Default Reactions Create Default Results

“Although you may never have even thought about it, your brain has already constructed an internal system for making decisions. This system acts like an invisible force, directing all of your thoughts, actions, and feelings, both good and bad, every moment that you live. It controls how you evaluate everything in your life, and it’s largely driven by your subconscious mind.

The scary thing is that most people never consciously set this system up. Instead, it’s been installed through the years by sources as diverse as parents, peers, teachers, television, advertisers, and the culture at large. This system is comprised of five components:

1) Your core beliefs and unconscious rules

2) Your life values

3) Your references

4) The habitual questions that you ask yourself

5) The emotional states you experience in each moment

The relationship of these five elements exerts a force that’s responsible for prompting you to or stopping you from taking action, causing you to anticipate or worry about the future, making you feel loved or rejected, and dictating your level of success and happiness.It determines why you do what you do and why you don’t do some things that you know you need to do.

By changing any one of these five elements—whether it’s a core belief or rule, a value, a reference, a question, or an emotional state—you can immediately produce a powerful and measurable change in your life. Most importantly, you’ll be fighting the cause instead of the effects.”

–Tony Robbins