Whether you're studying music, martial arts, dance, a sport, or anything else that requires you to refine, develop, and/or expand a skill, when you feel stuck or you're progress has plateaued, it’s always a good idea to go back to the basics.

Fundamental to our work is the idea that your personality creates your personal reality, and your personality is made up of how you think, act, and feel. Thus, in order for a person to create a new life and a new reality, they have to change their personality. To transform from the old self to a new self requires us to become conscious of all our unconscious thoughts, automatic behaviors, routines, and emotional reactions that we’ve been conditioned into. To become conscious of any of these unconscious programs is the first initation to change.

I was recently speaking with a friend who mentioned she had been struggling, so I asked her to do a simple exercise that I often do when I personally reach a point where I am being challenged by something or I feel like there’s no movement in my life. I simply take out a piece of paper and write down at least two or three thoughts, habits, behaviors, or emotions I want to change. Then in my meditation, I simply review and memorize each one until I become so conscious and aware of them that I don’t go unconscious and let them slip unnoticed or unchecked past my analytical mind. In doing so, I take note of how I am thinking, speaking, acting, and feeling, because it’s those negative or redundant thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that have been keeping me living in the same personality or state of being.

Next, I write down two to three thoughts, behaviors, and emotions I do want to practice becoming. In my meditation, I review those thoughts with firm intention and attention—firing and wiring them into my brain. Then I mentally rehearse how I am going to act in different situations in my life over and over again until I know that I can align my behaviors to those intentions. Finally, I love to teach my body emotionally how I want to feel when my life changes, and I practice opening my heart until I can bring up those feelings on command.

Throughout the day, I review how I am doing and stay conscious. Via awareness combined with repetition, I fire and wire these new thoughts and behaviors into the fabric of my nervous system. In the act of combining the emotions of my future with my intentions, I am conditioning my body into a new future. The more I perform this process, the more I systematically install new circuitry into my brain, while at the same time chemically and genetically conditioning my body to become that new personality.

As a result of the new firing and wiring, the hardware (or the architecture of your brain) becomes more like software, and now the new thought in your head, the new voice, says I can or anything is possible, rather than I can’t or nothing is ever going to change. As you rehearse these new ways of being and think about who you are going to be in your waking day—with your children, how are you going to respond at work, who you will show up as in your relationships, the way you will alter your food intake, how an abundant person would live act, walk, and so forth—the more they become automatic, and it’s that new automatic neurological network that creates a new level of mind. Research now shows that just by performing these mental rehearsals, your brain will look like you've already experienced that reality. That's priming the brain into a new future, instead of revisiting the old circuitry from the past.

When you emotionally embrace your new life before it happens, you literally change your body’s biology. Why? If the environment signals the gene, and the end product of an experience in your environment is an emotion, you are signaling new genes ahead of the environment. Thus, because your body is so objective, it does not know the difference between the real life experience that produces the emotion and the emotion you are creating without the real experience. And since genes make proteins, proteins are responsible for the structure and function of the body, and the expression of proteins is the expression of life—you literally are becoming your future. The side effect of doing this properly is you begin to think, act, and feel differently—and that means you are becoming a different personality who is connected to a new personal reality.

To feel and experience the emotions of your future in the present moment—before that future has occurred—is what most people generally have a hard time with, because most people are waiting for some thing, person, or event to happen in their life to take away that feeling of emptiness, lack, or separation.

In this process, I think another challenge is to remind yourself who you no longer want to be. That's the unlearning process. That's the process of breaking the habit of being yourself. And so it makes sense that before you create a new personality, it’s a good idea to no longer be the old personality, who for the most part, has become a combination of unconscious programmed thoughts, behaviors, and emotions.

If done properly and you have neurologically, biologically, chemically, and genetically become this new person, it stands to reason that when no person, thing, or circumstance can knock you out of balance from your new personality, that's when you start to see the biggest changes and shifts taking place in your life.

If you understand that your personality is intimately connected to a new life and new personal reality, when you're a different person, diseases could naturally change in your body, because you're no longer thinking, acting and feeling the same way. New opportunities should also show up in your life. In addition, people will notice that you're different because you no longer match their memory of you because you’re no longer that person. Now you're in the unknown.

If by chance you fall back into the same old personality or fall from grace, it's not that you failed, it's just that you have to become conscious again, so pause for a moment and change your state of being—again. That’s executing a free will that’s greater than those unconscious programs.

Most people who try to change their personal reality as the same personality can never create a new life, so going back to the fundamental basics in order to change some aspect of yourself is one of the most powerful ways to create a new future and a new life.