Today we look at how T. Harv Eker solves the problem of failure to commit and the fear of commitment by sharing what he believes is the real reason behind why some people can’t commit, shouldn’t commit, who’s fault it really is, and what to do to cultivate habits that support progress.
Ready to experiment?
“I’ve broken so many commitments and promises to myself in regards to my personal, physical and financial growth.
What is the best course of action to get back in integrity with myself and the universe?”
Wow, Harv specifically loves this question that so many people can relate to!
So… “What’s the best course of action to get back in integrity with myself and the universe?” you ask?
Number one…
Even though you’ve broken a lot of commitments to yourself, or maybe every commitment to yourself, at some point in time beating yourself up for that is not helping.
And that point and time is NOW.
You see, Harv’s going to say something right now that’s very advanced and here it is…
Your ‘ego self’, your ‘conditioned self’, your ‘false self’ actually does not want you to be HAPPY.
Sorry to tell you that...
‘It’ doesn’t want you to be happy, that’s not its directive… ‘it’ wants you to be in fear.
WHY?
Well, according to Harv, it’s so ‘it’ can control you, it’s as simple as that.
If ‘it’ controls you, then you’ll be okay, according to ‘it’.
Once ‘it’ controls you, and once you do everything ‘it’ says, then you’ll be okay and you’ll stay alive… ‘it’ doesn’t want to take any chances…
“Just do what I say and you’ll stay alive.”... that’s all ‘it’s thinking about, okay?
And the way ‘it’ does that is by controlling you, says Harv.
Now if you’re HAPPY, then ‘it’ isn’t in control, and you don’t ‘need’ ‘it’, so why would you listen to ‘it’, right?
See, ‘it’ controls you by continuously keeping you off balance, as if something is basically ‘wrong’ with you, Harv adds.
So your ‘ego mind’, your ‘conditioned self’ for the most part, your ‘false self’ wants you to believe there’s something ‘wrong’ with you, to keep you where you are…
“There’s just something ‘wrong’ with you!”... and if there’s something ‘wrong’ with you, you have to do something about it, right?
Which means you have to get into your logic and reason and discuss it and delve into the negativity of ‘what’s wrong with you’, and ‘why it’s wrong with you’ and ‘where this SH!T came from’...
And the ‘ego mind’ loves that discussion OMG!
‘It’ could be entertained, for some people for days and for some people for weeks but for some people, their whole life!
The ‘ego mind’ is entertained by this BS back and forth of ‘what’s wrong with you’ okay.
But KNOW this… Harv insists that there’s NOTHING ‘wrong’ with YOU!
And the ONLY thing that’s ‘wrong’ with you is ‘your ego’ telling you there’s something ‘wrong’ with you.
That’s what’s ‘wrong’... the ‘ego voice’ is ‘wrong’.
There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with YOU, YOUR TRUE SELF.
Harv argues that there’s a ‘learned self’, an ‘ego self’, a ‘conditioned self’, a ‘lower self’, a ‘false self’ that keeps telling you there’s something ‘wrong’ with you.
That’s the ‘wrong’... ‘the voice’ is the ‘wrong’ thing and ‘the voice’ is the problem!
So here’s a helpful instruction from Harv…
Write this down…
“I AM NOT THE PROBLEM!
‘THE VOICE’ IS THE PROBLEM!”
And don’t go… “MY voice is the problem…”, NO!
It’s not YOUR VOICE that’s the problem, it is ‘a voice’ that you hear inside of you but it’s NOT your voice!
So the first thing is…
There’s NO problem with YOU.
There’s a problem with that same frickin’ Mindfrick that annoys you about everything else including… “There’s something ‘wrong’ with you…”!
Okay, so let’s get that straight, Harv resolutely states.
Do you GET this?
There’s nothing wrong with you… the only issue is the ‘the voice’.
And there’s no difference between ‘that voice’ that tells you… “You’re a cr@ppy golfer!”, or ‘the voice’ that tells you… “You always sleep in too late!” and ‘the voice’ that tells you… “You can’t do this or that right!”...
It’s the ‘frickin’ voice’... that’s the only problem!
Now HOW do you GET RID of ‘the voice’?
Remember Harv’s favorite words for stopping the enemy in their tracks…
“Thank you for sharing.”!
That’s it, “Thank you for sharing.” and then, adds Harv…
You have to come back to the PRESENT.
And very often, he mentions that you’ll use a new TRIGGER, a positive ANCHOR to come back to the present.
So, there’s ‘a voice’ that tells you… “I don’t keep my commitments.”.
“Okay well, you don’t.
What does that mean exactly?”
“Well, I make commitments and then I don’t keep them.”
“If you keep doing that all the time, that’s a clue.
What’s the clue?
The clue is there’s something ‘wrong’ with you, right? That you’re ‘bad’ at commitments, right?”
NO!
The CLUE, as per Harv, is that there’s a trick that’s being played on you!
A trick by ‘your ego’, that ‘sneaky ego’, that is being played on your HIGHER SELF, the REAL YOU.
That trick that tells you that…
“What I’m going to do is I’m going to make a commitment, even though I know I’m not going to keep it… But THIS TIME I will!”
And your ‘ego mind’ is laughing, going…
”UGH! You’re not going to keep this commitment…
And you know what I’m going to do to keep you out of balance?
I’m going to suggest that you make a commitment here.
You ‘need’ to make a commitment, Bob!
You ‘need’ to commit to waking up at 07h00 am.
Now you haven’t done that in your life except for once and then you broke that the next day…
But things are going to change!
And we’re going to commit to this!”
Now how many times have you made commitments?
If you’ve made commitments ten times and you haven’t kept them, it’s not a problem with YOU, asserts Harv.
It’s the problem with the ONE OF YOU who ‘wants’ to make the commitment.
WHY make it?
WHY would you make a commitment you know you’re not going to keep?
Why?
So you can beat yourself up!
It’s not the real you that has a fear of commitment.
You see, the ‘ego voice’ is giving you rationale to beat yourself up.
In other words, the goal is to beat yourself… the goal is negativity about yourself.
The goal is to downplay yourself, downgrade yourself, degrade yourself, dis’ yourself…
That’s the goal of the mind!
Now, Harv states that ‘it’ can’t do that for no reason.
So ‘it’ will create a strategy that ‘it’ knows you’re going to EFF up…
“So let’s do this and have you feel cr@ppy about it again..
Yay! We won again!”
WOW!
Can you see the whole vicious circle that’s going on?
“So why did you make a commitment in the first place?”
“Well, because I know I have to in order to get something done.”
“Well why make it if you know you’re not going to keep it?”
“Uh, I don’t know why. I guess it’s because I’m supposed to…”
Are you starting to understand why you believe you have a fear of commitment?
Yeah… what your ‘ego mind’ is doing is making certain you’ve got a nice rationale for beating yourself up, and here’s an internal dialogue from Harv’s mind...
“Hey Harv, why go out and golf again?
You know, every single time you go out you never feel good about yourself, you get to beat yourself up.
Why do that?”
And you know what, every single day it tells him the same thing…
“Today is going to be different.
Today, I’m going to hit it good.”
Today, what happens?
Harv doesnt’…
What does Harv do?
He beats himself up.
So what’s the ANSWER?
Number one… He can stop golfing.
Number two… He can stop making commitments.
OR he can say…
“You know what, I’m not going to play the game anymore, of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
When I golf, I’m going to golf socially.
I’m going to golf to be with my kids, or I’m going to golf to be with my wife, or I’m going to golf to be with my friends.
And my GOAL is only to see how much fun I can have.
And I’m going to NOT equate FUN with ‘good’.
I’m going to go for a good time.
In fact, every time the ball doesn’t look good, I’m going to laugh okay.”
Now Harv argues that if he can practice this, and by the way he’s done this, until his ‘ego mind’ gets back involved of course, he plays a different game!
Instead of… “How ‘good’ am I at golf?”...
Harv’s intenal dialogue becomes… “How social am I? How good a time can I have? How much can I enjoy the trees and the mountains and the grass and the beauty?”.
And you know what?
He’s done this several times, he refuses to feed the fear of commitment and every time it’s come out where he had a GREAT TIME.
Another example is when Harv and his son were going to football games and their team wasn’t doing so great.
So they decided with the next game they were going to that, instead of cheering only for their preferred team, they’re going to cheer for any good play regardless of which team’s doing well.
It simply didn’t matter where the good plays came from because both of them were happy for any good play.
Guess what… Harv says that they had the best time!
They had such a great time, because they were laughing, they were feeling good… it was amazing, he says.
WHY?
Because they weren’t attached to the outcome.
THEY changed the game.
The game wasn’t the same… the game was to have a good time, that was it.
And they could do that and enjoy every good play and that was it.
So what about you?
Do you have to change the game you’re playing with yourself, and the tricks that you’re playing on yourself?
Harv reckons that maybe you do.
Maybe, instead of a commitment for you, if you can never keep your commitments, maybe it’s…
“Let’s do an experiment.
Let’s do an experiment and try it out for a day and see how I feel about it okay?"
So… “I’m going to wake up at 07h00 am… And not every single day…
But my INTENTION is to get up at 07h00 am tomorrow morning as an experiment, a research project to see if..
A, I can do it and…
B, if I don’t do it, what’s the process of how I don’t do it.”
In other words, it’s not WHAT you do, it’s HOW you do it.
Harv’s Zen Teacher talks about it all the time…
“Don’t talk about WHAT you do, watch HOW you do what you do.”
Okay, so your intention is to get up at 07h00 am tomorrow… that’s your intention alright?
Now, you’re not making a commitment, you’re just getting up at 07h00 am tomorrow.
You’re going to set your alarm for 07h00 am, period, over and out.
Now 07h00 am comes, your alarm goes off, you close your alarm, you keep closing it until 08h00 am when it’s your normal time to get up.
Okay... what happened during this experiment?
Was there any fear of commitment?
Are you beating yourself up for not keeping your commitment?
No you’re not… But why?
Because you didn’t make any commitments.
You did have an intention though.
So now you’re looking at this thing and going… “How did I create the reality that I woke up at 08h00 instead of 07h00?”
Well let’s take a look…
Number one, you kept turning the alarm off.
Hmmm, maybe that’s an answer… it’s habitual.
Number two, you seem to require about 8 hours of sleep and you went to sleep at 00h30 at night and that gave you 7.5 hours.
Well, that could be a problem perhaps...
Alright, let’s do another experiment tonight, either one.
Let’s attempt to get to bed by 23h00, you’ll set your alarm for 07h00 and see what happens.
So you go to bed at 22h45.
At 23h00 you feel wide awake, and you’re watching TV.
It’s 23h30, then it’s 00h00, and now it’s 00h15 and you finally go to bed.
Alarm clock goes off… ‘BAM’, hit the snooze… ‘BAM’, hit the snooze.
What happened?
What happened was you didn’t go to sleep at 23h00 because you weren’t tired.
WHY?
Because you were watching TV.
Okay, let’s look at the process Harv describes here…
Alright, so here’s what you’re going to do.
You’re going to put your alarm clock on the other side of the room.
Let’s try that.
So tonight, your intention is to go to bed at 23h00, get up at 07h00, your alarm clock’s going to be on the other side of the room.
And BOOM! What happens?
Your alarm clock goes off at 07h00… you have to get up, you get out of bed.
It’s a little cold and you’d love to get back into bed but you go… “You know what, I’m already up, I have to go to the bathroom, brush my teeth…”
WOW, that worked pretty good!
So it seems that there’s a combination of going to bed a bit earlier that’s habitual, and putting your alarm clock across the room until you don’t keep on hitting snooze, that worked for you.
Let’s try it again tonight and see if we can do it again.
So there’s no commitments, says Harv.
We’re going to DO what WORKS.
We’re going to GIVE ourselves a WIN.
Do you understand?
And that’s going to take the ‘ego’ out of it.
We’re going to change the game.
Now, how many of you understand what Harv’s talking about?
He’s talking about a life of experience and adventure in watching the pot boil, instead of just knowing that the pot boils.
You’ve got to see what’s going on.
Harv’s Zen Teacher gives a great example in one of her books where she explains that, every morning, you hear the kettle whistling.
And you wake up to the kettle whistling and you go…
“What’s going on? Why’s the kettle whistling? I don’t remember putting the pot on heat. What’s happening? Why’s this going on? Why when I wake up every morning, the pot’s boiling?”
So, you can keep on asking yourself this question for a thousand years, or you can go to sleep during the day, stay up all night and watch the frickin’ pot!
And notice that the burner was set on a program that you didn’t know about, or forgot all about years ago…
And it’s on automatic programming, that’s why the heat’s going on at 03h00 in the morning and waking you up.
"Wow… I didn’t realize that.
After three years of the pot whistling I finally now got to see HOW I DID THIS TO MYSELF."
And that, according to Harv, is the key, and here’s the introspection he urges...
HOW am I doing this to myself?
WHY am I feeling ‘bad’?
Why do I have this fear of commitment?
Is it the commitments?
Well, says Harv, don’t make commitments then!
You’d like to get back in INTEGRITY with yourself and the universe?
Here’s what Harv believes you can do…
Get rid of the idea that you have a fear of commitment.
Number one… FORGIVE yourself because you didn’t know.
You didn’t know that the ‘ego mind’ was playing a trick on you, and playing a trick in ‘its’ way of making you feel ‘bad’ about yourself.
And ‘it’ keeps on playing that same stupid game with you… that fear of commitment game…
“I’m going to make you commit and make you think you’re doing the ‘right’ thing by committing, just so you don’t commit so you can feel like SH!T and I can control you.”
Alright?!
Harv urges you to remember that you don’t have to do what makes you feel ‘bad’.
And you don’t have to experience a fear of commitment once you realize you don’t have to commit.
That’s number one, according to Harv… forgive yourself.
Number two… Make whatever you’re doing EASY… simple.
Forget about the commitment.
If you can’t keep to a commitment, don’t keep making stupid commitments that don’t work for you!
Have an INTENTION… have an EXPERIMENT, he says.
If you’d like something to start changing, start changing your HABIT okay.
Get out of the habit where you live in fear of commitment and replace that habit with something intentional.
But one at a time, very very small ‘commitment’.
So if I’d like to wake up earlier, instead of waking up from 08h00 to 07h00, you know what Harv will do?
Tomorrow he’ll do an experiment and he’ll see what happens.
He’ll set his alarm for 07h55 and he’d put it on the other side of the room.
Okay… that’s going to be his goal.
There’s no fear of commitment there.
His intention is not to wake up at 07h00 because that’s too hard, but he thinks he can probably wake up at 07h55 and if he can’t, he’ll see HOW he’s not doing it by observing the process.
Understand?
Make it SO EASY, because, Harv says that if you think you’re going to wake up tomorrow morning and first thing, work out for 60 minutes despite not being in the habit of doing that, you won’t…
Aim for a workout of 60 seconds, that’s easier, much more doable and it’s better than zero seconds!
Write this down…
Make it STUPID EASY.
One minute is a great start, especially if you haven’t done something for a long time, or ever and have a fear of commitment.
One minute over 7 days is 7 minutes of building a habit and that, according to Harv, is a VICTORY!
And when you get that right, aim for 2 minutes.
“But Harv, it’s going to take forever to get results!”
You know what, it’s going to take forever if you do nothing to get any result!
Make it stupid easy, ridiculous and get an accountability coach or an accountability partner to help keep you on track, suggests Harv…
Someone who will ask you if your experiment of getting up at 07h55 was a success…
Who will stop you from setting a new goal that’s unattainable, and will suggest that your next experiment be to get up at 07h50 instead of 07h00.
STUPID EASY.
And be accountable… that’s number three on Harv’s list.
Number four, and the final point on the matter from Harv, is to… set reminders.
So, Harv insists that the only way to replace a ‘bad’ habit is by doing it over and over again.
Your ‘ego mind’ will say… “Aaah, no big deal…” but if you have daily reminders to do something it becomes ingrained in you.
To improve a habit, it must be with frequency, and it must be daily.
Kick your fear of commitment out the door by choosing not to commit, but choosing to experiment and create small wins so that you can build your confidence and the habit of following through.
To use the same tactics millionaires use to overcome their mindset challenges strategically on their journey to becoming unstoppable in life and in business, do what they do by taming fear and building self-confidence to take the steps necessary for progress.
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Has your Mind ever wondered…
It’s understandable that you have a fear of commitment when your past experiences have been dismal.
But you have to recognize the true reason behind your fear of commitment.
It’s not that there’s something wrong with you.
It’s your conditioned mind that has to be rewired.
Your conditioned mind is fear-based and keeps you in survival mode.
So to stop you from taking risks and taking action ‘out of the ordinary’, it will amplify your fear of commitment by getting you to commit to situations you’re bound to fail with.
If you’re attached to the outcome of a situation, this could feed your fear of commitment.
Why not simply just enjoy the moment, have fun with the experience, and be fully present to live right now?
By having attachment and making, or demanding, impossible promises - because nobody can reasonably predict future events in detail - fear of commitment becomes inevitable and you remain in fear that your expectations will not be met.
Instead of committing to something, do an experiment so that you can strengthen your habit of following through.
If you have a fear of commitment, your conditioned mind is still very much in the driver’s seat of your life.
In the event that you'd like to change this so you can get back in integrity with yourself, it helps to know that almost every other millionaire expert out there, just like T. Harv Eker, also had to learn to master their conditioned mind to achieve and maintain success.
Learn from someone who resonates with you but whatever you do, take the time to learn how to develop a millionaire mindset so you can get from where you are to where you'd like to be.
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