WHY YOU SHOULD 

(AND HOW TO)

READ THIS BOOK

“Think you can or think you can’t; either way you’ll be right.”

― Henry Ford

I’M GLAD YOU’RE HERE 

Going through life believing you are not worthy or not enough doesn’t work well, as this negative belief can show up in every area of your life, stealing your happiness, eroding your confidence and blurring your self-image. You or someone else may ask you: “Who do you have to be to get what you want?”

I struggled with this question for a long time myself, thinking that I didn’t really know how to describe who I was at the time, let alone who I needed to be. Eventually, I realized that “who I am” is defined by my Inner Beliefs – in other words, by what I know to be true for me. That’s why this book is about an Inner Journey.

Sally’s Story

Sally is a 48-year-old administrative assistant in a busy law firm. She is also a wife and mother, and participates in the PTA. Sally was miserable most days – though she put on a great face. She felt stuck in life. No matter how many reruns of Oprah she watched, no matter how many positive affirmations she read aloud, Sally felt unhappy and depressed. Most days, she felt overwhelmed by life and grossly  underappreciated. She was overweight and hated that she couldn’t seem to manage her own body. Her doctor had been warning her that her health was at risk, and she was showing signs of health problems ahead. She didn’t trust her decisions or her intuition. She held grudges and had a real problem forgiving anyone who complicated her life. She procrastinated to the point where she often felt trapped and forced into choices rather than making her own choices. She was sick and tired of putting everybody else first but afraid to do anything different. She loved her family (and still does), but she hated the way putting them first meant she didn’t get what she needed. Sally sacrificed so much for her husband and kids, and that left her with resentment towards them. She couldn’t help but wonder what happened to her. Sally was once a beautiful, fit, healthy, confident cheerleader and an A-student. She had many passions and hobbies that kept her motivated. Ordinary life events and a few unproductive beliefs hidden away in her inner mind took her from the brilliant, outgoing, and driven woman she was to feel like an ugly, unwanted doormat. She believed she was not worthy and not good enough.

Can Sally be fixed? Is Sally even “broken?” 

The answer to that question does not depend on what you believe nor on what I believe – all that matters is what Sally believes! Revisit the quotation from Henry Ford at the start of this chapter: if Sally believes that she is ‘‘broken’ (or ‘not worthy’ or ‘not good enough’), then that’s how she will live her life from minute to minute and year to year. She will never question or even explore those limiting beliefs hidden away in her inner mind. She may not like the results, but as long as she maintains the belief that she’s broken, nothing will change. Sally would like a better life for herself, but the core obstacle keeping her from it is that she didn’t know how to change her beliefs. She wasn’t even sure that changing beliefs was possible! Our beliefs are what create the life we live. This book is all about guiding Sally (and you) to change the beliefs you both need so you can create the life you want.

In my professional experience, most people (possibly even all people) have or have had beliefs that blocked them from what they want. You may be able to relate to some of what Sally was feeling. Feeling not good enough or feeling unworthy can lead to an incredible range of symptoms in multiple areas of your life. Unless you’re seriously happy and satisfied that you’re living the life you want in all areas, you have beliefs that are blocking you from what you desire.

• What is your life like now? What’s great about it? What sucks?
• What do you want? Do you want more? Do you want different?
• Who do you have to BE to get what you want?
• What do you have to believe that you do NOT believe now to BE that person?
• What will your life look like when you are the person you need to be to get what you want?
• What beliefs do you have now that get in your way?

These important questions and more will be answered in the upcoming chapters.

Is THIS book right for YOU?

You’re not satisfied with things as they are now. If you’re willing to put in the time and energy to change, this is the book for you. There is no magical pill. It DOES take effort – the difference with this book is that the steps are clearly spelled out and broken down into small successes that make you the winner.

I wrote this book because I wanted to help people like Sally become their best selves. By getting clear on who you want to be and methodically, systematically shifting your deep inner beliefs to become that person who:

• feels good enough,
• makes their own choices and owns them instead of procrastinating and feeling trapped;
• listens to and trusts their intuition;
• appreciates that there are times when putting themselves first is a necessary part of caring for loved ones;
• knows better than to lock anger inside;
• is strong enough to forgive;
• isn’t afraid of being vulnerable because they know that they’re beyond good enough.

The BEYOND Good Enough System has created deep, life-changing transformation for my clients. I want that for you as well! It took me decades of working with my clients’ beliefs, my family’s beliefs, and my own beliefs to appreciate how universal this sense of “not good enough” is and the devastating impacts this one seemingly simple belief can have on people’s lives. Here are a few of the consequences of believing you’re not good enough:

Focusing on What’s Wrong or Missing

Focusing on what’s wrong or missing is easy. We live in a messy world and, if you look for it, you will always find something wrong or missing. This book is about getting what you want. If you want to be able to get what you want, you have to know what you want and focus on that. Much like the difference between trying to drive a car while looking out the back window versus driving while looking out the front window.

Believing You Need to be Perfect

Perfection is impossible. Focusing on perfection is the lowest possible standard you can set; because it’s impossible to be perfect, you are guaranteed to fail. Most of the drive for perfection starts with feeling not good enough to win Mommy or Daddy’s love.

Giving is Easy – Receiving is Hard

If I believe I’m not good enough, one of the first things that goes is my ability to self-care. Self-care is really giving to myself and receiving from myself. I’m OK with the giving part, but because I’m not good enough, I’m not worthy to receive pampering or a relaxing bath or, or, or <fill in what you feel guilty about doing for yourself>.

If I believe I’m not good enough and someone else offers me something with no strings attached, that ‘not good enough’ belief insists that there ARE strings, that there is some sort of obligation connected and I cannot accept gracefully. Even if the belief is proven wrong by the passage of time and there are no strings, I still will feel guilty about having accepted. The fact that, by rejecting a gift, I deny the other person the joy of giving is irrelevant if I believe I’m not good enough. I call this keeping score. The belief that giving is impossible without creating an obligation and receiving is impossible without accepting an obligation is what creates this bizarre belief that keeping score is part of relating to people. The guilt around self-care often comes from a belief that those closest to us are keeping score. And if they aren’t keeping score, we (strangely) choose to keep it for them.

If I’m not good enough to take good care of myself, my weight, my health, my finances, and my relationships will all suffer. In the context of a relationship, the consequences are clear. Keeping score in a relationship is almost always fatal. He did this for me (or to me), so I must do that for him (or to him). Love is about caring and supporting no matter what. When we keep score, it’s as though we forget the “no matter what” part.

If some of this describes your beliefs, you will benefit from this book.

Negative Beliefs about Money

Negative stories around money are popular. Example: rich people are evil, and in order to become rich, you have to become a bad person. But this is just a story you tell yourself. Money is not inherently evil. Money is a tool and a measurement. You can shift this mindset with the tools you learn in this book. If you’re not good enough, you are not worthy enough to earn money, to manage money, to invest money, to enjoy money.

It’s Not My Fault

Some people feel like victims in their lives. They are not good enough and, therefore, need someone to blame for their circumstances. Because they’re unable to own their own choices, they will typically procrastinate on making a decision until the external world forces them to pick one. Naturally, they have somebody to blame if it doesn’t work out. What is important to recognize here is you always have a choice. Once you decide, own your choice, and guilt and shame will go away.

Anger and Difficulty Forgiving

The Buddha is quoted as saying “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Feeling not good enough makes a person far more likely to feel victimized. Holding onto anger is an easy choice when we feel forced into something. It is rarely useful but remarkably common. If we hold onto anger, it is all too easy to hold a grudge or have great difficulty forgiving someone for some wrong they may have done in the past.

When someone believes they are good enough (or beyond), it’s easy to let go of anger. Remember – forgiveness is not about them; it’s about you. Imagine that the wrong you don’t want to forgive is a heavy rock at the end of a rope, and you are dragging it through life with you, slowing you down. You can continue to drag the rock, or you can let go of the rope. The rock doesn’t disappear if you let go of the rope; the wrong done in your past doesn’t disappear. All that changes is that you decide to no longer allow the past to interfere with your present. Forgiveness doesn’t condone the actions in the past. Forgiveness is what allows you to get on with your present and create your future.

Self-Pity and Living with Regret

Wallowing in self-pity is a popular sport for people who don’t believe they’re good enough. Regret is another form of self-pity. Both self-pity and regret have you looking backwards. It’s like trying to drive a car facing where you’re coming from – much like focusing on what’s wrong. But feeling good enough, is like driving your car facing the direction you are heading. You can be happy about your accomplishments back there, celebrate them, and move on. And if there were lessons learned, use them to guide and control your future, and influence your present. But always look forward.

Blocks Around Success

People who have issues around success often feel afraid to put themselves out there. They are, in a sense playing small in the world. They do this because they do not feel good enough. They are afraid of what others will think and say about them.

Change Your Beliefs – Change Your Life

Believe it or not, a “belief” is a thought! Thoughts can be changed. Beliefs can be changed. Beliefs are not immutable, just as mindset, boundaries, and self-limiting stories you tell about yourself can be changed. Society and culture teach us that we are stuck – but we are not. There is not “only one way” to do something. We ALWAYS have choices.

Some of our beliefs have a negative function – we call them “limiting beliefs.” Limiting beliefs stop us from doing things or believing things. They hold us down and hold us back. When you start with the Beyond Good Enough System, you may run into a really big limiting belief: the belief that some beliefs can’t be changed. They can be changed. You may want to include this in your desire web as one of your needed beliefs: e.g. I can easily change my beliefs.

It is possible to feel threatened by the idea that beliefs can be easily changed. This book talks a lot about the idea that “who you are” is determined by what beliefs you hold. The work in the book is directed to helping you shift your beliefs so you can be the person you need to be to be capable of fulfilling your desires. If you take these ideas too literally, it may seem like changing your core beliefs easily and casually could become an existential threat to your very identity!

If this concerns you, here is a different way to look at what’s going on: rather than thinking of changing beliefs that make up your one and only identity, think of designing a persona (an aspect of yourself which exists over and above your identity) that is capable of fulfilling your desires. Creating a new persona only adds to your flexibility – it cannot take anything away. Most children are adept at creating personas by the age of three. Once the persona is created, you can simply ‘put it on’ like you would put on a change of clothes and use it whenever that persona will best meet your needs.

Change Your Neurology for Lasting, Effecting Change

Like all of us, you tell yourself stories about who you are and what you are capable of. These stories are a way of recognizing and talking about our beliefs. Likewise, emotions are an intellectual label that your prefrontal cortex assigns to a set of deep visceral sensations in your body. But the actual building blocks of emotion are the physical sensations you experience in your body, such as a chill running up and down your spine, a warmth that comes to your cheeks, or your heart beating out of your chest. Even if you don’t know how to do it now, the BEYOND Good Enough System will teach you to access those bodily sensations, make peace with them, change them, move them around, and amplify them when you want to.

How to read (and use) this book

Knowledge is great. It gives us a way to score social points at parties. It helps us navigate the technical complexities of life. What it does NOT do  give us is results. It does not cause transformation. Practice and repetition are what create results and transformation.

When you implement what you learn here (by doing the exercises), you will progress. When you do the tasks and keep doing them at least until you achieve basic mastery, you will create transformation in your life.

Much of the teaching in this book is contained in the stories. These stories are there to inform you, to guide you, to stimulate your imagination. Take care to read each story several times. If parts of the story seem to resonate with your life, think about how. Imagine what your life would be like if you had the challenges that each of my clients had. Imagine what it would have been like for that client to begin to understand what was possible for them and what it would have been like for them as they achieved their successes and breakthroughs. Think about what you might tell them if you were guiding them. Think about what each of them needed to believe to become the man or woman who was capable of fulfilling their desires. The beliefs can be deceptive – and it’s always easier to tell someone else what they need to believe than it is to know for ourselves.

The Beyond Good Enough System is a roadmap on how to transform your life in powerful ways. Using the roadmap, you’ll learn three simple pillars – desire, speak, and amplify.

How do we get started?

We start with Desire. A little background will make it obvious WHY we start with Desire. A choice that we make thousands of times each day is what to focus our attention on. You may have noticed that sometimes you focus on what’s missing or what’s wrong, and other times you focus on what you want or what you have or what you are grateful for. What we focus on is what we are paying attention to now. The way attention works is that we pay attention to something by ignoring everything else. The neurons in your brain suppress signals that relate to things that you are NOT paying attention to. Which end of the spectrum (of avoid versus desire) we spend more time in has a huge impact on our lives.

When you’re focusing on what’s wrong, there are functions in your brain that are busy suppressing signals that relate to what’s right, to what you can be grateful for, to what you want, to your future. When you are focusing on what you don’t want (i.e., what you want to avoid), your brain gets busy suppressing signals that relate to what you DO want. The lesson here is that until we shift our focus away from what we don’t want and towards what we DO want, we can’t address any of the more mundane obstacles to being “good enough.”

The reason we start with Desire on our Inner Journey to being good enough (and beyond) is that we want to make sure we are focused on what we want rather than what we don’t want. Getting clear on Desire points us in the direction we need to go.

Pillar One: Desire and Beliefs

covered in Chapters Two and Three

• Choose a life area.
• Identify desires related to that life area.
• Identify the beliefs you MUST hold (that you do not already hold) in order to be the person who is capable of fulfilling those desires. Building and embracing these beliefs is the Inner Journey the subtitle speaks of.
• Each desire in your desire web must be stated in the positive, must be under your control, and you must be clear about how you will know when you have fulfilled each one.

The whole Beyond Good Enough System starts with choosing a life area you want to make changes in. For example – relationships, business/career, health, money, self-esteem, etc. Once we have narrowed things down to one area in your life, we ask the simple question, “What do you want?” The next question is, “who do you have to be to make that happen?” In other words, what beliefs must you hold that you do not hold now in order to be the person who is capable of fulfilling those desires?

We start with the desire and gradually work out the beliefs that are required

Examples:

• “I want to be good enough” calls for believing that “I am good enough.”
• “I want to be able to make a commitment to myself and keep it” calls for believing that “I keep commitments” and “I honour my commitments.”
• “I want to believe that I can trust myself to make money decisions” calls for “I am worthy,” “I trust my ability to make good decisions,” “Money decisions are just like other decisions.”

Notice that all these examples call for focusing on what we want rather than what we don’t want.

We spend time discovering deeper desires – e.g. “I want to be present” leads to the question, “what does being present DO for you?” The deeper you explore, the more clarity you have around what you want.

1. It may be that you’ll believe in yourself enough to trust your intuition.
2. It may be that you feel good enough about yourself to be comfortable being vulnerable with a romantic partner.
3. It may be that you believe in what you’re doing so deeply that you’re comfortable taking the time to really listen to your customer (thus allowing them to feel heard and be more open to buying your product or services).
4. It may be that you'll have a clear enough business vision that you can effortlessly evaluate options against that vision. This makes decision-making simply rather than overwhelming. I.e. as the book's subtitle says, from Overwhelm to Owning It.

This desire discovery process continues as we create a web of interrelated desires which, taken together, present a reasonably complete picture of what you want.

The desire pillar itself has four legs:

1. Each desire in the desire web is clearly articulated, stated in the positive and is within your control. To keep things manageable, we limit this list to five or six.
2. Your clear understanding of how you will know that each particular desire has been fulfilled.
3. A list of the beliefs (that you don’t hold now) that you MUST hold in order to be the person who can fulfill those desires.
4. An image of how your life will be different (and presumably better) once you have these beliefs and this collection of desires has been fulfilled.

There are subtle challenges to desires that we create to put in our own way. We believe we need permission to believe something. It may seem odd at first that we need permission to believe something – but a little practice will make it clear that giving ourselves permission to believe what we need to believe is the bulk of the work in the Beyond Good Enough System. It often feels like we need permission from parents, from authority figures, from our peer group, from our culture, but permission from ourselves is what’s really needed.

We must believe that the belief is possible for us, that it applies to us. We often have thoughts like “<Famous person X> is comfortable giving speeches to large audiences, but Ill never be able to do that – even though I want to.”

We must be able to speak the words of our desire out loud. My clinical experience makes it clear that this is often extremely difficult. The charge around speaking our truth is the foundation for the second pillar – Speak Your Truth. When we’re clear about what the desire is, how we know it’s been fulfilled and what it will change in our lives, it’s usually easy to speak.

Pillar Two: Speak Your Truth

covered in Chapter Five

A traditional approach to shifting your beliefs is via affirmations. An affirmation is a statement that you want to be true for yourself. Unfortunately, affirmations fail to work most of the time for most people. The reason they fail is because they tend to be ‘one size fits all’ and only by chance will they ever represent something you can accept as your truth now. And it’s only “your truth now” that has the power to shift your beliefs.

When Susie says, “I look after my needs first,” or “I trust my choices, and I’m comfortable living with them,” a little voice from deep inside her mind instantly says, “No you don’t!” and that affirmation fails – because it is not Suzie’s truth now; because her unconscious mind is not ready to accept it. Not only does it fail to work for her but repeating it can actually make things worse – because the repetition gives her unconscious mind practice rejecting it. Because our approach is so radically different from traditional affirmations, we’ll be avoiding the term ‘affirmation’ as much as possible from here on.

We start with the notion that ‘speaking your truth’ is powerful. The concept is ultra-simple: if the belief you want to lock in is too big a step to take, take a series of smaller steps. Imagine a path. (Remember, this is a metaphor, not a physical path). For any desired belief, at the desire end of the ‘path’ is a clear and explicit statement of that belief. At the opposite end of that ‘path’ are statements like “I heard about a person who looked after their needs first” or “I met a woman once who claimed she trusted her choices.” Somewhere in between is a statement of what your unconscious can accept as true for you right now AND anything closer to the desire end of the path it recognizes as not true for you right now. One step beyond is a statement that your unconscious can accept as nearly true for you now – and just a single, achievable step away. This statement is “your truth now.” The task of choosing the best truth statement along this path is to pick one that sits on this one-step-beyond point. Because it is close to where you are now, and the gap is “small,” your body responds with a very noticeable, visceral, positive sensation. It’s as though your “Inner Cheerleader” is doing a fist-pump and shouting “YES!” 

I call this the “Sweet Spot.” The Sweet Spot shifts over time. The main effort of this pillar is to keep coming up with new truths to speak that are ‘one step closer’ to your desired belief.

Pillar Three: Amplify Sensation

covered in Chapters Four, Six, Seven, and Eight

The third pillar is all about taking the natural ‘sweet spot’ response and amplifying the sensations to accelerate movement along that metaphorical path to lock in the desired inner beliefs.

Throughout the entire animal kingdom, creatures are on the move. While some movements are random, most tend to be motivated by something. Human neurology, as well as that of virtually all other members of the animal kingdom, is motivated in two ways. One sort of motivation is move-away. We use the language concept PAIN to identify this category. The neural pathways that manage the pain response operate very quickly and are often referred to by neuroscientists as the fast path. Because pain and its “friends” (fear, anxiety, panic, escaping boredom) are so much a part of our attention, we have lots of words for this cluster. In the final analysis, it’s all move-away. 

The other branch of motivation is, not surprisingly, move towards. We use the word PLEASURE to refer to this category. The neural pathways that manage the pleasure response tend to operate more slowly than the pain responses. In creatures with larger brains, pleasure often involves more complex evaluation by other parts of the brain. For us humans, pleasure is a term that covers anything that we move towards – e.g., food, comfort, mating opportunities, fun, pleasant stimulation, etc.

The reason for bringing this up is obvious when we think about the image of our destination. The first pillar, our underlying Desire, is what we want and what we need to believe to be able to achieve what we want. Getting closer to what we Desire is Pleasure. The second pillar, Speak Your Truth, is what we use to take the ‘next’ step towards that belief. The third pillar, Amplify, is (positive) motivation, the energy we use to move us along that path.

While the details of how we do take up the most of this book, the essence of this third pillar is to take the natural sweet spot response when we speak the appropriate truth and amplify it in some way, so we move farther and faster. The function of amplifying is to create an internal body response, to augment or amplify your automatic response – a powerful sensation, strong enough that our very nature instinctively moves towards the goal (the current truth). When we combine our amplified truth with our images of our life with the necessary beliefs in place and the desires fulfilled, they all work together to train our neurology. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the actual mechanisms at a neurological level – but the results at a macro level are clear and very real: when we combine speaking our truth and the images with a powerful pleasure sensation, the unconscious mind shifts towards the beliefs or mindset that the images and the truth represent.

We make use of several different mechanisms to amplify pleasure (or, if you prefer, to generate energy) to move along that path towards the desired belief. Management of mental state, pure imagination, physiology – posture and breathing, etc. – all are ways that can raise energy, intensify motivation, increase pleasure and shift beliefs.

Why We Talk of “BEYOND” Good Enough

The title of this book is BEYOND Good Enough. It is one thing to unambiguously and congruently believe that you are ‘good enough’ to manage say, money choices. When you’ve actually managed money choices for a long time, your belief shifts to beyond being simply good enough. You can then believe in a much deeper way because you have actual life experience of doing it well. This is the essence of “beyond.”

The extra pillar – When your truth and amplification still isn’t enough.

This material is covered in Chapters Nine and Ten. Sometimes we get stuck in a rut that’s so deep that the three pillars need a boost or a jump-start. These chapters contain powerful processes that you can follow to get yourself unstuck.

Why Writing this Book is Important to Me

I want to make the world a better place by helping individuals like YOU pursue (and achieve) their desires. I draw on my decades of working with hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and other change modalities to help clients tap into the unconscious resources they already have.

By using the Beyond Good Enough System, you can create and follow a road map for your life transformation. And with self-honesty and inner work, you can identify your desires, isolate the beliefs you need to achieve them, create relevant step by step truths to speak, and harness life energies to accelerate your journey to become who you need to be to achieve your desires. I have witnessed powerful transformations happen with my clients, as I’ve helped them go from feeling overwhelmed, unhappy, and stuck to taking charge of their own destiny.

I have chosen specific techniques and steps for you to follow to get real-life results. But those results don’t come from acquiring knowledge; if you pick up this book and choose to only read it – without doing the exercises – you may learn some interesting things, but you will not get the results you desire. Getting to BEYOND Good Enough takes effort. It takes doing the exercises.

I think you’re worth it. Don’t you?

“The elevator to results is out of order – you have to take the stairs, one step at a time.”

― Joe Girard