Peak Performance Training: Step Three to Personal Power

Welcome to the third in our 5-part series on building your Personal Power and taking back control of your life.

By now you’ve understood that Personal Power is just a new word for an age-old concept, a concept that the ancient world’s best schools of spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts were well aware of. Personal Power is the measure of your ability to change your life and yourself at will. My guess is that you don’t know a lot of people who fit that description, but you’d sure like to become one of them!

This time, we’re continuing with your mindset. If you want Personal Power, you’ll definitely need to get serious about what’s going on within, about the thoughts you entertain and the attitudes you’ve allowed to rule your life.

Authentic Ancient Traditions – i.e., the ancient world’s top schools of spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts – realized we are all very deeply conditioned by the culture we grow up in and by the events that have taken place in our lives, especially when we were young.

They realized too that if you don’t deal with all this stuff and “take the garbage out” you’ll always be:

- A slave to the emotional traumas of your past
- Wasting energy by subconsciously trying to prop up your vision of the world and your pet opinions and attitudes
- Shackled by your fears, doubts and self-limiting beliefs
- Recreating the same negative situations in your life because you live in a puddle of negative emotions you don’t even see.

Step One: Arm Yourself with the Best Weapons

I highly recommend to all my clients that they learn and start using either the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Be Set Free Fast (BSFF). These are two different and equally effective energy psychology methods that can almost instantly eliminate any fear, doubt or self-limiting belief. These tools are easy to learn, quick to use on yourself and you must have one. You can use it to blunt any attack by even your most serious mindset demons.

Step Two: Find Out What’s Really Going On Inside

For this step, you’ll need to track your negative emotions for one week. Every time you find yourself dwelling on something negative, just jot it down on a piece of paper. Why should you bother?

Simple. Most people think of themselves as nice, fun-loving and positive. In reality, that’s just the way they want to appear to others. However, if they were to take stock of what really goes on between their ears, they’d find a veritable avalanche of negativity.

To accumulate Personal Power effectively, you need to learn a new way of relating to negative emotions. You need to see them as a wake-up call, a signal that when you sense their approach, you’re starting to lose Personal Power. The easiest way to reverse this downward spiral is to turn your attention immediately to something you’re thankful for. Gratitude is the strongest positive emotion and part of cultivating peak performance and Personal Power is realizing you’re surrounded by things to be grateful for.

In other words, you need to start taking responsibility for your own emotional life and decide to be happy, joyous and optimistic. No one else can do that for you.
This means refusing the subtle emotional payoff of negative emotions. There’s a payoff to anger, rage, even fear. That payoff is related to the victim mentality, the mentality that absolves you of all responsibility for the quality of your own life. Needless to say, there ain’t no Personal Power there!

The good news here is that once you begin cultivating your peak performance and Personal Power on an ongoing, consistent basis, you’ll find yourself becoming more and more impervious to other people’s negative emotional energies. And that brings us directly to Step Three…

Step Three: Stop Associating with Negative People

The negative attitudes of people around you can suck your Personal Power, especially at the beginning. So if you’re surrounded by whiners and complainers, it’s time to do something about it. Seek out people who are peak performers, who are strong, positive and definite in their approach to life. You’ll begin to notice significant shifts inside you that come from this.

Following these three steps consistently can literally remake your emotional world within a matter of weeks. And no amount of exercise, no nutritional program and no daily visualizations will magically give you peak performance and Personal Power unless you take back control of your emotional life. So resolve to begin today!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Get your FREE Special Report on the secrets of Personal Power and resilience here:
http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/specialreport/index.php

Peak Performance Training: Step Two to Personal Power

Welcome to the second in our 5-part series on Peak Performance Training and building your Personal Power to take back control of your life.

Last time, you learned that Personal Power is just a new word for an age-old concept, a concept that the ancient world’s best schools of spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts were well aware of. Personal Power is the measure of your ability to change your life and yourself at will. If you think about it, most people you know have never demonstrated this ability and my guess is that you’d like some help too.

This time, we’re continuing with your physical body, since your body is really the key to peak performance training and to control your mind you must work through your body. Last time, working through your body meant leaning proper diet and introducing periodic detoxification cleanses. This time, we take it to the next level.

1. Get that Wet Noodle of a Physique into Shape!

Why would you want to do this and what does getting in shape have to do with Personal Power? Just this:

You’ll feel better physically and have lots more energy
You’ll realize you can generate energy on demand
You’ll find yourself dealing with fewer negative thoughts
Your self-image will improve
You’ll start to dig your way out of the unseen spirals of disease creation that you don’t even recognize (see below)

How Should I Get in Shape?

You can use any exercise program or combination of programs that develops the following in equal proportions:

Strength (of muscles, tendons and ligaments)
Flexibility (of joints and soft tissue)
Endurance (cardio vascular)

Please note that developing Personal Power doesn’t require cultivating extremes of fitness. In fact, the extremes of the tri-athlete, the marathon runner or the body builder can actually cause long term damage and in themselves won’t help you on your quest for Personal Power.

2. Get Internal Exercise

What’s that? Well, internal exercises include such things as Tai Chi, Qi Gong and Yoga. These are systems designed to produce both health and fitness at the same time. And remember, you can get really fit without producing health. We want to build them in together in a balanced way.

The greatest advantage of internal exercise is that it does a much better job than our usual external exercise at overcoming the “7 Deadly Spirals of Disease” – these are downward spirals resulting from lack of proper maintenance that begin around age 30, accelerate after age 50 and produce serious medical challenges. Internal exercises will:

· Take all your joints through their total range of motion
· Cleanse your energy meridians
· Inject potent energy into your bodily tissues
· Cleanse and energize your internal organs, muscles, tendons, ligaments, bone marrow, skeletal structure, blood cells, central nervous system, fasciae, diaphragms and skin

Personally, I believe the top 5 Qi Gong systems are the fastest and easiest way to get these results.

The Personal Power Payoff

If you start working on your body with these internal and external methods, you’ll notice the payoff in terms of health, energy levels, self-confidence and sense of control over your life is one thousand percent.

There’s lots more that goes into peak performance training and accumulating true Personal Power. However, without a strong foundation in your physical body, the rest won’t help you much. So start now so that you can experience the overwhelming joy that comes from realizing you really can change your life!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger
Warrior Coaching International

Watch the video here!

For more information on mastering internal exercise, defeating disease and building true personal power, go to:
http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/RSHQG/index.php

Peak Performance Training: Step 1 to Personal Power

Feeling lately like your life is just out of control? If you’re getting hit with health challenges, faltering relationships, increased stress, and other things all at once, you’re probably asking yourself how this happened and what you can do about it.

If I were the standard self-appointed guru of modern times, I suppose I’d tell you to visualize what you want, take a particularly magical nutritional product or use some other simplistic solution. However, none of that will change your life unless you first recover what you’ve lost. And what you’ve lost is your Personal Power.

Personal Power is a relatively new term for an age-old concept. There is no true peak performance training without Personal Power. At the most basic level, Personal Power is the measure of your ability to change anything in your life – and especially yourself – at will. Ask yourself how many people you know can do that - you’ll be lucky to name even one. Yet it’s the birthright and the calling of every human being to exercise their free will to become the master of their own life.

After decades of studying the ancient world’s top approaches to spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts, I realized these traditions were able to consistently turn out people who were exactly that – masters of their own lives, graduates of the ultimate peak performance training of their time. And yet in my pastoral work and counseling and coaching it became quickly apparent that most people are exactly the opposite. They are so short of Personal Power that they have been reduced to “coping” with a life they don’t like but can’t change.

“Authentic Ancient Traditions (AATs)” – as I’ve called them in my book, The 5 Pillars of Life – were those ancient traditions capable of proving that they consistently got the transformational results they claimed. Among them are certain schools of Buddhism and Taoism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity (the direct continuation of the ancient Christian approach), some native American approaches and yet others worldwide.

They all know that Personal Power is the vital foundation for all spiritual development and for true happiness. They also know Personal Power is the fruit of “resilience” – becoming physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually stronger, more effective and more resilient than average. And knowing you can only develop resilience by deliberately facing tough challenges created for that purpose, these traditions put their newbies through some pretty tough stuff. To be real and produce results, peak performance training has to challenge your mental, physical and spiritual capacities.

So how can you start to develop Personal Power today and take back control of your life? Simple. You absolutely must proceed methodically, step by step, and the first step is your body.

The Body and Personal Power: Diet

If you want to develop your Personal Power and take back control of your life, you must get really serious about your body. There are some deeper reasons for this I’ll explain later, but for now here’s what you have to put into place:

1. First, you must stop eating all harmful foods at once. This includes all white flour, white rice, white and brown refined sugars, table salt, trans fats and preferably also meat that’s been subjected to antibiotics and growth hormones.

Once you start to hydrate yourself properly, eat what your body needs and not what it’s craving, you’ll find your energy levels go way up.

2. You need to cleanse your body from accumulated toxins. That means you’ll want to do a week long cleanse at least twice per year (fall and spring are often the best times) and once a week you’ll want to take a day where you go really easy on your digestive system. You see, modern research on mice and ancient research on monks came to the same conclusion: if you reduce the burden on your organism’s digestive system, you’ll quite likely live a lot longer.

3. The Mindset You Need. To make all this work, you need to create a burning desire to do it. And, strangely enough, that’s easier than you think! Here’s what to do:

Take time every day to visualize your body-mind organism as absolutely pure and functioning perfectly
Visualize yourself in perfect health
Visualize yourself with boundless energy

If you do this every day for a month, you’ll find your cravings for junk food will disappear on their own.

Is it easy to build up your Personal Power? No. Is it a magic pill that will fix everything you’ve screwed up over the years so you can continue in the same self-destructive behaviors with no negative consequences? Nope!

If you find it’s tough to take charge of your diet at first, just ask yourself, “How much do I want to live a powerful, deliberate and stress-free life?” “Am I willing to go back to the life I’ve known so far and spend the rest of my days this way?” Accumulating Personal Power and true mind-body transformation aren’t the result of pills, gimmicks or quick fixes. They take commitment and persistence. So if you’ve got what it takes, you’ll want to read this whole 5-part series on Personal Power and discover a whole new approach to what it means to be human.

And there’s a free special report for you on Personal Power, resilience and how to transform your life at:
http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/specialreport/index.php

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Watch the video here!

Self-Improvement Books? They Won’t Change Your Life, But This Will…

Chances are you’ve already read a ton of self-improvement books and attended lots of seminars and workshops. And did any of them transform your life? Unless you’re part of the 5% who eventually report experiencing significant results at some point in their lives, your answer will probably be a somewhat embarrassed “Ah…no… not yet.”

After three decades researching and practicing the personal development systems of the ancient world and about half that long doing coaching, counseling and pastoral work, I’ve come to realize there are some fundamental reasons why our physical and emotional lives are such a mess and why our attempts to “fix” them seldom work. So if self-improvement books aren’t doing it for you, you’re not alone. There are good reasons why you’ve failed to transform your life so far…

Obstacle One: Your Culture

As someone brought up in a Western (or westernized) culture, you’ve been taught a specific way to relate to your physical body, to your mind and to you own thoughts – you see your body and mind as separate and you identify your Self with your thoughts. And you’ve been thoroughly but subtly indoctrinated into interpreting the world around you according to the defunct paradigm of Newtonian physics – meaning you see the world around you as solid and real, and you give your physical senses a monopoly on providing the information you build your interpretations on.

This particularly dangerous combination gives rise to the unprecedented rates of neurosis you see around you (and perhaps within you) every day.

Obstacle Two: The Mentality of Specialization

Your culture has taught you to assume that every “problem” needs its own solution. If you look at your own life and start to list these problems - the things that aren’t working the way you want - you could easily come up with a list of twenty or thirty such “problems”. Of course, taking the standard “self-improvement” approach is great for the industry because it means you’ll be buying twenty or thirty new titles in a vain attempt to fix your life!

We’ve all imbibed this mentality of “specialization”. In other words, if you want to develop your willpower, fill your wallet or reduce your waistline, you assume the person most qualified to help you is someone who thinks about and writes about nothing else. Unfortunately, this blinds you to the fact that each of those problems is just a symptom and that until the root cause is dealt with, those problems or similar ones will simply recur. Know anyone who’s tried to lose weight several times?

Obstacle Three: You’ve Been Educated!

You’ve come through an educational system that also sees your mind and body as very separate realities. This system is based on the faulty premise of classical liberalism that if you feed people all the facts, they’ll make good choices in life. Alas, if only it were that simple!

In contrast, the best educational systems of the ancient world, from North America to the Mediterranean to the Orient, all focused on the acquisition of character development, values and integrity rather than just facts. And they all understood that the only way to master your mind is through your body, so their educational systems were very physical. And, unlike people who went through these ancient educational systems, you’ve come out mentally and emotionally fragmented and probably predisposed to making dozens of choices per day that make you weaker instead of stronger.

The Solution

The ancient world’s top traditions of spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts all knew something we’ve long since forgotten: until a person develops physical, mental and emotional resilience, he or she will live a fragmented life of “coping” and low personal effectiveness. This will inevitably translate into feelings of powerlessness and victimization, failed relationships, poor health, financial problems and non-stop stress, among other things.

Fortunately, these traditions – all of which still exist, by the way – had a solution. They taught an approach we would call “holistic” (and they would call “bloody obvious”), an approach that gives those who practice it a deliberate, powerful and stress-free life of continual inner and outer achievement.

All of this rests on their understanding of how your mind-body organism was designed to function and what it’s really capable of – which goes far beyond what you’ve been taught to believe. And, paradoxically, that’s an understanding that modern science, with its recent forays into the study of consciousness, sub-atomic physics and genetics is more and more likely to support.

Acquiring resilience is the basis of personal power, which in turn is the basis of transforming your life. Until you have resilience, you can read all the self-improvement books you want, go to workshops, go to church, go on a diet, go to the gym and more, and none of it will transform your life in any significant way.

You see, all those nifty self-help techniques you learn are like seeds – how well they do depends on the quality of the soil you plant them in. And in this case you are the soil. So if you want to become soil that produces phenomenal results, you’ll need to adopt an entirely different, holistic approach to your life and acquire resilience.

Next time, I’ll talk about what you can do to acquire this resilience for yourself, so that your many of your challenges in life will dissolve on their own.

If you want to get off to a running start, just pop over to this address and grab a copy of my Special Report on resilience for free:

http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/specialreport/index.php

- Dr. Symeon Rodger