The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower--and Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion

When we anticipate run-ins with these people, we waste a lot of time worrying about how they’ll treat us and how we’ll react. This doesn’t prepare us for the interaction, it’s just another version of the Maze.

although they require energy at the outset, they increase your energy in the long run.

This is the second cue: each time you catch yourself thinking about the dreaded task, stop thinking and use the tool.

We’re trapped because of a universal human expectation that the world will treat us fairly. This is a cherished, childish assumption—“If I’m good, the world will be good to me.”

pain is not absolute. Your experience of pain changes relative to how you react to it.

The victim thinks he knows how the universe should work. When it doesn’t treat him the way he “deserves,” he concludes the world is against him. This becomes his rationale for giving up and retreating to his Comfort Zone where he can stop trying.

But inevitably, life will never exempt you from facing more pain. Once you accept this, your goal will no longer be for pain to stop; it will be to increase your tolerance for it—which is exactly what the Reversal of Desire will do for you.

The first step is to learn to experience fear without the mental image of the dreaded future event. Focus all your awareness on how the fear feels right now, in the present. When you’ve separated fear from what you’re afraid of in the future, it becomes just another kind of pain you process with the Reversal of Desire.

THE TOOL: THE REVERSAL OF DESIRE

The Maze doesn’t just damage your relationship to other people; it damages your relationship to life itself. When you’re in the Maze, life passes you by.