able to afford decent health insurance?”  –K.

“I have had a deep desire to be a self made man, to escape the shackles of the 9-5, and hustle my way to success. But based on my actions alone, a self made hustler I am not.” –J.

These are all too common and all too real concerns, fears, and inner doubts that plague us.  All of this makes me sick at heart and mad as hell at the same time.

We have created a consumer economy that requires us to continually buy more of what we don’t need to keep all of us afloat.

We’ve created a higher education that’s mostly effective at smothering our children in an avalanche of debt.

And, worst of all, we are squandering our amazing opportunity to create a society of people who work to express their values, their talent, and their passions.

Has there ever been a time in history when humans have trivialized their opportunities and advantages as much as we have?

As Helen Keller said,

“I can’t do everything, but I can do something, and I will not allow the things I cannot do prevent me from doing the things I can.”

That’s my New Year’s Resolution. For the past six months the ThoughtRocket team has reviewed your questions and sought answers. We are now putting the final touches on a new career course called “Turn Your Superpower Into Your Career.”  Did you know you had a specific superpower?  That’s what our research has confirmed.  Our course is designed to help you find it, develop it, and turn it into a livelihood.  You may even be able to do that right where you work today.  It turns out how and why we work is as important to our well being as what we do.

As the time gets close to launch the Superpower course, the pressure to make it as great as it can be grows. Right now, we are going over the smallest details. Even down to the music and sound effects–we’re testing everything from punk rock tracks to angel choirs! What will get people’s attention? What will communicate the message? What will motivate us to action?

It’s important to answer these questions. I’m putting everything I’ve learned into this effort. And I’m working with the most capable group of extreme talents that I’ve ever known. A team that is a live, organic example of how to survive and thrive in today’s economic culture.

Please accept my invitation to follow the ThoughtRocket Story on Facebook to learn about our ups and downs. How we handle resistance (including our own stupidity), and how we achieve our goals. Share your story with us and the rest of the ThoughtRocket community.

In the journey to the career of our dreams, none of us are alone.

What does it take to live a better life? Action! Nothing will change until you do something. Sign up for ThoughtRocket’s daily challenges and see action ignite your life. Scientific research and practical inspiration are fused together in quick, powerful messages sent to your email three times a week. Click here to subscribe, or visit ThoughtRocket.com to learn more.

Thank you for all your kind birthday wishes. It’s encouraging to to know that so many of us “think different” when the ever-present media complex seems to want us to think the same.

And yes, I had some zippy birthday waves. The surf on the North Shore is always spicy, so it creates tasty waves even when they are “fun size.”

I am writing this on our way to San Francisco to spend tomorrow teaching some health care leaders how to maintain their own health in our high-stress world. Here are some highlights of what I will say:

Nothing grows or improves without making investments. Living day to day by coping or teeth-gritting self discipline will eventually exhaust you physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. So here are some science-based ways to recharge, reset, and grow in 2012.

• Physically – Eat to keep your blood sugar level throughout the day and night. Eat so you are never over-full, or ever very hungry, because that’s when we eat stupid. When your energy level is constant, you will have better judgement and a better personality. Walk  briskly, take the stairs, just move. Get up every hour and stretch…hell, dance!…do something that gives your body a reason rejoice and feel alive!
• Emotionally – Tell someone you love one thing you are grateful for each day. It will make your brain look for the positive which will cause you to notice hidden opportunities. This is what research says makes people luckier.
• Mentally – Opening our minds requires examining facts and evidence which are contrary to our current opinions. This makes us nervous, but also much wiser. When we open our minds, we can play with curiosity, which makes life so much more exciting rather than frightening. Who knows what we may learn?
• Spiritually – Do what you came to do. When we stop and reflect, most all of  us feel a deeper calling to make our difference. This personal calling resides at the intersection of our passionate interests, our deepest values, and our motivated talents (the talents we most enjoy developing and expressing). When our work is the consistent expression of our calling, it ceases to exhaust us.

That’s the simple message. Live healthy, become happy, think freely, and do what you came to do.

The longer I live, the more I need to do those things.

So what about you? Do you have any coaching for the rest of us? Leave us a comment with what you have learned on life’s journey.

And if you have a question about finding your best career, please write me at askwill@thoughtrocket.com. I am recording some final ” to dos” early next week, and I want to make sure I have tailored the course to whatever you most need. Thanks!

What does it take to live a better life? Action! Nothing will change until you do something. Sign up for ThoughtRocket’s daily challenges and see action ignite your life. Scientific research and practical inspiration are fused together in quick, powerful messages sent to your email three times a week. Click here to subscribe, or visit ThoughtRocket.com to learn more.

My 13-year-old granddaughter recently visited, and (to my shock) had never seen the movie What About Bob? That’s the one where a super neurotic psychiatrist (Richard Dreyfus) tells an ultra neurotic patient (Bill Murray) that he could change his life by taking “baby steps.”

That advice was so clear and so potent that it’s become part of pop culture.

As we sat together watching the movie I was jolted by a second piece of profound advice.  Crazy, frightened-of-his-own-shadow Bill was given a prescription to “take a vacation from his problems.”

Well…it turns out that’s pretty great advice if we want to increase our feelings of optimism, contentment, and happiness.  To take a vacation from our problems means we cease to dwell on what we don’t have and what’s wrong, and focus on what we do have and what’s working in our lives.

This is especially important with people.

Sustaining relationships is hard.  That I know for a fact.  Some interesting research reveals that the happiest people in relationships are those who have an unrealistic view of their loved one.  People who are “insanely” positive about their spouse/partner are much happier and high-functioning than those who more coldly and accurately see each other’s downsides.

I am not talking about relationship-ending faults like abuse, addiction, or infidelity.  I am talking about the everyday quirks and uncorrected faults we all have, that we don’t believe matter.  After all, we are normal and everyone else is weird and obnoxious, right?

Well, try an experiment.  What if we all took a vacation from our inner and outer criticism of those whom we love?  Just for the few weeks between now and New Year’s, what if we accept in each other all our raw, imperfect messiness?

What if we offered one positive, authentic compliment once a day with a genuine smile?  That’s a gift we all would enjoy receiving, and it’s also a gift that generates positive brain chemistry in the giver.  That’s the great thing about genuine, loving affirmation.  It makes both the receiver and giver happier.

We have about 21 days until New Year’s.  21 vacation days from criticism.  21 days of gift giving.  ’Tis the season.

What does it take to live a better life? Action! Nothing will change until you do something. Sign up for ThoughtRocket’s daily challenges and see action ignite your life. Scientific research and practical inspiration are fused together in quick, powerful messages sent to your email three times a week. Click here to subscribe, or visit ThoughtRocket.com to learn more.

We are getting to the time of year when we start to reconsider our lives.

• Are we heading in the right direction?
• Will 2012 be better than 2011?
• Do I need to make some changes to reset my health, my work, and my relationships?
• Am I living life as big and as meaningful as I genuinely want to?
• What would your new and improved life look like?

Today, we are excited by innovation.  We can’t wait for new gizmos to come out that make our lives easier or better.  But the biggest innovation that will impact our lives is not a smart phone that talks to you.

It is changing the inner conversation you are having with yourself.

We all have this conversation constantly.  This conversation is the voice of our self-concept telling us why we can’t do what we most deeply desire.  It’s giving us powerful excuses about why we cannot change.  This voice has engrained assumptions about us and our circumstances that make change seem impossible.

This voice uses something called double negative logic, which tells us any given change will create too much risk and that it won’t work anyway.  It’s the kind of engrained logic that traps us.  As long as we are trapped by this negative life logic, our vast resources for personal positive innovation are shut off.

What our American Dream Project research confirms is that happy, successful people who are invested in their most satisfying careers have developed an entirely different logic pattern that produces creative self-realization.  “Creative” means developing a different part of your brain to address problems and roadblocks.  And by “self-realization,” I mean making your best, authentic self real.

New brain scans have confirmed our findings that successful people use a different inner language that frees them from their old fears and excuses.  And what’s more amazing is that this whole pattern of personal innovation to create new ways of pursuing your dream in spite of current obstacles happens by forming a simple mind habit.

The habit is to use your imagination to envision your best possible future.  Make it vivid.  But vision alone will not create what you desire.  If it did, the positive reinforcement of simply wishing things into reality would be so strong, every dream would come true.  But our dreams don’t always come true.  The biggest reason for that is we don’t act.  We don’t take the first bold step.  The security of the status quo is so strong, we lock ourselves in a tiny cage of our present life.  The strength we need to bend the bars back to step out of the cage is emotion.  It’s emotion that drives action.

To ignite emotion, imagine your future if you do nothing different. 

This is our destiny if we do nothing new.  Is your default future okay with you?  Does it represent your values and ideals?  Does it bring you joy?  If not, imagine your feelings of disappointment of getting what you don’t want instead of what you do.  This emotional tension creates the energy to act.  Once you are clear on what you don’t want, ask yourself, “How?”  How can I change what I need to change?  Let your drive for creative self-realization create an action plan.  And then…act.  Take the first step.  Just start.

Often the new solutions or personal innovations come to us as flashes of insight when we are driving, gardening, playing, or when we wake up in the morning.  This insight comes from our non-conscious brainpower that creates new patterns linking our experiences, knowledge, and outside sources of stimulation into ideas we’ve never thought of before.

Maybe reframing your challenges using “how” seems too simple to work.  But what if it really does?  You see, “how” stimulates your creative brain capacity to work constantly, to come up with new options to try.  And the fastest road to success comes from getting into action.  Doing, improving, doing, improving, doing, improving.  Most plans fail because they are never acted upon.

Big change does not have to require big risk. 

But we don’t need to be Einstein to know that doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result, assures failure.  So instead give “How?” a try.  What do you really, really want to change this year?  Remember, pose the change you want as a “how” question.  How might I transition out of my current job without risk?  How might I re-ignite romance with the person I’ve been married to for 20 years?  How might I really lose 20 pounds and still enjoy eating? Generate a list of possible actions.  Next week, I’ll tell you how to formulate a research based change plan that is proven to work.

I almost finished with my career course titled, “Turn Your Superpower Into Your Career.”  Did you know you have superpowers?  Well, you do.  And you need to turn up the volume on yours to create your best possible future because that’s what happy, fulfilled people do.  I still want your questions.  I fully realize as I write these blogs that you may be saying, “Whatever.” So challenge me with your questions, your skeptical doubts, anything that will help me create what you need, just send your questions to askwill@thoughtrocket.com.

Talk soon.

What does it take to live a better life? Action! Nothing will change until you do something. Sign up for ThoughtRocket’s daily challenges and see action ignite your life. Scientific research and practical inspiration are fused together in quick, powerful messages sent to your email three times a week. Click here to subscribe, or visit ThoughtRocket.com to learn more.

I am an aging bull.  My knees hurt when I exercise.  My right one is arthritic.  Often, when I come in from surfing, my shoulders ache with sore fatigue.  This never used to happen.  Getting old gets old.

Two years ago, we had a winter of king-size surf.  The Gulf of Alaska was churning with storms that threw a steady stream of 10-foot-plus surf onto San Diego’s coast.  They called it the biggest surf in twenty years.  At least ten.

When waves get over ten feet high, the water that gets sucked up into the rising wave can force your board to stall in the breaking lip. This can viciously catapult you down the face of the breaking wave.  It’s called “going over the falls.” It happened to me on one of the first swells of the winter.  My wipeout was so violent that as I got rag-dolled in the churning chaos, I felt my spine momentarily separate from the rest of my pelvis.

I experienced an instant of terror.  It felt like paralysis.

Fortunately my body snapped back together, and I kicked myself to the surface. I was both shaken and stirred. And worse, psychologically traumatized. I hadn’t ridden big waves in at least a decade, and that wipeout had wiped out my confidence. It confirmed that the aging bull was getting close to the final meat market.

For the next several weeks, when I went surfing I kept a keen eye on the horizon for any big waves. I sat on the outside of the pack of younger surfers who were ripping the big waves with big grins, thrilled but unafraid. I, on the other hand, would freak out at the first sign of a big wave. I wasn’t focused on riding them, only surviving by paddling beyond their reach.

It made me feel bad. An old, scared loser.

Finally I talked to Dr. Jim Loehr, a renowned sports psychologist who founded the Human Performance Institute. When I told him my sad story of fear and trembling, he chuckled and mocked my wimpiness. Then he said something profound.

Whenever you feel over your head, just ask yourself, “How?”

How might you do what you deeply desire to do?

It turns out, when we engage our creative brain in the question of how, it switches off our fear response and focuses our massive problem-solving capability on coming up with new strategies to accomplish what we want.

Another psychologist friend, Dr. Bob Maurer from UCLA, works with patients trying to make big changes by having them break down big change into a series of ridiculously tiny changes that are easy to accomplish. He gets his patients to habitually answer how questions like “How can I exercise and enjoy it today?”

It turns out most of us amplify our anxieties by posing inner questions as unsolvable dilemmas.

We might think, “Either I can excel at work or at home, but it’s impossible to do both.”

Or, “Either I can continue doing this job I hate and pay my bills or I can chase my dreams and go bankrupt.”

This is called “double negative logic.” It traps us in false choices that make us stuck in our own unhappiness.  And we can stay stuck for years, even decades.

The how question ignites something called “creative self-realization.”  It gently engages all our experience, knowledge, and skill to come up with new, unconsidered strategies to resolve the previously unsolvable.

As soon as we ask, “How can I excel both at work and at home?”, new ideas are triggered.

“How can I pursue my dream and be financially responsible?” sets off a cascade of brain synapses that circumvent our stress centers, and help us ignite opportunistic thinking.

If we persist on asking ourselves “How?” whenever we feel stuck, we start to build creative mental muscles that will lift us above our current problems.

You can do it right now.  Think of any unpleasant dilemma that has ground you down into accepting what should be unacceptable.  Reframe the problem into a “How can I both _______ and __________?” question, and see what you come up with over the next 24 hours.

What’s great about how questions is that your powerhouse subconscious will work on the issue while you’re sleeping, watching television, or working in the yard.  Your creativity program will always be running in the background, and new insights will begin to pop into your consciousness. Test them. Insights are not infallible, but they can lead you out of confusion to new paths of progress.

And yes, this aging bull had a happy ending to his surf challenges.

After my conversation with Jim, I went surfing on a bright and beautiful winter day. After about an hour, I saw a big set of waves marching toward me. Immediately, I felt super stressed. My breathing got fast and shallow as I started ferociously paddling to escape them.

Then the how question popped into my mind.  “How can I ride this one?” I asked myself.

Instinctively, I shifted my paddling to a 45-degree angle to meet the wave as it peaked. I swung my blue board around and stroked down the face. As it pitched, I sprang into a crouch and leaned hard on my right rail, and then looked down the line at a beautiful green highway.

Pumping my legs to gain speed, it felt like flying.

The wave exhausted itself on the sand, and I kicked out and headed in, totally stoked. My clear thought was, “Let’s not press my luck.”

An old surfer with long stringy hair, who was standing on a rock, watched me come in.

“Dude,” he said, “You’re a human smile.”

Indeed I was.  It was a moment of pure vitality.  It only happened because I engaged my brain in how. For me, it’s become the most powerful word in the English language.

How is the question our ThoughtRocket research team is continually asking. How can we help more people live the life of their dreams?  If you feel stuck, or are skeptical that simply reframing your challenges as a how question will create a breakthrough, talk to me by either commenting on this blog directly, or send me a question at  askwill@thoughtrocket.com.  That way we can create systematic processes to help you become a “human smile.”

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