You’re at home and suddenly you realize you need to go grocery shopping. You grab the keys to your car and head out. Once you get back home and start putting away the groceries, you realize you bought a lot of what you don’t need and not much of what you really needed. What happened?

For all major grocery stores, everything in the store is made to lead you into buying certain things, often things you don’t really need. This can be done by where they place an item, the size and type of font on an item label, the colors used on the label, or any sales or coupons made available. Some of the most needed items like milk and eggs are placed at the back of the store to make you walk through the store just to get to them, making you grab other items along the way. Items that are more interesting for the store to sell you are placed closer to eye level on the shelves. Sales and coupons make you buy those items because why not, after all you got them on sale. You’re basically up against many many dollars of investment in sales and marketing used to program your brain to tell you what you should buy. So how can you avoid this? The answer, program your brain before others do it for you. In this example, creating a shopping list before heading out to the grocery store is one way you can do your own programming before the grocery store does it for you.

This is just one example of how others can program your brain, often not giving you the results you really need. Unfortunately there are many other cases that have much more serious consequences than buying grocery items you don’t really need. So lets talk about how we can avoid this to make sure we’re always on the driver’s seat.

“Know who you are.” “Know where you want to be.” “Be in control”. These might sound like something a coach would tell his players, but this is about life. Know who you are and program that in your brain to avoid the negative people you will come across, and you will come across them, to create any doubt on who you really are. Leave only enough room in that program open to those who really care for you. Create your identity and be unshakable.

“Know where you want to be.” What is you goal in life? What is your purpose? I know these can be difficult question and you don’t have to have it all figured out, but I promise you that if you take the time to think about it you will come up with something. Again, you don’t have to have it all figured out, even if what you come up with is something that takes you to next year, next month, next week. Once you get there you’ll come up with something else. It will be hard at first, but the more you keep doing it the easier it will get. And once you do this you will have programmed where you want to be and now no fancy advertisement, no sales person, no bad influence or any other negativity that you encounter will be able that for you.

“Be in control.” This is more than anything a result of knowing who you are and where you want to be in life. You will naturally align every decision you make towards what you have programmed. Sure you will make mistakes, but just like when you make a wrong turn but you have set your GPS to your desired destination, you will reroute. And don’t beat yourself up for making those wrong turns, there is usually a purpose for every one of them. The journey to get back on course will make you stronger and wiser and will become part of who you are, and you will soon find out that without those wrong turns, you would not have been able to get to your destination.

“You were put on this earth to achieve your greatest self, to live out your purpose, and to do it courageously.” – Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free