Key Number One: You Must Take Control of How You Interpret Your World

Things do not change; we change. - Henry David Thoreau

Handy Tip: How do you break the pattern to telling yourself the old stories? It's easy. Think of an old story right now that you know has to go. As you think of that story, raise your left hand, wiggle your bottom, shake your hand, hold your nose and make a squeaky noise as you say "Poor me, poor me, poor me," until you laugh or feel totally ridiculous. If you do this each time you catch yourself in an old, unresourceful story you'll stop telling yourself and others about them!

Now that you know what you need to tell yourself to live a Level 1 like, here are the five tools to assist you to assist you to stay there. Each of these tools has been developed not becausee they are always true, but because by believing they are true people who choose them experiece extraordinary living. As you read each of them, ask yourself "What would my life look like if I chose to accept these beliefs a true?"

For lasting transformation to take place in your life, you must act as if these keys are true for you, regardless of the circumstances of your life. Every great story has a time when the hero is in despair, feeling that all is lost. The true hero then finds the resources that she needs to turn things around and emerge victorious. This is how you must play this game of life. To be a winner, there are certain keys that when applied consistently produce extraordinary results.

Key Number One: You Must Take Control of How You Interpret Your World

What determines the quality of your life is not what happens, your level of luck or hard times, your family, your income, your job or your friends. What determines the quality of our life is the meaning we give to the events that happen and the choices we make as a result of those meanings.

Throughout the world there are people who we know or know of who have overcome extraordinary hardship, loss or challenges and gone on to live remarkable lives. Despite their own suffering they have found a way to live lives of fulfillment and have made difference to our world. Throughout history people have made incredible sacrifices to achieve extraordinary success.

For years people held the belief that it was impossible for a human being to run the mile in less than four minutes. Then Roger Bannister did exactly that in 1954. He achieved the "Impossible" by mental and physical practice.

What is remarkable about this story foes far beyond what Bannister achieve. Within one year of his feat 37 other runners broke the four minutes mile. Another year after that, another 300 runners did the same thing.

Had four minutes become a longer time? No, had four miles shrunk to accommodate the runners? No. All that had changed was what people believed was possible.

What this tells us is that it isn't the event that has meaning. We can never see an event exactly for what it is. Our interpretation of an event, as we learnt in the Defining Moments exercise, is all we have.

Even if we try really hard to only interpret an event for what it is, we will still distort the event in our minds to conform with what we believe to be true.

This means that the map is not the territory. No mater how hard we endeavour to recreate an event or a situation, we will only be able to represent it based on our map of the world.

This one key has the power to totally transform your life. It is not the event in your life that shape you. It is the meaning you give these events.

Think about this for a moment. Think of what is happening in your life right now. Perhaps you're stressed or feeling overwhelmed or out of control.

What if you were feeling overwhelmed because of how you perceived the situation a certain way? Doesn't that mean you also have an equal power to choose to perceive the event in another way?

The first time I heard this key, I said there is no way anyone would say that if they knew what was going on in my life right now. I decided that the person telling me this must be heartless, because if they knew how hard things were for me, they would never say that.

Then I started thinking about it.

What if it was true? Just for a moment, I imagined my life with this key being true. I realise that it meant that how I was feeling about my life was entirely up to me. I had the power to change how I felt about it. Only I had the power to change how I related the world. Only I could change how I experienced this world.

And what I chose was going to shape my life.

It moved my illness into a completely different light. All of a sudden being sick wasn't a terrible tragedy that no one could possibly understand. It became an opportunity for me to learn about patience and compassion and forgiveness. My getting ill didn't have to be a barrier to my having the life I wanted. It was only going to be a barrier I chose to let it be.

I had the power to chooes.

Remember, the map is not the territory. No matter what is happening in your life, you can never interpret it accurately. You can only interpret it according to your map.

Your Map

Your map is made up of your beliefs, values and experiences. It is made up of other ingredients too, but we'll focus on these for now.

• Your beliefs are feelings of certainty about what something means.
• Your values are emotions that you want to experience on a consistent basis.
• Your experiences are what you believe had happened in you life up until now.

How you create your map is through what you see, hear, feel, smell and taste. These are all the senses we have to access our world. We can see an event, hear it as it unfolds, feel it happening, and perhaps we can also taste and smell it.

These six senses are all we have to record the world around us. We are being bombarded with an estimated two million bits of information every second. We could not possibly absorb and process all of this information. Most people can only mange 132 bit of information - or 7 plus or minus 2 chucks.

If we could suddenly absorb all of the information coming at us we would go made or would close down. Notice how you're sitting. Notice the sounds around you that until nor you may have been turning out. Notice any smells in the air. Notice the objects around you that you had deleted to allow you read this blog. If you were aware of all of this all of the time you would never be able to function.

So our minds protect us. It filters out what it considers to be irrelevant.

The question is: how does our mind decide what is relevant or not? What filter in is what we believe we need or will need for a future time. This explains why two people can view the same event - say, a car accident - and recall it so differently. They have recorded the event in their minds based on their own filters.

The filter in our minds constantly delete, distort and generalise about what an event means.

We delete what we decide is irrelevant. We distort what we experience so it can fit in with what we are familiar with and we generalise on thing to mean something we have experienced before.

For example, think about someone whom you don't like. They maybe do something that annoys you and violates your rules about how people about them that is likeable? Maybe they're loving to their parents or good you've magnified a habit they do that annoys you so that's all you notice about them. Perhaps you've exaggerated their dislikeable traits because they cause such intense feelings within you.

Finally, what are you generalising about them to cause you to dislike them? Perhaps they have a behavioural trait that you've seen someone else do. When the first person did they behaviour that did it to hurt you, so now you feel very strongly about what that behaviour means.

You can do the same exercise with tasks you don't enjoy, with places you've visited and felt strongly about, anything you experience in your life. 

Like something and disliking something is based on what we filter in and leave out. What we filter in and leave out is based on what we are deleting, distorting, or generalising. 

How your Filters Shape Your Life

Imagine for a moment you are faced with a challenging task. It's a task that you have never been able to accomplish successfully in the past. You feel intimidated by the thought of having to do it and you tell yourself you'll probably get it wrong. 

What are you filtering out to decide to be intimidated by this event? What are you filtering out to decide to be intimidated by this event? What evidence of your abilities are you deleting? What past events do you need to distort to give yourself the most anxiety? Aren't you needing to generalise about past results to make the decision to doubt your abilities this time?

Now think of a task that you know you are totally capable of doing. Something that you have has complete success in for a period of time. It could be tying your shoe laces or making coffee. 

What do you have to delete to decide you can do this task? Don't you need to delete evidence of when your first started doing these task? A time when you weren't totally successful? Aren't you needing distort your past results so that the times you weren't great at became simply"learning experiences"? To believe your ability to do these task take your decision to generalise that because you could do the task before you can do it again now.

Constantly, deleting, distorting, and generalising.

Think about this... what if what you are filtering out of your life are the very things that would mean your happiness, your success or your fulfillment?

Five years ago I was convinced that people were full of weaknesses and faults. I was sure that people were generally disappointing and incapable of anything except for selfish, self involved actions.

To believe this I had to delete any evidence of anyone's kindness, compassion or generosity, which I did easily. I had to distort their slightest comment to interpret it as thoughtless and mean. I had to generalis that because they would say one thing that I decided was mean that would equate to all of them being mean.

And this is how I lived my life for years. If you could imagine living this way for a moment, what do you think I thought about the world? About people generally? What relationships do you think I had?

If you've decided I didn't have many good friends, and that I had a poor relationship with my family, and that I was lonely, you would be right on track.

I realised that how I interpreted the world was up to me, and that id I wanted to experience love, happiness and fulfillment then I needed to start hunting for evidence of exactly that, instead of the opposite.

I had to change my map of the world.

Once I changed my ma, my entire experience of the world and of people transformed for the better. Since changing my map I have not met a single person I don't like. I have not experienced a situation I haven't been grateful for. I now only see the magnificence in others, even when they don't see it in themselves.

Had the word suddenly replaced itself? Of course not.  All that had changed was my map of the world.

For the next seven days, act as if the map is not the territory. Decide to give the best possible meaning to everything that happens and everything you see, hear and feel. Make the effort t filter in everything that is good, positive, and a learning opportunity our of everything you experience. Give yourself the gift of living at Level 1 as often as you can, and if you slip, be aware of it and then step up once more.