Neural Associations

Tony Robbins – Day 3.

Growing up there must’ve been a lot of things in life that conditioned us into what we are today. Some of these things are positive but if you’re honest with yourself many of them are not. How we react to certain situations today is affected or even driven by these. This conditioning is called neural associations. It’s how we associate certain things with other things. As a cause we react a certain way according to what we associate that certain condition with. For example if you associate girls with sex then obviously everytime you meet a gorgeous girl you will instantly get horny.

Tony said that we can reprogram these neural associations if we’re willing to. I for example associate moving on in life (moving out of the house, etc) as something scary, something full of trouble and a lot of hassle. For those reasons I haven’t moved on in life yet when I should’ve moved on years ago. The result is my current state of depression, hating my life and where I live simply because I could’ve done something about it and I didn’t.

To put things short I simply failed.

Yesterday we talked about failing, to turn failure into motivation. I guess I have a few things in my neural system that I need to redefine so I can keep trying till I pull through. These are:

• Moving on » Hassle, not surviving, etc.
• Working » Feeling out of place, that I should be somewhere else doing something else
• Dial-up » Slow, no work done, high internet bill
• Alcohol » Temporary solution, bliss, forget my problems
• Sleep » Nightmares, uncomprehendable visions, complicating life

I need to work on re-associating those with more positive things. I don’t think it’ll come easy but if I’m ever to pick myself up and have some sense of liberation from this misery then I have no choice. I need to focus on the pain of not doing these things. My possible future outcome is that I’ll stay miserable, and I’ll live a mediocre live, which is my scariest nightmare. Sometimes pain treats pain, and I have to go through the coming pains to avoid the greater pain in the end.

How many chances do you give a baby to learn to walk before you give up? Endless. The baby has got to walk, are you kidding me?! That’s the reason everyone walks these days. So if you’re doing something and you feel like giving up, keep trying, failure after another. You’ll never know you’re 90% there until after you hit 100%, you’ll always feel as though you’re at 10% the whole time. Tony said the majority of big success on the planet failed 7 out of 10 times during their lifetime. That’s the statistic, that’s pure fact. If you can’t overcome failure (pain) then you’ll never succeed (gain that ultimate pleasure).

I hope you guys give this a thought and consider redefining your neural associations too. Have a great day!