Managing Your 3 Resource Systems – HEALTH

NOTE: The prologue of this post (in orange text) is the same in all three posts under the general title “Managing Your 3 Resource Systems.” Topic-specific content is below that.

A lot of people are looking for the magic key that will open a door to the meaning and joy of life. Unhappy people are convinced they will find this key one day, which is why happiness eludes them. It’s not actually something you can find, and there is no magic key or secret door. Looking for happiness assumes that you do not presently know where it is, when in fact it’s not anywhere at all.

Happiness arises as you learn how to master the three resource systems of your life: Time, Money, and Health. Again, you won’t find happiness some day in the future, and neither can it be purchased or achieved. When we talk about mastering these three resource systems, don’t make the mistake of thinking that this, finally! is your magic key.

Happiness is a measure of the flow, quality, and connection of your life to what really matters. It’s not that getting rich will make you happy, but it is true that happy people are better at mastering the flow of wealth in their lives. It’s not that being in perfect health will make you happy, but it is true that happy people are better at mastering the quality of health known as vigor, which enables them to enjoy more of what life has to offer.

And it’s not that you need more time to get happy – and believing so is a sure-fire setup for disappointment, but it is true that happy people are better at mastering the connections over time to what supports the life they really want.

After we take a look at the separate elements in the mastery of each of the three resource systems of Time, Money, and Health we will step up a level to talk about the meta-skill of managing your life across all three. Mentallurgy LifeChange teaches that Time, Money, and Health are really just different transformations of the energy known as consciousness. By managing your balance across the three systems, you will be cultivating the conditions that allow happiness to arise.

Health

Like the other resource systems, Health is something many of us take for granted – as long as it’s allowing us to do what we want. When we run out of time or money, or when the quality of our health is compromised somehow, that’s when we pay attention. Unhappy people commonly suffer from health challenges, which only supplies them with something else to complain about.

Mentallurgy LifeChange makes a critical distinction between health and fitness, even though these are used interchangeably in popular culture. But the difference is significant! Fitness is a function of how “fit” you are physically with respect to a specific challenge level of strength, agility, flexibility, speed or stamina. You can be in great health but not fit to run a 5K race. It will take conditioning, practice, and time to rise to that challenge.

Health, on the other hand, is less about challenge levels than your chronic physical and mental well-being. Your body, its organ systems and the cells supporting your life are working efficiently and productively. The energy your body needs to restore itself, build immunity, eliminate toxins, and engage your daily tasks with vigor (what we might think of as the measure of health) is being managed well.

The resource system of Health also has a set of four actions to keep in balance. Optimizing health means that you give each one the attention it needs, and that you maintain a regimen that will support a healthy life.

Diet

Unhappy (and unhealthy) people are typically not very mindful or disciplined when it comes to what they put into their bodies. Their diet is filled with junk food, processed sugar and flour, saturated fats, artificial sweeteners, high sodium, and regular doses of caffeine or energy drinks to get them through the inevitable energy slumps.

Your diet, referring to the nutritional value of what you eat and drink, is what delivers to your cells the energy they require. If you take in junk, toxins, and artificial food substitutes, your cells succumb to oxidation and inflammation, which can lead to them becoming abnormal and reproducing uncontrollably as cancer. Inflamed cells also mean a fat body, as it tries to remove and lock away the xenobiotics (strange or ‘alien’ substances) that would otherwise cause damage and additional health complications.

People who struggle with obesity – the drain of health and longevity – aren’t always (or only) guilty of excessive calories. Their fat is also the body’s (ultimately futile) strategy for stashing toxins into quarantine.

Instead of “going on a diet,” it is much better to take in a well-balanced variety of foods that are fresh (not packaged), whole (not processed), and organic (not genetically modified, boosted with fertilizers, or treated with herbicides and hormones). 

Exercise

We’ve already made a distinction between (core) health and (adaptive) fitness, but something also needs to be said for regular movement and aerobic activity. As a rule, unhappy people don’t get off the sofa unless they have to, and only rarely do they go outside for a brisk walk or run. Exercise doesn’t have to take hours out of your day, and it isn’t even necessary to engage in it as a ‘special project’ apart from your daily life.

In addition to keeping your muscles toned and bones strong, regular activity will flush toxins, charge your immune system, keep your arteries and heart flexible and strong, and invigorate your brain so it can function optimally as well.

Rest

Unhappy (and unhealthy) people crowd both ends of the bell curve when it comes to getting sufficient rest. They either don’t sleep well because of obesity-related issues (e.g., sleep apnea and midnight cravings), or they sleep too much (but not well) because they lack the energy and motivation to get “up and at it.”

As a rule you need 7-9 hours of restful sleep each night, preferably between the hours of 9PM and 6AM. Humans evolved as a daytime-active, nighttime-dormant species, which is why your body and brain benefit most from restful sleep in that time zone.

Meditation

Although this word can mean many things, in Mentallurgy LifeChange it refers to any practice that serves to focus the mind, calm the body, and center the self. A lot of people (not only, but unhappy people especially) have difficulty with this because once the body starts to calm down, it’s hard to keep it from sliding further into sleep. They “gave it a try” but it “didn’t work” for them.

Cultivating a state of focused calm, where you are simultaneously relaxed and alert, takes time and consistent practice. But once you have achieved it, the benefits are both numerous and significant! Everything functions better and you feel more present to your life. This one action, consistently practiced, will elevate the quality of your life in remarkable ways. For a simple breathing meditation, click here.

Managing Your 3 Resource Systems – TIME

NOTE: The prologue of this post (in orange text) is the same in all three posts under the general title “Managing Your 3 Resource Systems.” Topic-specific content is below that.

A lot of people are looking for the magic key that will open a door to the meaning and joy of life. Unhappy people are convinced they will find this key one day, which is why happiness eludes them. It’s not actually something you can find, and there is no magic key or secret door. Looking for happiness assumes that you do not presently know where it is, when in fact it’s not anywhere at all.

Happiness arises as you learn how to master the three resource systems of your life: Time, Money, and Health. Again, you won’t find happiness some day in the future, and neither can it be purchased or achieved. When we talk about mastering these three resource systems, don’t make the mistake of thinking that this, finally! is your magic key.

Happiness is a measure of the flow, quality, and connection of your life to what really matters. It’s not that getting rich will make you happy, but it is true that happy people are better at mastering the flow of wealth in their lives. It’s not that being in perfect health will make you happy, but it is true that happy people are better at mastering the quality of health known as vigor, which enables them to enjoy more of what life has to offer.

And it’s not that you need more time to get happy – and believing so is a sure-fire setup for disappointment, but it is true that happy people are better at mastering the connections over time to what supports the life they really want.

After we take a look at the separate elements in the mastery of each of the three resource systems of Time, Money, and Health we will step up a level to talk about the meta-skill of managing your life across all three. Mentallurgy LifeChange teaches that Time, Money, and Health are really just different transformations of the energy known as consciousness. By managing your balance across the three systems, you will be cultivating the conditions that allow happiness to arise.

Time

Let’s begin by making some critical distinctions inside the resource system called Time. Whenever we speak of “time management” we are not really presuming to manage time itself, but rather the amount and quality of time we give to things. We can’t define time in the abstract since it’s always contained inside event-cycles, referring to how long something takes from start to finish, from beginning to end. The largest event-cycle we know of is called the Universe, and the smallest is the half-life of subatomic particles. Somewhere in between is your lifetime, and inside that are many countless smaller event-cycles such as friendships, careers, household projects, the laundry, a video game, and the time it takes for you to read this blog post.

So when you “manage time” you are really managing the many event-cycles that connect your life to the reality around you, and to possible futures ahead of you.

We can further distinguish among these connections by seeing how some things come upon you suddenly and demand your attention. Their urgency grabs your focus and won’t let go until you’re worn out, make a decision to disengage, or get past the last-minute deadline with success or failure. Your house on fire is urgent, but so is the due date of that assignment you procrastinated on or the text message of a friend who needs a response now. Just because it’s urgent doesn’t make it bad or unworthy of your attention.

In contrast to these urgent demands on your time are such eternal values as peace, love, beauty, and truth. Eternal here is not a reference to the otherworldly and everlasting objects of religious interest. At its root it simply means timeless, abiding, and essential. The eternal value of beauty, for example, is timeless as an ideal and recognized only in its embodiment or temporal expressions. By giving time to the cultivation of harmony, proportion, grace, and elegance in your life, you are connecting to the eternal value of beauty.

What needs your attention isn’t all right now in this moment, in these urgent demands or eternal ideals. Your life is an unfolding event-cycle opening into any number of possible futures. How things end up going depends a lot on your aims, decisions, choices, and actions. As a resource system, then, Time requires that you look ahead to your preferred future, to the scenario you really want.

Some of it will break down to short-term goals – things to accomplish in a few hours, a few days, or a few months from now. But other aspects of your preferred future are more long-term – a few years or even decades from now. It’s important to keep the frame large enough and the view long enough so that the things which develop slowly, or only come about through consistent effort and patient attention, are not neglected.

Think of each of these elements in the resource system of time as an “action.” With each action you are connecting your life to a type of value – immediate and pressing (urgent), timeless and inspirational (eternal), those on the near horizon (short-term), as well as values that clarify the general direction you want your life to go (long-term).

Managing your life well in time requires an ability to distinguish between urgent and eternal, so that what is time-critical doesn’t absorb all your time and keep you from cultivating the timeless values that make life truly meaningful. You shouldn’t try to eliminate urgency entirely, as some of it contributes to the spontaneity, unpredictability, and surprise of life.

As unhappy people will teach us, however, urgent values are more likely to crowd out eternal values than the other way around.

The reason for this has a lot to do with the way unhappy people create their own urgency. By failing to lengthen their view of life so as to chart a course into a preferred future, unhappy people are constantly surprised: by sudden deadlines, last-minute demands, an avalanche of unforeseen consequences, the whirlwind of details impossible to sort out and nail down.

This is not the sort of surprise that adds positive excitement to life! The chronic urgency of putting out fires or frantically looking for their keys takes up precious time which could be given to creating the life they really want. In managing life in the resource system of time, not giving attention to the values and connections that truly matter will only generate stress, which eventually translates into distress, exhaustion, and depression.

Stress is one of the drains down which unhappy people lose the quality and joy of life.

What’s Going On With You?

Mentallurgy LifeChange is based in strong psychological theory and best-practice therapeutic strategies. Even though it sets itself apart from conventional forms of therapy (talk and drugs) and works more effectively to give you creative control in your life (with no side-effects), it shouldn’t be seen as some newfangled, trendy ‘self-help’ program. Mentallurgy works, plain and simple; and here’s why.

Take a look at the diagram above. At the top is what we call your personal world view (PWV for short) which refers to that construction of meaning in which you find value and purpose for your life. Your PWV is unique to you (I have one, too), even though much of it is the product of your culture and the local tribes (e.g., your family of origin) that have shaped your personal identity over the years. In Mentallurgy this is where your mind, as Storyteller, is tirelessly at work spinning the narratives (opinions, tales, myths, and theories) that make sense of it all.

At the bottom of the diagram is your unconscious body (UNC for short) where the animal urgencies keeping you alive and the dynamic state of your nervous system carry the spontaneous feeling of what’s going on, inside and around you. Our name for your body is the Alchemist, in light of the complex ‘mixology’ of enzymes, peptides, hormones, and neurotransmitters it manages in keeping you alive. Thankfully your brain monitors and regulates this biochemistry far below your conscious awareness or direct control, which is why we say it’s unconscious.

When unhappy people seek help from mental health professionals, better therapists will analyze their experience on several levels, indicated in the diagram as symptoms, behaviors, relationships, and stories. (I list them in this order because it’s typically a set of symptoms that motivates an unhappy person to seek therapy in the first place, and is thus where analysis naturally begins.) Common symptoms are associated with anxiety (e.g., hypertension, panic, insomnia) or depression (e.g., fatigue, lethargy, autoimmune disorders) and interfere with the individual’s ability to function productively in daily life.

Behaviors to watch for represent attempts on the part of an unhappy person to reduce, work around, cope with, or escape the physical symptoms in the body. Quite often various foods, drink, and other substances will be used (and abused) toward this end, leading almost inevitably into chemical addictions and a whole new set of symptoms to contend with. Behaviors such as risk-taking, repetition compulsions, self-isolation, social withdrawal, or emotional outbursts can also provide immediate and temporary relief from symptoms.

As we would expect, such dramatic changes in behavior will disrupt the unhappy person’s relationships. Customary modes and occasions of social interaction are thrown off their routines and partners grow perturbed or concerned over the disruption. Predictably such disturbances generate conflict, estrangement, and distance in relationships – and quite often these are what drive unhappy people to therapy. It’s easy in such cases to get so involved in treating relationship problems, that the instigating behaviors and underlying symptoms are downplayed or altogether ignored.

When the unhappy person’s relationships land in the rocks, the stories that once constituted a meaningful life narrative start falling apart. The deep interpersonal history and shared vision of a future together are no longer congruent with the strain and dysfunction that characterize the current relationship. A talk therapist (or counselor) is often given a distorted account by the client him- or herself, where blame is shifted to a partner whose behavior, which might very well be a normal reaction to changes in the client, is interpreted as uncaring, irrational, or hostile.

With this ‘architecture of unhappiness’ in view, let’s move our focus to the middle of the diagram, to the arrow anchored between behaviors and relationships and pointing to the orange-colored table of terms on the right. Those terms are what Mentallurgy names our “feeling-needs,” that is, our need to feel certain things from very early in life. All of us have a need to feel safe, a need to feel loved, a need to feel capable, and a need to feel worthy.

We say we have a need to feel these things because simply ‘being’ safe, loved, capable, or worthy in an objective sense isn’t sufficient. In other words, we can be capable (etc.) but not feel capable, and that feeling, utterly disregarding the actual fact, will disable us with self-doubt. Healthy development and a stable personality requires that we feel protected (safe), cared for (loved), able to meet the challenges of life (capable), and recognized as possessing value (worthy).

The four feeling-needs are arranged in order from the bottom up (as signified by the upward arrow), to make the point that each one builds on and grows out of those beneath it, making our need to feel safe foundational to the entire set.

Unhappy people are almost always deficient in their need to feel safe, loved, capable, or worthy, and their behavior in relationships enact social strategies for getting these needs met. An example of an ineffective social strategy is where an individual doesn’t feel safe and proceeds to cling to his partner with the unrealistic demand for absolute assurance.

Another common but ineffective social strategy is where an individual strives to make herself worthy of her partner’s love by doing everything in her power to please and placate him. The many ways these feeling-needs get twisted into each other accounts for the prevalence of codependency in most unhealthy relationships.

Even if we had all this information in front of us as adults, the work of psychological liberation would be no less difficult, for the simple reason that unhappiness typically starts very early and its roots go very deep. Underneath the table of feeling-needs we find another important concept in Mentallurgy: Neurotic styles. These are not so much intentional strategies as preconscious coping behaviors that helped us get our way as young children when the world was slow to accommodate our needs.

I will only name the six neurotic styles here; for fuller descriptions, you are encouraged to check out What’s Your Neurotic Style? and Why Do You Keep Doing That?

1. The Worrywart: a phobic-avoidant neurotic style
2. The Fixator: an obsessive-compulsive neurotic style
3. The Hothead: an explosive-aggressive neurotic style
4. The Saboteur: a passive-aggressive neurotic style
5. The Recluse: a passive-depressive neurotic style
6. The Fanatic: a manic-obsessive neurotic style

The thing to understand about neurotic styles is that they name behaviors which were ‘successful’ once upon a time. Explosive-aggressive behavior in the form of a temper tantrum in the middle of a busy restaurant successfully motivates an embarrassed parent to hand over chocolate cake to his demanding child. Passive-depressive behavior in the form of a sobbing retreat to the bedroom successfully motivates a compassionate parent to seek out and soothe her sullen child. Such behaviors commonly deliver on the child’s need to feel capable (in the first example) or loved (in the second), and each accommodation increases the likelihood of a repeat performance.

A real problem with neurotic styles is that while they may have worked to motivate desired responses from our caregivers, they only make life more difficult when we enact them in our adult relationships. Temper tantrums and sulking under our bed covers will typically generate more complications for us, as nobody really wants to be our parent now that we’re supposedly grown up.

As you better understand what’s going on with you, the opportunity grows for taking responsible control and creating the life you really want.

Are You a ‘Discrepancy’ or ‘Proximity’ Thinker?

Take a look at the graphic above and answer this question: How far is ‘A’ from ‘B’?

Now take another look and answer this question: How close is ‘A’ to ‘B’?

Your answer to both questions should be “4 inches,” but notice the difference in how the two questions set up the challenge. The first question sets up the challenge in terms of discrepancy, how far apart ‘A’ and ‘B’ are, while the second question sets it up in terms of proximity, how close together they are. Since the answer is the same in either case, you’re probably struggling to see the point of this exercise.

So let’s move from this intrinsically meaningless example to something with more emotional value. Bring to mind one of your bigger life goals – something that really matters to you. Perhaps it has to do with your physical health, an important (or prospective) relationship, improving your character somehow, getting to the next major phase in your education or professional career, or maybe becoming more spiritually grounded. (If you’ve been playing our game so far, you will recognize these as the ‘5 Domains’ of Mentallurgy LifeChange.)

Take that life goal and draw an imaginary line between where you are now and where you envision its point of accomplishment to be. Your line will probably represent some quantity of time, effort, and resources. Now consider your imaginary line between now and that point in the future and answer these questions:

• How far are you from where you want to be?
• How close are you to where you want to be?

The particular way you phrase the question and set up the challenge makes a difference now, doesn’t it? Discrepancy thinking focuses on how much separates you from your goal, how far short you presently are. Proximity thinking focuses on what remains for you to close the gap and achieve your goal. When it comes to your motivation, the feeling that is associated with a mathematical fact like distance in time or calories expended in the effort of pursuing a goal has everything to do with how you set up the challenge.

The well-known analogy of a glass ‘half empty’ or ‘half full’ is another way of distinguishing discrepancy and proximity thinking. Interpreting the glass as half way to empty tends to cast the challenge in terms of insufficiency and inevitable loss. Whereas seeing it as half way to full turns the challenge into one of progress and anticipated fulfillment. By the way, which of these is how you tend to frame your life – as a glass half empty or a glass half full?

Unhappy people are almost always ‘half empty’ types. They are easily overwhelmed with anxiety, disappointment, and frustration precisely because they are in the habit of focusing on what they don’t want and on how far from their goals they happen to be. A majority of them don’t even have clear and compelling life goals because the time and effort that might be dedicated to creating such a vision are being consumed in managing problems.

If they do get around to considering what they might want in life, unhappy people will persist in their negative focus by constructing goals that are tied to negative motivators. They want to weigh less, be less anxious, less depressed, have fewer problems. As often happens with negative motivators, there can be a quick and early victory which stokes excitement. But as they are “successful” in eliminating what they don’t want, they get farther from their motivator (or it gets smaller and less urgent), which drains it of its power to galvanize passion and move behavior.

Happy people, on the other hand, tend to be proximity thinkers. They see the glass as half full, they don’t get fixated on their problems but stay oriented on solutions, and they anchor their goals to positive motivators, realizing that it’s not what you want to change but the change you want that keeps you inspired and empowers genuine success. If they are not there yet, proximity thinkers measure their current position according to how close they are to the goal, not how far they are from it.

So let’s get back to that all-important question: How close are YOU to the life you really want?

Big Brain, Big Picture

The evolution of the human brain is recorded in its neural architecture – in the anatomical arrangement of its circuits, networks, regions and lobes. Your brain stem, limbic system, and cerebral cortex are like portals in time to different evolutionary eras, reaching back to the age of reptiles.

Your brain stem is in charge of regulating the autonomic functions required to keep you alive. It also represents a primitive way of interacting with your environment, sometimes summarized as your sensorimotor intelligence.

Think of the crocodile that lays motionless on a riverbank until something triggers it into action – a hunger urge, the detection of vibration or temperature change, or an antelope coming to the water’s edge for a drink. Such internal and external stimuli work to trigger a behavior in the reptile.

The dynamic balance of an organism’s internal state with the conditions of its external environment is a brain-stem specialization. Such organisms (like the crocodile) are not in control of their behavior but instead operate according to sensorimotor drives and reflexes.

Warm-blooded mammals are less determined by environmental conditions, as evident in their ability to maintain a constant internal body temperature. While temperature regulation is still a brain-stem function, this relative freedom from external pressures on behavior marks a major difference between limbic (emotional) and autonomic (sensorimotor) intelligence.

Your limbic system is in constant communication with your brain stem (and body), but it also is much more interested in what’s going on around you. The structures and networks located in this “second brain” work together to encode your experience with emotional value – this is scary, that’s aggravating, you seem like a friendly person. As these value-codes were stored away for later activation and retrieval, mammals developed memory and a highly adaptive ability to learn new behaviors. Dogs can learn tricks, but crocodiles can’t.

Another distinction of mammals is their propensity for living in groups. More than just a “preference,” many newborn mammals are simply not capable of living on their own but must depend on their parents for protection, nourishment, and intimacy. No higher mammal is as dependent for a prolonged period as a human being, whose reliance on others extends well into the second decade of life.

This strong limbic attachment of human youngsters to their caregivers keeps them engaged in social interaction, where bonding establishes powerful emotional patterns called attitudes. In this interpersonal context, the brain developed a capacity to imitate the behavior of others, acquire language, use tools, and begin to construct meaning. Such advanced talents as these are experience-dependent, where the brain is actually shaped by the challenges and opportunities of the environment.

Your cerebral cortex, then, takes much longer to develop and embodies your interactions with the world by generating new cells and “re-wiring” its networks in the real-time stream of experience. At this higher level as well, the two hemispheres of your brain take on further specializations, with the right hemisphere having more descending circuits to limbic regions of emotional engagement and intuition, and the left hemisphere with stronger circuits into centers responsible for the inhibition of impulse, mental abstraction, and logical thinking.

Generally speaking, the cerebral cortex – and particularly the most forward region known as the prefrontal cortex – gives humans the ability to represent reality and construct a “world.” This is not simply another word for what’s “out there” but refers to the mental projection that we create around ourselves for context, orientation, and significance. Symbols, metaphors, stories and theories support our need for meaning in life, which dogs and crocodiles seem to have no concern about.

This is especially relevant to the game of Mentallurgy LifeChange, as we consider the domain of Lifeplan. Beyond your needs for a grounded and relevant spirituality, physical health and fitness, strong and positive relationships, and a character that is centered and self-confident, an ability to see the Big Picture and appreciate the narrative arc of your life over time is vital to happiness.

Your day-to-day concerns and activities are unfolding within a larger temporal context that trails into a “past” of formative events, and is trending into a “future” of purpose and destiny. (I put those time-tense words in quotes to remind us that past and future are not real, but only meaningful projections from the present.)

More and more, the business of daily life is preoccupying the attention of people everywhere. Unhappy and happy people alike can become so absorbed (or distracted) in relatively trivial concerns, that they lose a sense of the “whence” and “whither” of their lives. Today is just another turn of the same daily grindstone, taking care of today’s To Do list and falling into bed (but not easily to sleep), only to get up the next morning and start it all over again.

Lifeplan is where you can see the narrative plot of your life, your “personal myth” that helps you clarify a sense of direction, an inner aim to your development as a person. Getting to the “altitude” where the Big Picture and Long View of your life can be considered requires a certain limbic detachment from your immediate environment. Interestingly enough, this talent for pushing your chair away from the table of immediate emotional engagements, and directing attention along a broader time horizon, does not come fully online until your early twenties.

While Spirituality (see http://wp.me/p3e1Rr-4O) is about cultivating the disciplines that can help you stay grounded in the here-and-now, Lifeplan invites you to open the canvas of your life to broader considerations of your family heritage and human destiny, higher purpose and your personal legacy. And whereas a meditative descent into The Clearing (see http://wp.me/p3e1Rr-39) takes you down through the brain stem and into your body (which is always in the present), the exploration of Lifeplan will lead you out through the cerebral cortex and into the larger context of your life in time.

Of course, happy and unhappy people alike can open their minds beyond what’s just going on right now. A major difference between them, however, is that happy people are better able to hold open these larger horizons and keep things in perspective, while unhappy people chronically allow the Big Picture to collapse into the next thing that’s wrong with their world.

Traction for Making Change

Your most recent assignment in our game of Mentallurgy LifeChange was to assess your over-all life balance using the 5-D Tool. In the same way that managing your balance physically in standing upright makes it possible to perform all kinds of tasks, feats and stunts, managing your life balance across the five domains is absolutely crucial to your success in any of them. That’s why Mentallurgy names it the axial skill.

Unhappy people are typically deficient in the axial skill of managing life balance. As a consequence they wobble and tip into one domain and away from another, obsessing over the one and altogether neglecting the other. The general system of their life is perpetually unstable, over-reactive, and chronically fatigued. The fallout of all this imbalance is the energy drain of depression. It takes more energy to keep a teetering system from falling apart than it does to hold a centered one in balance.

But life balance isn’t about some fixed position of organizational perfection. Life is dynamic, and every living thing is what’s known as an “open system” – responsive to the changing conditions and events of its surroundings. An open system such as your life doesn’t just find its center and stay there, regardless of what’s going on around it. It can’t. As life happens, you respond and adapt – but not always successfully.

Mentallurgy LifeChange is designed to help you do more than just respond to what life brings your way. After all, you are a creator, which means that you can direct your life and change your world from the inside out. Learning how to be happy was the first important step, because it’s about focusing on what you want rather than reacting to what just happened. Now you’re taking the second step, of clarifying what you want and living intentionally in that direction.

In the 5-D Tool  (http://wp.me/p3e1Rr-4h) you were given a way of looking at your life as a whole system. In order to become a conscious creator of the life you really want, you have to set your intention on where to begin. By helping you assess your life balance, the 5-D Tool has already provided some critical information.

Where are you “tipping” right now in your life? Is one life domain taking up all your time and energy? Are you neglecting another domain – perhaps because you don’t have time and energy left over from the first one? Perhaps you haven’t taken creative control in a particular life domain because it’s been invisible to you. Until now.

Spirituality, Health, Relationships, Character and Lifeplan (the Five Domains) are essential to your life. Each one is its own realm of concern, a vital dimension of human experience, and all together they are the whole you. And because these domains are not separate “pieces” of your life, but fully integrated and mutually dependent, obsessing over one or neglecting another will have noticeable effects throughout the system.

As you prepare to take creative control, it might seem obvious that the most “troubled” life domain should get your first attention. As you may recall, this is the approach of conventional therapy: assessment, diagnosis, treatment. Locate the problem, define the problem, try to fix the problem. This doesn’t really work – recall that pathetic 40% success rate – for the simple reason that focusing on the problem and continuing to reference your “progress” on the problem keeps giving energy to the problem.

Where to begin is entirely up to you. After getting a feel for how balanced your life is right now, you may want to step right into a domain that’s been taking up a lot of your time and energy, but with mediocre results. Instead of becoming fixated on the problem, Mentallurgy will help you clarify what you really want and then teach you the skills for getting it.

On the other side of the imbalance might be a life domain that’s slipped out of sight recently, or maybe it has never been in focus. Vague intentions and undeveloped skills in this area not only compromise your success, but you are likely trying (unintentionally) to make up for that handicap in the other domains. A classic example is the person who tries desperately to fill a spiritual emptiness with starchy foods. Chronically unhappy people are forever compensating in one life domain for deficiencies in another.

Wherever you begin, you will learn the basic formula for making creative change that can be used over and over again across every life domain. So here’s your encouragement: decide.

Use the 5-D Tool again, this time to dig down into the details of each life domain. As the first “turn of the tool” helped you get a sense of life balance across the domains, a second turn invites you to answer the question, “What change do I want in this domain of my life?” Write your responses in the spaces provided on the tool. If you’re all set in one domain, leave the spaces blank and move on to the next. If you can think of more than four changes you’d like to make, add more spaces.

Once you’ve made it around a second time, take one last turn around the tool. From among the desired changes you’ve listed, choose your top priority. That’s where you’ll start creating the life you really want.

Do you want a deeper spirituality? Do you want to improve your physical health and fitness? Do you want to strengthen your closest relationships, or start a new one with fresh intention? Do you want to break free of limiting habits and establish new patterns of character instead, ones that will empower and support success? Do you want to create a lifeplan that builds on the past, connects meaningfully to the present, and opens up a future of passion and purpose?

There’s nothing stopping you. Right now you are either stepping into the life you really want, or you’re not. There’s no other option.

It’s time to get traction for making change.