Want to transform your life, reach beyond your limits and achieve your most ambitious goals? Three TED talks that would help you change your life. Here are the transcriptions of the key points of the talks. Be inspired and take action today.

Three Steps to Transform Your Life

Lena Kay  shared ‘Three Steps to Transform Your Life’.

Step 1: Focus on your dream and your vision

What is your goal? This is not the time to get practical. People think, ‘I love to have this, I love to do that, but how am I going to do it?’ Or they talked to someone and someone talked them out of it. Don’t be practical in Step 1. It is just about focusing, clarifying what you want. Make sure you write it down. Get very specific on what you want because the brain will give you what you want.

Step 2: Self-mastery

What do you believe about the things that you want? You see, life doesn’t give you what you want, it gives you what you believe in. Self-mastery is about knowing how you feel, what do you believe. It is so important what you believe in. Self-mastery is your inner work. Only you can do the work but it is worth it.

Step 3: Imagine you have already reached your goals, and from that conscious awareness, take action

Imagine you go forward five years from now, everything in your life is 10 out of 10. Would you feel and act differently from today? The answers are usually ‘yes’.

What I suggest is you act from that level of consciousness. Don’t wait for five years to feel like that. You can feel like that today. Then, you take action. Then you take the next step. Just one step towards what you want.

Negative thoughts and emotions weaken your immune system, so judgement, complaining, any negative emotions weakens your body. Scientists said we have 50,000 to 90,000 thoughts per day, but 90% of them are the same ones you had yesterday. But the problem is that the same thoughts create the same emotion, that create the same action that gets the same results, and then you get the same thoughts and the cycle of creation continues.

You see, most people wait for outside circumstances to change before they change. But life is totally opposite. You must change on the inside in order to see change on the outside.

Lastly, Lena ended the talk by stressing the need for individual transformation.
‘Everything wants society to change. Everyone wants social transformation. But you cannot have social transformation without individual transformation.’

Reach Beyond your Limits by Training Your Mind

Marisa Peer shared how ‘To reach beyond your limits by training your mind’. Marisa highlighted that the most important collaboration is between you and your mind. To her, the brain is not really complex and complicated like what most people think.

Just put these 4 things into practice and you will have success across the board at every level.

(1) Your mind does what you think you want

It always does what it thinks is in your best interest. For example, if you are staying the ‘work is killing me’, your brain will know you don’t want to do the work and it will procrastinate, or if you say ‘you want some days off’, it will make you fall sick. Tell your brain using very specific, very detailed words of what you want, and it must bring pleasure, so you must tell yourself that you ‘love it’. Look at your behaviour. If you are not getting what you want, you are not collaborating with your mind.

(2) Mind is hardwired for pleasure and avoid pain

Tell your mind what you want and link to pleasure what you want to do. Link ‘what you do’ to pleasure, and link ‘not doing it’ to pain.

(3) Pictures you make in your head and the words you use

When you collaborate with your brain, you must change those pictures and words to what you want. Your body doesn’t care if the words you tell it is true or false, helpful or unhelpful, it will respond to the words you tell it.

(4) Mind loves what is familiar and likes to go over what is familiar

Change what is unfamiliar into familiar. Make self belief normal to you. What is familiar is for example, procrastination, not applying yourself, not believing in yourself. So, you need to make those unfamiliar familiar, like working hard, believing in yourself. Believe you are the best, not only believe, but also work hard. First you make your beliefs, than your beliefs make you. When you believe in yourself, other people believe in you. When you stretch your mind to new dimension, it never ever goes back. Your potential expands.

Achieve Your Most Ambitous Goals

Stephen Duneier shared ‘How to Achieve Your Most Ambitous Goals’.

He shared how from kindergarten to second year of college, he was a C- student who couldn’t settle down. All his teachers feel that he was a very bright kid, if only he could settle down and focus. In reality, they didn’t realise that he wanted that even more than they wanted it for him. But he just couldn’t.

Finally, in his junior year of college, he had enough. He would make a change. He would make a marginal adjustment. He was going to stop being a spectator of his decision making and start becoming an active participant. So that year, instead of pretending again that he would suddenly be able to settle down and focus on things for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time, he decided to assume he wouldn’t. He felt that to achieve the type of outcomes that he wanted in school, he would have to change his approach. He decided to make marginal adjustments. If he was given an assignment, he would break it down into these tasks that he could achieve, that would require him to focus for 5 or 10 minutes at a time. Then, he would get up and do something else. Then, he would come back, not necessarily to the same assignment, not even necessarily the same subject, just do another task that require 5 to 10 minutes of his attention. From then on, he was a straight A student, Dean’s list, President Honour, every semester.  Using the same approach, he then went on to success in his career and personal success as an artist and achieving many other personal goals like learning German, learning how to fly an helicopter, learning knitting and crocheting, losing weight and many others.

He shared three simple steps:

(1) Make large tasks into small tasks that you can achieve
(2) Then, make marginable adjustments to the process
(3) Become an active participant

You would absolutely love this guy. I encourage all to listen to his speech which was engaging, funny as well as motivating.