The HERO In You
Much of what we learned as kids reading comic books and watching TV is that a hero is someone with super-powers 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 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 either 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 word argument. 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 H.E.R.O. Tour.
What Is the H.E.R.O. Tour?
In our usage the word HERO becomes an acronym for Honest Examination of Real Occurrences. It’s an organized structure that is built around the idea of searching your own success history and locating the core motivational element to caused you to push through barriers to get to a success conclusion.
The undeniable fact is that often times you were in a tough situation and thoughts of just wanting to give up become a voice that creeps 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.”
But for some reason you didn’t quit and it resulted in a successful outcome and a benefit for you or for 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 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 win a race was a success that added to you as an independent person. No one (except you) can ever take away from you the credit for your hard-earned achievements.
This is important because it’s the stuff that your sense of self-confidence and self-belief are built on.
What Is the H.E.R.O. Tour? (See video HERE)
In the context of our work 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 entering your responses to a sequential set of simple “keys” 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 (your history of successes) in an organized format just like a real tour would do.
The purpose of using the H.E.R.O. 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 H.E.R.O. workspace, you’ll be forming neural connections that will help you later when you’re faced with new challenges. Working with H.E.R.O. 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 dominate 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 H.E.R.O. Tour in as strong a state as they were when they originally experienced. This is why those who use the H.E.R.O. Tour report a feeling of great joy and delight at the end of the session.
A Dual Brain System
Inside the H.E.R.O. Tour the word persistence is used numerous times. That’s because you’re looking for 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 for what it actually is. You’ll only find the meaning for it as it relates to its use in language.
But persistence, something often referred to as your grit, is more than a word. It emerges 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 you’d be best to actually locate its root source and that, as already stated, is what H.E.R.O. 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 become persistent in all things and the world would 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. It get’s stressed by the presence of difficulty. It’s a brain that thinks, often too much but doesn’t feel anything. On the other hand the gut brain is a feeling brain but it doesn’t actually think. It’s more a brain of action.
The drive of persistence is actually an active ethereal force that can be felt by the gut brain.
Within H.E.R.O. you’ll use your head brain to recall, with thought, the events that fit the various triggers the system gives you. Later on in your H.E.R.O. session you’ll use your gut brain to 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 creating 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 had forgotten about. That will lead to you having a huge improvement in your self-belief because you’ve repeatedly uncovered the hard evidence of truth that you’ve been successful all of your life. For many who use H.E.R.O. that epiphany is a major takeaway.
Ready to learn more about the H.E.R.O Tour? Go here now to learn more.
Like to see the live videos I do every Saturday? Go HERE.