The Commitments: A Step-by-Step Guide to Personal Transformation

Committing to The Commitments

If you're like most people, the things you're committed to in your life are entirely wrong.

I don't say this to be harsh or mean. It's almost inevitable, because most of what we've been taught by society – and by extension, what our parents taught us, and our grandparents before them – isn't right either.

What are you most committed to in life? Most people will say things like family, career, friends, pets, church, or a cause. On the surface, these are fine. But the problem is that many people come to these commitments through a combination of conditioning (what they were taught they should do with their lives) and reactivity (responding to the stresses of their life, as opposed to actively choosing their path).

The writer Henry David Thoreau famously said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." He meant that people are mainly going through the motions, not actively choosing their lives. Thoreau said this in 1849 – and sadly, even with countless advances since, our emotional state hasn't changed much in over a century and a half.

Well, I can tell you that you are holding this book in your hands because you know, innately, that life doesn’t have to be an endless struggle, and that you are capable of achieving much more. And that – gasp! – life can even be fun. You don’t need to live a life of quiet desperation.

So let me introduce you to a concept that will revolutionize your life. It will help you move from struggle and frustration to purpose and joy. It will help you connect to your true Self – the one buried deep under everyone else’s expectation and agendas for you (including the subconscious ones you hold for yourself), and it will transform your relationship to other people, especially those bonds that have been rife with dysfunction.

Get ready to learn The Commitments.

The Commitments boil down to a series of steps that help make the experience of being a human much easier. They are simple, foolproof, and can be implemented in any situation. They are a set of thoughts and behaviors that can transform your mental and physical health, and elevate every part of your life.

Beyond being steps, they are also part of a process, meaning they are more powerful than the steps of an equation. Together, they will provide you with a new way to think about your life, your perceptions, and your conditioning.

You may be wondering how I created the Commitments, and why you should go through the effort to learn and implement them. The answer is: I know how effective these Commitments are because I used them myself to go from a life of stress and reactivity to one with a thriving career, personal life, and deep happiness.

Today, I'm a psychologist who’s worked with people from all walks of life, including celebrities and Fortune 500 CEOs. I run a multi-million-dollar company, Dr. Tracy Inc., that provides emotional training to help elevate my clients' lives from reactivity into one of intentionality. I’m happily married to a wonderful man. But I came from humble beginnings, and my current success is no accident.

I am the product of teenage parents – my mother was 16 when she gave birth to me, and my dad was 19. To say that they were not prepared for parenthood, either practically or emotionally, is an understatement. While there was a great deal of love in my family, I was also born into emotional patterns of reactivity, volatility, anxiety, and self-medicating, to name just a few.

As a child, I would watch my family members argue, shut down, and misunderstand each other. They were emotionally sensitive people, channeling their feelings of overwhelm and reactivity and turning them into destructive habits. As stressful as it could be, I also recognized from a young age that their perceptions were much more complicated than the reality occurring – more accurately, they were caught up in repeating patterns, and largely unaware of them. I began to study their emotions in a scientific, objective way.

But being aware of these patterns wasn’t initially enough for me to change them. Just like my father had done, I ended up getting married and divorced a few times. I struggled with an eating disorder for years. Although I had a high-paying corporate job, I felt depressed, and like I was putting on a performance all the time.

So I went back to the lessons of my childhood. I decided to make it my life's work to help people heal from these misperceptions and reactive patterns. I earned a PhD in psychology. Through my own experience and through working with hundreds of clients, The Commitments were born.

Over the years, my clients have called The Commitments magical, and I believe them to be magical as well. But I also know that things can feel magical when they were previously mysterious and difficult for us, and then become easy. You’ll learn to create things on purpose, instead of accidentally.

Because everyone is creating, whether they recognize it or not.

This is the process that's always going on. And creating with difficulty is not necessary.

By practicing The Commitments, you’ll also learn how to become an Emotional Scientist. That’s a phrase I coined to describe the practice of observing emotions (yours and others’) without having a knee-jerk reaction to them. Being an Emotional Scientist gives you the ability to choose how you will respond to a situation for your greatest benefit, and to stop letting other peoples’ wayward emotions affect you.

The Commitments you will learn are:

-Stay connected to your Self

-Be intentional, accurate, and factual in your speech with yourself and others

-Choose your intentions, and focus on your outcomes over your feelings

-Say and do only what it is that will create your outcomes

For now, I invite you to embrace these Core Commitments, to fully integrate them and live them. Know that these will lead you to an elevated life, and they will allow you to live your full potential in each moment. They will allow you to become a world-changing leader, simply by the way you live your life.

They will be the Commitments you make to those you care about and those you influence during your time on Earth. After you are gone, these are the Commitments you will pass down to your children, grandchildren, and everyone you've touched. They are your legacy, and they can be your children's children's legacy. They are a tremendous gift for you to receive, and they can help you create anything.

If something is painful, difficult, or unproductive, you’ll know that you can come back to these basics. Use them to elevate yourself and your life out of the trenches, or if you’re already happy with your life, to soar even higher.

Each Core Commitment works beautifully together, and allows the Method to bestow its most incredible benefits. Be diligent about integrating each one into your life, and also enjoy the process of growing deeper into each Commitment, and the fulfillment that it will bring to you each and every day.

Now let’s get started.

Chapter 1: The Foundation: The Concept of Conditioning

To start off, I want to explain one of the most important concepts a person can understand about being human: conditioning.

You may be thinking something like, “Dr. T, I already know about that. It’s the way people are taught to act around each other.” And while you’re right, when I talk about conditioning, I’m taking a more expansive view. I’m talking about the very nature of reality and how we perceive it – and why the way we were raised to view it is only a small part of the picture.

The highest form of suffering is to know what you want and to be continually re-experiencing something you don't. While it may seem that there is no rhyme or reason to this, it occurs because people are individually and collectively conditioned to keep recreating the same things over and over again – because that's what they are familiar with. Even when things are bad and we know they don't work, the conditioning to keep doing it is very strong.

Conditioning is how human beings are receiving, learning, and sharing information from the moment they are born, and throughout the rest of their lives. It’s largely a social process, in which things get developed and reinforced over and over. And when you do something, it creates a likelihood that you will do it again.

Let’s take a benign example. Since childhood, you’ve probably been conditioned to put on a pair of shoes before you leave the house. You don’t have to put much thought into it, beyond selecting a pair. But the idea of wearing shoes isn’t one you debate. And because you kept putting on shoe as a kid, you continued to do so every day.

Eventually, putting on shoes just became automatic. This is what I refer to as programming. Just as you can program a computer, you can also program yourself to do certain things, such as learning the quickest route to drive to work, or memorizing a dance routine. While programming can get a bad rap, from a practical standpoint, it’s beneficial because it allows you not to conserve time and energy for more difficult tasks.

Both conditioning and programming on their own are neutral, but they can develop into both positive and negative forms.

Another important pair of concepts are reaction and intention. A reaction is how you respond to a given stimulus, especially when it’s a conditioned response. Reactions typically feel stressful, and may not even be about a particular stimulus itself. They don’t necessarily get easier either, because if the negative reaction was there in the first place, it has the potential to continue aggravating you, keeping you stuck. You may not be aware of these reactive patterns, which makes them harder to change. In turn, this can keep you from building a life that is a reflection of what you really want and care about.

In contrast, intention is the opposite of reaction. It’s the conscious choice of how you want to respond to a stimulus. Intentions usually feel good; they are reflective of your deepest desires and how you want to spend your life, both in the moment and in the grand scheme. While intentions initially can take some work, with practice, they become second nature.

The Commitments will teach you to set and keep intentions.

Okay, some big concepts here. But stick with me – we’re going to delve more into how conditioning works, which will bring all these ideas into focus.

Let’s start with perception, and what’s really going on in “reality.”

Say there’s a man walking down the street on a sunny day. He’s middle-aged, of average height and weight. You ask three different people to describe the man. The first person, a teenaged girl, notes that he is wearing flip flops. The second person, an older gentleman, notices the man’s body turning, and says he’s approaching his driveway. The third person, a young mother, states that he looks a little worried. All of these are just different perceptions of the same, raw reality.

Each person’s take is unique because we are each perceiving reality based on the millions of things we have perceived before in our life – and the countless things human beings before us have perceived, stretching all the way back through the history of humanity. Anything created in the past – from small conversations to big discoveries, like Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb – has continuous momentum that is carried forward.

The way we perceive our surroundings is also a result of the perspective of the people around us. Their perceptions shape the way we view the world. This includes people in our immediate vicinity – such as spouses, children, or roommates – and through more remote channels like social media.

For most people, the sum total of their perception of reality creates a largely unconscious (and flawed) filter. But when we know that this is a filter, and that we are simply perceiving an experience, we no longer have to use it as our only perception of what’s going on. We can instead choose any type of interpretation we want, because we have the powerful creative capacity to do so.

In the case of the man walking down the street, you could notice that he is smiling, and interpret that he’s doing so because he loves the roses in front of his house. You can notice something totally different than you would have before.

This intelligence can guide you forward when you use what I call your internal navigation system. This is your inner wisdom; your inner GPS that gives you life direction, whether you choose to follow it or not. It urges you to follow your interests, talk to an intriguing person, and express the real you. You can access it by being in connection with your Self. Ideally, it’s meant to guide you throughout your life so you can fulfill your unique purpose. The Commitments you're going to learn will shed more light on how to access this intelligence.

From the moment we are born, we begin to absorb the patterns and environment around us. Let’s use the example of a newborn named Johnny. He starts to hear, see, touch, and feel the world around him. But in addition, he’s experiencing emotions – both his own, and the different emotions of the people around him. Johnny is a sponge soaking up what his parents and other caregivers feel, think, and believe, and how they do things. Much of this is not a conscious choice; it’s just part of Johnny’s human nature.

Johnny’s parents try to create patterns for their baby, like when to eat and when to go to sleep in his crib. Johnny absorbs these patterns, just as he absorbs the rhythms of his mother or primary caretaker – how fast she moves, how present she is with him, how much she smiles.

Johnny’s genes also have a role in his development – he has his dad’s blue eyes, and he’s left-handed like Mom. The way those genes express themselves is a set of rhythms for Johnny, but beyond that, his environment is shaping him.

Little Johnny becomes conditioned for whatever his parents do. If his dad is patient and soothing when he cries, he absorbs that. If his dad reacts to his crying by shouting and storming out of the room, he absorbs that too. His dad is having one version of reality, and his mom is having her own version of reality, and both of these are influencing Johnny. If it doesn't feel good to be in the presence of a particular person, Johnny is still dependent and captive to absorbing what is around him – especially when he’s in this young, vulnerable state.

What’s more, Johnny’s patterns are also going into the environment and being absorbed by the rest of the family members, so that the baby becomes part of that emotional ecosystem. Johnny and his parents are syncing up with each other.

Without meaning to, Johnny’s mom and dad may teach him only to be connected with other people, not with himself. That sets up a scenario where Johnny may go through life propelled by everyone else's beliefs, especially those of his parents. As he gets older, there's great power in being aware of that and deciding if he wants to follow that programming or not.

Johnny (and you) can replace whatever doesn’t serve your true self with new programming that creates a a new set of outcomes. That's really fun and exciting, and alters the programming that says your whole life will be determined by your genetics and the circumstances you were born into, and that there's not much you can do to change that.

As Johnny develops as a child where so much information is being cemented into his sense of Self, he will start to form beliefs. These could be any kind of belief – brothers are fun, sisters are challenging. Anxiety is something you just have to live with. Ice cream makes me feel better.

All of this programming creates his filter of the world around him. And just like Johnny, as you interact with people, you're joining their conditioning and patterns. The result is a unique process and rhythms.

That’s why we want to be connected to ourselves and conscious of it so we can recognize things. There’s a vast difference between Johnny yelling when he gets upset because that’s what his dad does, and Johnny feeling the urge to yell, recognizing it, and choosing to take a deep breath. In the first case, he perpetuates his father’s cycle; in the second, he intentionally creates his own.

Commitments Question: What patterns in my life do I not like but find very hard to break?

Conditioning isn’t just what we are taught as children. Johnny is going to grow up, and he takes with him the perceptions from his childhood and those close to him as he starts to navigate the world as a teenager and then as a young adult. He absorbs and processes all the stimulus in his environment, so that he becomes what he is around, through every piece of learning that's happening socially and environmentally. As he takes in stimulus, he blends it with all his previous learnings.