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You want to change.
To ditch the beer gut, start your business, improve your dating life, read more books, or beat your addiction to pornographic cartoons.
But you don’t.
The good news?
The problem isn’t that you’re a lazy, unmotivated, sack of horse crap.
The problem is that your strategy sucks.
But today, we’re going to fix it.
Starting with:
As complicated, irrational, and batshit crazy as we seem, humans are simple creatures.
Creatures driven by only two forces:
Everything we do or don’t do is ultimately a result of these two desires––no exceptions.
But each of us associate pain and pleasure to different things.
Experiences throughout our life––specifically during our formative years––condition our brains to see certain activities are painful and others as pleasurable.
Want proof?
Just look at your own life.
Look at the habits you struggle to develop. The addictions you struggle to break. The action you struggle to take.
And ask yourself:
“Why is this a struggle?”
When you strip it down to the fundamental principles––if you’re honest with yourself––the answer is simple:
You associate pain with taking certain actions and pleasure with others.
Every action we take or don’t take is determined by the pain-pleasure associations we make on a subconscious level.
And therein lies the problem.
Your behaviors and habits are nothing more than a result of deeply embedded pain-pleasure associations.
Even though your behaviors are the cause of your results, your associations are the cause of your behaviors.
Meaning you can’t change the results in your life or the behaviors driving them without first changing the underlying associations.
It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much you try to achieve a goal––when your pain-pleasure associations are working against you, your behavior will be too.
But when you (re)condition yourself to associate massive pleasure with moving toward your goals and massive pain with staying the same?
Your life can change in an instant.
To drive this point home, just look at what some of the most elite men on the planet said about their craft:
You could be forgiven for assuming that men like Kobe or Arnold achieved elite levels of success because of discipline, grit, and willpower.
But the truth is much more profound.
Even though their results were a byproduct of extreme discipline, that extreme discipline was a result of associating total pleasure with pursuing and achieving their goals.
This is good news.
Because it makes success simple.
Instead of changing your behaviors, your first step is to change your associations.
Luckily, there’s a formula for making this happen.
My great grandfather smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for nearly 50 years.
He tried to quit hundreds of times throughout his life. And he’d succeed––for a while. But no matter how much grit or willpower he deployed, within a few weeks or months, something would bring him back for another drag.
Until, in his early 70’s, his wife––a fellow smoker––was diagnosed with lung cancer.
After that moment?
He threw his smokes on the ground, stamped them out, and never touched a cigarette again.
How is it that he was able to break a 50-year habit in an instant after decades of failure?
The answer is simple.
His associations changed in an instant.
Even though this is an extreme example, the core principles of his experience apply to anything you want to change in your life.
For years he tried to change the behavior with grit and willpower––but his pain-pleasure associations stayed the same.
But the moment his associations changed?
His behavior changed in an instant––without willpower, effort, or discipline.
Now, you don't need a cancer diagnosis or similar medical scare to create lasting change for yourself.
But you do need to change your associations.
The bad news?
You don’t get to choose the associations your brain developed.
The good news?
You can change them (in an instant) with three simple steps.
Before you can change an association, you must first identify it.
The problem for most of us?
We don’t even realize how fucked up our associations are.
We would never consciously admit that we associate pain with:
But on a subconscious level, we do.
And until we face off with the reality of our inner world, we can’t change our inner world.
So the first step is to get brutally honest with yourself and identify the associations cockblocking you from your goals.
Here’s a simple process to get you started:
Here’s an example from my own life to help make this concrete:
For years, as I was building ManEvolved, I avoided building a brand on social media.
I knew it was necessary for the business to grow––but I would always find some other way to spend my time to avoid taking this action.
When I started to delve into my associations around this, I started to understand why:
In other words, I learned to associate building a brand on social media with extreme pain.
Subconsciously I developed the beliefs that:
And on and on the list went.
Without an exercise like this one, I never would have admitted these things consciously.
But on a subconscious level, these beliefs stopped me from serving the world and building a business at a higher level.
And I can promise you that whatever you’re struggling with in your life, there are subconscious associations just like these that are holding you back and stopping you from reaching the levels of success and fulfillment you deserve.
And right now, it’s your job to find them.
Once you’ve identified the disempowering association, the next step is easy.
You need to consciously change the association and rewrite the script to tip the scales of pain and pleasure in your favor.
For this step, pull out a journal and write down ALL of the pain or pleasure you’ll experience when you finally change your behaviors and achieve new results.
Get clear on all of the PLEASURE you’ll experience when you make this change. And all of the PAIN you’ll experience if you stay the same.
Write out a vision of what your life will look like as a result of this new association:
Do NOT rush this step.
Spend at least 20-30 minutes diving deep and creating a crystal clear vision of the pain and pleasure you’ll experience by changing versus staying the same.
BONUS STEP:
If you want to take this even further, look for ways to create a lived-experience to solidify this new association.
For example:
As we’re about to cover, the more emotion you can create around your new associations, the faster you’ll be able to make the switch.
The pain-pleasure associations running your life today were developed through two simple forces:
Just consider the example of advertising.
If I say “Open happiness” what’s the first word that comes to your mind?
Coca-cola.
If I say, “Gives you wings,” it’s Redbull.
And if I start blaring a Sarah McLachlan song, chances are you’ll think about all of the abandoned and abused doggies of the world and shed a single tear in solidarity.
Now, why do these phrases bring up an instant association with specific brands and products?
Because advertisers are masters of human psychology.
They understand that when a person is exposed to anything with repetition and emotion, it creates subconscious associations that drive buying behavior.
And we can use these same two forces to develop new associations to help us achieve our goals.
By combining the power of repetition and emotion, we can slowly change the associations driving our behavior––and as a result, the behaviors themselves.
There are a myriad of tools we can use to do this. But the two most effective tools I’ve discover after studying human psychology for more than a decade are:
Because these tools allow you to experience a different version of yourself and your reality before you achieve it in the material world.
You’re able to have the emotional experience of wealth, fitness, love, adventure, or any other goal that you have now.
And the more you drill these experiences into your subconscious through repetition and emotion, the more you’ll condition your brain to take different actions and achieve different results.
It’s important to note that these practices require intense emotions.
It’s not enough to simply repeat some words or to think about a big house and a fast car.
Why do you think advertisers create campaigns centered around nostalgia, adrenaline, pity, or family connection? Because these themes all evoke intense emotions in their viewers.
And to change your associations, you need to engage all of your emotional faculties and feel the full force of the transformation you’re attempting to make.
But when you do this for long enough and with enough intensity, you will start to change.
To make this concrete, here’s my invitation to you:
If you do this, I can promise, your life will never be the same.
Because you’ll understand that everything you want in life is on the other side of the associations you have around pain and pleasure.
And more importantly, that you have the power to change your associations––and as a result, your life––at will.
The Founder of ManEvolved and the creator of The Unbreakable Experience––a system that's helped more than 10,000 men turn the pain of their breakup into the power they needed to rebuild their life.
I've been working in the men's personal development and relationship space for the better part of a decade and I've had the good fortune to study the principles of human psychology, relationship dynamics, and peak performance under some of the top authors, entrepreneurs, and thinkers in the world.
Today, I use these principles to help high performing men level up every area of their life––mind, body, money, and marriage.
I'm a guinea pig who lives what I teach and I've applied the same systems I share to beat addictions, generate millions of dollars in the market, transform my marriage, and achieve huge personal goals (like traveling the world, running marathons, and competing in BJJ).
