Beyond Good Enough - Introduction
You’ve been misled and mis-directed.
• The ‘gurus’ tell us to follow our dreams and desires.
Easy to say, but most people are not at all clear about what their dreams and desires are, and especially don’t know what they need to believe in order to be capable of fulfilling them.
• Thinking about your desires doesn’t get you any closer to fulfilling them.
• It’s not the external world that stops you, it’s your inner beliefs. Change your inner beliefs and you change yourself AND the world around you changes.
Take Rosaria and Nigel: two people whose beliefs kept them from the lives they wanted to lead. In slightly different ways, each believed that he/she was not good enough. Because of this one core belief, they believed that their dreams were out of reach; they focused on what was missing and what was wrong; they didn’t trust themselves to make choices and follow through; they blamed the world around them for what they didn’t have; they put the needs of others before their own needs. To a careful observer, it looked like they were choosing to suffer rather than to be happy.
Rosaria is a 32-year-old stay-at-home mom raising her two young children. Rosaria loves her family and adores being a mom. She was a talented performer as a young girl. When she fell in love and married her husband, her belief about being not good enough led her to a belief that her husband and her children came first 100% of the time. She quashed her desire to sing on stage. Fast forward 15 years and Rosaria was feeling overwhelmed with her domestic duties, and very aware of the joy of performing that she left behind. She consistently ignored her own inner voice which pointed out opportunities for her. She just as consistently watched reality TV shows like The Voice and America’s Got Talent to remind her of what was missing in her life. If pressed, she admitted that it was probably too late for her to be good enough to get up on stage and own her power.
Nigel is a 45-year-old recently divorced lawyer who was questioning his life choices. He couldn’t help regretting that he chose his career because of pressure from his parents. He married a woman who “looked good on paper” even though their relationship lacked passion. As a young boy, Nigel was spirited and adventurous. He was drawn to people and activities who lived life fully. Afraid to follow his heart and what moved his soul, Nigel found himself playing it safe and, as a result, found himself miserable, stuck, and unsatisfied with his life. He got down on himself for, as Nigel puts it, “living someone else’s life.” Over and over, Nigel was presented with opportunities to satisfy his deep inner needs but always held himself back for a whole range of excuses. They all boiled down to believing that he was not good enough to make the changes he knew he wanted to make.
Stop denying your desires! Stop choosing to suffer!
That’s easy to say, and most advice takes the form “just do it.” Unfortunately, that leaves out the part about how to make that happen, about which of your beliefs need to change before you can “just do it.” Some advice tells you to find your limiting beliefs and overcome them. Again, that’s easier to say than do. How do you discover your limiting beliefs, how do you change them, what do you change them to, and is that even possible? When you ignore what brings you joy and happiness, and when you allow yourself to continue to feel unhappy, miserable, and even depressed, you deny yourself life’s true pleasures. And you deny yourself a life of fulfilling your desires. What’s more, when you shame or blame yourself for decisions you made in the past, you give away your power and end up feeling unworthy of having a great life.
It doesn’t have to be that way …
It’s not that you’ve been lied to, it’s that what you’ve learned about how to change things has probably left out a few critical steps:
• What if I told you there is a simple recipe for discovering, embracing, and living the life you want? Would you do the work to learn and apply it?
• What if you thought about your desires – the deep desires, the ones you’re afraid to go for – and this book could guide you to know what inner beliefs you need to be the person who can make those deep desires happen?
• What if there were a way to allow you to take small, achievable steps towards those enabling beliefs and begin to feel more and more alive each step of the way?
• And what if there were a way to take that sense of aliveness and ramp up the sense of pleasure, connection and meaning so you couldn’t wait to jump out of bed each day?
That’s what happens when you implement the Beyond Good Enough System.
Beyond Good Enough will guide you from feeling overwhelmed, stuck, unhappy, and unworthy to feeling alive, happy, and worthy; to know that you own the life of your dreams.
Can you imagine living life on your terms?
A life filled with meaning and happiness? A life that allows you to move towards your personal and career goals and feel fantastic about yourself while doing it. A life where you feel safe and loved, and that is filled with deeply satisfying relationships. A life that allows you to flow creatively while living according to your beliefs, morals, and values. A life where you contribute to your community. A life where you actualize your full potential. A life where you organically evolve into the real you – the authentic you that’s encoded into your DNA, the original you that has long been buried underneath self-doubt and feelings of not being good enough.
Does that sound amazing? It is! You may even be thinking, ‘this is too good to be true.’ If that’s the case, I offer you this challenge: suspend your judgement long enough to discover what the recipe is and try it out for yourself.
Beyond Good Enough will walk you through the steps to become the person who can create that kind of life. All I ask of you is to dig deep and do the work. This book is filled with exercises for you to complete. They take just a few minutes each day to practice, but wow, are they impactful!
Now for the good stuff - the recipe:
Clarify your desires and the beliefs you need to hold; find and speak your truth; amplify your positive sensations. This adds up to an explosive and powerful method of achieving what you truly want in life!
Desire and Belief
A belief is an acceptance, a feeling that a statement is true. This entire book is based on the premise that most of what you need to fulfill your desires lies in your beliefs. Who you are, the persona that you manifest, is determined by the beliefs you hold. What you are capable of achieving is determined by the beliefs you hold. The Inner Journey that this book works with is the path to discovering what you want and shifting your beliefs so that you become the person who is capable of fulfilling your desires.
Remember the saying – “Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today; teach a man to fish and you have fed him and his family for all time.” BEYOND good enough teaches you to “fish” by guiding you through shifting your beliefs so you are capable of tackling your desires on your own.
Think of an area in your life where you want changes. This first phase is really “What do you want? What do you have to believe to be the person who is capable of achieving what you want?”
During this phase, you will embark on a discovery process to create an interrelated web of desires. Your list of desires will be clearly articulated. You’ll also create a related list of the beliefs you need to hold to be the person who is capable of achieving the desires you’ve listed. You’ll be able to describe, for each desire and belief, how you’ll know that each one has been fulfilled or fully accepted, and you’ll have a clear image of what your life will be like when you’ve locked in those beliefs and fulfilled those desires.
Speak Your Truth
Speaking a deep truth is a powerful action. When we speak a truth that we’ve been keeping from ourselves, the whole body responds. If it’s an important truth, the life energy generated is moving and delightful. One phrase for the kind of things we speak in the Beyond Good Enough System is “speaking your truth.” Another phrase is “affirmation.” But the System makes use of a radically new and different way of thinking about what people usually call affirmations. Do you remember the delightful scene from When Harry Met Sally, where Meg Ryan mimics a fake orgasm to Billy Crystal, and an older café patron says to the server, “I’ll have whatever she’s having!”? Like a fake orgasm, people often go through the motions when they recite generic affirmations. It’s not real to them because it is so far away from their inner reality that it doesn’t create any change in their life. For a truth statement to work, it needs to be believable NOW to your unconscious mind; it needs to resonate powerfully with your inner mind. It needs to be YOUR truth right now. That’s why, in this stage, the book will guide you to discover statements that are powerfully true for you to speak now. This truth creates a very noticeable, visceral response when you speak it. We call this the ‘Sweet Spot.’
Amplify Sensation
This is where the magic happens. The Sweet Spot response when you speak a deep truth is powerful. When we amplify the natural, visceral response to speaking that truth and start doing whatever we can to amplify that response, the results seem simply magical. We work with a combination of mental state, posture, breathing and pleasure. We use the word ‘Pleasure’ to mean ‘all body sensations and emotions which motivate us to move towards something.’ Starting with your sweet spot, you’ll learn to amplify your body’s response. Neuroscience shows us that your neurology will build new neural pathways to lock in your desired belief. The end result is often described by my clients as “feeling alive.” As people move along this metaphorical path, shifting their inner beliefs, speaking one truth at a time, one small, credible, achievable step at a time, they experience sudden, delightful shifts;
• like seeing the glass half full,
• like focusing on what they have accomplished rather than what’s missing,
• like being able to make commitments to themselves and keep them,
• like taking care of themselves, their health, their weight, their emotional health,
• like feeling good enough about themselves to forgive some past wrong,
• like building up the courage to share something vulnerable and risky with a partner.
In other words, shifting one belief is likely to cause other beliefs to shift.
With thousands of self-help books on the market, why read this one?
Basically, because it is the most direct way to discover what’s possible for you – and, if you do the work that the book sets out for you, to become the person you need to be to be able to achieve the results you want for your life.
As a hypnotist my work is focused on the mind. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients throughout my career. At first, they all seemed very different and amazing. Each intervention seemed unique. Over time, I began to recognize that there were patterns.
• People made commitments to themselves and then ignored or sabotaged them (think weight loss).
• People procrastinated, unable to commit to a choice.
• People didn’t trust their own intuition.
• People blamed others and couldn’t forgive.
• People felt forced to do things they didn’t really want to do.
• People focused on what had gone wrong in the past or what was missing in their lives instead of focusing on what they wanted!
• People were terrified to reveal their inner self to their partner.
• People were unhappy because they put looking after everyone else’s needs ahead of looking after their own needs.
• And on and on.
Eventually, I came to appreciate that all these challenges had the same destructive belief driving them. All of them stem from believing that “I’m not good enough.” In my hypnosis practice, I use a wide variety of techniques to help people transform. Our unconscious minds house all the beliefs that drive our behaviour, our actions, our words, our thoughts. Hypnosis is a very general word that basically means “communicating directly with the unconscious mind.” Hypnosis works so effectively because it utilizes two extraordinarily powerful tools:
• relationship (hypnosis is an interaction between two people, a very special kind of conversation) and
• engagement of the imagination to drive change.
As I explored these hypnotic tools, I learned that many of them could achieve useful and meaningful results without hypnotic trance. This book is my attempt to condense a cornucopia of powerful hypnotic techniques into simple steps, that anyone can follow without any need for trance or any experience with hypnosis.
The result is the BEYOND Good Enough System. It’s there to help you make the pervasive, lasting changes that YOU want. I know the system works because my clients and I have seen it work time and time again.
If YOU want to become the person you need to be to completely transform your life or simply make a change in one area of your life – Beyond Good Enough can guide you to do just that. All you need to do is:
1. read this book,
2. do the exercises, and
3. keep doing the exercises until you get the transformation you want.
Doing this consistently and reliably will take you to BEYOND Good Enough.
What This Book is Not
This book is here to help YOU shift your Inner Beliefs. It will not give you a zillion dollars by next Thursday; it will not find the partner of your dreams and make him or her fall madly in love with you; it will not convince the bank to give you that loan; it won’t even change your beliefs for you! What it WILL do is allow you to become the person who is capable of making your dreams and desires happen. Making your dreams and desires happen is what you want to do yourself anyway.
The Beyond Good Enough System has steps to take you through the desire, speaking, and amplifying steps. When you do the work, you will become the person you need to be. There are simple exercises to follow throughout the book. Don’t rush through the book like it was a mystery novel. Just as you can’t learn to play the guitar or ride a bicycle by reading a book, you won’t change any of your Inner Beliefs by reading this book. Doing the exercises to the point of basic mastery is what creates change. And doing that work will create transformation in your life.
What next?
Read Chapter One, as it will provide you with a solid overview of what’s to come, and how best to navigate what you will learn. Before you go on, know this:
I’m excited for you. I’m proud of you for taking the step to create change in your life and I’m thrilled to see how YOUR transformation unfolds!