Coming Alive offers four essential psychological techniques, or tools, to help you overcome the harmful attitudes and behaviours holding you back from reaching your true potential. Explaining how we fall into habits of demoralisation, temptation, paralysis and victimisation, the authors show how you can break free from these, tap into the universal life force, and live a life of creativity, renewal, confidence and engagement.

BARRY MICHELS has a BA from Harvard, a law degree from University of California, Berkeley, and an MSW from the University of Southern California. He has been in private practice as a psychotherapist since 1986.

PHIL STUTZ graduated from City College in New York and received his MD from New York University. He worked as a prison psychiatrist on Rikers Island and then in private practice in New York before moving his practice to Los Angeles in 1982.

Visit the Tools website for more information and resources.

thetoolsbook.com

By Barry Michels and Phil Stutz

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

Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul’s Potential

MOST PEOPLE SUSPECT they could live a completely different life from the one they’re now living. In this other life their days are joyful. They’re more confident, they take more risks, the things they do feel more meaningful. It’s as if—in this alternate existence—they’ve plugged into a different kind of energy, an energy that makes anything seem possible.

What they suspect is true. This energy is real and it has the power to change lives. We call it the Life Force. It’s the great prize of the universe—immortal, unstoppable, endlessly creative.

Most of us have experienced the Life Force in some way. You may have felt it at the birth of a child. It might have emerged as an urge to play an instrument that you gave up on when you were younger. Maybe you were stuck on something you were writing and then suddenly the solution came to you out of nowhere. Or perhaps you felt a dizzying grace when members of your family treated one another with love. There are an endless number of examples, each one reflecting the guiding, creating, infinitely nurturing qualities of the Life Force.

The most significant use of the Life Force is that it allows each of us to put our stamp on the world, to give it something that is uniquely our own. It doesn’t matter if it’s something huge and public or something humble and private, as long as it’s meaningful to you. When you use the Life Force in this way, you feel fully alive.

But most of us get no more than a quick glimpse of this other life before a curtain drops and we lose touch with it—wondering if it ever really existed. We find ourselves back in tedious “normal” life—stripped of promise, focused on what we can’t do, not on what we can. The source of our powerlessness, we believe, is some painful personal problem we are unable to overcome. It doesn’t matter what the problem is—what matters is that you’re unable to conquer it.

Here are some of the ways our patients describe problems they’ve been unable to vanquish. Do any of these statements sound familiar to you? Do they apply to you or someone in your life?

I can’t control my thoughts. I scan my life looking for things to worry about. It’s like I’m torturing myself.

I feel like there’s this in-group I can never be a part of. It’s like there’s something wrong with me. When I’m around people my mind fills with negative thoughts about myself.

I can’t stand up to my boyfriend because I’m too afraid of losing him. On nights when I’m not with him I drive past his house to make sure he’s not out with someone else.

I feel overwhelmed by the amount I have to get done, yet I sit in front of the TV like a zombie. I don’t know what I’m waiting for.

The world is unfair. People don’t treat me the way I deserve. When my feelings are hurt I don’t get over it for days.

The nature of the problem is different for each of these people. But they have one thing in common: their problems seem insurmountable. Going to therapy and understanding the “cause” of the problem is no guarantee they can solve it—what we’ve found (after a combined seventy years of experience as practicing psychotherapists) is that “understanding” isn’t the key to overcoming emotional problems.

So what is? Hidden behind each problem is a force working to make sure you don’t solve it. When you can’t overcome an emotional problem you feel powerless, and getting what you want from life feels impossible. This sense of impossibility keeps spreading—a poison in your soul. Eventually you give up on expressing who you really are, on living the way you suspect you could.

Being unable to solve your personal problems isn’t an indicator of lack of potential. It’s a sign that a powerful adversary is blocking your access to the Life Force.

But concepts and theories won’t give you access to the Life Force. You can’t think yourself back to life. To free yourself, you need to feel the forces of life as they flow through you.

So how do you access the Life Force? You need tools. Imagine a can of soup. If you want to know what the soup tastes like, reading the side of the can won’t help; you need to actually taste it. Unless you have the hand strength of a superhero, this is impossible without a can opener.

Think of this book as a can opener for your soul. It will give you the tools you need to access the Life Force and defeat your inner enemy. Only then will you discover what you’re truly capable of and come alive in a way you never have before.

I BECAME AWARE of the power of the Life Force as a college student—but it wasn’t part of my course work. At seventeen, I was already in my sophomore year. Physically and emotionally immature, I belonged back in high school. During my freshman year I had indulged my greatest love—basketball. When I was sixteen years old, I played on the best freshman team the school had had in years.

Now I wanted to move up to the varsity. I wasn’t ready. I needed to wait a year and get bigger and stronger. But I was a gym-rat whose pulse would quicken at the sound of the bouncing ball. I made the team—barely—and then I got what I deserved. I spent the next two years “riding the pine.” (The pine was the wooden bench the scrubs sat on during games.)

Worse than not playing was the dismissive way the coach treated the scrubs. By the time I was a senior, my confidence was destroyed. But what happened in that final season prepared me for the future in a way I never could have anticipated.

The team was even better than when I was a freshman. The best player was an All-American point guard. I was his substitute, which meant I only played when he was injured or had fouled out—usually when the score was close and the crowd was going berserk.

If I sat inertly watching, by the time I entered the game I’d be so cold I could barely move. So I’d “put myself in the game” from the bench. I’d jump up and down, scream at the top of my lungs, yell out where the screens were, etc. Besides keeping me loose, it had an effect I didn’t anticipate—it lifted up the energy of the guys actually playing.

The best moments were when my excitement spread to the rest of the team. I learned that I could inspire others to do things they’d never done before. It was at those moments that I felt most alive. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was being prepared for my future.

Winning was great, but the most alive part of the experience—the part I still remember fifty years later—was feeling that inner fire grow. The more powerful the other team, the more difficult the challenge, the more inspired we became. The drive to experience this inspired state is what moves competitive athletes to train for hours every day.

But sports are just one place to discover untapped potential. As a psychiatrist, my job isn’t to win basketball games, it’s to help people discover what they’re capable of. This happens in obvious ways, like helping them get a better job, be a stronger leader, or break through a creative block. But our most important potentials aren’t so obvious: to give and receive love, to listen to other people, to accept what life brings, to be patient—the spiritual and emotional abilities that work inside us and are the essence of what it means to be human. If you were building a fire, they would be the ring of stones that holds in the fire’s heat, allowing the flames of inspiration to grow and connect you to what I came to call the Life Force.

The Life Force speaks constantly—not in words, but through events. You can feel it as an undeniable presence guiding you. More commonly, you’ll feel its presence for brief moments, usually in reaction to a deeply moving event: the birth of a child, the act of falling in love, or a trip to a faraway place that awakens something deep within you.

Or it can emerge without explanation as a sudden insight into another person, as the solution to a problem that’s defeated you for months or as a burst of creative expression that comes from somewhere beyond you. These moments of inspiration can seem random, but they’re reminders that the Life Force is always there.

But knowing the Life Force is there isn’t enough if you don’t know how to connect to it. Look around. The people you see living inspired, expansive lives are the exceptions. The vast majority of human beings are caught in limited, joyless lives—every attempt to change seems thwarted.

Maybe you’re a songwriter with an idea for a film script. Rather than becoming excited about writing in a new medium, it feels beyond you and you give up. Or maybe you’ve developed strong feelings for a person you’ve always thought of as a friend, but when you’re around him you automatically close yourself off. Or perhaps you’ve run a lot of 5Ks and you’d like to run a marathon, but you’re not willing to commit to the time it takes to train for one.

All of these people want to open a new door in their lives, but the door is locked. There is only one key: the Life Force itself. But we’ve forgotten how to find the Life Force. In so doing, we’ve lost the key to our own future. How could we lose something so priceless?

Because we look for it in the wrong place. In our consumer culture, we look outside ourselves for everything. Products are sold with the claim they will magically solve life’s problems. The right hair conditioner will attract the perfect mate. The right wristwatch will give you the aura of success. A new car, a new lover, or a new home may create temporary excitement—but it doesn’t last. Like a child excitedly playing with a Christmas present he’s just unwrapped, we quickly lose interest and move on to another gift.

This fixation on things outside of us makes change impossible. If you want to open the door to a future with real potential, you’ll need to access the inner power of the Life Force. You won’t be able to see it, you can’t hold it in your hand, but when it’s flowing through you it will inspire you to do things you didn’t think were possible.

The belief that an invisible animating energy underlies our existence is thousands of years old. Unlike our modern, mechanical notion of energy, which we understand via mathematics, this is a living energy that we feel inside us. In Eastern religions, this energy, or Life Force, is known variously as prana (in Indian philosophy and medicine), lung (in Tibetan Buddhism), and chi (in Chinese philosophy and medicine). In the Old Testament, it was called ruach, the breath of God, which gave mankind not only life, but the spirit to evolve.

The Life Force itself may be invisible, but evidence of its power is everywhere. It created life on earth and, over untold eons, drove evolution from single-cell organisms to the unimaginable complexity of the human brain. Every seed that sprouts into a full-grown plant, every salmon that fights its way against the current to spawn, every sun-seeking weed growing through cracks in the sidewalk, is an expression of life’s unstoppable energy.

How does this affect you as an individual? The songwriter, lovesick friend, and runner were stuck; maybe they’d failed so many times they lost hope that change was possible. No amount of talking or analyzing could free them from their dark conclusions. But the Life Force affects you in a way that thinking can’t. You can feel its inspiring presence. When you do, you experience a force that has sustained all living forms for millions of years.

It’s natural to think of the Life Force as sustaining growth in nature—the grass growing, fish swimming, birds flying, etc. But the Life Force is capable of something more: it can fuel the inner growth of each of us. When you learn how to use its energy it becomes the antidote to the personal problems that fill us with a sense of powerlessness.

Every human being is blessed with the ability to use the Life Force in this way, but unlike its workings in nature, harnessing its power for inner growth requires a conscious choice.

Making this choice in your head isn’t enough; you register your choice through action. Living a life filled with unstoppable passion doesn’t happen by itself; it requires a heightened Life Force, and that takes work. Many times we build our Life Force without realizing what we’re doing. When I was screaming at my teammates from the bench it didn’t occur to me that I was stimulating their collective Life Force. But the more I did it, the more familiar it became, until it became a ritual I looked forward to.

Athletes in every sport, on every level, have rituals designed to stimulate their Life Force. Observe the players’ rituals before a game. The hopping, bouncing, slapping, and bumping might look like an overly aggressive dance number, but actually is a celebration of the Life Force.

Athletics isn’t the only arena that benefits from an expanded Life Force. Any role that requires you to lead, to create, or to perform—an actor, a lawyer in court, a teacher, etc.—benefits from a strong Life Force.

The most universal practice for tapping into the Life Force is really a number of practices—meditation, prayer, reading, journal writing, exercise—that make up the morning rituals that so many people swear by. Rather than preparing you for a single event, like a game, a play, or a public address, the rituals prepare you for the entire day to come.

Every time you “practice” these activities—all of them or a select few—you are making the “choice” to apply the Life Force to your own growth.

If choosing to trigger the Life Force is an action that anyone can take, each of us is free to bring this power into his or her life. But remarkably, even when we know it’s available to us, we don’t activate it. Instead we make a choice that makes us weaker: we give up on something out of laziness, avoid social situations out of insecurity, yell at a subordinate for an unavoidable business setback. We look back in wonder and ask, “Why did I do that? What was I thinking?” And the most disturbing question: “Why do I keep making this choice over and over?” The answer is that these weren’t choices any more than you have a choice when a mugger puts a gun to your head and tells you to empty your pockets.

The “guy with the gun” is forcing you to make the choice he wants you to make, not the choice that connects you to life. His goal is to deaden you and take away your freedom and your future. He doesn’t want your money; he wants your passion, your inspiration, your potential—all for himself.

The guy with the gun is a symbol, but of what? It would have to be something of immense power, strong enough to make you repeat the same choices even after you realize how bad they are for you.

We think of ourselves as rational beings with good reasons for the things we do. The last thing we want to admit is that a force we’re not aware of is making decisions for us. Especially one that has an agenda that is completely at odds with the way we want to live.

But admit it or not, this “other” force is real. It’s more than the result of psychological damage, though that makes its effects stronger. Present from birth, it’s an irrational force built into every human being. It’s a part of me, you, and everyone else.

Its presence doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. It’s not an illness, nor is it a punishment. But it’s always there, and every commitment you don’t keep, every challenge you avoid facing, every impulse you give in to, is the work of this force. When you wake up at 4 a.m. worried about paying your mortgage, when you hate someone so much you can’t concentrate on your own work, when you’ve been publicly humiliated and think the whole world is laughing at you, you are seeing the world through the eyes of this force.

I was thrown in the path of this inner enemy when I least expected it. I had just finished my psychiatric residency. Years of training now complete, I finally had what I most craved—freedom. For me, freedom didn’t mean traveling the world, it meant treating patients the way my instincts told me to.

This was a time of great promise. I was feeling the excitement that comes with doing what you are meant to do in life. It doesn’t take much to start a psychiatric practice—just an office. But I was missing one other crucial ingredient—experience. I was about to get it.

In a profession known for the silent reserve of its practitioners, I stood out like a sore thumb. I didn’t look at therapy the way my peers did. They saw the patient as “ill,” and their job was to “cure” them. This was the standard psychiatric model, and I rejected this almost as soon as it was taught to me. When you treat a person like they’re a “case,” it puts them at a distance. You can’t close that gap by asking a million factual questions; you need to connect with their experience through your heart.

My guiding star wasn’t psychiatry—it was basketball. That’s where I’d developed my passion for helping others reach their potential. In that context, success wasn’t some final end point, it was a commitment to constant growth. The range of human potential is limitless: anything from playing an instrument to becoming a leader in your community to discovering a new path to spirituality to learning to be vulnerable with your spouse—all are within your grasp.

As different as these potentials are from one another, they have one thing in common—to my patients they felt out of reach. I didn’t feel that way. To me, overcoming the seemingly impossible is the essence of being alive. My job was to make that a real experience for my patients.

Some of my peers accused me of going off on a tangent and pursuing some starry-eyed goal while doing nothing to “treat the illness” my patients were suffering from. The opposite was true. When a patient commits to pursuing their potential, it triggers their Life Force, and it’s the Life Force that gives them the vitality to heal themselves. You can bury your symptoms with meds, you can avoid situations that trigger them, but if you want to change yourself in a lasting way, you need to put yourself in forward motion and pursue your potential.

The further I could take a patient toward realizing their potential, the more satisfying it was for me. The most exciting thing was when someone discovered an ability they didn’t even know they had. It was the ultimate victory, a mystical experience as powerful as being present at the birth of a child. It was so satisfying I sometimes felt guilty that I was getting paid to witness it.

Patients developed these hidden abilities more often than you’d imagine. But you can’t develop potential until you discover what you have potential for. I found an “instrument” inside myself that could pick up the existence of potential talent before the patient could—it was my own passion.

What I’d developed playing basketball in college—my wild enthusiasm to see others transcend their limits—hadn’t gone away. As a therapist, I discovered it did more than inspire patients, it let me uncover their hidden abilities. My passion, the all-out commitment to my patients’ growth, was like a flashlight illuminating parts of them they weren’t aware of.

Thrilled at what I was learning and pleased that I was getting referrals, I thought I was off to a great start. I assumed that my enthusiasm would get me through every situation. Because I was a rank beginner, nothing had yet happened to contradict that delusion. But enthusiasm wasn’t enough to meet the opponent I was about to face.

Most new patients define progress in terms of symptoms. That’s natural because it’s their symptoms—depression, panic attacks, obsessions, insomnia, etc.—that bring them to therapy in the first place. My practice being young, most of my patients were new to therapy; new patients often make quick progress, especially when they get infected with my enthusiasm.

But before I got completely carried away with my own brilliance, something happened that disturbed and confused me. Their symptoms came back. It didn’t seem to matter what the symptoms were—constant worry, avoidance of intimidating situations, insecurity in public, inability to commit in a relationship—they all resurfaced.

Sometimes it was dramatic. Someone working on their rage and frustration would find themselves screaming at other drivers and instigating arguments. Another person would go on creative strike, and rather than work on something they were writing, they’d plop down in front of the TV for hours. Someone working on a business start-up would give in to a chronic gambling habit.

Sometimes it was banal. A person trying to lose weight would eat that one extra piece of cake. An executive would arrive ten minutes late to his own meetings. A wife would project an almost imperceptible coolness each time she walked past her husband. While these symptoms may be small, their long-term effects can cause the loss of a marriage, a career, or physical health.

Regardless of what problem my patients had, they were suddenly no closer to its solution than when they started therapy. Caught up in my enthusiasm, they’d become hopeful that they could free themselves from the pain and limitations making them miserable. Those hopes were now shattered. I’d try to restart the engine, pouring as much enthusiasm as I could muster back into my patients. But I was talking off the top of my head; I had no idea why these failures were happening.

The reaction of my patients stung. In one instance, a patient wanted to marry a woman he loved, but had problems with erections and was afraid to commit to her. All his tests were normal; it was a “psychological” issue. Initially caught up in my enthusiasm, he was able to overcome the problem. He proceeded to buy her a ring. But the improvement was temporary, and his sexual problems returned. He felt tricked, and he wasn’t shy about telling me.

“I’ve committed to a marriage that doesn’t work. You’re a great salesman but I don’t think you know how to help people.”

He was right that I didn’t help him, but it definitely wasn’t for lack of serious commitment. Helping him was impossible because I didn’t understand the force I was up against. In physics, a “force” has the power to make an object change course. In human psychology, there is a force that has the power to make you change course—just the way a guy with a gun to your head could. And what direction does this force push you in? It’s to act against growth, against forward motion, against your evolution.

If the Life Force opens limitless potential in all of us, this opponent is its counterforce, destroying your potential and casting you down into a life of limitation. It makes its presence known through rage, impulsivity, addiction, laziness, panic, negativity, and so on. What’s most striking is that you keep doing these things even though you know how bad they are for you. You give in to a sugar binge, or you instigate a shouting match at a family dinner, and after it’s over you ask yourself, “Why do I keep doing this?”

The fact that you’re asking the question says that you’re not yet aware of the counterforce. Just as gravity makes flying impossible, this inner opponent makes growth impossible. Its signature isn’t one incident of self-destructive behavior, it’s that you repeat the behavior over and over. It’s the equivalent of beating your head against the wall. When I began to identify the counterforce working in my patients, I was naïve enough to believe I could convince them with words to “stop being so self-destructive.”

I might as well have tried to convince them to fly without an airplane. No matter how determined I was to change their lives, this opposing force was just as determined to keep them stuck. And that force felt stronger than I was. I was in a wrestling match with an invisible opponent so powerful he could pin me to the mat and never let me up.

The physical presence of a crushing, hindering force as the real cause of my patients’ symptoms was outside what I’d been taught in my training. Psychiatrists think in theoretical terms; this didn’t feel any more theoretical than a brick falling on your head. The more I faced this force and felt its presence, the more convinced I became that it was something real.

I had completed my training but, like most young psychiatrists, I still had a supervisor I’d see to discuss my cases. The supervisor I chose was informal, maybe ten years older than I was, and very supportive. If there was anyone I could talk to openly about the experiences I was having, it would be him.

I asked him if he’d ever felt a destructive force in his patients that was more than just a theory, something that was so intense it felt real. He gave me an “It’s time to grow up” smile that immediately told me he put my experiences in the realm of nightmares and comic books.

He then explained—somewhat condescendingly—that many beginning therapists suffered from the same type of “confusion” as I did. I wasn’t feeling the presence of a mystical “force,” I was feeling my inner reaction to how resistant patients were to change. In conclusion, he reminded me what a frustrating process therapy was and that I had to accept this without resorting to fairy tales. Strangely, I left that meeting even more convinced that what I was dealing with was real.

Now I had to convince my patients. I had one advantage I didn’t have with my supervisor. He accepted nothing without scientific proof. My patients didn’t care about proof; they wanted relief—that would be its own proof.

This mysterious force appeared in my patients as doubt and worry, suspiciousness and withdrawal, impulsive desire for drugs and sex—and any other symptom strong enough to cripple their functioning. The variations were endless.

The guy with the gun controlled each of these patients. The specific symptoms—panic, chronic lateness, perfectionism, social avoidance, etc.—are his bullets. His goal isn’t to kill you, it’s to scare you out of reaching your potential. Something with this kind of power deserved a name. “The guy with the gun” was too awkward and didn’t do justice to its mysterious power.

I decided to call it “Part X.” It was a fitting name for something off-limits and dangerous—a force whose mysterious power had to be respected. Naming it “Part X” wasn’t a coincidence. As a “part” of you, it is intrinsic to your human identity, a permanent part of you, just like your heart and brain.

But there was another reason to describe it as a “part” of you. If it was only a part, there had to be another part. And this “other” part was the opposite of Part X. Rather than limiting you, it unlocks access to the Life Force. Rather than blocking your growth, it opens your potential. This other part is what most people think of as their soul.

Giving Part X a name made it real in a way it wasn’t before. But as excited as I was about my discovery, I didn’t know how my patients would react to a new concept presented by an enthusiastic—but very young—psychiatrist. I remember being alone in my office, pacing the floor and rehearsing what I would say to convince them Part X was real and extremely dangerous.

To my surprise, they didn’t need convincing. The concept of a universal force lurking behind their symptoms rang true immediately. They liked its name and they liked being able to identify the source of their misery. In a very short time, most of them could identify it in themselves.

I learned something important from this. The average person’s mind is a jumbled mess. They have no clarity about where they need to go, nor do they know what’s keeping them from getting there. To change, they need to bring order out of this chaos. Intellectual theories about the causes of their situations won’t help—people need constructs that relate to their actual experience. That’s why they accepted Part X so easily; they could feel its presence. True faith—in a person, an idea, a decision—isn’t based on a logical conclusion you’ve come to; it’s something you feel.

Once Part X had a name and became real in the eyes of my patients, the floodgates of their curiosity opened. If something they’d never heard of before was at the root of their problems, they wanted to know what it was, how it got there, and what to do about it. These were good questions I didn’t yet have the answers to.

The biggest challenge was explaining how a single force could create a variety of seemingly unrelated symptoms. From what I could observe, the most obvious thing my patients’ problems had in common was pain. Not the natural pain that’s a reaction to death, illness, economic reversal, loss of a friend, and so on. That’s necessary pain. It’s unavoidable and in fact can help you get through the difficult parts of life. Necessary pain serves as a warning that your survival or well-being may be at stake; it keeps you in touch with reality, bringing you to the present so you can see if you need to take action.

What my patients were feeling was unnecessary pain. This pain isn’t a reaction to anything real; it’s proactively generated by Part X, which creates a problem you don’t need to have and offers a solution that makes it worse. Far from helping you get through adversity, it makes life harder than it has to be. With unnecessary pain, you’re not reacting to the world as it is, you’re reacting to the world Part X has created.

This is the key to understanding Part X. It doesn’t just sit back and root against you; X is a dynamic force with an agenda it never stops pursuing. Part X is driven to create unhappiness the way a great artist is driven to create beauty.

Part X exploits the fact that human beings are complacent. We ignore danger until it’s knocking on our door. By the time we become aware of it, the danger has already established a beachhead in our mind. From there, it moves to crush our spirit, limit our future, and doubt the reality of our own potential. The real danger is not being aware of what Part X is doing to you.

It’s possible to defeat Part X and take your soul and your future back. But even the most powerful weapon is useless against an enemy you can’t see. Step one, therefore, is to recognize your personal version of Part X—how it makes itself known in your own life.

To find something—especially something as devious as Part X—you have to know where to look. Part X is invisible, but it leaves tracks in your inner experience. And the X experience that’s most universal is the sense of being stuck—unable to move forward, unable to change, unable to reach some goal that’s important to you. When you’ve hit a wall in life and you have no idea how to get past it, you’re walking in the tracks of Part X.

The place you’re stuck, the goal that’s out of reach, needn’t be something with status or power attached to it. What matters is that it’s meaningful to you. You may want to be more vulnerable with your partner, but you’re afraid of how they’ll respond; you may want to start a completely new career, but you don’t know how to take the first step; or you may want to overcome your fear of flying, but the thought fills you with dread.

Whatever goal you’re pursuing, at some point you’ll meet an obstacle. All human endeavors present difficulties and complications. These stumbling blocks are a natural part of life. It’s when a single setback expands and intensifies until all ability to grow is shut down that Part X has entered the picture. It’s as if you’ve hit a wall so high you can’t see over it. All you can see—written in huge graffiti-style letters—is the word “IMPOSSIBLE.” Part X doesn’t say, “Quite Difficult” or “A Real Challenge.” It’s telling you to give up and go home; you’ve hit a dead end.

X has taken something that is difficult—facing the pain of loneliness, the confusion of entering a business you know nothing about, the humiliation of looking self-conscious in front of an audience—and made it seem impossible and insurmountable. Part X has performed a kind of dark, destructive magic.

Part X is good at performing its negative alchemy in commonplace situations. Joan was a seventeen-year-old high school student who had intense anxiety when she was away from home. This had been a lifelong problem. Sleepovers, visits to faraway relatives, and school field trips were difficult for her.

She knew her fears weren’t rational, but when her panic started it felt impossible to bring it under control. Part X was less interested in the details of her fears than in leaving her with the sense that she couldn’t overcome them. X’s goal was to contaminate her with the sense of defeat, as if impossibility were a poisonous substance.

Joan was an unusually gifted soccer player, but as X spread its psychic poison, traveling with the school team became more difficult. She began to lose confidence on the field. Normally an aggressive attacker, she became passive, hanging back and avoiding contact.

Part X spread the sense of “it’s impossible” beyond the inability to leave home; now it included the inability to compete in a sport she’d had tremendous success in. And until it was stopped, X would keep spreading the toxic power of impossibility until all growth was out of reach and all future dreams were destroyed. This expanding sense of impossibility is the secret of Part X’s power. It’s how it takes an ordinary psychological problem and expands it until you’re crippled.

In Joan’s case, X was remarkably consistent in its efforts. Every time she tried to move out into the world, Part X was right there to remind her to be terrified and paralyzed.

Part X is persistent in perpetuating the world view it wants you to have—much like a dictator can control an entire population by repeating a lie until it is accepted as the truth. The lie that a dictator uses is that they are the only one who can solve people’s problems. Part X also brainwashes us. Its lie is that nothing can solve your problem; it’s impossible and you should give up trying.

Psychology can play into that lie by focusing too much on the past. This is an invitation for Part X to deepen the sense of impossibility. Imagine that your past is represented by a series of pictures in an exhibition at a museum; each picture represents one event in your life. Part X is the curator, choosing which events get into the show, but X picks only the most negative and painful events. Why? Because when you relive those events, your sense of who you are and what your potential is shrinks.

We want to believe that we assess the world rationally, when actually Part X dominates our worldview. By repeating negative experiences over and over again, it creates the sense that negativity is all there is. Part X can replay a single negative experience or search your past for a whole variety of them. It can even construct future bad experiences that haven’t happened yet. We think of this as worry, which it is, but worry is a tool in Part X’s crusade to flood you with negativity.

We all have known someone whose outlook is dominated by Part X. Whether they look backwards and complain about the past or look forward and worry about the future, they radiate negativity and the sense that the world can’t accommodate their plans and desires. When you spend too much time with them, you can feel their frustration, cynicism, and discontent rubbing off on you, threatening your own Life Force.

Everything you do either expands the sense of what is possible or adds to the feeling that nothing is possible. That extra drink after dinner, fighting with your spouse in front of the kids, those four hours in front of the TV—you know these things aren’t good for you, but you continue to do them anyway. Part X has strong-armed you, leaving you with the sense that you can’t control yourself, even though you know how destructive your behavior is. Rationality is no match for Part X.

Maybe you want to go back to school, or lose twenty pounds, or find a spiritual community that inspires you. You’re in a test of wills with Part X—although Part X would prefer that you don’t know it. X works toward its usual goal—making you helpless and hopeless in a world of impossibility. It’s your actions, more than your thoughts, that dictate who wins.

If it can’t stop you from taking action it will get you to take the wrong kind of action. One of its most effective strategies—and biggest lies—is to tell you that only large, dramatic actions count. That’s the opposite of the truth. The highest energies enter through the smallest actions. The importance of small steps is that they can be repeated over and over, creating a nonstop channel for the Life Force.

If you want to go back to school, start with a single class at night and see if that feels like the right choice. If you want to lose twenty pounds, start by skipping dessert at your next meal. If you’re looking for a spiritual community, start by asking those around you what works for them. Focusing on huge, symbolic victories—like switching suddenly to a crash diet—will lead you to quit after a few defeats.

No matter how impossible it might feel to change the way you act, there is always something you can do to get yourself moving. That’s what makes it important to be able to identify Part X as it emerges in your life. Recognizing its presence is an action, and, when done with discipline, this action becomes the first step in freeing yourself from the prison Part X has you trapped in.

This short exercise will introduce you to your own Part X as it emerges in your life.

• Remember a specific time in your life when you felt stuck, when you were unable to change something or to reach a desired goal. The goal needn’t be dramatic or noteworthy, as long as it was important to you. It can be related to relationships, career, creativity, parenting, or any other part of life. It can be from last week or years ago. If you’re having trouble finding something specific, pick a whole area of life that you’ve always found difficult. The only requirement is that you feel helpless, stopped by something inside you. Notice the place that you get stuck—at that moment Part X has appeared. Feel its presence around you. Say to yourself, “This is Part X.”

We call this process “labeling.” You’re learning to recognize the unique qualities that identify your personal Part X. As simple as it is, it’s a crucial building block for everything that will come later.

To stop Part X, you have to catch it in the act. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Part X sneaks up on you, and does it quickly. This gives it momentum. As Joan, our high school soccer player, listened to Part X’s warnings about leaving the house, she lost confidence that she could get her panic under control. The poisonous attitude of “I can’t do it, it’s impossible” gathered momentum and quickly spread to the rest of her life.

You need to stop X before it gains momentum. Just the way a surgeon has to stop the bleeding in the emergency room in order to see what needs to be done, you need to stop Part X from “bleeding” its negativity into your psyche. If you can’t you’re left with the crippling sense of “There’s nothing I can do about this.”

But stopping Part X isn’t the same thing as suturing a blood vessel. Part X is without physical form. It’s a force and can only be stopped by the infinite energy of the Life Force.

The fact that you can recognize Part X and call out its presence means you are not Part X. If you were, you wouldn’t be able to do the labeling. So every time you label Part X, you activate the part of you that’s free. This part is your soul, the part of you that can choose how you look at the world.

The more you label Part X, the more you activate your soul. This gives you direct access to the Life Force—the driver of your evolution, the source of your hidden potentials—and with it the sense that anything is possible.

When Joan discovered the power of her soul, it was a revelation. She could now see that Part X was behind the fears that were crippling her on and off the soccer field. No longer a passive victim of Part X, for the first time in memory she saw a way out of the world of impossibility.

The factor that separates those who free themselves from Part X from those who don’t is consistency. Part X will be relentless in its efforts to crush you with the sense of impossibility. Your commitment to labeling its presence must be just as relentless if you hope to take back control of your own soul. Real commitment means making a promise to do something and then keeping that promise—over and over again.

That means doing, not just thinking. You either act or you don’t—nothing else matters. There are two kinds of action. The first is outer action. It is what it sounds like, things you do in the world around you. We have a clear idea of what most people mean when they use the word action. You go to your computer and write your new résumé or you don’t. You cancel a meeting to see your kid in the school play or you don’t. You confront your boss or you don’t.

There’s a second kind of action we’re much less aware of. It’s called inner action. Just as outer action is meant to affect the world around you, inner action is meant to affect the world inside you. This is the world of your thoughts and feelings—your inner state. The battle between you and Part X happens in this inner world. It’s the battle for your soul.

Part X attacks by flooding your inner world with feelings of failure, negativity, and self-doubt. If you don’t fight back, X creates a vision of a bleak future stripped of all sense of possibility.

And most of the time, you don’t fight back. Not because you don’t want to, but because you don’t know how. This is an inner war—bombs and bullets are worthless. You need weapons that work inside you, weapons that can change your inner state.

Our work and our passion is to present you with these inner weapons. But you won’t be able to use them if you don’t recognize Part X attacking. Labeling is the first line of defense: it identifies the enemy so you can fight back.