Excerpts from

Cut the C.R.A.P. and Rresolve Your Problems

CRAP IS HOW WE UNWITTINGLY and unconsciously victimize ourselves. CRAP is what sabotages careers, destroys relationships, creates unmanageable finances, and makes us forget about the need to exercise and eat properly. CRAP unconsciously creates invisible bonds. Imagine your mind wrapped like a mummy and you’ll understand the impact of CRAP in your life.

CRAP is with us all the time, just looking for opportunities to destroy hope and minimize achievement. CRAP keeps us in front of the TV when we might much better be with family, working on a special "me" project, or getting out into the world to experience, not just observe. CRAP, as we will remind you many times in this book, is so pernicious because it becomes habitual and unconscious. Because CRAP becomes habitual and unconscious, it lies there unexamined, destroying without being acknowledged as the destroyer. We even blame our internal CRAP on external causes.

The good news is this: CRAP can only victimize you as long as it remains unconscious. Once we help you bring CRAP to a conscious level, once we assist you to become aware of how you have used CRAP to keep yourself in a self-limiting and often destructive comfort zone, you can free yourself of its limiting presence. You won’t believe how good it will feel when you break through — when you consciously Cut the CRAP.

When you buy a book like Cut the CRAP, a book that is aimed at helping you enhance the quality of your life, the book should provide direct and immediate benefits for you. The book should provide options, alternatives, and strategies to improve your life rather than simply providing information or explaining theories.

Our goal from the day we conceived Cut the CRAP as a book was clear.We wanted to enable you to consciously expand your sense of involvement in and control over your life. We wanted you to experience the promise and delight of a life without CRAP In order to accomplish this goal, we needed to develop and write a book that was:

Concise — In order to allow you to quickly grasp and implement the concepts.

Simple — In order to be consistently and immediately applied in a variety of situations.

Practical — In order to make a difference in your life without the burden of in-depth analysis and hours and hours of reflection and dissection.

Proven — In order to assure you that this concise, simple, and practical strategy really works in daily life.

Compelling — In order to achieve the goal of enhancing your life. Information is nice and we hope the book is enjoyable as well as informative, but we wanted to create something

More — not just a pleasant sort of agreement, but personal improvement. We wanted to provide a strategy for you to get beyond the CRAP and find the freedom that comes from knowing you really can improve your life. Our goal was that, when you have finished the book, you would know that the CRAP in your life doesn’t have to limit you.

Memorable — So that it is easily recalled and therefore more likely to be applied in your life.

The answer to the question "What’s in it for you?" is summarized in our personal vision in writing the book:

Cut the CRAP is based on our deep-set belief that each of us has more control over our beliefs, individual actions, and long-term habits than we acknowledge. With awareness and effort we can control these life dynamics rather than them controlling us. Cut the CRAP is designed to provide the reader: first, with a conscious awareness of the way he or she uses CRAP as a self-limiting mechanism; and second, with strategies to eliminate CRAP from his or her life. Our hope is that all readers will free themselves from the CRAP that is keeping them from achieving their goals, purpose, hopes, and dreams. Pretty lofty, huh? Well, vision statements should be. Besides we believe it.

So,What Is CRAP?

CRAP is just that. A concise, simple, practical, proven, compelling mnemonic device to help you break through and break out. (Actually, we are going to add another word in front of CRAP, but don’t worry about that now.) Cutting the CRAP and breaking out of the CRAP don’t have to be difficult. Yet, we tend to make it so. With complicated, complex analyses we find all the reasons we need to define for ourselves that:

Where we are is where we must be. That is, we are and always will be where our limits, choices, and habits have placed us.

We find perfectly logical reasons why we have been passed over for promotions, why we are physically unhealthy, seemingly stranded in unfulfilling relationships, living at the whim of others, and why we are "victims" of circumstance. We feel powerless and often, for all intents and purposes, live a life that seems to be in control of us rather than us being in control of our life.

At the root of this sense of missed opportunities, we make one key observation:

Due to the most basic failure to make a simple analysis of the stories we tell ourselves, we wind up living someone else’s life, not ours.

We believe that stepping out of this trap and reasserting control just doesn’t have to be that complex — or difficult. Let us say it again: 

breaking out doesn’t have to be complex. We propose the CRAP formula to help you understand why you are stuck and the CRAP strategy to break you out.

In essence, the CRAP formula first provides you a strategy to examine the stories you tell yourself — and then provides proven approaches to get past those stories that have held you back!

So, this book is written for the people who feel stuck —

• Stuck in jobs that don’t challenge and excite.

• Stuck in relationships that are too often draining rather than rewarding.

• Stuck in habits that have not served them well.

• Stuck in belief systems that undermine success and happiness.

• Stuck spiritually, physically, financially, emotionally, creatively, and/or relationally in the ruts of habit that must change if we are to grow, develop, and achieve those states of being that will bring joy, not just pleasure, to our existence.

Quite a challenge, we are sure you would agree. Well, we added one more. Remember, we wanted to make the solution that would free you from this position of being stuck SIMPLE. We didn’t want you going back to your childhood, revisiting the inner child, struggling through fifteen steps, or having to go to a mountaintop.

We wanted a solution that you could use now, today as a mom, a husband, a salesperson, engineer, accountant, administrator, churchgoer, or manager of your own finances. We wanted a solution that would apply to whatever role you were in whenever you were in it — and it had to be SIMPLE.

This book, then, is for the 80% of us who struggle with the day-to-day issues that keep us from a sense of progress and purpose.

It isn’t for the 10% who really require some form of psychotherapy and it certainly isn’t for the 10% who really seem to be doing fine without us, thank you.

Thus, our goal in writing this book was clear from the beginning. We wanted to provide the reader with a plan, a guide, a strategy, a solution, and a mantra ("I gotta cut the CRAP, I gotta cut the CRAP") in order to get out of the ruts of habit and circumstance that are keeping individuals from achieving personal fulfillment. Tall order, but we think that understanding the CRAP in your life will help you achieve this goal.

That’s it. When you are finished reading this book, we want you to become "unstuck" to experience the joy of a life not burdened by conscious or unconscious CRAP. Please write us with your stories of success. We look forward to hearing from you.