To create a sense of urgency that’s so intense that we’re compelled to follow through.

“Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure … they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.”
—JEREMY BENTHAM

Why do people persist in an unsatisfying relationship, unwilling either to work toward solutions or end it and move on? It’s because they know changing will lead to the unknown, and most people believe that the unknown will be much more painful than what they’re already experiencing. It’s like the old proverbs say: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know,” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” These core beliefs keep us from taking the actions that could change our lives.

If we want to have an intimate relationship, then we have to overcome our fears of rejection and vulnerability. If we’re planning to go into business, we must be willing to overcome our fear of losing security to make that happen. In fact, most of the things that are valuable in our lives require us to go against the basic conditioning of our nervous systems. We must manage our fears by overriding this preconditioned set of responses and, in many cases, we must transform that fear into power. Many times, the fear that we are allowing to control us never becomes reality anyway.
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If you and I want to change our behavior, there is only one effective way to do it: we must link unbearable and immediate sensations of pain to our old behavior, and incredible and immediate sensations of pleasure to a new one. Think about it this way: all of us, through the experience of life, have learned certain patterns of thinking and behaving to get ourselves out of pain and into pleasure. We all experience emotions like boredom or frustration or anger or feeling overwhelmed, and develop strategies for ending these feelings. Some people use shopping; some use food; some use sex; some use drugs; some use alcohol; some use yelling at their kids. They know, consciously or unconsciously, that this neural pathway will relieve their pain and take them to some level of pleasure in the moment.
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The first step to creating any change is deciding what you do want so that you have something to move toward. The more specific you can be about what you want, the more clarity you will have, and the more power you will command to achieve what you want more rapidly.

We also must learn what’s preventing us from having what we want. Invariably, what’s preventing us from making the change is that we link more pain to making a change than to staying where we are. We either have a belief like, “If I change, I will have pain,” or we fear the unknown that change might bring.
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Get Leverage: Associate Massive Pain to Not Changing Now and Massive Pleasure to the Experience of Changing Now!

Most people know that they really want to change, yet they just can’t get themselves to do it! But change is usually not a question of capability; it’s almost always a question of motivation. If someone put a gun to our heads and said, “You’d better get out of that depressed state and start feeling happy now,” I bet any one of us could find a way to change our emotional state for the moment under these circumstances.
But the problem, as I’ve said, is that change is often a should and not a must. Or it’s a must, but it’s a must for “someday.” The only way we’re going to make a change now is if we create a sense of urgency that’s so intense that we’re compelled to follow through. If we want to create change, then, we have to realize that it’s not a question of whether we can do it, but rather whether we will do it. Whether we will or not comes down to our level of motivation, which in turn comes down to those twin powers that shape our lives, pain and pleasure.

Every change you’ve accomplished in your life is the result of changing your neuro-associations about what means pain and what means pleasure. So often, though, we have a hard time getting ourselves to change because we have mixed emotions about changing. On the one hand, we want to change. We don’t want to get cancer from smoking. We don’t want to lose our personal relationships because our temper is out of control. We don’t want our kids to feel unloved because we’re harsh with them. We don’t want to feel depressed for the rest of our lives because of something that happened in our past. We don’t want to feel like victims anymore.

On the other hand, we fear change. We wonder, “What if I stop smoking cigarettes, but I die of cancer anyway and I’ve given up the pleasure that cigarettes used to give me?” Or “What if I let go of this negative feeling about the rape, and it happens to me again?” We have mixed emotions where we link both pain and pleasure to changing, which causes our brain to be uncertain as to what to do, and keeps us from utilizing our full resources to make the kinds of changes that can happen literally in a moment if every ounce of our being were committed to them.

How do we turn this around? One of the things that turns virtually anyone around is reaching a pain threshold. This means experiencing pain at such an intense level that you know you must change now—a point at which your brain says, “I’ve had it; I can’t spend another day, not another moment, living or feeling this way.”
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Change requires more than just establishing the knowledge that you should change. It’s knowing at the deepest emotional and most basic sensory level that you must change. If you’ve tried many times to make a change and you’ve failed to do so, this simply means that the level of pain for failing to change is not intense enough. You have not reached threshold, the ultimate leverage.