The effective program for change that shows, step by step, exactly what to do to create the life you want—now—with lasting happiness thrown in as a bonus.

Whatever you now do, whatever you now believe, whatever your current circumstances may be, you are perfectly equipped and fully capable of being who you want and having what you want. That you haven't already achieved what you want is due entirely to what you now believe. To become the capable person you dream of being and to attain your heartfelt desires, the great relationship, the needed possessions, the long-sought-for conditions of good living, you need only change what you believe about the way to achieve those goals.

"What you'll learn in these pages is that you can actually reinvent your world," says Chris Prentiss. "You are a powerful being, the most powerful being in your life, and you constantly create your future with your thoughts and actions. By changing your thoughts, you will change your actions and, as a result of natural law, you will change your life. This is an exciting, joy-filled journey that you will cherish forever."

Be Who You Want, Have What You Want is not simply a book you will read once and put back on the shelf. It will become a companion on your path to a new you, a new life, a new way of being. You will bless the day this book came into your life.

This empowering guide to real change delivers a sure-fire system for letting go of stress and unhappiness and creating the best possible outcome in every situation. It dissects the fallacies that say you can't achieve your highest dreams and shares simple yet powerful strategies to:

• Attain your heartfelt goals and desires
• Overcome negativity
• Stop punishing yourself and others for events you experience and let go of the past
• Bring more peace, enthusiasm, and joy into your life

You'll also learn how to develop a strong personal philosophy—one that will see you through the difficult times that come to us all. And you'll find just the right tools you need to move forward confidently and create deep and lasting happiness.

Be Who You Want, Have What You Want brings together insights, stories, meditations, and exercises to show you how to break out of limited thinking and free yourself to become who you really want to be and do what you've always wanted to do.

Chris Prentiss is cofounder and codirector, along with his son Pax, of the world-famous Passages Addiction Cure Center in Malibu, California. He is also the author of a dozen books on personal growth. Prentiss has also led personal empowerment workshops in Southern California and has written, produced, and directed a feature film. He resides with his wife in Malibu, California.

"A deftly written and superbly presented compendium of insightful advice and practical assistance. . . . Step-by-step procedures for accomplishing significant and enduring personal changes, the attainment of goals and desires, the overcoming of negativity and emotional obstacles to success (including letting go of the past), and the instilling of daily life with peace of mind, enthusiasm for, and the joy of, oneself and the surrounding world.”
—Midwest Book Review

"Guaranteed to fast-track your life."
—ReverseSpins.com

"Brilliant, insightful and a MUST READ."
—BackFlap.blogspot.com

"If I had 5 thumbs, I would put them all up....[The author's] life experience with helping people that have to change or die has made him a man who knows what it takes for real change, and the book Be Who You Want, Have What You Want seems to be a culmination of all that knowledge and experience…. MensSelfesteem.com highly recommends Be Who You Want, Have What You Want to anyone searching for real change....With the book Be Who You Want, Have What You Want in your hands, true change is within your grasp."
—Michael Lafrinere, MensSelfesteem.com

Contents:

Acknowledgments
How to Read This Book
1  Reinventing Your World
2  Consciousness
3  First Light from the Lodestar
4  The Perfect You
5  The World of Perfect
6  You Are the Center
7  Your Personal Universe
8  Possibilities
9  All of You
10 Commitment
11 Saying It Positive
12 Giving Up Stress
13 The Price of Failure, The Price of Success
14 Of Maximum Importance
Notes

Excerpt
From Chapter 1: REINVENTING YOUR WORLD

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
—George Bernard Shaw

I PROMISE YOU THAT BY READING THIS BOOK you will learn how to be who you want and have what you want, and you’ll have fun doing it. The big bonus is that you will also learn how to be happy, which is an art in itself.

There is an old saying, “The more you do of what you’ve done, the more you’ll get of what you’ve got.” That saying has merit because doing what you’ve been doing has brought you to this point in your life where you are who you are and have what you have. If who you are and what you have is what you want, that’s perfect. Keep doing what you’ve been doing and you’ll get more of it. However, if who you are and what you have is less than or different than what you want, you’ll have to make some changes to get what you want. You will have to reinvent the way you see your world.

I say “your world” because each of us lives in a different world. Your childhood was different, your parents or lack of them was different, your experiences were different, your relationships were different, your traumas were different, your health history was different, the life lessons you learned were different, and, as a result, your understanding of how the world works is different from everyone else’s. Even if the differences were small, it is those small differences that make all the difference.

Your perception of the world and the way you see yourself in it has created within your mind a concept, a philosophy, of the way you believe things to be. We all have a personal philosophy. Although you may not have ever defined your philosophy, it is fully operative and working in your life every day, all the time. It determines what you believe about the world, about how events and circumstances affect you, and about how you affect them.

Acting on the basis of your philosophy—what you believe to be true about the world and how it works—has primarily created who you are and is responsible for what your life is like today as you read this. You’ll learn more about your personal philosophy in chapter 5. For now, here are a few examples of what makes up a philosophy and how that philosophy creates and maintains your view of the world and governs how you respond to events. Some of these examples are part of your philosophy.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world.
Don’t trust anyone.
Only fools tell the truth all the time.
People are just out for what they can get.
Into every life some rain must fall.
You’ve got to take the bitter with the sweet.
You can’t have it your way all the time.
Bad things happen to good people.
Bad things happen to bad people.
Bad things happen.
I’m not a particularly lucky person.
If it weren’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.
God punishes me.
The devil puts traps in my path.
God is mean.
There is no God
Murphy’s law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”

or

People are generally good-hearted.
I’m a lucky person.
Things always turn out for the best.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
I expect good things to come my way.
Good things seem to come my way all the time.
I can always see goodness in people.
I can take every situation, no matter how bad it seems, and turn it into good fortune. Being the best person I can be always brings me benefits.
Every ending contains a new beginning, a new opportunity.
I believe that God exists.
God watches out for me.
God is good.
Everything always turns out for the best.

Take a moment now and see if you can think of a few examples that might define your own philosophy. If you want to, you can borrow from the list above.

You may not be aware of the power of your philosophy to shape your life—how it guides your actions, how it is responsible for the choices you have made in your life, how it has brought you to where you are now—but before you finish this book, you will be fully aware.

HOW YOU SEE

You are not alone in your quest to be who you want and have what you want. Being happy is everyone’s ultimate goal, no exceptions. That so few of us have achieved it is mainly due to what we learned as children, which is when the major portion of our philosophy was shaped, and how we have lived to this point in our lives. If the people from whom you learned—your family, your teachers, and your friends—didn’t know how to achieve that goal for themselves, how could they have taught you to do so? You can relax now; you are about to find out how to change all that.

One of my goals in this book is to help you correct the flaws in your philosophy that are holding you back from being who you want and having what you want. One of the ways to accomplish that begins with changing how you see your world and how you think about what you see.

Here’s a simple example. Suppose you and I decided to see a movie. We have been told it is a great thriller, the best one ever made. We go to the cinema, buy our tickets, find seats, and the film begins. We sit there looking for clues—a murder, a theft, a plot, a crime of some kind—but we don’t see any of that. After twenty minutes of watching, we are confused and baffled. It’s definitely not what we were told to expect. Nothing we are seeing makes sense.

Then the person in the next seat leans over and whis­pers, “Isn’t this a wonderful love story?” Suddenly, everything makes sense. All the events of the film fall into place because we are seeing it for what it really is rather than what we were told it was. We are seeing it with “new sight.”

That’s the same kind of transformation that will occur as you proceed through this book and start seeing yourself, the world, and its events for what they really are rather than what you were told they were. When you change the way you see and interpret events, suddenly everything will be different for you. Everything will make sense. You will see the past events of your life differently, you will react to new events differently, and you will envision future events differently. You will love that differ­ence; everyone does. At first, it will be hard to imagine that what you are going to read could be true, but as you continue on, absorbing the information, you’ll begin to smile—a lot. 

What you’ll learn in these pages is that you do have the power to actually reinvent your world. You are a powerful being, the most powerful being in your life, and you create your future with your thoughts and actions. By changing how you perceive things and how you act upon those perceptions, you will change your life.