Rejection	1. _________
Anger	2. _________
Frustration	3. _________
Loneliness	4. _________
Depression	5. _________
Failure	6. _________
Humiliation	7. _________
Guilt	8. _________

Again, would it be fair to say that all these emotions are states you’d like to avoid having to feel? Of course, because they’re painful. Wouldn’t it also be true to say that, while you want to avoid feeling all of these emotions, some are more painful to you than others? That, in fact, you have a hierarchy of moving-away-from values as well? Which value on the above list would you do the most to avoid having to feel? Rejection, depression, humiliation? The answer to this question will determine your behavior in almost any environment.

Take a moment before we go any further, and write this list out in the above blanks, ranking them from the emotional states you’ll do the most to avoid having to feel, to those you’ll do the least to avoid having to feel.

“I hope we can build a university our football team can be proud of.”

—UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

As you look at your list, what does it tell you? If, for example, you put at the top of your list that the emotion you would do the most to avoid having to feel is humiliation, then can you see how you would consistently avoid entering any situations where you might be judged harshly? If loneliness is the emotion you want to avoid most, it may drive you to be a nurturing person, reaching out to others and trying to give to them on a regular basis so that they’ll want to be with you, and so that you’ll be surrounded by many grateful friends.

THE SOURCE OF SELF-SABOTAGE: VALUES CONFLICTS

Now let’s look at the dynamics created by your values hierarchy. If you selected success, for example, as your top moving-toward value, and rejection as your top moving-away-from value, do you see any possible challenges that this hierarchy might create in your life? I’m here to tell you that a person who’s trying to achieve the pleasure of success without ever experiencing the pain of rejection will never succeed long term. In fact, this person will sabotage himself before he ever truly succeeds on a major scale.

How can I make such a claim? Remember the basic organizing principle we’ve talked about so often here: People will do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure. If you’re truly going to succeed at the highest level in life, don’t you have to be willing to risk rejection? Don’t you have to be willing to experience it? Isn’t it true that even if you’re an honest and sincere person and give your all to others every day, there are still people who will misinterpret your actions and judge you without even having met you? Whether you want to be a writer, a singer, a speaker, or a business person, the potential for rejection is ever-present. Since your brain inherently knows that in order to succeed you have to risk rejection, and it’s already decided that the feelings of rejection are the ultimate levels of pain, it will make the decision that the pleasure of success is not worth the price, and will cause you to sabotage your behavior before you even get in this position!

So often I see people who take huge strides forward, only to mysteriously pull back at the last minute. Or they’ll say or do things that sabotage the very personal, emotional, or physical success they’re pursuing. Invariably the reason is that they have a major values conflict. Part of their brain is saying, “Go for it!” while the other part is saying, “If you do, you’re going to get too much pain.” So they take two steps forward, and one step back.

During the 1988 election year, I used to call this principle the “Gary Hart Syndrome.” Here was a nice guy who truly seemed to care passionately about people and society, but whose value conflicts were played out for all to see. Was Gary Hart a horrible guy? I doubt it. He was just someone who had values in massive conflict. He grew up in a church that taught him he was committing a sin if he even danced. Simultaneously, he was exposed to role models like Warren Beatty. These conflicting desires obviously played a role in his political downfall.

Do you think that a person as intelligent as Gary Hart clearly seemed to be would tell the media, “If you’ve got questions about me, follow me,” and then immediately afterward go visit his mistress? Clearly this was his brain’s way of getting out of the pain of being in a position where he had to play by rules other than his own. You can call this pop psychology if you want, but doesn’t it make sense that if you are being pulled in two different directions, you will not be able to serve both masters? Something has to give. We’ll do whatever’s necessary, consciously or unconsciously, to keep ourselves from having to experience our most intense levels of pain.

We’ve all seen people in the public eye who’ve experienced the pain of values conflicts, but rather than be judgmental, we need to realize that each of us has values conflicts within ourselves. Why? Again, simply because we never set the system up for ourselves. We’ve allowed our environment to shape us, but we can begin to change this now. How? Simply by taking two steps:

Step One is to gain awareness of what your current values are so you understand why you do what you do. What are the emotional states you are moving toward, and what are the states you are moving away from? By reviewing your lists side by side, you’ll be able to have an understanding of the force that’s creating your present and future.

Step Two: You can then make conscious decisions about what values you want to live by in order to shape the quality of life and destiny you truly desire and deserve.

HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR CURRENT VALUES

So let’s get started. You’ve done some sample value lists by ranking the lists I gave you. What you really need to do is start fresh with your own lists. All you have to do to discover your values is answer one simple question: “What’s most important to me in life?” Brainstorm the answer to this question. Is it peace of mind? Impact? Love?

Now put your values in order, from most important to least important. Take a moment and do this now …

When I first created my list of moving-toward values, this is what I came up with, and the order in which they occurred:

As I looked at my list, I understood why I was doing what I was doing. I was such an intense individual; by anybody’s description I was explosive in my approach. I saw it as my passion. My love for my family and my friends and wanting to share it in seminars was clear. My desire was to free people, and I figured that if I freed the individuals around me and contributed to them, I’d feel like I was able to do almost anything. I’d grow and achieve and eventually have fun and be healthy and creative. Knowing my values list helped me stay on track and to live consistently with what was most important to me. For years, I felt a greater sense of congruency in my life.

But I was soon to make another distinction that would transform the quality of my life forever.

CHANGE YOUR VALUES, AND YOU CHANGE YOUR LIFE

After my experience with the infamous Mr. Smith, I went to Fiji to get away from it all. I needed to balance myself emotionally, and gain some perspective and clarity on the situation. Most importantly, I had to decide what I was going to do and how I was going to turn things around. The first night I was there, before I went to sleep, I asked myself a very important question. Instead of “Why did all this happen to me?”, I began to ask a better question: “What is the source of all human behavior? What makes people do what they do?”

When I woke up the following morning at 8 A.M., I felt a frenzy of ideas pouring through me. I grabbed my journal and began to write continuously, sitting in the main cabana. People walked in and out throughout the day as I wrote nonstop from 8 A.M. to 6:30 P.M. My arm was sore; my fingers were numb. I wasn’t just thinking calmly and writing; the ideas were literally exploding through me. From this unstoppable river of ideas, I designed Destiny Technologies™ and a good portion of the science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning.™ When I went back to review my notes, however, I couldn’t read a word!

But the ideas and feelings were anchored within me. I immediately realized the potency of what I had created: a program that could help a person redesign the life priorities of their nervous system, to literally redirect the process of how people make all their decisions about how to think, how to feel, and what to do in virtually every area of their lives!

I began to think about what would happen if, instead of just teaching people what their values were and clarifying them, I actually got people to consciously select or redirect the order and content of their values hierarchy system. What if I took someone whose number-one value was security, and whose number-fifteen value was adventure, and I switched the order, not only intellectually but so that adventure became the new highest priority in their nervous system? What kind of change do you think that might make in someone’s life? A minor one, or a major one?

The answer is obvious. By doing this, you literally change the way a person thinks, feels, and behaves in virtually every area of their life. I couldn’t imagine a more profound shift that a human being could make. In essence, this would be the kind of change that has been described throughout history: a conversion from Saul to Paul, if you will, with the things that a person hated most becoming the things they loved most, and vice versa.

Could this really be done? I decided that the best person to test this out on was, of course, myself. I began to look at my values list. At first I thought, “My values are great! I love my values. After all, this is who I am.” But I had to keep reminding myself that we are not our values. We are much more than our values. These values were not the result of intelligent choices and a master plan. What I had merely accomplished until now was discovering what priorities were conditioned into my life, and I had consciously chosen to live within the system of pain and pleasure that had been programmed into me. But if I were to really design my own life, if I were going to create a set of values that would shape the ultimate destiny I desired, what would they need to be?

“We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth,
Neither mortal nor immortal,
So that with freedom of choice and with honor,
As though the maker and molder of thyself,
Thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou
shalt prefer.
Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul’s
judgment,
To be reborn into the higher forms, which are
divine.”

—GOD’S SPEECH TO ADAM FROM PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA’S
ORATION ON THE DIGNITY OF MAN

I felt unbelievably inspired as I began to realize that in this moment I was about to make decisions that would change the direction of my life forever. I began to look at my values and ask the question, “What do my values need to be in order to create my ultimate destiny, in order to be the best person I could possibly be, in order to have the largest impact in my lifetime?”

I thought, “The values I have right now are helping me,” but then I thought, “What other values would I need to add?” I began to realize that one of the things that wasn’t on my list was intelligence. Certainly I was an intelligent person, but I hadn’t made being intelligent as high a priority as being passionate. In fact, in my passion I’d made some pretty stupid choices—including who my CEO was going to be!

I began to realize that unless I made intelligence a conscious priority of my nervous system (i.e., unless I learned to take a moment or two in advance to consciously evaluate the consequences of my decision making), I would continuously fail to achieve my deepest desires. There was now no question that intelligence needed to be placed high on my list. I then discovered an additional series of values to add, and I decided where they needed to be placed in my hierarchy.

Then I asked a question I had never asked before: “What values should I eliminate from my list in order to achieve my ultimate destiny?” I began to realize that by constantly focusing on how to be free, I was missing out on the freedom I already had. I realized that there was no way I could be any more free than I was in this moment. Maybe my feelings would be different if I lived in a country where the choices I have here don’t exist, but for me, there is no way to have any more freedom than I have today. So I decided to drop it from my list and not to make it an issue anymore. It was amazing the freedom I felt by getting freedom off my list!

Next, I began to evaluate each value individually as to its true merit. I began to ask, “What benefit do I get by having this value in this position on my hierarchy?” I looked first at passion and asked, “What benefit do I get by having passion here?” I thought, “It gives me drive and excitement and energy and the power to impact people in positive ways. It makes my life juicy.”

Then I asked a question that kind of scared me, a question I had never asked before: “What could having passion at the top of my list cost me?” In that moment, the answer became obvious. I had just recently returned from conducting a seminar in Denver, where for the first time in years I had felt unbelievably ill. Health was always on my values list; it was important. But it wasn’t very high up on the list.

By the way, if you have anything on your values list, you think it’s important, because there are hundreds of things that could have been on the list that aren’t. But my idea of health was to eat right. I wasn’t exercising, and I certainly wasn’t getting enough rest. Finally, my body was giving out under my constant demands for unlimited energy. I began to remember that in that day, when I felt like I had no health, I pushed myself and did the seminars in spite of it all. But I didn’t feel passionate, I didn’t feel loving, I didn’t feel like I could have impact. I began to realize that by having passion as the highest value on my list, it would cause me to burn out and therefore potentially cost me the very destiny I was pursuing.

I finally asked the last question: “In what order do my values need to be to achieve my ultimate destiny?” Not “What’s important to me?” but “What do they need to be?” As I began to do this process, my list began to evolve until it looked like this:

These shifts may look subtle to you, but they were profound in their emotional impact upon me. Just creating this new list of life priorities created some intense fear and struggle at times. Probably the most difficult one was changing the order that I had between achievement and happiness. If you recall, on my previous list I had to feel passion, love, freedom, contribution, being able, growth, and achievement, and a lower priority was feeling happy. I began to think, “What would happen if I made happiness a priority? What would happen if I made that a higher priority than achieving?”

Quite honestly, this was another question that created fear in me. I thought, “If it’s easy for me to feel happy, maybe I’ll lose my drive. Maybe I won’t want to achieve. Maybe I won’t want to have the same impact. Maybe I won’t contribute as much to people.” After all, I linked my identity to my capacity to passionately make a difference. It took me almost two hours to make the decision to “go for the gusto” and decide to make myself happy. How ridiculous!

But I can tell you, having worked with tens of thousands of people in Date With Destiny, of whom the majority of attendees would be considered achievers, this is one of the biggest fears they have. They generally fear that they’ll lose their power or drive if they feel happy first. I’m here to tell you that what happened in my life is that instead of achieving to be happy, I began to happily achieve, and the difference in the quality of my life is so profound that it is beyond verbal description. I didn’t lose my drive—quite conversely, I felt so good, I wanted to do even more!

When my list was complete, I felt an emotion that I could not ever remember feeling previously: a sense of calm. I felt a sense of certainty I hadn’t experienced before, because I now knew that every part of me was going to be pulled in the direction of my dreams. I was no longer in a tug-of-war with myself. By no longer striving constantly for freedom, I could have even more intimacy and love—I could feel even more free. I would happily achieve now. I would be healthy and vital and intelligent. With the decision to change my life’s priorities, I could immediately feel the changes in my physical body.

I also then began to realize that there were certain emotional states that I must avoid indulging in if I was going to succeed. One of those clearly was worry. I found myself emotionally and physically racked by the pain of trying to figure out how I was going to keep my company going and keep the doors open. At the time, I believed that if I worried, maybe I’d be more motivated, but what I found was that worry made me less resourceful. So I decided I couldn’t worry anymore. I could have legitimate concern, but more importantly, I could focus on taking the actions that would make things work. Once I decided worry would destroy my destiny, I began to avoid experiencing it at all costs. Clearly, this became an emotion too painful to indulge in. I began to construct a moving-away-from list.

I then flew back to the United States, having designed my own destiny. Boy, were my friends and associates in for a surprise! On my first day back at the office, people started approaching me to ask, “What’s happened to you? You seem so different! You look so relaxed.” I began to unload my entire new technology for hours at a time on each individual until finally I realized I needed to take it, refine it, and put it in a seminar. That’s how Date With Destiny was born.

I wrote this book out of my desire to spread the Destiny-NAC technology to as many people as possible. I hope you’ll use it now. Remember, we truly can design who we become.

“Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.”

—SOCRATES

So how can you now take control of this third element of your Master System known as values? Take the following two simple steps:

Step 1. Find out what your current values are, and rank them in order of importance. This will give you insight into what you want to experience most—your moving-toward values—and what you want to avoid most in your life—your moving-away-from values. It will give you an understanding of why you do what you do. It will also offer you the opportunity, if you’d like, to consistently experience more pleasure in your life by understanding the pain-pleasure system that’s already built within you.

Step 2. If you’re willing to take the bull by the horns, you have an opportunity to redirect your destiny. Ask yourself a new question: “What do my values need to be in order to achieve the destiny I desire and deserve?” Brainstorm out a list. Put them in order. See which values you might get rid of and which values you might add in order to create the quality of life you truly want.

You may be wondering, “What the heck is my destiny, anyway?” If you’re stumbling over this, go back to Chapter 12. In it, I asked you what type of person you’d have to be in order to achieve all that you want. In order to be that person, what would your values need to be? What values would you need to add or eliminate?

For example, how would your capacity to deal with fear, frustration, and rejection be affected by deciding to place courage high upon your moving-toward value list? Or, what might be the impact of giving playfulness a higher priority? Might it enable you to have more fun in life, possibly enjoy all experiences as they come, grow closer to your children and be more to them than just a “provider”?

So what have you accomplished by creating your new list of values? Isn’t it just a bunch of words on a piece of paper? The answer is yes—if you don’t condition yourself to use them as your new compass. If you do, however, they become the solid foundation of every decision you will make. It is difficult to give you in this book the full range of conditioning tools that I use in seminars, but let me remind you of the power of leverage. Many people who have attended Date With Destiny post their values prominently at work, at home, anywhere they will be seen by people who will hold them to this new, higher standard.

So use the same kind of leverage to strengthen your commitment to your new values. The next time you find yourself yelling at the kids, maybe someone who loves you will walk by and remind you, “Isn’t compassion number one on your list?”

“I touch the future; I teach.”

—ANONYMOUS

Watching people take control of their value hierarchies in Date With Destiny is so rewarding because of the huge contrast between what they’re like Friday morning and who they become by Sunday night. As transformations occur, magic happens. I remember one man who was dragged by his wife to the program and didn’t want to be there. As we started talking about values and the possibility of making changes in that area, he insisted, “I don’t need to change any of my values.” His number-one value, by the way, was freedom! He balked at being “forced” to change anything in his life that he didn’t want to; it became a control issue as he steadfastly refused to make any changes.

Finally I said to him, “I know you don’t have to make any changes. I also know that you’re free. So I’m sure you’re free to add a few values. What would be some values that might be useful for you to add in order for you to increase the quality of your life and maybe even impact your ultimate destiny?” After several moments of thought he said, “Well, maybe flexibility might be a good one to add.” The audience cracked up. “That’s great,” I said. “Where would you put flexibility on your list?” We started from the bottom and moved up, and it ended up being number four on his list.

The moment this man decided that was indeed the right place for his new value, another participant—a chiropractor—who was sitting behind him suddenly piped up, “Did you see that?” It was so obvious that several other people in the room had also noticed it. This man’s physiology had literally begun to change before our eyes. As he had adopted flexibility in his value system, his whole posture seemed to loosen up and become more relaxed. He sat in his chair differently, and seemed to be breathing with a lot more freedom. Even his expression changed as the muscles in his face released their tension. With flexibility as a new priority, his nervous system had obviously gotten the message.

Then I asked, “Are there any other values you might want to add to your list?” The man thought a moment and said, “Maybe … forgiveness?” with a question in his voice. Again the group broke up laughing. This was a man who had started out bristling with hostility and tension, and here he was, making a 180-degree shift. As he figured out where to put forgiveness into his values hierarchy, it was gratifying to see the further changes that took place in his demeanor, breathing, facial muscles, and gestures. Throughout the rest of the weekend people were amazed by the dramatic changes that had been wrought with two simple additions to his values. He talked to people with more softness in his voice, his face seemed to “open up” with more expression, and he really seemed to connect with people in ways he hadn’t before. Now, three years later, freedom is not even on his list, and the intimacy between his wife and him has expanded immeasurably.

“We are what we repeatedly do.”

—ARISTOTLE

Life has a way of testing our commitment to our values. My test came as I was boarding an airplane … and lo and behold, there stood the illustrious Mr. Smith. I felt the anger and animosity well up inside me with an intensity I hadn’t experienced for over two years, primarily because I hadn’t seen him. He scurried onto the plane and seated himself in the rear. As I sat in my seat, knowing he was behind me, questions raced through my head: What should I do? Should I confront him? Should I just walk up next to him, stand there and stare at him, and make him squirm? I’m not proud of these questions, but since honesty is one of my highest values, I’m giving it to you straight.

In a moment, though, my actions were guided by my values. Why? I opened my notebook to write something down, and there were my values hierarchies, placed at the front of my book. At the top it said, “What’s most important to me in life is to be loving and warm.” Hmmmm. “Be intelligent.” Hmmmm. “Be cheerful. Be honest. Be passionate. Be grateful. Have fun. Make a difference …” Well, as you can imagine, my state changed pretty radically. Obviously my pattern had been broken. A reminder of who I really am and what I’m really about was staring me in the face. What to do became obvious.

When the plane landed, I approached him with sincerity and warmth and told him that while by no means did I appreciate or approve of his past behavior, I had decided to no longer hold a ferocious level of resentment toward him, and that I actually wished him well. The last memory I have was his stunned face as I turned and walked away. Wow! What an emotional hit! Even in a stressful environment, I’d lived by what I believed was right. Nothing in life can match the fulfillment of knowing you’ve done what you truly believe is the right thing.

Give yourself the gift of taking hold of this force that shapes your destiny. Make certain that you take the time to do the exercises that can clarify the priorities of your life.

Is it possible to have values and not feel that you’re living them? You can have a great system of values that gives your life a magnificent direction but still feel unhappy, unless you understand the power of …

* Follett, Ken, On Wings of Eagles, New York: Penguin, 1989.