Fulfilling your dreams and your ability to thrive in the areas of your life that matter most can be simplified by breakthroughs, those moments in time when the impossible becomes possible. If anyone wants to thrive in any area of their life, they have to reach a point of breakthrough where they will not settle for anything less than extraordinary in that area. Whether you want a breakthrough in your business, intimate life, emotional well-being, health, finances or career, there are only three areas to break through to feel lasting success. Here are my 3 steps to a breakthrough:

1. YOUR STRATEGIES
I live for finding strategies — those shortcuts that help people get more done in less time. What is it that gets some people to succeed while others fail who seem to have equal enthusiasm or passion for the tasks at hand? They have insights, distinctions, and strategies that allow them to achieve more quickly.

For example, take someone who was born very poor, without an education, and had emotional and financial challenges but found a way to be highly successful and living an inspired life. I don’t believe that’s lucky—luck is what you do for a day or a week—strategies are what make it consistently happen for decades. A strategy can be found in the simplest or slightest distinction and it can happen in an instant.

For example, there are hundreds or even thousands of strateYOUR STORY
We all have stories — narratives we tell ourselves about why we can or cannot do or achieve something in our lives. Whether we believe we can or can’t, we’re usually right, because our expectation controls our focus, perceptions, and the way in which we feel and act. When a person succeeds it’s because they have the right strategy, and usually they found it because they have a story that it was possible or they could make it happen. Often people don’t lose weight because they have a simple story: it says, “I’m big boned.” With that as your core belief system you are never going to find a strategy, and even if you do, you won’t follow through on it.

Your story may be true — you may have been through a horrific experience — but that’s not the reason why you can’t have the life you want. For example, you might have had a bad breakup five years ago, but that’s not the reason you haven’t found the passionate and loving relationship you deserve. A disempowering story is one of the things that controls people and makes them stuck in their beliefs. Most people tell a story in a selective way so they don’t have to ever maximize their effort towards a strategy because they’re afraid they will fail. In order to get out of a story you have to be triggered by hunger and desire: if someone wants something strong enough they will break through the story that’s limiting them.gies out there for losing weight, and frankly most of them are proven to work — if you work them! We’re not hurting for strategies. There are fitness clubs on every street, dieticians, health coaches, training videos, audios, books, etc. Yet 65% of the United States is overweight and 33% is obese, and those numbers are only growing geometrically. I think that the problem for most people is not that they don’t have a strategy; it’s that they’re not using a strategy that works for them or acting upon it. Why? Because they have a disempowering story.