Controlling Your Character

When moving across the board as your character, you draw upon your roles, skills, tools, resources and more. It’s up to your character to manage all of these. How you manage them determines how you move and how well you succeed in your Game. Your success in advancing levels or overcoming hurdles is determined by how strong your character is and how well equipped you are with the required skill sets. Therefore, it is equally important that you strengthen and manage your intellect, your physical body, and your energy. 

In volume 8, you will learn all the ways of controlling your character to keep you as empowered as possible when managing your Game. You will learn how to rebuild your character's foundation from the ground up. You’ll learn how to hack, rack, and stack habits and routines to keep you in top form in all Game areas. 

Each level in your Game requires a new and improved you. You always need to be functioning optimally to get to where you are going and become who you are meant to become. Don’t get too comfortable along the way. You need to keep growing to keep leveling up. Part of your work in your Game is maximizing opportunities for improving your character. This involves applying the hacks and conditioning you’ll learn. 

Your character’s improvement is reflected directly back to you based on your accomplishments in each Game level. As you move forward, your real-world experiences continually develop your character. Your experiences reflect where you are at in your Game. 

Your character’s focus throughout your Game should be on keeping your character under control, managing your resources well, and maintaining high stat levels. This includes controlling how you behave, how you think, how you feel, what you know, how you look…. Everything. 

It’s often easier to look critically at others than it is to look at ourselves. It is also often easier to look at others objectively and realistically to see what could be improved. We are good at criticizing ourselves, but we don’t usually do this in the most productive ways. Until now, you 

may have been focusing on the wrong aspects of your character. You’ll start by taking inventory of your character to identify where it is so you can control it and take it in the direction you want to go. 

The objective of this practice is not to make you overly critical of yourself. It’s to get ahead. We’re going to look at specific elements of your character so you can revamp yourself into who you want to become. Before you start your actual Game journey, you’ll learn how to productively check-in in with your character on all important levels. By taking ownership of your character, you take back control of your life. 

You are in control of your character's outcome in your life. When I say you control your character, I mean you will train yourself. Much like a coach trains its players, you will be training your character to perform as best it can in your Game. You will train your character's mind, body, and energy. You’ll start by determining what you want in life and where you want to end up. Then, you’ll determine who you would need to be to get there. You’ll reverse engineer yourself into that person by completing the activities in this series. You’ll determine everything the character standing at your target would have – traits, skill stats, roles – and you’ll train your character to be that. 

To use a coach analogy, if your character wants to be an Olympic competitor, you’d determine all the training that would be required to stand at that level. You would align everything in your life – your training schedule, fitness level, daily habits, nutrition, everything – to align with what that character would have when successfully competing at that level. 

It might sound simple and easy but controlling your character is the most difficult thing you do at the Game’s beginning. Doing this is really, really tough. I say this so you know what to expect. 

When your discomfort arises, accept it as normal. In the beginning, you may even feel as if you want to quit. Don’t! It’s a test. Remember, you are choosing this change. When discomfort arises, remember that you chose it and you wanted to do this. No one is making you. Don't let these moments get you down and pull you off path. 

The beginning is difficult because it’s when you are likely making very radical changes. 

Your character has complex layers, many of them affecting one another. As you begin to swap out habits and build new character stats, shifts start to happen in other areas of your character. While all of it is aimed at enhancing your character - and it will - some of these shifts will feel uncomfortable. You are shedding your previous life and beginning a new Game. 

When your new habits are radically different from your existing ones and you’re making major changes, your brain must work harder. This makes it more difficult for you to adapt and build initial neural connections. 

Building pathways between similar neural pathways is easier for your brain to do. As you get more aligned to where you are going, your character changes become more subtle and gradual. Your brain becomes able to respond much more easily. You’ll also start to feel that it is easier for you to adapt to changes energetically and in your body. As you progress, it will be easier and easier to integrate changes into your new character. This is when all your changes, such as habits, become integrated into your growth lifestyle. At this point, it is no

longer hard work to deploy them. You’ll still be working. That never stops! It just gets easier. 

In the beginning, it’s often harder to change your character because you frequently lack resources, support, or allies. As you grow, these all increase. Trust that as you do the work, you’ll gain more resources in all areas. This gives you the ability to further expand and enhance your character. You’ll also gain the ability to leverage resources and tools. This then opens opportunities to better manage your resources and further enhance your character.