Mental toughness is about taking mental and emotion control of your life, and it begins with self discovery. The enemy of world class success is self delusion. For a vast array of reasons, human beings are pre-disposed to delusional thinking. This is NOT for YOU! The more aware you are of your habitual thoughts the easier it is to capitalize on your empowering habits and eliminate the habits holding you back. This post poses a critical thinking question no one has probably ever asked you. This is the stuff we all should have learned in school, because knowing how you think is your ticket to the big time. (whatever that means for you)
While the middle class is forever focused on fixing their weaknesses, the world class focuses on building their strengths.
What are your strengths and weaknesses? Is your answer based on objective reality or self delusion? Listen to this post and see what you think. As always, I look forward to your comments. Steve Siebold ( 7:00 )
10 thoughts on “Are you suffering from conscious or unconscious delusion?”
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sorry mate, i put this reply on the wrong blog entry!
How dare you attack the ‘delusions’ of the middle class! Calling them liars! What are you trying to do… Save them from an EARLY GRAVE??? How will McDonalds survive without people lying to themselves? Jobs will be lost! The economy will get worse on the back of the LENTIL BURGER! Fit happy people prowling the streets could mean a drop in crime! Police will lose their jobs in droves! More sex means more kids! The schools can’t cope as it is, resulting in more unemployed! And what about the owner of the local donut shop, Slavos Gianopolus! He’s a wonderful man who makes a mean cream-custard tart! His future would be ruined! What do you expect him to do… grow soya beans!!!
We hear about that courageous man in Australia who risks his life to save a baby kangaroo from the surf and the sharks and we get interrupted by this dose of reality! What is the world coming to?? This is very typical of a man who has for decades done everything he can to discover what makes world-class people lead healthy, happy lives! And who has run the gauntlet of middle-class consciousness himself! Your very real ‘non-delusional’ message can only result in people living longer, happier lives contributing significantly to their community, the economy, and morality as a whole. You nasty piece of work!
Love the book though! Really!
If I read you as clearly as you read me, you are always trying to improve yourself and it gets down to a day to day if not moment to moment recognition of a highly personal focused awareness and evaluation. It’s directed toward external goals and dreams you want to make clear to accomplish as you expect your own learning adventure to uncover things yet to be recognized as more worthy goals.
Life’s purpose is to act, to achieve things, and if it’s in your heart and a direction you want to take to improve the world around you.
Reading 171 MTS got inside my head and emotions in a way that I had never experienced – and I had decades of self analysis and study before. From reading your book at a time when I was getting into lots of other resources one transforming thing began to happen: I was challenged as I had never been challenged to look at my vision and beliefs, at my motivation – at my life – to see what performance level I was at, had been at, and where I wanted to be.
What I recognized was a kind of drifting in and out of a poverty mind set to a middle class mind set to a world class mind set from my teens to the present. That blew my mind BUT it blew my mind that while I had been working toward greater accomplishments what was missing was consistency. I was not living an all around life of world class performance and I knew I wanted to lock myself into that for the rest of my life – it came at the perfect time.
I appreciate you calling me one of the great ones and that definition has to include a great and joyful effort at facing failures and fears and delusions and sometimes the immediate “I don’t want to do them” things which you know world class performers and world class performers to be have to face.
Continue inspiring people Steve – one of the things I like about you is the honesty and candid way you say things and talk about things you’ve personally had to over come and face up to – it’s like being on the playground with a buddy and you just hang out and talk, do crazy things bouncing on bars and swinging around – for some reason that’s the kind of conversation I hear from reading and hearing you.
The best of 2009 to you.
Thank you Steve,
Your considerate and inclusive response speaks to immense greatness. You are right in so many ways and the fact of your perspective gained from years of deliberate caring is undeniable.
When delusion (which is of the mind) has been absent for me, I have been awestruck by what has come of my recent realization of completeness. While I have experienced explosive personal growth, I am also making ever increasing contributions at work, at home, and with others. I cannot describe these willing contributions as hard work. My sategy is to be fully present to the situation at hand and to do what is best.. I have an awareness that this approach is consistent with the thought processes of some of the greatest who ever walked the earth.
Perhaps this acceptance / completeness realization is innate to you or others reading this (or it is easily availble to you to be with). For me, it has been a great ride of what feels like ‘grace’. If it keeps expanding as it has done so far, may this be a permanent delusion of pure awareness.
I Thank You for being about assisting people in being their best selves. I wish you unlimited success in the class of this world and beyond.
Namaste,
Brett
I never thought deeply and clearly about mental delusions before reading 171 MTS – AND I never personalized looking at myself in such detail and persistence – so thanks for that, Steve. I knew the concepts in other terms, had applied them to others and myself, but not with the same sustained practice nor intensity.
I uncovered one conscious delusion after reading/listening to your challenge and today am going to do what I’ve postponed doing for many months.
More than that – it’s a business action I will take today – I uncovered the WHY to not doing what I should have done months ago which is neither deep nor self defeating: it’s just being too lazy to do it with a habit I’m still not fully over which is ignoring things I need to do to reach goals I have when they are simple things BUT I just wanna lay back and chill and do nothing. I’m disgusting – Shirley has been right all along.
As far as unconscious delusions if there are any I haven’t uncovered them all yet. For the past three years I’ve been on the most persistent self discovery program of my life – your book and writing had a lot to do with it – and it’s been revealing, transformative, and sustaining.
“The more aware you are of your habitual thoughts the easier it is to capitalize on your empowering habits and eliminate the habits holding you back.” — Steve
THAT statement is gold.
The best of success in 2009 to you.
Mike
Mike,
After reading your comments to many posts on this blog, it’s obvious you are one of the great ones.
I have always found it fascinating that the best performers are always the people trying to improve, while the mediocre performers rest on their results. Thanks for your ongoing participation and comments on this blog. I always look forward to what you’re going to say.
Steve Siebold
I thought it was interesting that the blog text says that middle class people fix weaknesses, that world class people build on stengths , and then proceeds to attempt to fix a weakness of suffering from delusion.
I made a discovery recently that i think could be transformative: be complete within yourself and then do what naturally flows from this. Fear, incompleteness, and negativity are all illusions that can be released when you perspective moves from ego to awareness. Constructive and harmonious thoughts are then allowed which leads to actually building on strengths while nullifying weaknesses. I have recently bought and read much of your “177 Mental Toughness Secrets” book, it entirely comes from the ego, in my reading thus far. It codifies and describes the behaviours that come naturally to those who are powerful (rather than wilful or forceful) since they are operating from completeness. The answer to how to achieve moving to an ego-less perspective is available in any spiritual tradition, but is most succintly described by the Zen statement “Let mind choose no-mind”. It is so simple that most, including me for many years, could not take this in. Once no-mind became a meditation for me, i found it easy and natural to see and not add power to negative thoughts, this being different from resisting them.
I wish everyone a stable connection to their underlying awareness, and the love, bliss, peace, acceptance and compassion that will flow from this ego choice.
Steve, if you would like to discuss this further, please email me.
Brett
Brett,
Thanks for your email. Being aware of delusion is a strength, not a weakness. Much of what you say later in your comment regarding spirituality is true, but has little to do with this post. After interviewing, coaching and working with world class performers for 25 years I can tell you you’re wrong about their success and power coming naturally. These are the hardest working, strategic people on the planet. Dismissing their success as something that comes naturally is a mental trap of middle class thinking, and I encounter it with audiences every time I give a speech. It’s a self-delusion that makes people feel better about themselves and emotionally absolves them of the responsibility of living up to their own potential. I’m not saying this is you, because I don’t know you, but it’s a very common response among people who are struggling, especially financially. As far as your comment about my book , 177 mental toughness secrets of the world class, being written in an ego based consciousness, I don’t think you actually understand the concept. World class success is an extremely rare thing, and very few people on the planet understand the level of awareness it requires to acheive it. You can label a statement like this as ego based, but it’s actually not. It’s absolute fact. I didn’t read this in a book, I’ve lived and breathed it for 25 years. But whatever you decide to label my book or any other book, follow the thought processes, habits and philosophies of the great ones and you have a legitimate shot at becoming one of them. Let go of what you think you know about the mind to allow a higher level of awareness to emerge. That’s what spirituality is REALLY about. And if you’re completely satisfied with where you are, ignore all of this and keep thinking the way you’re thinking. Thats what most people do, and thats why there are so few world class performers.
Thanks again for your commment. I look forward to hearing more from you!
All the best,
Steve Siebold
Interesting post.
Got me to thinking about Oprah and conscious delusion. Maybe it goes beyond that. I know it does with me, also a compulsive eater, like Oprah. What happens with me, and maybe with Oprah, is that at the moment of decision – whether or not to eat unneeded food– if the delusion that eating will really solve/help/heal anything beyond nutritional needs kicks in at that moment of decision – an amnesia response occurs and the person no longer is aware of much else than reaching for and ingesting the food — and THEN the amnesia wears off and the person goes into remorse, similar cycles to follow.
I believe the conscious delusion and amnesia can, with work, permanently shift into a conscious awareness, and though lifelong unhealthy eating habits are challenging to overcome, YES! It can be done.
I hope Oprah and anyone suffering from obesity has a chance to read and study the Die Fat Get Tough book. Like a top writer said, it’s “a disturbing masterpiece.” And boy, it works.