Rudy's Question

ASKING QUESTIONS of yourself is the best way to direct your mind, as I've said elsewhere. The last time I watched the movie Rudy (for probably the 12th time), I grasped anew the power of questions. That was the first time I ever noticed Rudy's question in the movie. Twice in the movie, while he is trying to achieve a goal others view as impossible, Rudy asks of his mentor, "Have I done all I can?"

The thing that most impresses me with this true story is how absolutely focused on his goal Rudy stays, no matter what setbacks he runs into. He is committed. He is so committed it is inspiring. I said aloud to the two people watching with me, "What would happen if we were as committed to our goals as he is to his?"

Afterwards, I was thinking about it and I realized asking Rudy's question would do it. If we asked that question of ourselves several times a day, our behavior would look to others as if we were impressively and inspiringly committed to our goal.

And since that day, I've been asking Rudy's question, and it has changed me. The question makes me more committed and more motivated.

This question calls to mind more than just work, because there is always more work you can do. But have you set your goal? Have you written it down? Have you envisioned it clearly and repeatedly? Have you communicated your goal to people who can help you? Have you put out all the effort you can? Have you maintained a great attitude while working toward your goal? Are you getting enough sleep and eating right and exercising? Have you done all you can to accomplish your goal?

Let Rudy's question provoke you and motivate you every day. Use it to raise your mood. One of the most reliable ways to stay in a great mood is to live in a continuous state of purposefulness and accomplishment. Rudy's question can get you there.

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The Only Technique You Need to Live the Life You've Always Wanted

THAT'S A BIG title to live up to, but assuming you're willing to do the work, the technique will more than match the title. The method is simple: Clearly and persistently envision your goals. In detail.

That's it. Everything else flows from it — the work you do, the ideas for what to do, the motivation to do it, the insights into how to solve problems — all this springs forth naturally when you clearly envision your goals often.

It's a good idea to set goals and write them down. But deliberately visualizing your goals in detail adds so much power to goal-setting, it'll put you in another league.

"But," you might be thinking, "whenever I set a goal, I already have a picture of what I think it will be like." And I'm sure that's true. But have you closed your eyes and relaxed and imagined your goal in its completeness? Have you envisioned all the details you can come up with? And have you done that many times?

My guess is: Probably not. Visualizing goals is one of those things you often hear successful people mention, but you hear it and ignore it, for one reason or another. I ignored it for a long time because I wasn't very good at visualizing. But making mental pictures is a skill like any other, and I've gotten better with practice.

If you're ready to take your life to a whole new stratosphere, start envisioning your goals. Give it twenty minutes at a time. Sit down, close your eyes and relax as deeply as you can. It's best to sit up so you won't fall asleep. Sitting up rather than lying down also helps you control your visions better. On your back, your images tend to drift.

If you relax first, it will be easier to envision positive outcomes. When you're not relaxed, fears and worries are more likely to pop up in your visualizations (here's one way to relax).

Once you're relaxed, imagine the accomplishment of your goal. See what you would see. Start with how you would know. For example, I envision a million subscribers to Moodraiser.com. When I accomplish the goal, how will I know it happened? I would look at my Feedburner stats and see the number 1,000,000 (or more).

After you've reached your goal, what will you do? Who will you tell? What will you do next? Visualize all these things. See the look on your spouse's face. On your kid's face. How will you feel? See and feel and hear all this and more, in detail. Hear what they would say and how they would say it.

Let yourself become absorbed in the vision.

Doing this regularly has tremendous consequences. First of all, it will put you in a good mood more often. When you have a clear goal, when you know what you want and are working toward it, your mood will rise.

One of the most powerful consequence of envisioning your goals is the way it changes your interpretations of ordinary events. You will find yourself naturally — without trying — reframing the events of your life in a more constructive way. For example, after envisioning my goal of a million subscribers, the next day if a reader writes to me and says, "I'm unsubscribing because your articles are too long," how do I take that?

Normally I might feel bad, at least a little. But with a clear, tangible, envisioned goal, this same comment doesn't bring me down. Instead, it makes me think, "I should look into this because if this is a common opinion, I could get more subscribers by keeping my articles short."

See what happened? My clearly envisioned goal caused me to automatically reframe the criticism in a constructive way.

You'll find this happening a lot. Annoyances or upsetting events are transformed into the perfect lessons to help you get where you want to go.

The most noticeable consequence of regularly envisioning your goals is the way it changes how you think about your goal and how you can make it happen. Solutions and ideas pop into your mind spontaneously. Something about getting a clear mental picture of your goal stimulates your creative powers.

It feels like reverse engineering. When I imagine my goals, it gets me to think about how it happened. What led to the accomplishment? I'm looking back from the future, and I can see things I need to be doing now for that to happen. It's a very natural process, but produces surprising insights and great ideas. I have often thought, "Why didn't I think of that before?" Something about envisioning the goal changes the way you see the space between then and now.

You already set goals. You already work toward them. Now add one more thing: Envision your goals clearly and in detail. It will lead to more accomplishment and better moods. I can see it now. Can you?

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Heighten Love by Capitalizing

WHEN YOUR SPOUSE tells you some good news, how do you respond? Shelly Gable, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA who studies what makes marriages great, discovered that the way you react matters a lot. When a husband or wife tells some good news to their spouse, the spouse's reaction can raise the husband's or wife's mood, or lower it.

Gable divided the possible responses into four categories. For example, if your spouse told you s/he just got a promotion at work, you might respond in one of these four ways:

Enthusiastically: "That's great, Honey! You're on your way!"

Negatively or critically: "Are they going to make you work longer hours?"

Positive, but subdued: "That's nice."

Uninterested: "Did you see they finally opened the new Macy's on 8th Street?"

When you typically respond enthusiastically, as opposed to any of the other ways, studies show it makes a big difference in how satisfied your spouse is in your marriage, how committed s/he is, and how in love s/he is with you.

And, of course, if your spouse is more satisfied with your marriage, is more committed to you, and more in love with you, that'll really raise your mood, and that's why I'm talking to you about it! You can read more details about the studies here: Love And Positive Events.

The moral to this story is clear: If your typical response is not enthusiasm, a simple way to make your relationship better is to pay attention to those moments, and heighten your response to them.

Something else you can do: Fill Your Spouse's Love Tank.

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"When I Do Good, I Feel Good"

WE CELEBRATE ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S birthday today (February 12), and we should. Lincoln was one of the few great men who really was great. Before he became president, Lincoln spent twenty years as an unsuccessful Illinois lawyer — at least he was unsuccessful in financial terms. But when you measure the good he did, he was very rich indeed. Legends are often untrue, but Lincoln was the real thing. George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree, but Abraham Lincoln was honest. During his years as a lawyer, there were hundreds of documented examples of his honesty and decency.

For example, Lincoln didn’t like to charge people much who were as poor as he was. Once a man sent him twenty-five dollars, but Lincoln sent him back ten of it, saying he was being too generous.

He was known at times to convince his clients to settle their issue out of court, saving them a lot of money, and earning himself nothing.

An old woman in dire poverty, the widow of a Revolutionary soldier, was charged $200 for getting her $400 pension. Lincoln sued the pension agent and won the case for the old woman. He didn’t charge her for his services and, in fact, paid her hotel bill and gave her money to buy a ticket home!

He and his associate once prevented a con man from gaining possession of a tract of land owned by a mentally ill girl. The case took fifteen minutes. Lincoln’s associate came to divide up their fee, but Lincoln reprimanded him. His associate argued that the girl’s brother had agreed on the fee ahead of time, and he was completely satisfied.

“That may be,” said Lincoln, “but I am not satisfied. That money comes out of the pocket of a poor, demented girl; and I would rather starve than swindle her in this manner. You return half the money at least, or I’ll not take a cent of it as my share.”

He was a fool, perhaps, by certain standards. He didn’t have much, and it was his own fault. But he was a good human being by anyone’s standards and I’m glad we celebrate his birthday.

Honesty makes you feel good about yourself and creates trust in others. It improves your relationship with yourself and with others. It’s not much in fashion these days to talk about the benefits of honesty and decency, but the benefits are there and they are valuable and worth the trouble.

Lincoln didn’t talk much about religion, even with his best friends, and he didn’t belong to any church. But he once confided to a friend that his religious code was the same as an old man he knew in Indiana, who said, “When I do good, I feel good, and when I do bad, I feel bad, and that’s my religion.”

Honesty. It may be corny, but it’s the finest force for good in the world, and it always will be.

This is a chapter from the book Self-Help Stuff That Works.

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The Print Button On Moodraiser

WHEN YOU WANT to print an article to share with a friend or post at work, scroll to the end of the article. You'll see a green button that says "print friendly." It looks like this:


Click on the button and you can print a nice copy of the article.

Once you click on the "print friendly" button, you will find other options — to remove the picture from the printed copy, for example, or to make a PDF document out of the article.

Use this feature to spread the word. Let's help put this world in a better mood!

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Placebos Are Getting Stronger?

RECENTLY I came across this headline: Placebos Are Getting More Effective. What? The article says over the last couple decades, placebos have been having an increasingly powerful effect. How can that be? My first thought was, "Maybe people are more gullible than they used to be." But the answer is far more interesting than that.

Research into the "placebo effect" started right after World War II. An anesthetist, Henry Beecher, was tending to American troops in Italy. Morphine was running low, so Beecher's assistant injected a soldier with saline water but told the soldier it was morphine.

Beecher was surprised to see the shot helped. When the war was over, Beecher started looking into this phenomenon.

In a long but fascinating article in Wired Magazine, Steve Silberman explains why placebos are getting stronger. Here's his answer in a nutshell:

The double-blind test against a placebo has become the gold standard for good research on drugs. The FDA requires it, and the "placebo response" (what percentage of people respond to a sugar pill) was established and has been used for years.

But nowadays, more and more drugs are for mental health issues, which are more influenced by the placebo effect than straight-ahead physical issues. Your own depression, for example, is more influenced by your expectations than, say, your cholesterol level.

The result is: If you combine and average all the experiments, you clearly see a stronger placebo effect over the years. Researchers may have to re-study drugs like Prosac and Paxil — it seems possible they may not be much better than placebos, now that we know the placebo effect is more pronounced for the mental health problems those drugs were tested for.

Another interesting finding is that researchers have gotten different placebo effects at different locations. Prozac, for example, has a greater effect in studies in America than in Europe.

Also, "a pill's shape, size, branding, and price all influence its effects on the body," wrote Silberman. "Soothing blue capsules make more effective tranquilizers than angry red ones, except among Italian men, for whom the color blue is associated with their national soccer team — Forza Azzurri!"

We call it the placebo effect, but it isn't a single effect. The body can produce many different physical reactions to expectation. If subjects think the placebo kills pain, their expectation rallies their bodies to increase the production of endorphins. If the subjects think the drug will make them relax, their bodies react by lowering the stress hormone level in the blood.

"Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol," writes Silberman.

In other words, expectation can rally the body to greater effort than it would normally make. Remember, these people are taking the placebo to alleviate a symptom they have been suffering with. Their bodies did not produce this effect on its own before taking the placebo. Their expectation — their belief — stimulated the body to do something it had not been doing up until that time; something the body was clearly capable of doing all along.

When I read this, I thought about aboriginal "healing ceremonies" where a shaman or other well-respected healer chants and blows smoke and says prayers, and maybe the family gathers around to participate in the ceremony. With that kind of activity and intention, it seems likely (if the sick person believed in it) that the ceremony could have many positive physical effects that could, in fact, really help the person heal.

If a pill handed to a Westerner by a doctor could rally the body in many different ways, it seems likely a healing ceremony performed by a shaman in that contest could rally the body even more.

But most of us don't believe in that sort of thing, so what good does this do us? Well, we can change our beliefs, can't we? I'm not saying we should start believing in magic smoke, but we could change what we believe is possible. We could change a limiting belief we have about our potential or our future or our health. And if we did, couldn't that also change the way our bodies physically respond? Of course it could.

So how can you change a belief? Two of the best methods are the Antivirus for Your Mind and NLP belief change techniques. The antivirus for your mind is a somewhat blunt instrument, requiring no sophistication or skill, but it works very effectively. NLP belief change techniques are more subtle and precise, needing some degree of skill, but they work very effectively too.

If you're doing everything you can to reach a goal but you feel somehow stimied — whether that goal is physical or emotional, financial or personal or marital — it may be a limiting belief holding you back. Instead of continuing to beat your head against an invisible wall or persisting in something that hasn't worked in the past, try belief change. It's the next best thing to a magic pill.

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