PREFACE

Back in the late 1980s the Franklin Quest company was growing at a meteoric pace. Franklin Planners began to appear all over the world. The planner and the time management seminar that went with it were creating remarkable and lasting change in those we taught.

Over 90 percent of the people who began using the Franklin Planner would purchase the refill every year. As a result, we became obsessed with the answer to the question, “Why do they do that?” Then came the real question: “What causes permanent behavioral change?” As we continued to ask ourselves that question, we discovered the Reality Model.

We didn’t call it the Reality Model at first; it was just a visual way of describing what was going on in people’s lives anyway. Jerry Pulsipher, to whom this book is dedicated, led the way in this discovery. None of us ever talked about creating the model or even inventing the model; it was always, “We discovered the model.”

I was so taken by the model’s potential for good that I began giving what I call my You Are What You Believe speech all over the world. In the late 1980s I was asked to present this speech at the Securities Industry Institute’s annual school held at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia. And for the last twenty-seven years I have been invited back to make the same speech to each new class. The reception of the speech has been so positive that we decided to turn it into a book.

So here it is. If you want to know why you do what you do, and how to make changes that last forever, this book is for you. When you have finished reading You Are What You Believe you will likely want to invest in a large bottle of Windex.