“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.” ~ Tony Robbins

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Money is a lot more like sex than people care to admit.

Everybody seems to want it, and yet, we make the point that we are perfectly fine living without it. Also, just like sex, we think we should know everything there is to know about it—but we don’t.

Let’s leave sex where it is for now and focus on money, shall we?

I should explain right from the jump that after I turned 40, I decided to go big. Perhaps I should re-phrase that: after I turned 40, I decided I didn’t want to die. Well, I mean, that’s how it all began for me. What ensued was an epic journey.

The audacity that it took for me to decide, against all odds, to get clean and stay clean turned out to be the most important quality I’ve ever had. That same audacity has seen me through learning a new career, starting a family, writing a book, and pruning and manicuring what has—with time—become a perfect life for me.

Not wanting to stop there, I decided I should probably max out a credit card and hire myself a serious life coach for 2018. I have never regretted that decision.

A couple of months ago, I was filling out the “plan your call” form. This is the online communication between the client and the coach where the client makes it known what it is they are trying to accomplish in the next 10-day period. This is, essentially, what makes having a life coach so valuable.

A coach takes a person from having nebulous and half-hearted plans and transforms them into a goal-setting/goal-hitting machine. Having just received a bill in the mail that made me feel a little worried, I decided that I’d like to set a goal of pulling in an extra $200 a week until my weekend music gigs went into full swing in early May.

Now I am by no means perfect. So when my coach and I began to discuss this, I was a little hesitant. She cut me off to bring up the important “emotional triad” made famous by Tony Robbins in his book Awaken the Giant Within. The emotional triad is a combination of your focus, your physiology, and your language. After she explained it to me, it made sense why she cut me off. My language was all wrong. I was certainly not going to make it happen with the way I was approaching it.

After the call, I decided to try what she suggested: I stood up straight, I became really calm, and I envisioned myself having achieved the goal already.

Some may poo poo this as “magical thinking,” but I am conveying to you the exact and literal truth: I earned an extra $200 every single week from the middle of March all the way to the end of April—twice from performing gigs that seemingly came out of nowhere, once from something I wrote, and once from a paid holiday at work that netted me triple time.

The point, of course, is that where it came from is sort of irrelevant. The fact that I set the goal, worked the emotional triad, and reached the goal was where the beauty existed for me.

On the next call I had with my life coach, she suggested I write an article about how I became a force of “intention.” She was impressed with how I made a decision to do something that for many people might have seemed impossible, and then, actually made it happen. I, however, thought it might be more valuable to write about the triad. Either way, if you think about it, the power of intention and the emotional triad go hand in hand. Here it is in a nutshell:

Physiology

Stop slouching! No…seriously! Take nice deep breathes and stand up straight. Walk around like you’d be walking around if what you are trying to do had already been accomplished. When your body thinks it has won the race, you are a third of the way to the finish line!

Focus

Tony Robbins has this pithy and smart saying, “Where focus goes, energy flows.” If you find yourself trapped in thoughts of what is standing in your way, those obstacles will only get bigger. By the same token, if you envision nothing in your way, those same things virtually disappear. This is tried and true stuff. It’s been expressed, at times, as “living in the solution,” instead of “existing in the problem.”

Language

The language you are speaking internally is far more important than the words you are expressing to others, so pay more attention to that. If you are telling anyone who will listen that you are going to make it happen, but the voice in your head is asking sarcastically, “Make what happen?” your ship is sunk before it gets out of the channel. You have to go whole hog on this one.

The truth is, there is nothing that lives inside of me that doesn’t live inside of you, too. It really is a simple matter of employing the most effective techniques. The “emotional triad” is one of those techniques—so suspend your disbelief and give it a try.

It’s not really about the extra $200 a week or whatever your personal goal happens to be. It is what happens inside of us when we set a goal like this and achieve it. The swagger in our step is unmistakable and our confidence soars.

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Author: Billy Manas
Image: Flickr
Editor: Lieselle Davidson
Copy Editor: Nicole Cameron