I am extremely excited for a conference I’m attending this week, where I’ll get to see Tony Robbins keynote on Saturday. If you have not heard of Tony Robbins, he has 33 different businesses, to the tune of a multi-billion dollar business empire in the personal and business transformation space. He has advised people like Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Clinton, to name a few.

Essentially, he is one of the best in the business when it comes to understanding what it takes to help people perform at their highest levels, and he’s coached many uber-successful self-made millionaires. What I find fascinating is that (for the most part) these extremely successful people do not have a higher IQ than you or I. They weren’t born into money. So, what do they do differently that has allowed them to achieve a high level of success?

According to Tony, there’s a number of success traits they share, but today we’re going to focus on one specific trait that can do everything from cause us to lower our expectations at work, to continue to say “yes” when we really want to say “no.” This single trait is the difference between showing up at work with a great attitude or feeling like every day is a slog. It’s the difference between going after our big goals and dreams, and just going through the motions.

Six months into my first job, I needed to purchase a car.

As I considered my purchase, I wanted something reliable, that had good gas mileage, and that would last a long time. I wanted something that was small yet able to haul more than the average car, mostly because at the time it was our 4th house or apartment move in 3 years, so it seemed practical to have a vehicle with a lot of trunk space for its size. If possible, I’d prefer a vehicle in a unique color to make it easy to find in a parking lot.

My purchase ended up being a small Mazda hatchback. At the time I purchased it in 2003, hatchbacks weren’t yet a thing. That car had an unusual design for the time, and it met all my criteria and seemed the perfect purchase for me. I could put down the seats flat and haul stuff around in the back easily. It was easy to maneuver in city traffic, got good gas mileage, and it was bright blue.

The next vehicle my husband and I would buy, years later, was a Toyota 4Runner that we still have. We had recently moved to the northeast, where there is snow. We wanted a vehicle that was good in the snow, could haul things around (including children), and was both very safe and very reliable.

I remember being excited when we realized that there is 4Runner 200,000 mile club. In other words, there is a much-higher-proportion of people who drive those vehicles to 200,000 miles and beyond than most other types of vehicles.

When we lived in the city, I had a coworker who loved her MiniCooper. She’d zip around the city, she lived downtown in an apartment, and it was perfectly suited to who she is as a person.

I also know several stay-at-home moms who are very proud of their fully tricked-out minivans, and a couple of city-dwelling friends who have wondered out loud why anyone would even need a vehicle, when there’s public transportation, Lift, and Uber.

Know anyone with a pickup truck? I bet that’s perfectly suited to their identity too.

Each of us tell ourselves a different story about what personal transportation means to us. For me, it’s a practical, cost-conscious way to get from point A to point B. For my ex-coworker, it’s an extension of her bubbly, unique personality. For some of my mom friends, it’s the epitome of what they think it means to be a family maker. And for my city-dwelling friends, a car is an unnecessary, expensive, wasteful use of space, based on their identities as hip young professionals.

We all have told ourselves a different story about our vehicles and what having a particular type of car, minivan, or truck means. The story we told ourselves dictated what type of vehicle we picked, or even if we drove one at all. Our identities dictate the stories we tell ourselves.

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Have you ever walked out of a discussion, only to learn that the person you had the discussion with came to an entirely different conclusion as to the outcome of your discussion? Have you ever walked out of a highly-charged meeting and found that others attending the exact same meeting had a different view of what had happened? It’s a similar phenomenon. We frame every interaction we have through the lens of the story we “know to be true” based on our individual identities. Yet, so often what we “know to be true,” isn’t actually true.

The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are mindful of their stories, and choose to tell themselves stories that will move them towards their goals.

At work, let’s say you are asked to take notes by a senior man. You’re the only woman in the meeting. Depending on the story you’ve told yourself, the following thoughts may run through your head:

I can’t believe that sexist jerk is asking me to take notes…..again!
I wish I could say no this request, but then who else would take notes? Besides, I’m good at taking notes. It’s easier to just agree than it is to push back on this.
Taking notes sets a really bad precedent, especially considering that I’m trying to be a role model for other women in my firm. Even though I’ve agreed to it before, I’m going to suggest someone else take a turn.
Why am I always singled out to take notes? That might be the only reason I was invited to this meeting. I guess this is just my role and it’s the way things are always going to be.

Every single one of the above thoughts has run through my own head at various points in my career. Every thought but #3 resulted in my feeling frustrated and resentful. #4 also resulted in a slow but steady drop in confidence.

Did I have any data to back up what I was telling myself? No.

Do you think the person who make the request of me spent more than 5 seconds thinking about the request? No.

Why then, was I wasting my time and energy ruminating over stories I had made up?

I became aware that I was telling myself these stories by accident. One evening, around year 2 after college, I was talking to my husband after work. I gestured with my glass of red wine in hand, venting about something - I actually don’t remember what - that had happened to me at work that day. As the wine sloshed over the side of the glass, he looked at me and said:

“I can hear that what happened upset you, but I’m not following why. I’ve had a similar conversation with my boss in the past, and I never would have interpreted it that way. Tell me more.”

As our discussion progressed, I realized that I had pre-framed my work experience that day with “what I had known to be true” about the person I was venting about, thus taking a conversation entirely out of context in a way it likely wasn’t intended. I had overreacted to the situation based on the identity I had assigned to another human. That experience caused me to begin thinking about the stories I tell myself, and how those stories can dictate my experiences.

For example, for many years I told myself: “I can’t ask my boss for that because they’ll say no,” without any actual data to back it up. Or worse, one time I did work up the courage to ask for something, and was told “no,” causing me to make up a story that every future request would also result with a “no.” Neither of these stories I told myself ended up being factually accurate.

The challenge, then, is to start telling yourself stories that DO serve you. Those stories are the ones that fuel you and give you energy, as opposed to invoking feelings of anger or despair or helplessness. The stories we tell ourselves create feelings. Feelings create behaviors. Those behaviors can either move us towards our goals and dreams or away from them. Successful people tell themselves stories that result in behaviors that move them towards their dreams and goals.

How do you change your stories? I want to share an exercise with you that I find extremely powerful. It’s one I adapted from several career coaches I’ve worked with in combination what I learned from following Tony’s work.

Do you ever feel like you have multiple identities at work that you access in different situations? For example, when one of my coworkers told me that his dad was ill and in the hospital and might now make it, I evoked my empathy and compassion for him in that moment. I listened without offering advice (nothing I could say would make it better anyways). I was simply there for him in that moment of need.

Later in the day, I was leading a conference call discussion on one of my projects. In that situation, I accessed the part of my personality needed to confidently and professionally make my points and build the consensus needed for a decision.

We access the different parts of ourselves that we need when those skills are called upon. The trick is to be able to access the right part of us at the right time.

We can choose the parts of ourselves we need to access, by setting out an intention for how we will show up in a particular situation. For me, I’ve found it particularly helpful to name my work personality (it’s “S” in case you are wondering), which was recommended to me by multiple career coaches. I completely recognize this seems a little strange (I was skeptical too at first!), but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

After you’ve named your work personality, the next step is decide how that personality should show up. Write those things down during your morning journaling practice, or on your phone. It’s also really powerful to read these out loud to yourself.

As an example: Let’s say I have an important meeting. How do I want “S” to show up for it? Here are a couple of things I might write:

She has an open and enthusiastic mind, ready to serve.
She confidently shares her expertise with others.
She stays curious, especially if confronted with criticism.
She speaks up, especially if her viewpoint is different from others.
She is a problem solver, ready to creatively find solutions to any challenge presented.
She is patient, willing to explain to others what seems obvious to her as many times as needed.

Your intentions may be different, but you get the idea. As you write those intentions down, pay attention to the feelings they invoke. For my meeting, I wanted to walk in feeling confident, powerful, and like I’ve got everything under control and can meet any challenge thrown at me. That’s exactly how the intentions above make me feel.

If I was writing intentions for how I wanted to show up at my daughters’ birthday parties, what I would write would be very different.

Beliefs lead to feelings which lead to actions. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Setting an intention has been scientifically proven to change outcomes. (Some resources to explain further: Harvard Business Review article, this Inc. article, and this Science Direct article.)

You deserve to crush your goals this year. Set an intention for who you want to be, and watch those goals become reality.