The HERO In You
Much of what we learned as kids reading comic books and watching TV is that a hero is someone with superpowers and who has the ability to save people—just in the nick of time—from any manner of serious threats.
The whole idea of the word “hero” got so magnified that it became a bit overblown, so that the term eventually came to mean beyond ideal.
But nowadays, we usually apply the label “hero” to otherwise average citizens who risked their own safety to save another from harm. Often these individuals dodge the spotlight and seem uncomfortable with all the attention they’re getting. They declare that they don’t see themselves as heroes at all, just someone who saw a desperate situation and responded spontaneously to meet it. “I was at the right place at the right time” is how they often describe it. “Anyone would have done the same thing,” they say with authentic humility.
I’m talking about this because I need to make a point about you. Depending on the level of your self-belief, you may or may not agree with this next statement:
You are a hero to yourself.
I say this because, in a certain way, I can prove it.
The fact is, you’ve had accomplishments that saved you from failure. Not just once, but many times throughout your life. They may not be earthshaking to the ears of others, but without them, you’d probably not be the person you are now.
But enough of the argument type using words. Let’s talk about the real and active proof that this is true.
To do this, we need to go deep inside of your person and look for the evidence that is left behind from every brave accomplishment that took your effort to gain. To do that kind of discovery, we need a specialized tool.
It’s called the HERO Tour.
What is the HERO Tour?
In our usage, the word HERO becomes an acronym for Honest Examination of Real Occurrences. Just these few words are intended to be the description of an organized structure. One that is built around the very positive experience of searching your own history of success. This type of searching leads you to feel, in a physically tactile way, the core motivational element that enabled you to push through barriers to get to the achievement of a successful outcome.
The undeniable fact is that oftentimes you found yourself in a tough situation and needed to solve an urgent problem. But in the midst of all this your own thoughts worked against you by encouraging you to give up. An inner voice might also have creeped in saying things like, “This is just too hard a problem to solve. I’m too tired. I don’t have the strength to go on. I should just quit.” (Researchers say that this is your brain trying to protect you from the trauma of failing.)
But, for some reason, you didn’t quit. You pushed ahead, and it resulted in a successful outcome with a benefit to you or to others.
How was it that the hero in you was able to muster the strength to persist long enough at a task until the barriers fell away and you got the job done?
That’s the mystery element that enables the story of the hero’s journey to ever be told. Even simple things like the first time you tied your own shoelaces, learned to ride a two-wheeler, or won a race was a success that added to you as an independent person. No one can ever take away from you the credit for your hard-earned achievements.
This is important because this is the stuff that your sense of self-confidence, self-belief, and optimism are built on.
What Is The HERO Tour? (See video HERE)
In the context of what we’re teaching here, the word HERO becomes an acronym for Honest Examination of Real Occurrences. The process uses a special online platform, which will act as your private journaling workspace during the session. This is where you will be typing your responses to a sequential set of simple “keys” or “prompts” that are designed to help you recall a cross-section of your previous accomplishments that required your applied effort. Something we usually refer to as your Victory History.
Why is it a “Tour”?
We call it a “tour” because, like any tour, it’s designed to have you visit certain points of interest, in this case your history of success in an organized format, just like a real tour would do.
The purpose of using the HERO Tour is to locate the root cause of the drive that caused you to overcome difficulties and to ultimately breakthrough to success. By accessing this drive in a controlled environment, such as the HERO Tour workspace, you’ll be forming neural connections that will help you later when you’re faced with new challenges. Working with HERO Tour gives you the chance to experience a prolonged focus on pin-pointing only those certain positive episodes of your past where your persistence and determination—your grit—became the dominant motivational force within a very specific set of actions.
Associated with these victories, large and small, is the feeling of accomplishment that you were the one who made the effort and won the day. These feelings are made available to you because the thinking brain in your head is hard-wired to your feeling brain in your gut via the vegas nerve.
We think that the somatic marker hypothesis put forward by Antonio Damasio may be useful in describing how the gut brain records these unique experiences. It helps to explain how these feelings of thrill and delight can be recalled within the HERO Tour in as strong a state as they were when they originally experienced. This is why those who use the HERO Tour report a feeling of great joy and delight at the end of the session.
A Dual Brain System
You will notice that inside the HERO Tour the word persistence is used numerous times. That’s because you’re looking to recall very specific times, a number of which will usually be first-time incidents, where successful accomplishment happened and caused a memorable benefit to yourself or to another.
But what exactly is persistence anyway? Why is it so important?
If you look up the word persistence in the dictionary you’ll see that it doesn’t offer much insight into what it actually is. You’ll only find the meaning of it as it relates to its use in language.
But persistence, something often referred to as your grit, is more than a word. We see it as a powerful drive that forces the doing of a task that’s perceived at first as too hard to do. To really understand the drive of persistence, it’s best to actually locate its root source, and that, as already stated, is what the HERO Tour is designed to do. But besides that, we can look at how our two brains see it. (If you haven’t yet heard of the second brain in humans, see this post.)
The first thing about persistence is that it’s not a head-brain thing. If it were, we could just think it up. It would be great because we would then be able to become persistent in all things, like compassion, respectfulness, and generosity. The world would then be a very different place to live in. We can think about it, of course, but that doesn’t make it manifest itself within the activity. The head brain is strictly a contemplative organ. But it gets quite stressed by the presence of difficulty. It’s a brain that thinks, often too much, but doesn’t feel anything. There are no pain receptors in the cortex at all. On the other hand, the gut brain is a feeling brain, but it doesn’t actually think. It’s more a brain of action, such as managing the complicated process of digestion 24/7.
The drive of persistence is actually an active ethereal force that can be felt by the very sensitive gut brain.
Within the HERO Tour method you’ll use your head brain to recall, with thought, the events that fit the various prompts the system gives you. Later on in your session you’ll use your gut brain to see if you can physically feel the presence of the drive of persistence itself. This repeated thinking/feeling activity will form a solid link between the two different brains. This will create an elegant reciprocal system that you can use whenever life throws a challenge your way. By the time the session concludes, you’ll be feeling a certain excitement from seeing all the things that you’ve accomplished. But with the passing of time, those memories had been forgotten. That will lead to a huge improvement in your self-belief because you’ve repeatedly uncovered the hard evidence of the truth that you’ve been successful all of your life. For many who work through the HERO Tour, epiphany is a major takeaway.
Ready to learn more about the H.E.R.O Tour? Go here now to learn more.
More power to you.