First of all, recognize that there are people and corporations with a strong ves ted interest in conditioning

you to maintain the (false) belief that you need so me kind of external validation to feel a certain way. Marketers spend billions o f dollars each year to convince you that you need to drink their soda, eat their food, wear their clothing, drive their cars, and shop at their stores to feel h appy, cool, fashionable, popular, confident, successful, etc. Who benefits most when you adopt the belief that you need to dress a certain way to feel fashionab le or drive a certain car to feel cool? When you understand that you have the innate ability to consciously direct your thoughts to create any feeling you want, whenever you want, you re not going to ma ke such people rich. But you will be much more free, since you ll gain the power o f conscious control over your own emotional states. This is a skill that takes p ractice, but it is a learnable one. For example, in a matter of minutes I can ge t myself to feel any emotion I want, and for those I ve already anchored, I can pu t myself into that state in less than 5 seconds. This is nothing unique experien ced actors can do it too. If an actor can laugh uproariously or cry rivers of te ars or shout with intense anger over something completely fake, then you can cer tainly learn to be 100% confident on que as well (and really experience the genu ine emotion). My favorite emotion is the state of feeling unstoppable, which is one I anchored a t a Tony Robbins seminar. Anchoring means conditioning a specific emotional stat e to be linked to a simple trigger, just as Pavlov conditioned his dog to link g etting fed with the sound of bell. So if I make a certain movement, I automatica lly surge into this emotional state within a few seconds. In my old Tae Kwon Do studio, I noticed another student firing off an anchor several times during spar ring matches. The tennis player Andre Agassi and the basketball player Byron Sco tt both used emotional anchoring in their athletic careers, and I ve read that emo tional conditioning has been used by German Olympic teams with outstanding resul ts (the U.S. Olympic teams are generally much further behind in this area). Anch oring is well covered in Tony Robbins Unlimited Power book, and he also takes yo u through it directly in his live seminars and he covers it in his Personal Powe r audio program. Something really cool I discovered is that once I ve conditioned an anchor, I don t even have to physically fire it off. If I merely imagine myself making the particular motion, it still works. So Weds night when I was being in troduced as the speaker, I mentally imagined myself firing off my trigger for co nfidence, and by the time I reached the lectern I was feeling 100% confident. Ye s, 100% no nervousness or self-doubt whatsoever. Advertisers use anchoring on you all the time. This is why Pepsi will pay someon e like Michael Jackson $20 million to be in a 30-second commercial (OK, so that was years ago). They want to condition you to link the emotions you get from hea ring a particular song to their product. This emotional conditioning works a lot better than trying to logically argue why you should consume sugar water and ch emicals. And it absolutely works to the tune of billions. Dr. Wayne Dyer said that when he was learning about self-actualization in colleg e, a professor posed this question: If a totally self-actualizing person unknowi ngly showed up to a formal event wearing overly casual attire, how would s/he re act? The answer: S/he wouldn t even notice. That s the state of total emotional mast ery, where no external event can knock you into a negative emotional state. A mi nd like water. The problem isn t that external events have control over your emotions. The proble m is believing that they do. Abandoning this belief and realizing that you have the innate ability to control how you feel at any given moment, regardless of yo ur circumstances, is the first step to emotional mastery. Events are neutral. Wh at causes you to feel a certain way is how you interpret an event, how you think about it. The same event (even one so serious as the death of someone close to

you) will be interpreted differently by different people. You were taught to rep resent certain events to yourself as tragic, while other people on this planet w ere taught to celebrate those same events. The event itself has no meaning but t he meaning you assign to it, and that act of assigning meaning (whether done con sciously or unconsciously) is what causes you to feel a certain way. Once you understand this, you can begin to take conscious control over these ass ignments. When stricken with a terminal illness, some people interpret it as ter rible and go into a deep depression. Others interpret it as a challenge and find a way to overcome the illness. And still others see it as a wake up call to ree valuate their priorities and make the best possible use of the time they have le ft, developing deeper bonds with the people around them and living much more ful ly. To some people it s an ending, while to others it s a new beginning. But this do esn t have to be a subconscious reaction it can be a conscious choice. Whenever so mething happens that you would normally say makes you depressed, you can choose to find and assign an alternate interpretation that makes you feel empowered inste ad of disempowered. Instead of failure you can see a learning experience. Instea d of a loss, you can focus on deepening your feelings of gratitude for what you do have. Instead of rejection you can see a temporary mismatch and a renewed opp ortunity to find the perfect fit. Just because TV teaches you to feel a certain way in response to a certain event doesn t mean you have to blindly accept that in terpretation, especially since the TV business benefits when you feel down and t hereby tune in to try to change your emotional state.