what is success
Introduction
There is nothing on earth that you cannot have once you havementally accepted the fact that you can have it.You are engineered for success and designed to have high levels of self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride. You are extraordinary; there has never been anyone exactly like you in all the history of mankind on earth.You have absolutely amazing untapped talents and abilities that, when properly unleashed and applied, can bring you everything you could ever want in life.
You are living at the greatest time in all of human history.You are surrounded by abundant opportunities that you can take advantage of to realize your dreams. The only real limits on what you can be, do, or have are the limits you place on yourself by your own thinking.Your future is virtually unlimited.
This is exactly how I felt many years ago. Even though I wanted to be a big success in life, I was unskilled, uneducated, and unemployed. I had no idea what I could do to improve my situation. I felt trapped between big ideas on the one hand and limited resources and opportunities on the other. Then I discovered a series of remarkable principles that have been responsible for all the great successes and achievements of the ages, and my life changed forever.
After proving these laws and principles in my own life, I began speaking, and training others to apply the same ideas. Since then, I have given more than two thousand talks and seminars as long as four days in length, in 24 countries, to a total of more than two million participants. Most of them were also skeptical when they first heard these ideas of optimism and possibility, until they learned what you are going to learn in the pages ahead. It changed their lives, as it will change yours.
Your thoughts can make you happy or sad, sometimes in an instant. They can make you alert and aware, or distracted and depressed. They can make you popular or unpopular, confident or insecure, positive or negative. Your thoughts can make you feel powerful or powerless, a victim or a victor, a hero or a coward.
In your material life, your thoughts can make you a success or a failure, prosperous or poverty-stricken, respected or ignored. Your thoughts, and the actions that they trigger, determine your whole life. And the best news of all is that they are completely under your own control.
Your thoughts trigger images and pictures, and the emotions that go with them. These images and emotions trigger attitudes and actions.Your actions then have consequences and results that determine what happens to you.
If you think about success and confidence, you will feel strong and competent, and you will perform better at whatever you attempt. If you think about making mistakes or being embarrassed, you will perform poorly, no matter how good you really are.
Pictures and images, from your imagination or from the external influences, produce ideas, emotions, and attitudes that correspond to them. They then trigger actions that bring about certain results and outcomes.The thought of a person or situation can cause you to instantly feel happy or sad, elated or angry, loving or lonely.
Your actions trigger the emotions and attitudes that go with them. By the Law of Reversibility, you can actually act your way into feeling in a manner consistent with the action. By acting as if you were already happy, positive, and confident, you soon begin to feel that way on the inside. And your actions are under your direct control, whereas your emotions are not.
In and of themselves, the outer aspects of your life are neutral. It is only the meaning that you give to them that determines your attitudes, opinions, emotions, and reactions to them. If you change your thinking about any part of your life, you will change how you feel and behave in that area. And since only you can decide what to think, you have the ability to take complete control over your life.
Your beliefs largely determine your reality.You do not believe what you see; you rather see what you already believe. You can have life-enhancing beliefs that make you happy and optimistic, or you can have negative beliefs about yourself and your potential that act as roadblocks to the realization of everything that is truly possible for you.
The most harmful beliefs you can have are your self-limiting beliefs. These are beliefs about yourself and your potential that hold you back. Most of them are not true. Most of them are the result of information you have accepted without question, often from early childhood. Even if it is completely untrue, if you believe yourself to be limited in areas such as achieving wonderful health and happiness and earning a lot of money, that will become your truth. As the author Richard Bach in his book Illusions wrote, 'Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours.'
When you think positive, optimistic, loving, and successful thoughts, you create a force field of magnetism that attracts, like iron filings to a magnet, the very things you are thinking about. This law explains why it is that you don't have to be concerned where your good is going to come from. If you can keep your mind clearly focused on what you want, and refrain from thinking about what you don't want, you will attract everything you need to achieve your goals, exactly when you are ready. Change your thinking and you change your life.
In other words, the only question you need to ask about any idea is, 'Does it work?' Does it bring about the results that you desire? Milton Friedman, the Nobel prizewinning economist, said, 'The only true measure of a theory or idea is your ability to make accurate predictions of the future based on it.'
The good news is that the ideas and principles you are about to learn have been tested and proven in the lives and experiences of millions of people. In themselves, like any principles of nature, they are neutral. Nature plays no favorites. Nature treats everyone alike. Whatever seed you plant in the ground, nature will grow.Whatever thought seeds you plant in your mind, nature will grow as well. It is entirely up to you.
Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her she despises, and only to the apt, the pure, and the true does she resign herself and reveal her secrets.
Chapter-1 Change Your Thinking
There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.- William James
Once upon a time there was a woman, about 30 years old, married with two children. Like many people, she had grown up in a home where she was constantly criticized and often treated unfairly by her parents. As a result, she developed deep feelings of inferiority and low self-esteem. She was negative and fearful, and had no confidence at all. She was shy and self-effacing, and did not consider herself to be particularly valuable or worthwhile. She felt that she was not really talented at anything.
One day, as she was driving to the store, another car went through a red light and smashed into her.When she awoke, she was in the hospital with a mild concussion and complete memory loss. She could still speak, but she had no recollection of any part of her past life. She was a total amnesiac.
At first, the doctors thought it would be temporary. But weeks passed and no trace of her memory returned. Her husband and children visited her daily, but she did not know them. This was such an unusual case that other doctors and specialists came to visit her as well, to test her and ask her questions about her condition.
Eventually, she went home, her memory a complete blank. Determined to understand what had happened to her, she began reading medical textbooks and studying in the specialized area of amnesia and memory loss. She met and spoke with specialists in this field. Eventually she wrote a paper on her condition. Not long afterward, she was invited to address a medical convention to deliver her paper, answer questions about her amnesia, and share her experiences and ideas on neurological functioning.
During this period, something amazing happened. She became a new person completely. All the attention in the hospital and afterward made her feel valuable, important, and truly loved by her family. The attention and acclaim she received from members of the medical profession built her self-esteem and self-respect even higher. She became a genuinely positive, confident, outgoing woman, highly articulate, well informed, and very much in demand as a speaker and authority in the medical profession.
All memory of her negative childhood had been wiped out. Her feelings of inferiority were wiped out as well. She became a new person. She changed her thinking and changed her life.
The Scottish philosopher David Hume was the first to propose the idea of the tabula rasa or blank slate.This theory says that each person comes into the world with no thoughts or ideas at all, and everything that a person thinks and feels is learned from infancy onward. It is as though the child's mind is a blank slate that every passing person and experience leaves a mark on.The adult becomes the sum total of everything he or she learns, feels, and experiences growing up.What the adult does and becomes later is the result of this early conditioning. As Aristotle wrote, ''Whatever is impressed is expressed.''
Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in the field of human potential in the twentieth century was the discovery of the self-concept. This is the idea that each person develops a bundle of beliefs regarding oneself, starting at birth. Your self-concept then becomes the master program of your subconscious computer, determining everything you think, say, feel, and do. For this reason, all change in your outer life begins with a change in your self-concept, with a change in the way you think and feel about yourself and your world.
The child is born with no self-concept at all. Every idea, opinion, feeling, attitude, or value you have as an adult you learned from childhood. Everything you are today is the result of an idea or impression you took in and accepted as true.When you believe something to be true, it becomes true for you, whatever the fact may be. ''You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.''
If you were raised by parents who continually told you what a good person you were, who loved you, encouraged you, supported you, and believed in you, no matter what you did or didn't do, you would grow up with the belief that you were a good and valuable person. By the age of three, this belief would lock in and become a fundamental part of the way you view yourself in relation to your world. Thereafter, no matter what happens to you, you would hold to this belief. It would become your reality.
If you were raised by parents who did not know how powerful their words and behaviors could be in shaping your personality, they could very easily have used destructive criticism, disapproval, and physical or emotional punishment to discipline or control you. When a child is continually criticized at an early age, he soon concludes that there is something wrong with him. He doesn't understand why it is that he is being criticized or punished, but he assumes that his parents know the truth about him, and that he deserves it. He begins to feel that he is not valuable or lovable. He is not worth very much. He must therefore be worthless.
Almost all personality problems in adolescence and adulthood are rooted in what psychologists refer to as love withheld. The child needs love like roses need rain. When children feel unloved, they feel unsafe and insecure. They think, ''I'm not good enough.'' They begin to engage in compensatory behaviors to make up for this inner anxiety. This sense of love deprivation is manifested in misbehavior, personality problems, bursts of anger, depression, hopelessness, lack of ambition, and problems with people and relationships.
The child is born with no fears, except those of falling and loud noises. All other fears have to be taught to the child as he or she grows up.
The two major fears we all develop are the fear of failure or loss and the fear of criticism or rejection.We begin to learn the fear of failure if we are continually criticized and punished when we try something new or different.We are shouted at and told, ''No! Get away from there! Stop that! Put that down!'' Physical punishment and the withholding of love, possibilities that scare us and make us feel insecure, often accompany these shouts and criticisms.
We soon begin to believe that we are too small, too weak, incompetent, inadequate, and incapable of doing anything new or different. We express this feeling with the words, ''I can't, I can't, I can't.''Whenever we think about doing something new or challenging, we automatically respond with feelings of fear, trembling, and a churning stomach.We react exactly as if we are afraid of getting a spanking.We say, ''I can't'' over and over.
The fear of failure is the primary reason for failure in adult life. As the result of destructive criticism in childhood, we hold ourselves back as adults. We sell ourselves short. We quit before we even try the first time. Instead of using our amazing minds to figure out how to get what we want, we use our reasoning ability to create reasons why we can't, and why the things we want are not possible for us.
The second major fear that holds us back, undermines our confidence, and destroys our desire for a happy life is the fear of rejection, and its expression, criticism. This emotion is learned in early childhood as the result of our parents expressing disapproval of us whenever we do something they don't like, or don't do something that they expect. As a result of our displeasing them, they become angry and withdraw the love and approval we need so much as children.
The fear of being unloved and alone is so traumatic for a child that she soon conforms her behavior to do whatever she thinks her parents will approve of. She loses her spontaneity and uniqueness. She begins to think, ''I have to! I have to! I have to!'' She concludes, ''I have to do whatever Mommy and Daddy want me to, or they won't love me, and I'll be all alone!''
As an adult, a child raised with what is called ''conditional love'' (as opposed to unconditional love, the greatest gift one person can give to another) becomes hypersensitive to the opinions of others. In its extreme form, he cannot do anything if there is the slightest chance that someone else may not approve. He projects his childhood relationship with his parents onto the important people in his adult life-spouse, boss, relatives, friends, authority figures-and tries desperately to earn their approval, or at least not lose it.
The fears of failure and rejection, caused by destructive criticism in early childhood, are the root causes of most of our unhappiness and anxiety as adults. We feel, ''I can't!'' or ''I have to!'' continually. The worst feeling is when we feel, ''I can't, but I have to!'' or ''I have to, but I can't!''
We want to do something, but we are afraid of failure or loss, or if we are not afraid of loss, we are afraid of disapproval. We want to do something to improve our lives, at work or at home, but we are afraid that we may fail, or that someone else may criticize us, or both.
For most people, their fears govern their lives. Everything they do is organized around avoiding failure or criticism. They think continually about playing it safe, rather than striving for their goals. They seek security rather than opportunity.
The author Arthur Gordon once approached Thomas J.Watson Sr., the founder of IBM, and asked him how he could succeed faster as a writer. Thomas J.Watson, one of the giants of American business, replied with these profound words: ''If you want to be successful faster, you must double your rate of failure. Success lies on the far side of failure.''
The fact is that the more you have already failed, the more likely it is you are on the verge of great success. Your failures have prepared you to succeed.This is why a streak of good luck seems to follow a streak of bad luck. When in doubt, ''double your rate of failure.''The more things you try, the more likely you are to triumph. You overcome your fears only by doing the thing you fear until the fear has no more control over you.
Everything you know about yourself, all your beliefs, are recorded on the hard drive of your personality, in your self-concept. Your self-concept precedes and predicts your levels of performance and effectiveness in everything you do. Because of the law of correspondence, you always behave on the outside in a manner consistent with your self-concept on the inside. All improvement in your life therefore begins with an improvement in your self-concept.
You have an overall self-concept that is made up of all your beliefs about yourself and your abilities. This bundle of beliefs includes all the experiences, decisions, successes, failures, ideas, information, emotions, and opinions of your life up to now. This general self-concept determines how and what you think and feel about yourself, and measures how well you are doing in general.
You have a series of ''mini-self-concepts'' as well. These mini-selfconcepts combine to make up your overall self-concept.You have a self-concept for every area of your life that you consider important. This mini-self-concept determines how you think, feel, and perform in that area.
For example, you have a self-concept for how healthy and fit you are, and how much you eat or exercise.You have a self-concept for how likable and popular you are with others, especially with members of the opposite sex.You have a self-concept for what kind of a spouse or parent you are, for how good a friend you are to your friends, how smart you are, and how well you learn.You have a selfconcept for every sport you play, and for every activity you engage in, including how well you drive your car.
You have a self-concept for how well you do your work, and for how well you do each part of your work. You have a selfconcept for how much money you make and how well you save and invest it. This is a critical area. The fact is that you can never earn much more or less than your self-concept level of income. If you want to make more money, you have to change your beliefs about yourself relative to income and money. This is an important part of this book.
In every case, if you want to change your performance and your results in any area of your life, you have to change your selfconcept- or your beliefs about yourself-for that area. Fortunately, your beliefs are largely subjective. They are not always based on facts. Instead, they are based largely on information you have taken in and accepted as true, sometimes with very little evidence or proof.
The very worst beliefs you can have are self-limiting beliefs of any kind. These are beliefs about yourself that cause you to feel somehow limited or deficient in a particular area. These beliefs are seldom true, but if you accept them as valid estimates of your ability, they become true for you, exactly as if they were correct.
The starting point of unlocking your potential, and accomplishing more than you ever have before, is for you to challenge your selflimiting beliefs. You begin this process of freeing yourself from self-limiting beliefs by imagining that, whatever they are, they are completely untrue. Imagine for the moment that you have no limitations on your abilities at all. Imagine that you could be, do, or have anything you really wanted in life. Imagine that your potential is unlimited in any way.
For example, imagine that you could be earning twice as much as you are earning today. Imagine that you could be living in a bigger house, driving a better car, and enjoying a more expensive lifestyle.
Imagine that you have the ability to be one of the top people in your field. Imagine that you are one of the most popular, powerful, and persuasive personalities in your social and business world. Imagine that you are calm, confident, and unafraid of anything. Imagine that you could set and achieve any goal you put your mind to. This is how you begin changing your thinking and changing your life.
The starting point of eliminating your fears, and releasing your potential, is to reprogram your mental hard drive with new, positive, constructive, and courageous beliefs about yourself and your future. Throughout this book, you will learn how to do this.
Your self-concept has three parts, like a pie divided into three wedges. Each is linked with each of the others. All three elements together make up your personality.They largely determine what you think, feel, and do, and everything that happens to you.
Your self-ideal is the first part of your personality and your selfconcept. Your self-ideal is made up of all of your hopes, dreams, visions, and ideals.Your self-ideal is composed of the virtues, values, and qualities that you most admire in yourself and others. Your self-ideal is the person you would most like to become, if you could be a perfect person in every way. These ideals guide and shape your behavior.
Great men and women, leaders, and people of character are very clear about their values, visions, and ideals. They know who they are and what they believe in.They set high standards for themselves, and they don't compromise those standards. They are men and women that others can look up to and depend on.They are definite and distinct in their interactions with others. In everything they do, they strive to live up to their ideals.
The second part of your self-concept is your self-image. This is the way you see yourself and think about yourself. It is often called your ''inner mirror.'' It is where you look internally to see how you should behave in a particular situation. Because of the power of your self-image, you always perform on the outside consistent with the picture you have of yourself on the inside.
The discovery of the self-image, pioneered by Maxwell Maltz, is a major breakthrough in understanding human performance and effectiveness. By visualizing and imagining yourself performing at your best in an upcoming situation, you send a message to your subconscious mind.Your subconscious mind accepts this message as a command, and then coordinates your thoughts, words, and actions so that they fit a pattern consistent with the picture you created.
All improvement in your life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures.Your internal images influence your emotions, your behaviors, your attitudes, and even the way other people respond to you. The development of a positive self-image is a vital part of changing your thinking and changing your life.
The third part of your self-concept is your self-esteem. This is the emotional component of your personality, and is the most important factor in determining how you think, feel, and behave. Your level of self-esteem largely determines much of what happens to you in life.
Your self-esteem is best defined as how much you like yourself. The more you like yourself, the better you perform at anything you attempt. And by the law of reversibility, the better you perform, the more you like yourself.
Your self-esteem is the ''reactor core'' of your personality. It is the energy source that determines your levels of confidence and enthusiasm. The more you like yourself, the higher will be the standards you will set for yourself. The more you like yourself, the bigger the goals you will set for yourself and the longer you will persist in achieving them. People with high self-esteem are virtually unstoppable.
Your level of self-esteem determines the quality of your relationships with others. The more you like and respect yourself, the more you like and respect others and the better they feel toward you. In your business life and career, your personal level of self-esteem will be the critical factor that determines whether or not people will buy from you, hire you, enter into business dealings with you, and even lend you money.
The better your self-esteem, the better you will be as a spouse and parent. High self-esteem parents raise high self-esteem children. These children develop high levels of self-confidence and associate with other high self-esteem children. High self-esteem homes are characterized by love, laughter, and happiness for everyone who lives there.
Your level of self-esteem is largely determined by how closely your self-image - your current performance and behavior - matches your self-ideal - your picture of how you would perform if you were at your very best.You are always comparing your actual performance with your ideal performance at an unconscious level.Whenever you feel that you are living up to your very best, you feel terrific about yourself.Your self-esteem soars.You feel happy and fulfilled.
Whenever you do or say something that is not in keeping with your ideals or the best of which you feel you are capable, your selfesteem goes down.Whenever there is a wide separation between the person you are in the moment and the ideal person you want very much to be in the future, you feel badly about yourself. This is why you get angry with yourself whenever you fail at something, or behave badly in a situation with other people.Your self-ideal continually reminds you of how much better a person you can be.
Psychologists agree today that your self-esteem lies at the core of your self-concept and your personality. Every improvement in any part of your personality or performance boosts your self-esteem, and causes you to like and respect yourself even more. The more you like yourself, the better will be your self-image and subsequent performance, and the faster you will move toward becoming more like your self-ideal.
The best news of all is that there is an inverse relationship between your level of self-esteem and your fears of failure and rejection. The more you like yourself, the less you fear failure. The more you like yourself, the less concerned you are with the opinions of others, and the less you fear criticism. The more you like yourself, the more you make your decisions based on your own goals and standards, and the less you care what others think or say.
Just as you become what you think about, you also become what you say to yourself. The most powerful words you can repeat to yourself, especially if you are feeling tense or uneasy about an upcoming event, are the words, ''I like myself! I like myself! I like myself!''
Whenever you say, ''I like myself!'' your fears diminish and your courage increases. The words, ''I like myself!'' are so powerful and positive that they are immediately accepted by your subconscious mind as a command. They instantly affect your thoughts, feelings, and attitudes.Your body language immediately improves, and you stand straighter.Your face becomes more positive and cheerful.Your tone of voice becomes stronger and more confident.You feel better about yourself, and as a result, you treat everyone around you in a warmer, friendlier way.
You begin the process of changing your thinking and changing your life by going to work on your self-concept.You start by developing a clear, positive, exciting, and inspiring self-ideal, consistent with the very best person you can imagine yourself becoming. You develop a positive self-image by imagining yourself performing at your very best in everything you do. Finally, you develop high and unshakable levels of self-esteem by loving and accepting yourself unconditionally as a valuable and worthwhile person.
Most of your thoughts and your responses to the events and people of your life are determined by your basic premises. These are the ideas, beliefs, opinions, and conclusions you have come to as the result of inputs and experiences starting in childhood.They constitute not only your self-concept, but also your philosophy of life.The more adamant and convinced you are of your basic premises, the more they predict and control everything you do, say, and feel.
If you believe yourself to be an excellent person, loaded with talent and ability, friendly and popular, healthy and energetic, curious and creative, and destined to have a wonderful life, these basic premises will lead you to set goals, work hard, develop yourself, treat others well, bounce back from adversity, and ultimately succeed. Nothing will be able to stop you in the long run.
It is not what happens to you in life that is important. It is only how you react to what happens. It doesn't matter where you're coming from, either. All that really matters is where you are going. And where you are going is limited only by your own imagination. And since your imagination is unlimited, your future is unlimited as well. These are the basic premises and beliefs you need to fulfill your potential.
Unfortunately, there are several myths that we accept as we grow up that can sabotage our hopes for success, joy, and fulfillment later in life. Let's look at these self-limiting beliefs one at a time.
The first and worst is summarized in the feeling, ''I'm not good enough.'' This is the basic premise that causes feelings of inferiority and inadequacy.We assume that other people are better than we are just because, at the moment, they are doing better than we are.We feel that they must be worth more than us. Therefore, we must be worth less than them. This feeling of worthlessness sits deep in the psyche and causes us to sell ourselves short.We settle for less than we are truly capable of. Rather than to fail at a new goal, we don't set it in the first place.
The correct basic premise for you to develop, or belief for you to have, is that not only are you good enough, but you have the ability to be excellent in any area that is important to you.You have unlimited potential to be, do, and have more than you have ever achieved up to now. As William Shakespeare said in The Tempest, ''What's past is prologue.''Whatever you have accomplished in the past is only a hint of what you can do in the future.
The most powerful words in your vocabulary are the words that you say to yourself and believe.Your self-talk, your inner dialogue, determines 95 percent of your emotions.When you talk to yourself, your subconscious mind accepts these words as commands. It then adjusts your behavior, your self-image, and your body language to fit a pattern consistent with those words.
From now on, talk to yourself only in terms of what you want to be and do. Refuse to say anything about yourself that you do not sincerely desire to be true.. Repeat the powerful, positive words, ''I can do it!'' over and over. Prior to any event of importance, repeat the words, ''I like myself!'' Say, ''I'm the best! I'm the best! I'm the best!'' again and again like you really mean it.Then, stand up straight and strong, put a confident smile on your face, and do the very best of which you are capable. Soon it will become a habit.
As the result of previous destructive criticism, people accept another myth, or self-limiting belief. It is that they don't really believe that they deserve to be successful. This deep inner feeling of undeservingness is quite common among those of us who started off with very little in life, or who came from families that had little money when we were growing up. It can also be caused by people who told us at a young age that to be poor is virtuous but to be rich is sinful.
If you have grown up feeling undeserving of good things, for any reason, and you do achieve success in your field, you may experience what is called the ''imposter syndrome.''You will feel that you are an imposter in your success, and that you are going to be found out. No matter how successful you become as the result of your hard work, you will have a nagging fear that it will all be taken away from you.
If you feel like an imposter, you will often feel guilty for achieving greater success than others. To escape these feelings of guilt, many people engage in self-sabotage. They eat too much, drink too much, take dope, ignore their families, engage in unpredictable behaviors, and often throw their money away in extravagant living and unwise investments. They feel deep down inside that they don't deserve their success. As a result, they often drive it away.
The truth is that you deserve everything you can rightfully earn by doing an excellent job, and producing or distributing products or services that improve people's lives and work. In a market society such as ours, all transactions are voluntary. People buy something only if they feel that they are going to be better off as a result.You can therefore be successful in the long run only by providing people with the things they want to improve their lives and work. The more and better you serve other people, the more you both deserve and earn.
The word ''deserve'' comes from the two Latin words, ''de-'' which means ''from'' and ''servire'' which means ''to serve.'' Therefore, the word ''deserve'' means ''from service.'' The people who do the best in our society, with few exceptions, are those who are serving other people better than someone else.Your whole focus in your career should be on serving other people better. Then you will deserve every dollar you earn.
Abraham Lincoln once said, ''The very best way to help the poor is not to become one of them.'' In our society, the more financially successful you are, the more taxes you are likely to pay. These taxes help pay for the schools, hospitals, roads, welfare, Medicare, military expenditures, and all the important things that our society offers.You can be proud to be financially successful. By making a lot of money, you make a significant contribution to lots of people.You do well for yourself by doing well for others.
Repeat the words, ''I deserve every penny I earn as the result of serving others with the products and services they need to improve their lives. I am proud of my success.''
You are a thoroughly good person.You are honest, decent, truthful, and hardworking.You treat other people with courtesy, respect, and warmth. You are dedicated to your family, friends, and your company.You are strong, confident, and responsible.You are knowledgeable, intelligent, and experienced.You are important not only to the people closest to you, but also to your community.You were born for a special reason, and you have a great destiny to fulfill.You are an excellent person in every way.
The preceding paragraph is a statement of your real personality and character. It may not be true for you 100 percent of the time, but it is a good general description of who you really are inside, and where you are going with your life. When you unconditionally accept that you are a truly valuable and worthwhile person, you will express it in everything you say and do. Over time, it will become true for you.Your ideal will become your reality.
Repeat to yourself, ''I like myself and l love my life. I am a thoroughly good person in every way, and I always do my very best at anything I attempt.''
Imagine that there was a store that sold mental programming.You could purchase any self-concept, belief, or attitude that you wanted and install it in your brain, and that is the person you would be from then on. If such a store existed, and you could buy any set of beliefs, what would you choose?
Here is a suggestion. Look around you and find out what the happiest and most successful people in your world have developed as their core beliefs, and then get the same set of beliefs for yourself. Load them onto your mental hard drive and start running the same programs they are running.
Fortunately, based on hundreds of interviews with successful people, we know exactly how they are programmed and what beliefs they have developed from an early age.The most important core belief you can adopt for yourself is this: ''I am a thoroughly good person and I am going to be a big success in life. Everything that happens to me, good or bad, is simply a part of the process of achieving the great success and happiness that is inevitable for me.''
If you absolutely believed that you were guaranteed to be happy and successful, and that every setback or obstacle was sent to you to teach you important lessons that you needed to know to achieve your goals, you would be completely unstoppable. You would be positive and optimistic most of the time.You would set big goals for yourself and bounce back quickly from any temporary defeat.Your belief would eventually become your reality. By changing your thinking, you would change your life.
Throughout the pages that follow, I will share with you a series of time-tested and proven methods and techniques that you can use to take complete control over every area of your thinking. I will show you how to think so positively and effectively that you will feel yourself capable of accomplishing anything. You will learn how to program and reprogram your self-concept so that your inner world is consistent with the person you want to be and the life you want to experience on the outside.You will learn how to become unstoppable.
ACTION EXERCISES
- Define your ideals clearly. If you could be an excellent person in every way, what qualities would you have? How would you behave?
- You become what you think about most of the time. Identify one or more areas of your life where your thinking is having a major influence on your emotions, attitudes, or actions.
- In what area of activity do you perform at your best? How do you visualize yourself in that area? How could you extend this act of visualization to other areas?
- What kind of people do you most admire and respect? Why? How could you change your behavior so that it is more consistent with that of the best people you know?
- In what areas of your life do you like yourself the most? What sorts of activities give the highest levels of self-esteem and personal value? How could you do even more of these things?
- You are a thoroughly good person. From this day forth, see yourself as the very best you can be, and refuse to accept any limitations on your possibilities.
- Change your self-concept by continually thinking, talking, and acting as if you were already the person you would like to be, enjoying the life that you want and deserve.
CH-2-Change Your Life
If you paint in your mind a picture of bright and happy expectations, you put yourself into a condition conducive to your goals.- Norman Vincent Peale
The way you think and feel about yourself, including your beliefs and expectations about what is possible for you, determines everything you do and everything that happens to you.When you change the quality of your thinking, you change the quality of your life, sometimes instantly.
You have complete control over only one thing in the universe - your thinking! You can decide what you are going to think in any given situation.Your thoughts and the way you interpret any event trigger your feelings - positive or negative.Your thoughts and feelings lead to your actions and determine the results you get. It all starts with your thoughts.
Positive thoughts are life enhancing. They empower you and make you feel stronger and more confident. Positive thinking is not just a motivational idea. It has measurable, constructive effects on your personality, your health, your levels of energy, and your creativity. The more positive and optimistic you are, the happier you will be in every area of your life.
Negative thoughts bring about the opposite. They disempower you and make you feel weaker and less confident. Whenever you think or say something negative, you give your power away. You feel angry and defensive. You feel frustrated and unhappy. Over time, negative thinking can make you physically ill, and even poison your relationships.
Positive thinking leads to mental health and peak performance. Negative thinking leads to mental illness and decreased effectiveness. Your goal, therefore, if you want to live a wonderful life, is to cultivate positive emotions and get rid of negative emotions.
The elimination of negative emotions is the most important single step you can take toward health, happiness, and personal wellbeing. Each time you take complete control over your thoughts and feelings, and discipline yourself to keep them positive, the quality of both your inner and outer lives improves. In the absence of negative emotions, your mind automatically fills with the positive emotions that generate feelings of happiness and fulfillment.
The Law of Substitution says, ''Your mind can hold only one thought at a time, positive or negative.You can substitute a positive thought for a negative thought whenever you choose.'' You can apply this law by deliberately thinking about something positive whenever you want to cancel out a thought or feeling that makes you angry or unhappy.
The Law of Habit says, ''Any thought or action that you repeat over and over will eventually become a new habit.'' When you repeatedly react and respond in a positive way, you take full control over your conscious mind. Soon it becomes automatic and easy to think and act in that manner. By using willpower and repetition, you develop new habits of thinking and acting. By applying this law, you can become a completely positive person and change your life.
Your negative emotions have all been learned, beginning in childhood. And what has been learned can be unlearned, sometimes quite quickly.You can learn any habit or skill that you consider to be either desirable or necessary. Especially, you can learn positive, constructive ways of thinking about people, money, health, and other factors to cancel out negative ideas that limit your potential and interfere with your success.
Many negative ideas or attitudes are based on false premises. Sometimes a negative idea about a subject, or a negative attitude toward a person, can be completely reversed with a single piece of new information. You could suddenly learn that an idea you had about yourself or another person was not true. As a result, you could change your thinking in an instant. Be open to this possibility.
Negative emotions exist only because we give them life and then keep them alive. We feed them by continually thinking and talking about things that make us angry or unhappy. Fortunately, you can change this situation by applying the Law of Emotion. This law states, ''A stronger emotion will dominate and override a weaker emotion, and whichever emotion you concentrate on grows and becomes stronger.''
What this means is that whatever emotion you dwell upon grows and eventually dominates your thinking in that area. If you withdraw your mental energy from a person or situation that makes you sad or angry by refusing to think about it, the emotion connected with that situation eventually dies away. Like a fire with no fuel, it goes out.
You have experienced this many times already. For example, as we grow up, we have relationships with the opposite sex. Most of them do not work out over time.When they end, we are often emotionally distressed and hurt.We are often sad, angry, depressed, preoccupied, and unhappy. These feelings last for a certain period. Then we recover.We meet someone else. Gradually we forget about the unhappy ending of the earlier relationship. Months or years later, we look back or even meet the other person, and we cannot imagine how emotionally involved we were with him or her. Because we did not feed them, the feelings have died away completely. This is an example of the laws of substitution and emotion in action in your own life.
There are four basic causes of negative emotions. According to the Russian philosopher Peter Ouspensky, in his book In Search of the Miraculous, these are: (1) justification; (2) identification, (3) inward considering, and (4) blame. The greatest leap forward in changing your thinking and changing your life will take place when you systematically eliminate all four of these causes of negative emotions from your life.
Justification is what you do when you rationalize or create a reason for your anger and unhappiness.You tell yourself, and whoever else will listen, how badly you were treated and how dreadfully the other person behaved. You continually rehash the situation in your mind.You repeat all the reasons you have for being upset. Each time you think of the person or situation, you become angry.You feel entitled to your anger, as if you have paid a high price for it, especially since, in your estimation, you were such a good and virtuous person.
The way you short-circuit the natural tendency toward justification and rationalization is by refusing to engage in it. Instead, you stop justifying.You use your marvelous mind to think of reasons not to justify your negative emotions. Remember, your negative emotions do you no good. They are totally destructive. They do not affect the other person or change the situation. They simply undermine your happiness and self-confidence, making you weaker and less effective in other areas of your life.
Instead of justifying your anger and unhappiness, you should use your intelligence and imagination to excuse the other person, or to let go of the unhappy situation. For example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, instead of becoming angry, you say,''Well, I'd better be more careful next time,'' ''I guess he is having a bad day,'' or ''He must be late for an important appointment.''
Since your mind can hold only one thought at a time, the instant you start excusing the other person you withdraw the energy or fuel that the negative emotions of anger and resentment require to get going and stay burning.You reassert your mental control. You keep yourself calm and positive. In a little while, the situation passes and you forget all about it. By substituting a positive thought for a negative thought, you get rid of the negative emotion, whatever it is.
If you have a major life problem, such as a divorce, a lost job, or a failed investment, the same rule holds true. Stop telling yourself (and anyone who will listen) why you are entitled to be angry or unhappy. Instead, make excuses for the other person each time you think about the situation until the negativity dies away. When the fire of negative emotion goes out, you can then turn your attention to something positive.
One of the most important rules for success and happiness is, ''Don't be upset or worry about something that you can't do anything about.'' Don't criticize anyone for something that the person cannot change. A famous law says, ''If there is no solution, there is no problem.''
There are two time periods in life, the past and the future. The present is only a brief, fleeting moment. You can choose to focus your attention on what has happened, which cannot be changed, or on the future, on what is possible, over which you have some control.
Many people spend most of their emotional energies being upset and angry about events that occurred in the past. Unfortunately, this energy is completely wasted. Nothing good can come of constantly complaining about the past. Even worse, the negative emotions kept alive by reliving past events rob you of the joy and excitement that you could experience by thinking about future possibilities.
A psychiatrist with more than 25 years' experience working with unhappy people wrote that the two most common words he heard in his practice were the words ''if only.'' It seemed that most unhappy people are held back by some event that occurred in the past that they cannot let go of. They are still resentful, angry, or depressed over something that someone did or did not do or say.They are angry with one or both parents, a sibling, a previous relationship or marriage, a boss or business relationship, a failed investment or financial mistake.
The fact is that your life will be a continuous series of problems, difficulties, setbacks, and temporary failures. These unexpected and unwanted reversals and disappointments are a normal, natural, and unavoidable fact of growing up.To change your thinking and change your life, you must make a decision to get over them and to get on with your life, no matter what happened. Until you do, you remain a slave to the past, which cannot be changed in any case. Make a decision today that, from now on, you are going to eliminate all the ''if only's'' from your life.
The author and speaker Wayne Dyer says, ''It's never too late to have a happy childhood.'' He means that at any time you can reinterpret the unhappy events of your early life in a positive way.You can practice the Law of Substitution and look into those negative experiences for something good, and think about that instead. You can focus on how your unhappy experiences have made you a better, wiser person. You can actually be grateful to people who have hurt you in the past because they have made you so much stronger in the present. And in any case, it could not have happened otherwise.
Your parents had no experience with raising children. In addition, they were a product of the way they were raised. Like all humans, they came to parenting with their problems and weaknesses, just as you have today. Nonetheless, they did the best they could with what they had. They were the people they were, and they could not have raised you any differently than they did. It is silly to continue to be unhappy about things they did or didn't do that they were incapable of doing otherwise. Let it go and get on with your life.
The second major cause of negative emotions according to Ouspensky, is identification, or attachment. This occurs when you take something personally or you become attached to a person or thing. You see the unhappy outcome of an event or circumstance as a personal affront or attack on you or on something you believe in or hold dearly. You become emotionally involved in a situation and identify so strongly with it that it affects your emotions and your reason in a negative way.
The great spiritual teachers, such as Buddha and Jesus, have emphasized the importance of separating yourself emotionally from the situation (disidentification), in order to regain your calmness and composure. Psychologist and philosopher William James of Harvard wrote, ''The first step in dealing with any difficulty is to be willing to have it so.'' He encouraged people to say, ''What cannot be cured must be endured.'' In other words, practice detachment from any person or situation that makes you feel angry or upset. Withdraw the emotional energy from it so that you can regain your calmness and composure.
This approach does not suggest that you passively accept anything that happens to you. Instead, it encourages you to use your willpower to keep your mind and emotions under control.You discipline yourself to stand back mentally and deal with the problem intelligently. You use your mind to see the situation objectively and make better decisions to resolve it.
Nothing and no one can have any control over you unless there is something you still want from them. They must have something that they can still give you or withhold from you. As soon as you detach emotionally from a person or object and no longer want anything from them, you are free. This ability to practice detachment is a power you can develop through practice. It can make you the master of a situation that might otherwise cause you to become upset and angry.
One of the kindest things you can do to help others is to encourage them to stand back from a problem situation and be objective about it. Encourage them to view the difficulty as if it was happening to someone else. Ask them what advice they would give to another person who was facing this same problem. By detaching from the emotionally charged situation, you and others will become much more capable of dealing with it effectively.
The third major cause of negative emotions, according to Ouspensky, is inward considering. This occurs when you become overly concerned with the way people are treating you. If you perceive that someone is not giving you the respect that you feel you deserve, you can feel insulted and angry, and want to strike back. If people are rude or indifferent to you, you can experience their behavior as an attack on your personality or character. This interpretation of their attitude or behavior can make you angry or depressed.
Psychologists say that everything we do is to increase our selfesteem and sense of personal value, or to protect it from being diminished by other people or circumstances. If your self-esteem is not as high as it could be, you will be sensitive to the actions and reactions of other people toward you.You will take everything personally, exactly as if what they said or did was consciously and deliberately directed at you. However, this is seldom the case.
The fact is that most people are preoccupied with themselves and their own problems. As much as 99 percent of the time, people are wrapped up in their own thoughts about themselves. They devote the other 1 percent of emotional energy they have available to everyone else in the world, including you. The person who cuts you off in traffic is so involved with his own thoughts, he is not even aware of your existence. It would be silly to become angry or upset over his thoughtless action.
There is a rule that I have learned from experience: Never do or refrain from doing something because you are concerned about what people might think about you. The fact is that nobody is even thinking about you at all.
Of course, I am not talking about criminal or antisocial behaviors. But it is amazing how many people make decisions to get into or to not get into relationships, businesses, new endeavors, adventures, and other things for fear that someone else might not approve. They stay in marriages they hate, they work at jobs they dislike, or they turn down business opportunities for fear that someone, anyone, might criticize them. The truth is that no one cares more about your key life decisions than you do. Plan accordingly.
In Abraham Maslow's studies of self-actualizing people, those 1 or 2 percent of men and women who are fully mature, fully functioning adults, he found a particular quality that they all had in common: They were completely honest with themselves. They were objective and clear about their own strengths and weaknesses. They did not hope or pretend that they were other than they were. This self-acceptance was a foundation stone of their self-esteem and self-respect.
Because they knew who they were, and who they were not, they did not feel that they had to continually earn the approval of others. They took the opinions of others into consideration, but then they made their own decisions. They were not overly influenced by the possible approval or disapproval of other people.You should do the same.You are the one who cares the most and who is most affected, in any case.
When Somerset Maugham, the famous English author, was asked by a reporter for his chief motivation for writing, he replied, ''I write to earn the respect of the people I respect.''
The fact is that much of what you do, or fail to do, is influenced by the same concern.You do many things in your social life to earn the respect of the people you respect, or at least not to lose it. In fact, the people whose respect is most important to you largely determine how good you feel about yourself, both at home and at work. The respect of others has an inordinate influence on your self-esteem because it is so closely linked to your self-ideal and your self-image.
Exceptional men and women look up to and seek the respect of men and women of character and accomplishment. They strive, at an unconscious level, to behave and to live up to their ideals of how an excellent person would behave.
One of the most important decisions you make as you go through life is to decide for yourself the specific people whose respect is of the greatest value to you. Once you are clear about who you respect and why you respect them, you can then organize your life in such a way that you continually earn that respect, whether they know of your actions or not.
In the famous book In His Steps, by Charles M. Sheldon (Christian Library, 1984), an entire town agrees, prior to every act or decision, to ask the question, ''What would Jesus do?'' and then to behave accordingly. The eventual outcome for the townspeople was that the problems that had divided them were soon solved and the town became happy and prosperous. They created an ideal for themselves and then built their lives around living up to it.
In a study of successful men and women, most of whom had started from humble beginnings, researchers found that these people had almost all been avid readers of biographies and autobiographies when they were young. As they read the life stories of famous men and women, they imagined themselves having the same qualities and characters of the people they were studying. When they became adults themselves, those qualities and virtues had become part of their thinking and guided their choices and decisions in later life.
Modeling has been used as a powerful way to develop personality and character throughout history.Young people have been encouraged to study school heroes and heroines, and emulate them as much as possible. In the military, the heroic acts of soldiers and sailors from the past are taught as part of the curriculum, encouraging young soldiers and sailors to think and act like them when the situation demands it.
The people you most admire and look up to have an inordinate influence on how you think and feel about yourself, and the kind of decisions you make.Who are your role models?
There is nothing wrong with being thoughtful and concerned about the feelings and reactions of others toward you and your choices. When you select admirable people to look up to, you develop an inner guide that leads you to conduct yourself in an excellent way yourself.
What is silly and self-defeating however, is for you to allow yourself to be inordinately influenced by the fleeting opinions of people whose regard and respect is of no concern or value to you. If you have been raised with destructive criticism, you can easily slip into the trap of organizing your life around trying to gain the approval, or escape the disapproval, or people you don't even know or care about.
Here is the way to avoid this form of negative emotion: Decide for yourself the men and women you most admire, and the qualities they have that you would most like to emulate. From now on, when you have to make a decision, think about someone you admire and ask, ''What would he or she do in this situation?''
When you ask this question, you actually connect at an unconscious level with a higher power that will then give you guidance and insight. You will experience a deep inner knowing of exactly the right thing to do or say. You will make the right decision and achieve the desired result. This is a technique used by many successful men and women. Give it a try and see what happens.
The fourth major cause of negative emotions, according to Ouspensky, and the trigger of anger, resentment, envy, jealousy, and frustration of any kind is blame. It is blame especially that generates anger, the worst of all the negative emotions. Anger is more destructive than any force in the human world. Uncontrolled anger destroys health, relationships, families, businesses, and societies, and is the chief generator of wars, revolutions, and social conflict.
The primary cause of anger can be traced back to destructive criticism in early childhood. Whenever a person is criticized, he reacts exactly as if he is being attacked, with defensiveness and resentment. Since any behavior that you repeat over and over becomes a habit, many people develop the habit of responding with anger to every problem, disappointment, or frustration they experience. Eventually, they reach the point where they are always angry about something.
To become angry, a person must be able to blame someone for something that has happened or not happened that they don't like or approve of. Many people are so preoccupied with blaming others for their problems that they lose contact with reality. They see the entire world through a lens of blame and its sister emotion, guilt.
Whenever there is a problem, personal or public, the angry person automatically concludes that someone must be to blame. The individual then spends his time and emotion apportioning blame among various parties. This obsession with blame and anger, leading to resentment and envy, can often consume the person who experiences it.
Here is a common example.Two people in love get married. Both of them have the best of intentions and the highest of expectations for the future, or they wouldn't get married in the first place. Unfortunately, people and situations change over time. The couple finds that they are no longer happy together and decide to divorce. But then the problems really begin.
Instead of agreeing, like adults, that they have reached a point where they are incompatible and they no longer want to live together, blame must be apportioned. Someone must be guilty. The guilty party must be punished. Lawyers and judges now have to get involved. Detectives and accountants are hired to dig up dirt on each party. The situation gets worse and worse, until it finally ends in anger, bitterness, accusations, and even hatred.
The best of solutions, when a marriage or a relationship does not work out, is to accept that fact as an unfortunate reality, make reasonable provisions for each party, and then for each person to get on with his or her life. Many couples are doing this today through mediation rather than going through the bitterness of a traditional divorce. The results turn out to be better for everyone involved.
It is a psychological fact that most people feel that they are right in whatever they do. But as soon as one person starts to blame the other, and even worse, demand that the other person admit to being guilty, the emotional and legal battles begin. The saddest part of these legal battles is that they usually end where they started, with no one having gained very much.
The best way to eliminate anger of all kinds is to accept responsibility. The acceptance of responsibility immediately short-circuits the emotion of anger. All the energy that anger requires for its existence is cut off. As soon as you say, ''I am responsible!'' your anger stops. Because of the Law of Substitution and the fact that your mind can hold only one thought at a time, you cannot accept responsibility for your situation and be angry at the same time.The idea of blame, on which the emotion of anger is based, is canceled out by the decision to accept responsibility.
There are two basic ways of looking at your world.You can have a positive and benevolent worldview or a negative and malevolent worldview. By taking responsibility for yourself and what happens to you, you become positive. You see the world in benevolent terms.You become more optimistic toward yourself and your possibilities. You become a happier and more effective person.
In contrast, when you take a negative or malevolent worldview, you see problems and injustice everywhere.You see oppression and evil. You see guilty people all around you. You see limitations and unfairness rather than opportunity and hope. Worst of all, you spend your time apportioning blame to various people and institutions for all the problems you see.
For example, in this country, some people are better off than others. This has been true of all societies throughout human history. This can be for various reasons. It may be the result of different people having different talents, ambitions, and desires. It may be the result of some people working harder, having a better start at life, being born with greater intelligence, or simply being at the right place at the right time to catch a favorable trend in the economy.
In any case, people who are well off are not to blame for the fat that other people are not well off. People who are healthy are not to blame for the fact that other people are sick. People who are successful and happy are not to blame for those who are unsuccessful and unhappy. People who are building a good life for themselves and their families are not at fault because other people are not.
Success does not cause failure. Correlation is not causation. Because both situations occur simultaneously, this does not mean that one caused the other. An honest acceptance of this simple fact would solve many arguments and disagreements at the philosophical and political levels.
The root cause of negative emotions, the main factor that predisposes a person to blaming and to anger and resentment, fear and doubt, envy and jealousy, is the inability to forgive someone we feel has hurt us in some way.
As we develop as children, we go through a phase where ''justice'' is very important to us.We fixate on the concept of ''fairness.'' We are upset by any situation in our lives that does not seem to be fair and equitable to anyone, especially if it concerns ourselves. Whenever we feel that we or anyone else has been unfairly treated, for any reason, we take it as a personal attack. Our fragile selfesteem is threatened.We react with anger and resentment. This is a normal developmental phase of growth that we go through as we move toward adulthood.
However, some people fixate at this stage and never grow beyond it. If we are not taught the importance of letting go of our grievances as children, we will come into adulthood with a gunnysack of unforgiven experiences. If we are not careful, we will then build our lives around our anger toward people who we feel are to blame for something they did or that we disapprove of. Many psychotherapists and psychiatrists spend their entire careers helping people confront and deal with these unhappy past and current experiences.
The most powerful and liberating decision you can make is to forgive everyone who has ever hurt you in any way. Only by freeing the other person, in your mind, by forgiving him or her can you be free yourself. This is why most religions stress the importance of forgiveness as the first step toward peace of mind and earthly bliss.
Just imagine how you would feel if you had no anger toward anyone at all in the whole world. Imagine being a completely positive, optimistic, cheerful person, with high levels of self-esteem and enthusiasm and unlimited self-confidence. Imagine being a warm, friendly, loving person filled with feelings of calmness and inner peace. All this is possible for you when you practice forgiveness.
In contrast, the refusal or failure to forgive lies at the base of negativity, anger, stress, anxiety, mental and physical illness, and most unhappiness. The refusal to forgive keeps you trapped. Forgiveness sets you free. And it is always a choice you make. It has nothing to do with the other person or situation.
Some people hold themselves back from forgiving with a false basic premise.They think that by forgiving they are condoning the behavior of the person they are mad at.They think that, if they forgive the other person, they are doing that person a favor. They even think that they are letting the other person go free, which they are determined not to do.
The fact is that it takes two to make a prison, the prisoner and the jailer. Both are in the jail. When you let the other person go free, you liberate yourself.You don't have to condone the behavior or like the person who hurt you.You just have to forgive him or her so that you can get on with the rest of your life. Forgiveness is therefore a totally selfish act. It really has nothing to do with the other person at all. It has only to do with your own mental integrity and peace of mind.
The comedian Buddy Hackett once said, ''I never hold grudges; while you're holding grudges, they're out dancing!''
When you remain angry with another person, you give away your emotional control to that person each time you think of him or her.You allow him or her to control your emotions at long distance. By not forgiving, you allow that person to run your emotional life, exactly as if he or she were right there with you and the situation was occurring all over again.
The way you forgive is simple. Each time you think of the other person, you use the Law of Substitution and say, ''God bless him/her; I forgive him/her for everything, and I wish him/her well.'' It is not possible to bless and forgive another person and simultaneously be angry or upset. The positive thought cancels out the negative thought.
You can speed up the process of personal liberation by accepting responsibility for your share of what happened. Very few negative events that lead to anger and resentment occur in a vacuum. Almost invariably, you did something to contribute to the situation. You therefore need to have the maturity to take your share of the responsibility.
You can then say, ''I am responsible. I shouldn't have gotten into the situation in the first place, or stayed in so long. I should not have done what I did. I forgive him/her completely and let it go.''
It may be difficult for you to forgive at first.These words will be hard for you. Many people have built their entire adult lives around their grievances. They are afraid that they will have nothing else to talk about if they stop complaining about their parents or their bad marriages. But don't worry.
When you forgive others and let them go, you soon begin to feel lighter and happier. As the thoughts of anger and resentment fade away, your mind will fill with positive thoughts.You will have more energy and enthusiasm. You will feel stronger and more confident.Your whole future will open up before you, like a summer sunrise.
Don't worry about what your friends think or say when you decide to forgive people who have hurt you.They are probably tired of hearing your complaints about the unfortunate events of your past. In fact, when you start forgiving, you will often find that the only common bond between you and certain people is your gripe sessions. When you decide to forgive others, you may no longer find them very interesting to talk to.
There are four groups people you need to forgive if you are serious about changing your thinking and changing your life.
The first is your parents, living or dead.You must absolutely forgive them for every mistake they ever made in bringing you up. At the very least, you should be grateful to them for giving you life. They got you here. If you are happy to be alive, you can forgive them for everything else. Never complain about them again.
Many of my seminar participants have phoned or visited their parents and told them that they forgive them for everything. Often this simple act of courage and character has had a profound effect on their relationship with their mother or father. From that day onward, they have become good friends, which lasted the rest of their lives together.
In contrast, by not forgiving your parents, you remain forever a child.You block your own chance to grow up and become a fully functioning adult. You continue to see yourself as a victim. Even worse, you keep your negative feelings of inferiority and anger alive.If your parents die without your having forgiven them, it can bother you for the rest of your life.
The second group you must forgive is the people from your close relationships that didn't work out. Marriage and other intimate relationships can be so intense, and so threatening to your feelings of self-esteem and self-worth, that you can be angry and unforgiving toward those people for years.
But you were at least partially responsible. Have the personal strength and integrity to say, ''I am responsible,'' and then forgive the other person and let him or her go. Say the words, ''I forgive him/her for everything and I wish him/her well.'' Each time you repeat this, the negative emotion attached to the memory will diminish. Soon it will be gone forever.
Many of my graduates have found that ''the letter'' is the key to putting a bad relationship behind them forever. This is a powerful technique that can free you from feelings of anger and resentment almost instantly.
Here is how it works:You to sit down and write the other person a letter of forgiveness. It consists of three parts.
First you say, ''I forgive you for everything you ever did that hurt me.''
Second, you write out a description or list of every single thing that you are still angry about. Some people write several pages in this part.
Third, you end the letter with the words, ''I wish you well.''
You then take the letter to the mailbox and drop it in. At that moment, you will feel a huge sense of relief, and you will be free at last.
By the way, don't worry about how the other person might react. That is not your concern.Your goal is to free yourself, to regain your peace of mind, and to get on with the wonderful life that lies ahead of you.
The third group you must forgive is everyone else in your life who has ever hurt you in any way. Let them go. Forgive every boss, business partner, friend, crook, or betrayer who has ever caused you grief of any kind. Clean the slate. Wipe each of their names and images off by saying, ''I forgive him/her for everything, and I wish him/her well.'' Repeat this statement each time you think of the person or situation until the negative feelings are gone.
The fourth and final person you have to forgive is yourself.You must absolutely forgive yourself for every silly, senseless, wicked, brainless, thoughtless, or cruel thing you have ever done or said. Stop carrying these past mistakes around with you. That was then and this is now.
Think of it this way:When you did those things in the past that you still feel badly about, you were not the person you are today. At that time, you were a different person, younger and less experienced. You were not your true self.You were an immature version of the person you have become with experience. Stop beating yourself up for something that occurred in the past that you cannot change.
In psychotherapy, when a person feels burdened with a deep sense of guilt or shame as the result of a childhood trauma, the cathartic moment comes when he or she suddenly realizes, ''It's not my fault.'' Sometimes you did things, or things were done to you, when you were too young or inexperienced to know what was going on or to change the situation. It was not your fault.You did the best you could.You are okay. Forgive yourself and let yourself off the hook.
Just say, ''I forgive myself for every mistake I ever made. I am a thoroughly good person and I am going to have a wonderful future.'' Whenever you think of that event or situation, just repeat, ''I forgive myself completely.'' And then get on with your life. Focus on the future rather than the past. Look at where you are going rather than where you have been.
Finally, if you did something that hurt someone, and you still feel badly about it, you can go to that person, or write, and apologize. Tell the person you are sorry for what you did or said. Whatever his or her reaction, positive or negative, it doesn't matter. The very act of repentance, of expressing regret, will set you free.
Most people are open to the idea of forgiveness. It is among the core beliefs of most religions, and is taught in psychology and metaphysics. You are probably comfortable with the idea of forgiving most of the people in your life who have hurt you in some way. But there is a great danger.
The danger is that your refusal to forgive just one major grievance can be enough to sabotage your entire life. Your insistence on holding onto just one person or situation by not forgiving can put the brakes on all your forward progress. There are countless men and women who ruin their lives because of their anger and resentment toward a single person.They can't let go of it, and so they never get free.
Don't let this happen to you.You must have the courage and character to forgive everyone, without exception. There should be no one in your life with whom you are still angry. Your mind should be calm and clear.You should be able to say, ''I do not have a negative or unforgiving thought toward anyone in the world; I freely forgive them all.''
The starting point of eliminating negative emotions is for you to take full control over your thoughts and actions, and to discipline yourself not to express negative emotions when they arise, as they surely will.You may not be able to stop the initial negative reaction to a disappointment or a frustrated expectation, but you can refuse to express it, either to yourself or to another.You can cancel it instantly by saying, ''I am responsible!''
There are some who say that it is healthy to express the negative emotions of anger, hurt, fear, and doubt. But the fact is that whatever you dwell upon and talk about grows in your reality. A small negative experience is like a spark that can be fanned into a blaze by thinking and talking about it. Instead, snuff it out the instant it arises by saying, ''I am responsible!''Then look for reasons why you might be responsible.You will always find them.
An English poet once wrote, ''When the false gods go, the true gods arrive.'' When you stop thinking about, talking about, and rehearsing negative events and the emotions they trigger, the ''true gods'' of positive emotions will fill your mind and heart. When you let go of the thoughts, opinions, prejudices, and attitudes that make you unhappy, you will begin to experience the thoughts and emotions that make you feel good about yourself and your life.
Nature is on your side. Nature wants you to be happy, healthy, prosperous, and fulfilled.Your destiny is to experience joy, harmony, love, and the greatest of all human blessings, peace of mind. And just as a gyroscope knocked off balance returns to an upright position, your life and emotions return to peace and joy just as soon as you stop doing and saying the things that move you away from a sense of inner peace. Decide this
Decide this very day to give up your negative emotions. Resolve from this moment forward to become a positive, optimistic, happy, enthusiastic person in every part of your life. Change your thinking about yourself and your possibilities, and you change your life.
ACTION EXERCISES
- Resolve today that you are going to be a completely happy person. Now ask, ''What is it in my life that makes me unhappy or causes me stress?''Whatever your answer, decide to deal with it and eliminate it.
- Recall an experience from your childhood that you are still angry about. Now reinterpret that experience positively and view it as a valuable learning experience.
- In what areas of your life are you angry or resentful because you are still blaming someone for something he did or didn't do? Whatever it is, accept responsibility and get on with your life.
- Who is there in your past that you have not forgiven? What previous experience causes you the most anger still today? Whoever or whatever it is, resolve to forgive and let it go.
- Don't take things personally anymore. From now on, when people do not respect you or treat you as you wish to be treated, rise above it and go about your business.
- Make a decision today to forgive everyone in your past toward whom you still feel any negative emotion. Let them go and let yourself go at the same time.
- Forgive yourself for every mistake you have ever made. If it is appropriate, go and ask forgiveness of the other person. Set yourself free.
CH-2-Change Your Life
If you paint in your mind a picture of bright and happy expectations, you put yourself into a condition conducive to your goals.- Norman Vincent Peale
The way you think and feel about yourself, including your beliefs and expectations about what is possible for you, determines everything you do and everything that happens to you.When you change the quality of your thinking, you change the quality of your life, sometimes instantly.
You have complete control over only one thing in the universe - your thinking! You can decide what you are going to think in any given situation.Your thoughts and the way you interpret any event trigger your feelings - positive or negative.Your thoughts and feelings lead to your actions and determine the results you get. It all starts with your thoughts.
Positive thoughts are life enhancing. They empower you and make you feel stronger and more confident. Positive thinking is not just a motivational idea. It has measurable, constructive effects on your personality, your health, your levels of energy, and your creativity. The more positive and optimistic you are, the happier you will be in every area of your life.
Negative thoughts bring about the opposite. They disempower you and make you feel weaker and less confident. Whenever you think or say something negative, you give your power away. You feel angry and defensive. You feel frustrated and unhappy. Over time, negative thinking can make you physically ill, and even poison your relationships.
Positive thinking leads to mental health and peak performance. Negative thinking leads to mental illness and decreased effectiveness. Your goal, therefore, if you want to live a wonderful life, is to cultivate positive emotions and get rid of negative emotions.
The elimination of negative emotions is the most important single step you can take toward health, happiness, and personal wellbeing. Each time you take complete control over your thoughts and feelings, and discipline yourself to keep them positive, the quality of both your inner and outer lives improves. In the absence of negative emotions, your mind automatically fills with the positive emotions that generate feelings of happiness and fulfillment.
The Law of Substitution says, ''Your mind can hold only one thought at a time, positive or negative.You can substitute a positive thought for a negative thought whenever you choose.'' You can apply this law by deliberately thinking about something positive whenever you want to cancel out a thought or feeling that makes you angry or unhappy.
The Law of Habit says, ''Any thought or action that you repeat over and over will eventually become a new habit.'' When you repeatedly react and respond in a positive way, you take full control over your conscious mind. Soon it becomes automatic and easy to think and act in that manner. By using willpower and repetition, you develop new habits of thinking and acting. By applying this law, you can become a completely positive person and change your life.
Your negative emotions have all been learned, beginning in childhood. And what has been learned can be unlearned, sometimes quite quickly.You can learn any habit or skill that you consider to be either desirable or necessary. Especially, you can learn positive, constructive ways of thinking about people, money, health, and other factors to cancel out negative ideas that limit your potential and interfere with your success.
Many negative ideas or attitudes are based on false premises. Sometimes a negative idea about a subject, or a negative attitude toward a person, can be completely reversed with a single piece of new information. You could suddenly learn that an idea you had about yourself or another person was not true. As a result, you could change your thinking in an instant. Be open to this possibility.
Negative emotions exist only because we give them life and then keep them alive. We feed them by continually thinking and talking about things that make us angry or unhappy. Fortunately, you can change this situation by applying the Law of Emotion. This law states, ''A stronger emotion will dominate and override a weaker emotion, and whichever emotion you concentrate on grows and becomes stronger.''
What this means is that whatever emotion you dwell upon grows and eventually dominates your thinking in that area. If you withdraw your mental energy from a person or situation that makes you sad or angry by refusing to think about it, the emotion connected with that situation eventually dies away. Like a fire with no fuel, it goes out.
You have experienced this many times already. For example, as we grow up, we have relationships with the opposite sex. Most of them do not work out over time.When they end, we are often emotionally distressed and hurt.We are often sad, angry, depressed, preoccupied, and unhappy. These feelings last for a certain period. Then we recover.We meet someone else. Gradually we forget about the unhappy ending of the earlier relationship. Months or years later, we look back or even meet the other person, and we cannot imagine how emotionally involved we were with him or her. Because we did not feed them, the feelings have died away completely. This is an example of the laws of substitution and emotion in action in your own life.
There are four basic causes of negative emotions. According to the Russian philosopher Peter Ouspensky, in his book In Search of the Miraculous, these are: (1) justification; (2) identification, (3) inward considering, and (4) blame. The greatest leap forward in changing your thinking and changing your life will take place when you systematically eliminate all four of these causes of negative emotions from your life.
Justification is what you do when you rationalize or create a reason for your anger and unhappiness.You tell yourself, and whoever else will listen, how badly you were treated and how dreadfully the other person behaved. You continually rehash the situation in your mind.You repeat all the reasons you have for being upset. Each time you think of the person or situation, you become angry.You feel entitled to your anger, as if you have paid a high price for it, especially since, in your estimation, you were such a good and virtuous person.
The way you short-circuit the natural tendency toward justification and rationalization is by refusing to engage in it. Instead, you stop justifying.You use your marvelous mind to think of reasons not to justify your negative emotions. Remember, your negative emotions do you no good. They are totally destructive. They do not affect the other person or change the situation. They simply undermine your happiness and self-confidence, making you weaker and less effective in other areas of your life.
Instead of justifying your anger and unhappiness, you should use your intelligence and imagination to excuse the other person, or to let go of the unhappy situation. For example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, instead of becoming angry, you say,''Well, I'd better be more careful next time,'' ''I guess he is having a bad day,'' or ''He must be late for an important appointment.''
Since your mind can hold only one thought at a time, the instant you start excusing the other person you withdraw the energy or fuel that the negative emotions of anger and resentment require to get going and stay burning.You reassert your mental control. You keep yourself calm and positive. In a little while, the situation passes and you forget all about it. By substituting a positive thought for a negative thought, you get rid of the negative emotion, whatever it is.
If you have a major life problem, such as a divorce, a lost job, or a failed investment, the same rule holds true. Stop telling yourself (and anyone who will listen) why you are entitled to be angry or unhappy. Instead, make excuses for the other person each time you think about the situation until the negativity dies away. When the fire of negative emotion goes out, you can then turn your attention to something positive.
One of the most important rules for success and happiness is, ''Don't be upset or worry about something that you can't do anything about.'' Don't criticize anyone for something that the person cannot change. A famous law says, ''If there is no solution, there is no problem.''
There are two time periods in life, the past and the future. The present is only a brief, fleeting moment. You can choose to focus your attention on what has happened, which cannot be changed, or on the future, on what is possible, over which you have some control.
Many people spend most of their emotional energies being upset and angry about events that occurred in the past. Unfortunately, this energy is completely wasted. Nothing good can come of constantly complaining about the past. Even worse, the negative emotions kept alive by reliving past events rob you of the joy and excitement that you could experience by thinking about future possibilities.
A psychiatrist with more than 25 years' experience working with unhappy people wrote that the two most common words he heard in his practice were the words ''if only.'' It seemed that most unhappy people are held back by some event that occurred in the past that they cannot let go of. They are still resentful, angry, or depressed over something that someone did or did not do or say.They are angry with one or both parents, a sibling, a previous relationship or marriage, a boss or business relationship, a failed investment or financial mistake.
The fact is that your life will be a continuous series of problems, difficulties, setbacks, and temporary failures. These unexpected and unwanted reversals and disappointments are a normal, natural, and unavoidable fact of growing up.To change your thinking and change your life, you must make a decision to get over them and to get on with your life, no matter what happened. Until you do, you remain a slave to the past, which cannot be changed in any case. Make a decision today that, from now on, you are going to eliminate all the ''if only's'' from your life.
The author and speaker Wayne Dyer says, ''It's never too late to have a happy childhood.'' He means that at any time you can reinterpret the unhappy events of your early life in a positive way.You can practice the Law of Substitution and look into those negative experiences for something good, and think about that instead. You can focus on how your unhappy experiences have made you a better, wiser person. You can actually be grateful to people who have hurt you in the past because they have made you so much stronger in the present. And in any case, it could not have happened otherwise.
Your parents had no experience with raising children. In addition, they were a product of the way they were raised. Like all humans, they came to parenting with their problems and weaknesses, just as you have today. Nonetheless, they did the best they could with what they had. They were the people they were, and they could not have raised you any differently than they did. It is silly to continue to be unhappy about things they did or didn't do that they were incapable of doing otherwise. Let it go and get on with your life.
The second major cause of negative emotions according to Ouspensky, is identification, or attachment. This occurs when you take something personally or you become attached to a person or thing. You see the unhappy outcome of an event or circumstance as a personal affront or attack on you or on something you believe in or hold dearly. You become emotionally involved in a situation and identify so strongly with it that it affects your emotions and your reason in a negative way.
The great spiritual teachers, such as Buddha and Jesus, have emphasized the importance of separating yourself emotionally from the situation (disidentification), in order to regain your calmness and composure. Psychologist and philosopher William James of Harvard wrote, ''The first step in dealing with any difficulty is to be willing to have it so.'' He encouraged people to say, ''What cannot be cured must be endured.'' In other words, practice detachment from any person or situation that makes you feel angry or upset. Withdraw the emotional energy from it so that you can regain your calmness and composure.
This approach does not suggest that you passively accept anything that happens to you. Instead, it encourages you to use your willpower to keep your mind and emotions under control.You discipline yourself to stand back mentally and deal with the problem intelligently. You use your mind to see the situation objectively and make better decisions to resolve it.
Nothing and no one can have any control over you unless there is something you still want from them. They must have something that they can still give you or withhold from you. As soon as you detach emotionally from a person or object and no longer want anything from them, you are free. This ability to practice detachment is a power you can develop through practice. It can make you the master of a situation that might otherwise cause you to become upset and angry.
One of the kindest things you can do to help others is to encourage them to stand back from a problem situation and be objective about it. Encourage them to view the difficulty as if it was happening to someone else. Ask them what advice they would give to another person who was facing this same problem. By detaching from the emotionally charged situation, you and others will become much more capable of dealing with it effectively.
The third major cause of negative emotions, according to Ouspensky, is inward considering. This occurs when you become overly concerned with the way people are treating you. If you perceive that someone is not giving you the respect that you feel you deserve, you can feel insulted and angry, and want to strike back. If people are rude or indifferent to you, you can experience their behavior as an attack on your personality or character. This interpretation of their attitude or behavior can make you angry or depressed.
Psychologists say that everything we do is to increase our selfesteem and sense of personal value, or to protect it from being diminished by other people or circumstances. If your self-esteem is not as high as it could be, you will be sensitive to the actions and reactions of other people toward you.You will take everything personally, exactly as if what they said or did was consciously and deliberately directed at you. However, this is seldom the case.
The fact is that most people are preoccupied with themselves and their own problems. As much as 99 percent of the time, people are wrapped up in their own thoughts about themselves. They devote the other 1 percent of emotional energy they have available to everyone else in the world, including you. The person who cuts you off in traffic is so involved with his own thoughts, he is not even aware of your existence. It would be silly to become angry or upset over his thoughtless action.
There is a rule that I have learned from experience: Never do or refrain from doing something because you are concerned about what people might think about you. The fact is that nobody is even thinking about you at all.
Of course, I am not talking about criminal or antisocial behaviors. But it is amazing how many people make decisions to get into or to not get into relationships, businesses, new endeavors, adventures, and other things for fear that someone else might not approve. They stay in marriages they hate, they work at jobs they dislike, or they turn down business opportunities for fear that someone, anyone, might criticize them. The truth is that no one cares more about your key life decisions than you do. Plan accordingly.
In Abraham Maslow's studies of self-actualizing people, those 1 or 2 percent of men and women who are fully mature, fully functioning adults, he found a particular quality that they all had in common: They were completely honest with themselves. They were objective and clear about their own strengths and weaknesses. They did not hope or pretend that they were other than they were. This self-acceptance was a foundation stone of their self-esteem and self-respect.
Because they knew who they were, and who they were not, they did not feel that they had to continually earn the approval of others. They took the opinions of others into consideration, but then they made their own decisions. They were not overly influenced by the possible approval or disapproval of other people.You should do the same.You are the one who cares the most and who is most affected, in any case.
When Somerset Maugham, the famous English author, was asked by a reporter for his chief motivation for writing, he replied, ''I write to earn the respect of the people I respect.''
The fact is that much of what you do, or fail to do, is influenced by the same concern.You do many things in your social life to earn the respect of the people you respect, or at least not to lose it. In fact, the people whose respect is most important to you largely determine how good you feel about yourself, both at home and at work. The respect of others has an inordinate influence on your self-esteem because it is so closely linked to your self-ideal and your self-image.
Exceptional men and women look up to and seek the respect of men and women of character and accomplishment. They strive, at an unconscious level, to behave and to live up to their ideals of how an excellent person would behave.
One of the most important decisions you make as you go through life is to decide for yourself the specific people whose respect is of the greatest value to you. Once you are clear about who you respect and why you respect them, you can then organize your life in such a way that you continually earn that respect, whether they know of your actions or not.
In the famous book In His Steps, by Charles M. Sheldon (Christian Library, 1984), an entire town agrees, prior to every act or decision, to ask the question, ''What would Jesus do?'' and then to behave accordingly. The eventual outcome for the townspeople was that the problems that had divided them were soon solved and the town became happy and prosperous. They created an ideal for themselves and then built their lives around living up to it.
In a study of successful men and women, most of whom had started from humble beginnings, researchers found that these people had almost all been avid readers of biographies and autobiographies when they were young. As they read the life stories of famous men and women, they imagined themselves having the same qualities and characters of the people they were studying. When they became adults themselves, those qualities and virtues had become part of their thinking and guided their choices and decisions in later life.
Modeling has been used as a powerful way to develop personality and character throughout history.Young people have been encouraged to study school heroes and heroines, and emulate them as much as possible. In the military, the heroic acts of soldiers and sailors from the past are taught as part of the curriculum, encouraging young soldiers and sailors to think and act like them when the situation demands it.
The people you most admire and look up to have an inordinate influence on how you think and feel about yourself, and the kind of decisions you make.Who are your role models?
There is nothing wrong with being thoughtful and concerned about the feelings and reactions of others toward you and your choices. When you select admirable people to look up to, you develop an inner guide that leads you to conduct yourself in an excellent way yourself.
What is silly and self-defeating however, is for you to allow yourself to be inordinately influenced by the fleeting opinions of people whose regard and respect is of no concern or value to you. If you have been raised with destructive criticism, you can easily slip into the trap of organizing your life around trying to gain the approval, or escape the disapproval, or people you don't even know or care about.
Here is the way to avoid this form of negative emotion: Decide for yourself the men and women you most admire, and the qualities they have that you would most like to emulate. From now on, when you have to make a decision, think about someone you admire and ask, ''What would he or she do in this situation?''
When you ask this question, you actually connect at an unconscious level with a higher power that will then give you guidance and insight. You will experience a deep inner knowing of exactly the right thing to do or say. You will make the right decision and achieve the desired result. This is a technique used by many successful men and women. Give it a try and see what happens.
The fourth major cause of negative emotions, according to Ouspensky, and the trigger of anger, resentment, envy, jealousy, and frustration of any kind is blame. It is blame especially that generates anger, the worst of all the negative emotions. Anger is more destructive than any force in the human world. Uncontrolled anger destroys health, relationships, families, businesses, and societies, and is the chief generator of wars, revolutions, and social conflict.
The primary cause of anger can be traced back to destructive criticism in early childhood. Whenever a person is criticized, he reacts exactly as if he is being attacked, with defensiveness and resentment. Since any behavior that you repeat over and over becomes a habit, many people develop the habit of responding with anger to every problem, disappointment, or frustration they experience. Eventually, they reach the point where they are always angry about something.
To become angry, a person must be able to blame someone for something that has happened or not happened that they don't like or approve of. Many people are so preoccupied with blaming others for their problems that they lose contact with reality. They see the entire world through a lens of blame and its sister emotion, guilt.
Whenever there is a problem, personal or public, the angry person automatically concludes that someone must be to blame. The individual then spends his time and emotion apportioning blame among various parties. This obsession with blame and anger, leading to resentment and envy, can often consume the person who experiences it.
Here is a common example.Two people in love get married. Both of them have the best of intentions and the highest of expectations for the future, or they wouldn't get married in the first place. Unfortunately, people and situations change over time. The couple finds that they are no longer happy together and decide to divorce. But then the problems really begin.
Instead of agreeing, like adults, that they have reached a point where they are incompatible and they no longer want to live together, blame must be apportioned. Someone must be guilty. The guilty party must be punished. Lawyers and judges now have to get involved. Detectives and accountants are hired to dig up dirt on each party. The situation gets worse and worse, until it finally ends in anger, bitterness, accusations, and even hatred.
The best of solutions, when a marriage or a relationship does not work out, is to accept that fact as an unfortunate reality, make reasonable provisions for each party, and then for each person to get on with his or her life. Many couples are doing this today through mediation rather than going through the bitterness of a traditional divorce. The results turn out to be better for everyone involved.
It is a psychological fact that most people feel that they are right in whatever they do. But as soon as one person starts to blame the other, and even worse, demand that the other person admit to being guilty, the emotional and legal battles begin. The saddest part of these legal battles is that they usually end where they started, with no one having gained very much.
The best way to eliminate anger of all kinds is to accept responsibility. The acceptance of responsibility immediately short-circuits the emotion of anger. All the energy that anger requires for its existence is cut off. As soon as you say, ''I am responsible!'' your anger stops. Because of the Law of Substitution and the fact that your mind can hold only one thought at a time, you cannot accept responsibility for your situation and be angry at the same time.The idea of blame, on which the emotion of anger is based, is canceled out by the decision to accept responsibility.
There are two basic ways of looking at your world.You can have a positive and benevolent worldview or a negative and malevolent worldview. By taking responsibility for yourself and what happens to you, you become positive. You see the world in benevolent terms.You become more optimistic toward yourself and your possibilities. You become a happier and more effective person.
In contrast, when you take a negative or malevolent worldview, you see problems and injustice everywhere.You see oppression and evil. You see guilty people all around you. You see limitations and unfairness rather than opportunity and hope. Worst of all, you spend your time apportioning blame to various people and institutions for all the problems you see.
For example, in this country, some people are better off than others. This has been true of all societies throughout human history. This can be for various reasons. It may be the result of different people having different talents, ambitions, and desires. It may be the result of some people working harder, having a better start at life, being born with greater intelligence, or simply being at the right place at the right time to catch a favorable trend in the economy.
In any case, people who are well off are not to blame for the fat that other people are not well off. People who are healthy are not to blame for the fact that other people are sick. People who are successful and happy are not to blame for those who are unsuccessful and unhappy. People who are building a good life for themselves and their families are not at fault because other people are not.
Success does not cause failure. Correlation is not causation. Because both situations occur simultaneously, this does not mean that one caused the other. An honest acceptance of this simple fact would solve many arguments and disagreements at the philosophical and political levels.
The root cause of negative emotions, the main factor that predisposes a person to blaming and to anger and resentment, fear and doubt, envy and jealousy, is the inability to forgive someone we feel has hurt us in some way.
As we develop as children, we go through a phase where ''justice'' is very important to us.We fixate on the concept of ''fairness.'' We are upset by any situation in our lives that does not seem to be fair and equitable to anyone, especially if it concerns ourselves. Whenever we feel that we or anyone else has been unfairly treated, for any reason, we take it as a personal attack. Our fragile selfesteem is threatened.We react with anger and resentment. This is a normal developmental phase of growth that we go through as we move toward adulthood.
However, some people fixate at this stage and never grow beyond it. If we are not taught the importance of letting go of our grievances as children, we will come into adulthood with a gunnysack of unforgiven experiences. If we are not careful, we will then build our lives around our anger toward people who we feel are to blame for something they did or that we disapprove of. Many psychotherapists and psychiatrists spend their entire careers helping people confront and deal with these unhappy past and current experiences.
The most powerful and liberating decision you can make is to forgive everyone who has ever hurt you in any way. Only by freeing the other person, in your mind, by forgiving him or her can you be free yourself. This is why most religions stress the importance of forgiveness as the first step toward peace of mind and earthly bliss.
Just imagine how you would feel if you had no anger toward anyone at all in the whole world. Imagine being a completely positive, optimistic, cheerful person, with high levels of self-esteem and enthusiasm and unlimited self-confidence. Imagine being a warm, friendly, loving person filled with feelings of calmness and inner peace. All this is possible for you when you practice forgiveness.
In contrast, the refusal or failure to forgive lies at the base of negativity, anger, stress, anxiety, mental and physical illness, and most unhappiness. The refusal to forgive keeps you trapped. Forgiveness sets you free. And it is always a choice you make. It has nothing to do with the other person or situation.
Some people hold themselves back from forgiving with a false basic premise.They think that by forgiving they are condoning the behavior of the person they are mad at.They think that, if they forgive the other person, they are doing that person a favor. They even think that they are letting the other person go free, which they are determined not to do.
The fact is that it takes two to make a prison, the prisoner and the jailer. Both are in the jail. When you let the other person go free, you liberate yourself.You don't have to condone the behavior or like the person who hurt you.You just have to forgive him or her so that you can get on with the rest of your life. Forgiveness is therefore a totally selfish act. It really has nothing to do with the other person at all. It has only to do with your own mental integrity and peace of mind.
The comedian Buddy Hackett once said, ''I never hold grudges; while you're holding grudges, they're out dancing!''
When you remain angry with another person, you give away your emotional control to that person each time you think of him or her.You allow him or her to control your emotions at long distance. By not forgiving, you allow that person to run your emotional life, exactly as if he or she were right there with you and the situation was occurring all over again.
The way you forgive is simple. Each time you think of the other person, you use the Law of Substitution and say, ''God bless him/her; I forgive him/her for everything, and I wish him/her well.'' It is not possible to bless and forgive another person and simultaneously be angry or upset. The positive thought cancels out the negative thought.
You can speed up the process of personal liberation by accepting responsibility for your share of what happened. Very few negative events that lead to anger and resentment occur in a vacuum. Almost invariably, you did something to contribute to the situation. You therefore need to have the maturity to take your share of the responsibility.
You can then say, ''I am responsible. I shouldn't have gotten into the situation in the first place, or stayed in so long. I should not have done what I did. I forgive him/her completely and let it go.''
It may be difficult for you to forgive at first.These words will be hard for you. Many people have built their entire adult lives around their grievances. They are afraid that they will have nothing else to talk about if they stop complaining about their parents or their bad marriages. But don't worry.
When you forgive others and let them go, you soon begin to feel lighter and happier. As the thoughts of anger and resentment fade away, your mind will fill with positive thoughts.You will have more energy and enthusiasm. You will feel stronger and more confident.Your whole future will open up before you, like a summer sunrise.
Don't worry about what your friends think or say when you decide to forgive people who have hurt you.They are probably tired of hearing your complaints about the unfortunate events of your past. In fact, when you start forgiving, you will often find that the only common bond between you and certain people is your gripe sessions. When you decide to forgive others, you may no longer find them very interesting to talk to.
There are four groups people you need to forgive if you are serious about changing your thinking and changing your life.
The first is your parents, living or dead.You must absolutely forgive them for every mistake they ever made in bringing you up. At the very least, you should be grateful to them for giving you life. They got you here. If you are happy to be alive, you can forgive them for everything else. Never complain about them again.
Many of my seminar participants have phoned or visited their parents and told them that they forgive them for everything. Often this simple act of courage and character has had a profound effect on their relationship with their mother or father. From that day onward, they have become good friends, which lasted the rest of their lives together.
In contrast, by not forgiving your parents, you remain forever a child.You block your own chance to grow up and become a fully functioning adult. You continue to see yourself as a victim. Even worse, you keep your negative feelings of inferiority and anger alive.If your parents die without your having forgiven them, it can bother you for the rest of your life.
The second group you must forgive is the people from your close relationships that didn't work out. Marriage and other intimate relationships can be so intense, and so threatening to your feelings of self-esteem and self-worth, that you can be angry and unforgiving toward those people for years.
But you were at least partially responsible. Have the personal strength and integrity to say, ''I am responsible,'' and then forgive the other person and let him or her go. Say the words, ''I forgive him/her for everything and I wish him/her well.'' Each time you repeat this, the negative emotion attached to the memory will diminish. Soon it will be gone forever.
Many of my graduates have found that ''the letter'' is the key to putting a bad relationship behind them forever. This is a powerful technique that can free you from feelings of anger and resentment almost instantly.
Here is how it works:You to sit down and write the other person a letter of forgiveness. It consists of three parts.
First you say, ''I forgive you for everything you ever did that hurt me.''
Second, you write out a description or list of every single thing that you are still angry about. Some people write several pages in this part.
Third, you end the letter with the words, ''I wish you well.''
You then take the letter to the mailbox and drop it in. At that moment, you will feel a huge sense of relief, and you will be free at last.
By the way, don't worry about how the other person might react. That is not your concern.Your goal is to free yourself, to regain your peace of mind, and to get on with the wonderful life that lies ahead of you.
The third group you must forgive is everyone else in your life who has ever hurt you in any way. Let them go. Forgive every boss, business partner, friend, crook, or betrayer who has ever caused you grief of any kind. Clean the slate. Wipe each of their names and images off by saying, ''I forgive him/her for everything, and I wish him/her well.'' Repeat this statement each time you think of the person or situation until the negative feelings are gone.
The fourth and final person you have to forgive is yourself.You must absolutely forgive yourself for every silly, senseless, wicked, brainless, thoughtless, or cruel thing you have ever done or said. Stop carrying these past mistakes around with you. That was then and this is now.
Think of it this way:When you did those things in the past that you still feel badly about, you were not the person you are today. At that time, you were a different person, younger and less experienced. You were not your true self.You were an immature version of the person you have become with experience. Stop beating yourself up for something that occurred in the past that you cannot change.
In psychotherapy, when a person feels burdened with a deep sense of guilt or shame as the result of a childhood trauma, the cathartic moment comes when he or she suddenly realizes, ''It's not my fault.'' Sometimes you did things, or things were done to you, when you were too young or inexperienced to know what was going on or to change the situation. It was not your fault.You did the best you could.You are okay. Forgive yourself and let yourself off the hook.
Just say, ''I forgive myself for every mistake I ever made. I am a thoroughly good person and I am going to have a wonderful future.'' Whenever you think of that event or situation, just repeat, ''I forgive myself completely.'' And then get on with your life. Focus on the future rather than the past. Look at where you are going rather than where you have been.
Finally, if you did something that hurt someone, and you still feel badly about it, you can go to that person, or write, and apologize. Tell the person you are sorry for what you did or said. Whatever his or her reaction, positive or negative, it doesn't matter. The very act of repentance, of expressing regret, will set you free.
Most people are open to the idea of forgiveness. It is among the core beliefs of most religions, and is taught in psychology and metaphysics. You are probably comfortable with the idea of forgiving most of the people in your life who have hurt you in some way. But there is a great danger.
The danger is that your refusal to forgive just one major grievance can be enough to sabotage your entire life. Your insistence on holding onto just one person or situation by not forgiving can put the brakes on all your forward progress. There are countless men and women who ruin their lives because of their anger and resentment toward a single person.They can't let go of it, and so they never get free.
Don't let this happen to you.You must have the courage and character to forgive everyone, without exception. There should be no one in your life with whom you are still angry. Your mind should be calm and clear.You should be able to say, ''I do not have a negative or unforgiving thought toward anyone in the world; I freely forgive them all.''
The starting point of eliminating negative emotions is for you to take full control over your thoughts and actions, and to discipline yourself not to express negative emotions when they arise, as they surely will.You may not be able to stop the initial negative reaction to a disappointment or a frustrated expectation, but you can refuse to express it, either to yourself or to another.You can cancel it instantly by saying, ''I am responsible!''
There are some who say that it is healthy to express the negative emotions of anger, hurt, fear, and doubt. But the fact is that whatever you dwell upon and talk about grows in your reality. A small negative experience is like a spark that can be fanned into a blaze by thinking and talking about it. Instead, snuff it out the instant it arises by saying, ''I am responsible!''Then look for reasons why you might be responsible.You will always find them.
An English poet once wrote, ''When the false gods go, the true gods arrive.'' When you stop thinking about, talking about, and rehearsing negative events and the emotions they trigger, the ''true gods'' of positive emotions will fill your mind and heart. When you let go of the thoughts, opinions, prejudices, and attitudes that make you unhappy, you will begin to experience the thoughts and emotions that make you feel good about yourself and your life.
Nature is on your side. Nature wants you to be happy, healthy, prosperous, and fulfilled.Your destiny is to experience joy, harmony, love, and the greatest of all human blessings, peace of mind. And just as a gyroscope knocked off balance returns to an upright position, your life and emotions return to peace and joy just as soon as you stop doing and saying the things that move you away from a sense of inner peace. Decide this
Decide this very day to give up your negative emotions. Resolve from this moment forward to become a positive, optimistic, happy, enthusiastic person in every part of your life. Change your thinking about yourself and your possibilities, and you change your life.
ACTION EXERCISES
- Resolve today that you are going to be a completely happy person. Now ask, ''What is it in my life that makes me unhappy or causes me stress?''Whatever your answer, decide to deal with it and eliminate it.
- Recall an experience from your childhood that you are still angry about. Now reinterpret that experience positively and view it as a valuable learning experience.
- In what areas of your life are you angry or resentful because you are still blaming someone for something he did or didn't do? Whatever it is, accept responsibility and get on with your life.
- Who is there in your past that you have not forgiven? What previous experience causes you the most anger still today? Whoever or whatever it is, resolve to forgive and let it go.
- Don't take things personally anymore. From now on, when people do not respect you or treat you as you wish to be treated, rise above it and go about your business.
- Make a decision today to forgive everyone in your past toward whom you still feel any negative emotion. Let them go and let yourself go at the same time.
- Forgive yourself for every mistake you have ever made. If it is appropriate, go and ask forgiveness of the other person. Set yourself free.
CH-3-Dream Big Dreams
Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of you shall at last unveil.- John Ruskin
Your mind can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Your thoughts alone have the power to make you healthy or sick, rich or poor, popular or unpopular.Your mind is like a powerful force that can be turned in any direction to bring about wonderful results, or wreak havoc and destruction.Your main goal in life must be to harness your amazing powers and direct them intelligently and systematically toward achieving everything you really want.
Let me tell you a story. Some years ago, I took my family to Italy on vacation.We toured several of the great art museums of Rome and Florence. In Florence, there is a special museum that was built to house the statue of David created by Michelangelo several hundred years ago. This is perhaps the most beautiful piece of sculpture in the world.The actual physical experience of being in the same room with it is something that none of us has ever forgotten.
The story of the creation of the David is very interesting and contains a lesson for all of us. Michelangelo was commissioned by the Medicis to create a statue for the main square in Florence. The Medicis were the wealthiest and most powerful family of Italy at the time. A commission for a statue from the Medicis was not only a great honor; it was also a task that could not be refused. For two years, Michelangelo searched for a block of stone out of which he could create the kind of masterpiece the Medicis were looking for.
Finally, on a side street of Florence, partially overgrown with weeds and covered with dirt, he found a huge slab of marble lying on wooden trestles. It had been hauled down from the mountains years before and had never been used.
Michelangelo had walked past this street many times, but this time he stopped and looked more closely. As he walked back and forth studying the block of marble, he actually envisioned the statue of David and saw it in its entirety.
The sculptor quickly arranged to have workmen haul the block of marble to his studio some distance away. He then began the long, hard job of hammering and chiseling. It took him two solid years of work to create the rough outline of the statue. He then put his hammers and chisels aside and spent two more years polishing and sanding before the statue was complete.
Michelangelo was already famous as a sculptor, and the news that he was working on a major commission for the Medicis spread all over Italy. When the day came for its first public viewing, thousands of people came from all over Italy and gathered in the main square.When it was unveiled, the crowd stood gaping in awe. It was breathtakingly beautiful. People cheered.Women fainted. The audience was amazed at the incredible beauty of the enormous statue. Michelangelo was immediately recognized as the greatest sculptor of his age.
Afterward, when Michelangelo was asked how he was able to create such a masterpiece, he replied by saying that he saw the David complete and perfect in the marble. All he did was to remove everything that was not the David.
There are many parallels between yourself and the David.You are very much like a great masterpiece enclosed in marble as well. But the marble that envelops you, and most other people, is the marble of small, limited thinking and excessive worry about the possibilities of loss or failure, rather than an excited anticipation of the rewards of success and achievement.
To realize your full potential, your greatest need is to break out of your limited thinking by dreaming big dreams and imagining unlimited possibilities.You need to remove all the negative beliefs that hold you back from becoming all you are capable of becoming.
But remember, even after the David had been released from the marble, it took Michelangelo two solid years of sanding and polishing to turn it into a masterpiece. In the same way, you also have to work on yourself, sanding and polishing, learning and practicing, for days, weeks, months, and even years, to develop and bring out all the talents and abilities that lie deep inside of you.
The central purpose of this book is to help you change your thinking in such a way that you become absolutely unstoppable in achieving any goal you can set for yourself.Your goal is to develop yourself to the point psychologically where you become like an irresistible force of nature.You will be like the tide coming in, or like a powerful storm that sweeps across the land.
Your aim is to become so confident, courageous, strong, and resolute that you can set any goal for yourself with the firm knowledge that you can learn what you need to learn, and do what you need to do, to eventually achieve it.You will become so persistent and determined that nothing and no one can slow you down or alter your course.You will become truly unstoppable!
You begin the process of becoming unstoppable by dreaming big dreams. Since everything you create in your world begins with a thought, the bigger the dreams you dream, the bigger the goals you will achieve. All successful men and women are dreamers. All peak performers are what are called ''blue-sky thinkers.'' They continually allow their minds to float freely when they think about what is possible for them. They look at the unlimited blue sky above them as the only limit to everything and anything that they could possibly be, or have or do.
Successful people continually practice ''back from the future'' thinking. They project into the future several years and imagine what their lives would look like if they had achieved all of their goals. They look back to the present, from the mental vantage point of the future, like looking from the top of a high mountain down to where they are actually standing in the valley, in the present. They then look at the path that they would have to take to get to where they want to be in the future.
By the law of correspondence, whatever you can clearly see on the inside, you will eventually experience on the outside.You should therefore visualize your goals with as much clarity and vividness as possible. Visualize your goals intensely and create within yourself the same feeling that you would have if you had already achieved your goals. Visualize your goals frequently. Replay a picture of your goal, as if you had already realized it, on the screen of your mind as many times a day as you possibly can. Visualize your goals for as long as you possibly can, preferably just before falling asleep each night.
Repeat these exercises of visualization-vividness, intensity, frequency, and duration-until your goals become absolutely clear, living, breathing, exciting, clear pictures in your mind. The more skilled you become at moving from the dream through the goal to the visualization, the more motivated and determined you will be. The more clarity you develop, the more courage and confidence you will have, and the more unstoppable you will become.
The most important part of dreaming big dreams is for you to define your ideal future vision. It is for you to think about what you want before you begin to think about what is possible for you.You dream big dreams by looking into the future and imagining that you have no limitations holding you back from achieving anything you set your mind on.
Detach yourself from your current situation and allow yourself to dream. Pretend for the moment that you have all the time and money you need. Imagine that you have all the connections and contacts, all the resources and opportunities, all the education and knowledge, all the skills and experience that you require to be, have, or do anything that you could dream of.
Imagine your ideal lifestyle. Imagine your ideal job or income. Imagine where you would like to live and how you would like to spend each day, each week, each month. Imagine your ideal family life. Imagine your ideal state of health. Design your perfect life in every respect.
Here is an exercise for you.Take out a piece of paper and at the top write the words ''Dream List.'' Underline these words and then write down everything that you can think of that you could ever possibly want if you had no limitations whatsoever.
Most people are held back by their self-limiting beliefs.The way you burst these mental chains is with a dream list.The very fact that you can write down something that you would love to have someday means that you probably have within you, right now, the ability to achieve it. Let your mind float freely as you write. There will be lots of time to organize and evaluate your dreams later.
Here is a great question: ''What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?''
If you were absolutely guaranteed of success in the achievement of any one goal, big or small, long-term or short-term, what would it be? If a billionaire took a liking to you and offered to write you a check to cover any goal that you could clearly define, what one goal would you choose?
If you could have any job, what would it be? If you could work for any kind of company, what kind of a company would you select? Where would it be, and what would it be doing? If your family life and your relationships could be perfect in every respect, what would they look like? Answer these questions clearly. Write them down.
You begin the creation of your ideal future by making up your dream list.You write down everything that you would want to be, do and have, exactly as if you had no limitations at all.You make up your list as if you were absolutely guaranteed of success. Then you can begin refining your list, step by step to develop a detailed blueprint for your life.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote, ''Have you built your castles in the air? Good, that's where they should be built. Now, go to work and build foundations under them.'' Once you have broken free from your limited thinking, like a balloon casting loose its moorings and rising high into the sky, you can begin to turn your dreams and fantasies into concrete practical goals with specific plans of action.
Your ability to set goals and to make plans for their accomplishment is the ''master skill'' of success.With this master skill, there are no limits on what you can accomplish. Putting your goals on paper is the next step in the process.
There is a seven-step method for goal setting and achievement that you can use, over and over, in any situation, to accomplish anything you could ever want for yourself. These seven steps constitute a powerful, proven formula that you can use to change your life immediately.
A real goal is clear, specific, measurable, and time bounded. A nongoal- a wish or a hope-is fuzzy and unclear. It is a fantasy that floats in the air. People with clear, specific goals, who know exactly what they want, are very different from people who are going through life hoping for the best.Your ability to decide exactly what it is you want in each area of your life is one of the most important responsibilities of adult life.
People often approach me at my seminars and ask what their goals should be. I reply that only they can decide. It is amazing how many of them tell me how hard it is to set goals, and I agree with them. It is hard, but it is also essential. With clear goals, you can do almost anything. Without them, you can do virtually nothing.
One of the major reasons that people fail in life is because they waste so much of their time doing things of low value or no value at all. And the reason they waste so much time is because they have no real idea of what they really want. Once you have clear goals, your ability to manage your time improves dramatically.
Here is a way to decide whether something is a good use of your time. Just ask, ''Does this move me toward the achievement of one of my goals?'' If the activity helps you to achieve a goal you have set for yourself, it is a good use of time. If it doesn't, it is a poor use of time.
When you get into the habit of only doing those things that move you toward your goals, your life will take off.Your results will improve.You will soon find yourself busy every hour of every day doing things that are helping you in some way.You will have no time left to spend on activities that aren't helping you to achieve one of your goals.
When you set clear goals for yourself, and you know exactly what you want, you will become increasingly impatient with activities that are not helping you in some way.You will watch less television. You will listen to less radio. You will read the newspapers quickly, if at all. You will become far more selective with your friends and your social activities.You will spend time only with people you enjoy, people you can learn and benefit from. But, as the old saying goes, ''If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.''
Write your goals down on paper. There is something quite incredible that happens between the brain and the hand. When you take a paper and pen and write down your goals, you activate the Laws of Expectation, Attraction, and Correspondence simultaneously. You intensify your belief and deepen your conviction that your goals are possible for you. The very act of writing down your goals gives you a sense of control and personal power.Written goals increase your resolve and determination to do whatever is necessary to achieve them.
The speed at which you will begin to achieve your goals after you have written them down is nothing short of miraculous. The very act of writing out your goals increases the likelihood of your achieving them by as much as 10 times-1,000 percent!
Many thousands of my graduates have written or come back to tell me about the amazing things that have happened in their lives that started immediately after they began putting their goals in writing.
Determine the price you are going to have to pay to achieve your goal. Make a list of everything that you are going to have to do if you want to make your goal a reality.
Are you going to have to start each day's work a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later? Write it down. Are you going to have to upgrade your knowledge and skills, and take additional courses? Again, write it down. Are you going to have to change jobs, change industries, or change careers in order to achieve everything that is possible for you? Write it down.
The Law of Cause and Effect is the iron law of the universe. For everything that you want, there is a price that must be paid. This price must be paid in full and in advance. The Law of Sowing and Reaping is not the Law of Reaping and Sowing.You have to put in before you get out.You have to give before you receive.You have to pay the price before you enjoy the reward.
Your willingness to do whatever you need to do, pay whatever price is required, go whatever distance is necessary, and make whatever sacrifice is demanded is the measure of how badly you really want your goal.
Many people sabotage their own success by deciding that they want a particular goal, and although they are willing to pay a high price for it, they are not quite willing to pay the full price that the goal demands. This is like wanting to win in a poker game but not being willing to match the final bet made by the other player.You end up losing the whole hand, just as by failing to make a total commitment people end up losing the entire goal.
Make a plan, in writing. Remember, the ability to develop written goals and create plans for their achievement is the master skill of success. A plan begins with your making a list of all the things that you can think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal. Once you have made your list, you can add new items as they occur to you.
You then organize your list in terms of priority and sequence. What are the most important things on the list that you will have to do to achieve your goal? What are the things that you will have to do before you do something else? Which items on your list are dependent on your completing other items first?
A plan of action gives you a track to run on. It increases your level of belief and intensifies your desire for the goal.You gradually become convinced that your goal is actually possible and achievable for you.You begin to see possibilities that you may not even have been aware of in the absence of a written plan.
Take action of some kind in the direction of your goal. Once you have set a goal, written it down, determined the price that you are going to have to pay, and made a plan, you must take some action immediately. Even if you only make one phone call or collect one piece of information, be sure to do something. In the Bible it says, ''Faith without deeds is dead.''
There is something powerful in your willingness to take a specific action, in faith, in the direction of your goal, with no guarantee of success.Your action itself seems to trigger all kinds of other powers and forces in the universe.You activate the Law of Attraction to help you.When you take action, you demonstrate to yourself, and to others for that matter, that you are really serious about your goal.
Until you have taken a specific, irrevocable action of some kind, you have merely engaged in an enjoyable exercise, like daydreaming. You have put your key into the ignition but you haven't turned it on.
Do something every day that moves you toward your most important goal. This is a vital success principle that generates energy and enthusiasm. For you to maintain your courage, confidence, and selfmotivation, you must be doing something every single day that gives you a feeling of forward motion and progress.Your job is to build yourself up to the point where you genuinely feel unstoppable, and the only way that you can do this is by refusing to stop, by doing something daily.
Resolve in advance that you will never quit once you have started toward your goal. No matter how many setbacks or obstacles you experience, make the decision that you will keep on picking yourself up and persisting until you eventually succeed.
By deciding in advance that you will persist, no matter what the difficulty, you give yourself a psychological edge. When the difficulties do arise, you will be mentally prepared to plow through them rather than quitting.Your willingness and ability to persist are what will eventually guarantee your success.
If money is your goal, remember that most of the people who are wealthy today started out with no money at all, or even deeply in debt. Almost everyone who is on the top today was once at the bottom. Almost everyone who is at the front of the line of life was once at the back of the line. Almost everyone who is wealthy today was once poor.
Most of the five million millionaires in the United States are self-made. That is, they started out with nothing and worked their way up. Our world today has more than 300 self-made billionaires and multibillionaires as well. Many of these are people who started with little or nothing, and by changing their thinking, they unleashed their own inner potentials to achieve extraordinary financial results. And almost anything that anyone else has done, within reason, you can do as well.What are your goals?
One of my favorite quotations is from the mountain climber Charles Murray.
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is an elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment that one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidences and meetings and material assistance that no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
He finishes off his statement with these words from Goethe:
Are you in earnest? Seek this very minute, Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage and the mind grows heated. Begin and then the task will be completed.
ACTION EXERCISES
- What one great goal would you set for yourself if you were absolutely guaranteed success?
- Make out a ''dream list''; write down everything you would like to have in your life someday, exactly as if you had no limitations.
- Imagine your perfect lifestyle; if you were financially independent and you could live any way and anywhere you wanted, what would you change?
- Make a list of 10 goals you would like to accomplish in the next year. From that list, select the one goal that would have the greatest positive impact on your life if you could achieve it right now.
- Write your most important goal on a separate piece of paper. Make it measurable and set a deadline for its accomplishment.
- Make a written plan to achieve this one goal.Write out a list of everything you can think of that you will have to do to accomplish it.
- Take action on your plan immediately. Once you have started, discipline yourself to do something every day that moves you toward that goal. Never miss a day until you have achieved it.
CH-4-Decide to Become Rich
Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.- Claude M. Bristol
We have passed from a world based on material limitations into a world that is determined by mental concepts.We have moved from the age of things into the ''Psychozoic Age,'' the age of the mind. Wealth and opportunities are contained more in the person you are and the way you think than in the assets you have acquired in life so far.Your future lies more in your ability to apply your mind and intelligence to your work and your life than it does in your current job or situation.
Because health, wealth, and happiness are essentially mental, there are very few limits on how much of them you can acquire for yourself. In this chapter, and in subsequent chapters, you will learn many of the simple, practical, proven methods, techniques, and strategies used by high-achieving men and women in every field to accomplish far more than they, or the people around them, ever dreamed possible.You will learn how to break the bonds of limited, conventional thinking, expanding your desires and ambitions so dramatically that you will be able accomplish any goal that you could ever set for yourself.
There are three major forces reverberating through our world today, transforming everything they touch and creating unlimited opportunities for the creative minority. These three forces are the incredible growth in information, technology, and competition.
- Information and Knowledge Explosion
The information revolution, combined with the speed of computerized information processing, the Internet, and wireless communications, is enabling knowledge in every field to double every two or three years. Fully 90 percent of all the thinkers, inventors, engineers, scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds who ever existed are living and working today. The results of their efforts are becoming almost instantaneously available to each other, thereby doubling and tripling their outputs. - Technological Advances
The explosion in technology and high-speed computers is literally breathtaking.Today, you can e-mail a message around the world to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people simultaneously, in a matter of seconds, at a cost of pennies. The World Wide Web gives you access to tens of millions of other Internet users, as well as to the accumulated knowledge stored in more than 50,000 libraries and research institutes. Instantaneous transmission of data enables the money markets to move a trillion dollars per day, sometimes in seconds, making it impossible for countries to control their currencies, much less their economies.
In the twenty-first century, you will own a laptop computer with a microchip that can process one billion commands per second. It will have a long-life battery and a built-in cellular telephone, connected to cells and satellites that will enable you to communicate instantaneously with almost anyone, almost anywhere in the world. You will have your own personal telephone number that will enable anyone in the world, anywhere, to telephone you, wherever you are, whether or not they even know what country you are in. And this telephone technology will probably fit on your wrist like a large digital watch does today. - Thriving Competition
The third major factor driving our lives is competition. Every business organization wants to generate sales and make profits, locally, nationally, and internationally, if possible. To survive and thrive, each person and business must be continually seeking faster, better, newer, cheaper, easier ways to deliver value to their customers.
Every advance in knowledge and technology creates opportunities that fleet-footed competitors can grab and run with to create new products and services to leapfrog each other in their markets. All three forces- information, technology, and competition- are multiplying times each other to create the greatest rate of change in human history. And if anything, the rate of change is going to increase in the years ahead.
Fully 80 percent of the products and services that you will be using five years from now will be brand-new or completely transformed from today. Probably 80 percent of the jobs being done in five years will be new jobs or jobs that have been completely transformed by the onrush of information, technology, and competition. And the good news is that every single change that takes place opens up more opportunities and possibilities for you to achieve your goals and make greater progress, faster than ever before.
The forces of change impact everything you do. The rate of change is accelerating week by week and month by month. The speed and variety of change is something over which you have no control, and about which you have no choice. The only decision you have to make is whether you are going to be a ''master of change'' or a ''victim of change.'' Are you going to be a creator of circumstances or a creature of circumstances? Are you going to ride the wave and stay ahead of the curve of change, or are you going to be bowled over by it and left in its wake? It will be one or the other, but the impact of change will be forced upon you, whatever you do.
If you want to learn how to cook, you study cooking. If you want to be a lawyer, you study law. If you want to be an engineer or an architect, you study engineering or architecture. And if you want to be financially successful, you study others who have become financially successful before you.You find out what they did, and you do the same things, over and over, until you get the same results.
Making money is a skill, like riding a bicycle or operating a computer. Because it is a skill, it is therefore learnable by anyone who wants to acquire wealth. If in the past you have accepted the false idea that you cannot make or keep all the money you want, it is now time for you to get rid of that idea. It is a false belief. It is time for you to decide to become financially independent.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle first articulated the foundation principle of Western philosophy in about 350 B.C. It became known as the Aristotelian Principle of Causality.Today, we call it the Law of Cause and Effect. This law says that for every effect in your life, there are specific causes. It says that everything happens for a reason. Success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident, either. What happens to you is not determined by luck or by coincidence. It is the result of unchanging law.
My journey from unemployment and poverty to success and financial independence started when I began to study the most successful people in our society. My idea was simple: I would find out what they had done to accomplish so much, and then I would do the same things. Why reinvent the wheel? What I discovered changed my life. It will change yours as well.
When I began my reading and research in the 1960s, there were seven hundred thousand millionaires in the United States, mostly self-made, having started with nothing. By 1980, according to the IRS, there were 1,800,000 families or individuals with a net worth of more than one million dollars. Today, there are more than five million millionaires, an increase of 277 percent in 22 years. And most of them are self-made as well.These are men and women who started with little or nothing, often broke or deeply in debt, and who gradually accumulated enough money to become financially independent.
Self-made millionaires come from every walk of life, with every level of education and skill, and with every difficulty, obstacle, handicap, and challenge to overcome that you could ever dream of.
Some are young and some are old. Some are new immigrants who arrived in America unable to speak English, and some are from families that have been in America for generations. Some have excellent educations from the finest universities, and some are high school dropouts. Some have superb physical health and others are in wheelchairs, hard of hearing, blind, or have other physical limitations.
The most important thing to remember is that no matter what difficulties you have, no matter what problems you feel are holding you back, someone else, and probably thousands of other people, have had far greater obstacles to overcome than you could possibly dream of, and they have gone on to become successful nonetheless. And what others have done, you can do as well.
Dr. Thomas Stanley of the University of Georgia spent more than 30 years studying self-made millionaires. He interviewed thousands of them and compiled his findings into a variety of books, research studies, and reports, including two best-selling books, The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind. His research shows that every single kind of person, from every walk of life, has been able to start from nothing and pass the magic million-dollar mark by doing certain things in certain ways, over and over again.
When I began studying self-made millionaires, I was living in a rented apartment with rented furniture. I had a used car that was not paid for and I was deeply in debt. I was between jobs and living off credit cards.
The first thing I found was that self-made millionaires did things differently from average people, and I was tired of being average. I therefore decided to stop doing what I was doing, which wasn't working, and to start doing what they were doing. My life has never been the same since this decision.
It wasn't easy to change my thinking about money and my financial future, but eventually these efforts began to pay off. Like a large ocean liner changing direction, one degree at a time,my habits began to change. Within five years, I was out of debt and making good money. In another five years, I passed the million-dollar mark. When I look back, I see that it was no miracle. All I really did was to learn what other successful people had done before me and then do the same things until I got the same results.
There are a great many myths about self-made millionaires. If you want to become a self-made millionaire yourself, you must dispel these myths from your own mind. Remember, as the humorist Josh Billings once said, ''It's not what a man knows that hurts him; it's what he knows that isn't true.''
Many people have fixed ideas or beliefs about themselves and money that are holding them back. These ideas may be completely untrue, but they will cut off your chances of success nonetheless. You must get over them. To achieve something you've never achieved before, you will have to think in ways that you have never thought before.
One myth is that you have to have a great education to become rich. Another myth is that you have to start off with a lot of money. Some people are convinced that financial success depends on getting a lucky break of some kind, like picking a hot stock in the stock market.
None of these myths are true. In fact, a survey of members of the Forbes 400, the 400 richest men and women in the United States, found that high school dropouts in the group who made it to the list were worth, on average, $300 million more than university graduates on the list.
The most successful immigrant group per capita in the United States, in terms of starting and building successful businesses, are Russians.Why is this so? It is because the Russians have come from a system where it has been so extraordinarily difficult to succeed that when they arrive in America, believing that America is the land of opportunity, they find that it is much easier to succeed than they have ever experienced.
As a result, Russians start business after business and achieve successes that the average American continually claims are no longer possible. Because they absolutely believe that it is possible for them, they make their dreams come true. Their beliefs become their realities.
The past president of General Electric Company, Jack Welch, was considered to be one of the best business executives in the world. He said that the most important single quality of leadership is what he calls the ''reality principle.'' The reality principle says that you must deal with the world as it is, not as you wish it would be.You must strive to be completely honest with yourself and your situation.You must refuse to engage in self-delusion and the hope that things will work out whether or not you do anything about them.
Especially when it comes to building wealth, you must be totally honest with yourself. You cannot afford to play games with your own mind if you truly want to be wealthy.You cannot wish and hope and pray that somehow you are going to win the lottery or strike it rich as a result of luck or some remarkable external circumstance.
Often people ask me about the role of luck in success.They are convinced that luck is a critical factor in achieving anything worthwhile. They feel that some people are just lucky and some are not. They talk about luck as if it were a matter of fate or destiny, largely inexplicable. They insist that a person gets to the top of his field largely as the result of getting lucky breaks, which they, of course, did not get.
I have studied the concept of luck for many years. My conclusion is that luck is a word that people use to explain away things that turn out much better than could have been expected. If a person achieves great financial success at a young age, people say he was ''just lucky.''
Some people use luck to describe something remarkably good that happens that is out of the ordinary. But it is not luck at all.The fact is that all so-called lucky outcomes are really the result of probabilities. There is no such thing as luck.
The Law of Probabilities says that there is a probability for everything that happens. These probabilities can often be determined with considerable accuracy. The entire insurance and underwriting industry is based on probabilities, which are expressed in actuarial tables.
There is a probability that you will become a millionaire in the course of your working lifetime. Today in America, one family in 20 has a net worth of more than one million dollars. This means that your likelihood of acquiring a million dollars is one in 20, or 5 percent.
However, this also means that your likelihood of not acquiring one million dollars, should that be your goal, is 95 percent. These are not good odds.Your job must be to improve the odds in your favor. Your aim should be to dramatically increase the probabilities of achieving financial independence by doing more and more of those things that will help you to achieve your goal. This principle applies to anything you want to accomplish.
The more different things you do that are likely to help you to achieve your goal, the more likely it is you will do the right thing at the right time. If you set clear, written goals, make detailed plans, and continually upgrade your skills to increase your income, you increase the probabilities that you will earn a good living.
If you study money and investments, save and put aside 10 percent to 20 percent of your income every month, keep tight control over your expenses, and think long-term about your financial life, you will eventually become a millionaire. It is not a matter of luck. It is just a matter of probabilities.
Imagine you are an inexperienced dart thrower, slightly inebriated, in a darkened room, standing some distance from the dartboard. Even under these conditions, if you throw enough darts in the direction of the dartboard, you would eventually hit it. And if you continued to throw darts, almost in spite of yourself you would become more accurate. As a result, by the law of probabilities, you would eventually hit a bull's-eye.
This metaphor explains why people who start off with high levels of desire and determination ultimately succeed. They just keep trying. And by the law of probabilities, they finally win. It is not luck. They create their own luck by what they do, or what they fail to do.
Now, imagine the conditions are different. Imagine that you are a skilled dart thrower, and that you practice every day to get better. In addition, you are fully rested, clear-headed, and completely prepared. The lights in the room are bright and you stand at a reasonable distance from the dartboard. Under these conditions, all of which are under your control, the time it would take you to hit a bull's-eye would be greatly reduced. And of course, when you do hit a bull's-eye, everyone would tell you how ''lucky'' you were. But you made your own luck.
Throughout your life, you must be constantly thinking about all the things you can do, in every area, to increase the probabilities that you will be successful in achieving your goals. You should leave nothing to chance. You should refuse to wish or hope, or trust to luck.You must take control of your situation.You are responsible.
You will achieve financial success only after you accept that everything that you ever become is completely up to you.You are responsible. No one is going to do it for you. Keep repeating, ''If it's to be, it's up to me!''
Fortunately, in America there are more opportunities for wealth creation and personal success than have ever existed previously in all of human history.The United States is the only country on earth that is commonly referred to overseas as ''the land of dreams.'' In 2003, it was rated as the most entrepreneurial country in the world. This means that it is easier to start and build a successful business in the United States than it is anywhere else on earth.
As information and technology continue to expand and multiply times each other, and competition continues to intensify, more and more opportunities are opening up every day for the creative minority who are willing to take advantage of them.Your job is to find these opportunities, and if you don't find them, create them for yourself.
One of the discoveries in the research on self-made millionaires is the finding that most of them start off with little or no money. Most of them start off by saving their money carefully for a long time until they have enough to start a small enterprise or business. Some of the biggest companies in America were started on a kitchen table or in a garage, like the Hewlett-Packard Company or Apple Computer. Some of the newest millionaires in America come from the field of multilevel marketing.Working from home, they paid $50 for a sample kit and went out to work. They sold something, made a profit, reinvested their profits, grew larger, and eventually achieved financial independence.
In Dr. Thomas Stanley's interviews with self-made millionaires, he discovered their common denominator of success. The most important quality that self-made millionaires used to explain their success was the habit of hard, hard work.
Self-made millionaires work much harder than the average person. They start earlier, work harder, and stay later. According to many studies and interviews, self-made millionaires work an average of 59 hours per week. Some work considerably more, especially at the beginning.
The average employed person puts in about 40 hours per week on the job, but only about 32 hours of that is officially working time. Fully 50 percent of time spent at work is wasted in idle socializing with co-workers, personal telephone calls, and personal business. Average employees start a little later, take long coffee breaks and lunch hours, and leave a little earlier. Even managers privately report that they spend fully half of the time they are at work doing things that have absolutely nothing whatever to do with the job.
Only about 5 percent of people working today work full-time on their jobs from the time they begin each day until the time they finish. These people are the ones on the fast track in their careers.They are moving upward and onward, getting paid more and being promoted faster. They are the movers and shakers in every business, and everyone knows who they are.
The saddest part of the research into employee work habits is not just that people waste a lot of time at work. It is that in the other 50 percent of the time, when people are actually working on company tasks and responsibilities, they tend to work on low-value, low-priority tasks. As a result, they contribute little of value to their companies. Low productivity leads to lower wages and fewer opportunities.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are laid off from large and small corporations, often from white-collar, midmanagement jobs.Why is this? The answer is simple. The companies have finally learned that they are paying high salaries to people who are producing very little of value. No company can survive very long under these conditions, and these companies are determined to survive. So the redundant staff has to go.
If you are serious about becoming financially independent, or even better, becoming a self-made millionaire over the course of your career, here are two facts: First, it is definitely possible. Hundreds of thousands of men and women become financially independent each year after having started from nothing.Whatever others have done, within reason, you can do as well. The very fact that someone else has achieved a particular financial goal is proof it is possible for you. The only question is, how badly do you want it?
Second, the reality principle says that if you want to be successful in any area, you have to find out what other successful people have done to succeed in that area, and then do the same things over and over until you get the same results. As long as you don't try to fool yourself and look for shortcuts, you are virtually assured of eventually achieving, and even exceeding, your goals.
Begin today to apply the ''40 Plus Formula'' to your work and your career. This formula says that you work 40 hours per week in the United States for survival. If you work only 40 hours per week - if you work only the number of hours that are required of you - then all you will ever do is survive.You will tread water financially.You will make enough to pay your bills and perhaps a little more besides, but you will never get ahead and you will never be successful.
According to the 40 Plus Formula, every hour that you put in over 40 hours on your job, or on yourself, is an investment in your future success.You can tell where you are going to be five years from now by simply looking at how many hours per week you put in on your job. Every hour over 40 that you invest in getting more results for your employer and your customers adds up and contributes to your long-term success.
If you work 45 to 50 hours per week, you give yourself an edge over your co-workers. If you work 55 to 60 hours per week, your longterm success is virtually guaranteed.You put yourself on the side of the angels. Many self-made millionaires work 70 to 80 hours per week to get established in their careers. There are no shortcuts to lasting success.
I have studied successful men and women in America for more than 25 years. I have never found a single successful person who got there working only 40 hours, or five days per week. The idea of the five-day week, which was promoted by the labor unions as a great advance in the life of the working person, has been the cause of more financial underachievement and failure than perhaps any other single myth.
The fact is that, especially at the beginning of their careers, all really successful people work much harder than the average person. They work 10 to 12 hours per day, six days per week. They work at this rate for many months and years, before they reach the point where they can slow down. The average self-made millionaire has taken 22 years to get from being broke to having a net worth of more than one million dollars. It is not easy and it is not quick. But it is definitely possible if you want it badly enough.
A key part of success at work is to use your time well, to focus on results, and avoid the time-wasting social activities of the poor performers. In correlation with this is the need for you to ''work all the time you work.''
This is a remarkable idea for many people. Often employees think about work as if it was an extension of school.When they were growing up, they came to think of school as a place where you go to socialize. You take the required courses, but the most important part is spending time with your friends between classes. School becomes a form of play.
Many people think, when they take their first job, that work is also a place where you go to spend time with your friends. This is why fully half of the working day is spent socializing, and in idle conversation on the telephone with friends and family.Work is seen as a giant sandbox where you continue to play as you did in school. You do a little work when the boss is watching, get a paycheck, and then go home.
But this is not for you. If you are determined to succeed greatly and be paid the very most, you must work all the time you work. When you go to work, you must put your head down and work wholeheartedly.
Many people believe the myth that you have to spend a lot of time getting along with your co-workers. They say, ''Work is supposed to be fun!'' And this is true up to a point.
Of course, it is important for you to be positive and agreeable person to work with. But you can accomplish this in a few minutes of pleasant interaction each day. You don't have to spend endless hours chatting about sports, television shows, and family activities. Your job is to work all the time you work.
When you work, you work.You do not pick up your dry cleaning or drop off your laundry during working hours.You do not socialize with your friends or chat on the phone with your family.You do not take long coffee breaks and extended lunch hours.You work all the time you work.You commit yourself to getting the very most done that you possibly can in the time that you have available to you.
Your goal is to earn the reputation around your company as being the hardest-working person in the organization. If someone wants to shoot the breeze with you, explain to him or her that you would be pleased to chat after work, but right now you have to get back to work. Keep repeating to yourself, ''Back to work, back to work, back to work!''
People who achieve great financial success, either in their own businesses or working for other organizations, are people who very early develop a reputation for hard, hard work. There is a saying in business: ''Everyone knows everything.'' There are no secrets. Everyone knows who works the hardest in every organization, and who doesn't.
There is no quality that will bring you to the attention of people who can help you faster than your developing a reputation for being one of the hardest-working people in your company.
Napoleon Hill, the author of Think and Grow Rich, once told the story of a young man who started at the bottom of a large organization and eventually moved up into the top ranks of executives, passing all the people who had started with him at the same level. His strategy was simple. He noticed that his boss came in a little earlier than the rest of the staff, stayed to finish up his work, and left a little later than the others. This young man therefore resolved to arrive 15 minutes before his boss and to leave 15 minutes after his boss left.
He put his resolution into action the next day. This is another hallmark of high achievers:They don't procrastinate when they have a good idea; they take action immediately. The young man began coming in 15 minutes before his boss and going straight to work, continuing all day. When his boss left he would still be at his desk, working away.
The boss said nothing for several weeks. Finally, after work one evening, his boss came over to his desk and asked him why he always seemed to be there, even though all his co-workers had left. The young man said it was because he was really determined to be successful in this company, and he knew he couldn't be successful unless he was willing to work harder than anyone else.
The boss smiled and nodded and went on his way. Soon after that, the boss asked him to do something that was not part of his job description. He did it quickly and well, delivered it to his boss, and went back to his desk. Soon after, he was given another assignment, which he also completed quickly. Within a year, the young man had been given several additional responsibilities, each one of which he accepted and fulfilled immediately.
In his second year, he was promoted to a higher position. He studied, upgraded his skills, and continued to work hard. Within a couple of years he had surpassed all of his rivals. He had earned the respect and esteem of the other managers.They soon promoted him so that he was one of them, rather than one of the staff. His career took off. Eventually he became a vice president of the company.
This is a simple strategy that works for anyone who is willing to do more than is expected of him or her. It works for almost anyone, anywhere, over and over again, year after year.
If your goal is to become wealthy, you have to know how wealth is created. The answer is contained in two words: ''add value.'' All wealth comes from adding value in some way. All wealth comes from serving and satisfying your customers better than they could be served and satisfied by someone else. Wealth is the result of adding value to them in a way that no one else can match.
In your job, you should be looking for ways every day and every week to add value and to become more valuable than you were before. Throughout your career, your main focus must be to constantly seek out ways that you can add value to your boss, to your co-workers, to your customers, to your suppliers, and to everyone else and anyone upon whom you rely for your success. This should become your motto: ''Add value, add value, add value!''
One of the major revolutions in thought that has taken place in the world of work in the past few years is the idea that you must justify your position anew every day.
It used to be that a person would work hard for a few years until he had achieved a certain level in his job. He could then coast along at that level for many years, if not for the rest of his career. His attitude was, ''Well, I've paid my dues. I earned my position. I did a great job. Now I am entitled to this job indefinitely.''
But this is no longer good enough. Today, everybody wants to know, ''What have you accomplished lately?'' In the fast-moving, highly competitive business world of today, your boss wants to know what you have done to add value recently.You have already been paid for what you did last year, last month, and even last week. Now you must earn and justify your paycheck anew. There is a race on and you are in it, whether you know it or not.
There are two major sources of value in the world of work today. The first is time and the second is knowledge. Today, time is the currency of modern business. Everyone must be focused on reducing the amount of time that it takes to get the same results. Customers will pay dearly for anyone who can reduce the time needed to get them the products and services they want. People will pay more for someone who can satisfy their needs faster than someone else. This is why most of the major improvements in modern management are those that reduce the amount of time that it takes to get the job done.
The most important measure of time is speed. The most important quality that you can develop with regard to time is a ''sense of urgency.'' This is the habit of moving fast when opportunity presents itself to you. Develop a bias for action. Fast tempo is essential to success. All successful people not only work hard, hard, hard, but they work fast, fast, fast!
Procrastination is not only the thief of time; it is the thief of life.To outperform your competition, both inside and outside your organization, you must develop the habit of moving quickly when something needs to be done. You must develop a reputation for speed and dependability. Study after study shows that those individuals with the best reputations for speed and dependability are the most valued in any organization. They are very quickly promoted onto the fast track in their careers.
The wonderful advantage of developing the habit of moving fast is that the faster you move, the better you get. This is because the faster you move, the more experience you get. The faster you move, the more you learn and the more competent you become.The faster you move, the more energy and enthusiasm you have. People who move fast as a way of life soon develop a totally different temperament and personality than people who move slowly or who take a casual attitude toward their work.
Whenever possible, do your work in ''real time,'' as soon as it comes up. Do it now. It is amazing how much time you can waste by picking up a task, looking at it or starting it, and then putting it down and coming back to it again and again. As a general rule, small tasks should be done immediately, as soon as they appear.This habit of taking action quickly will enable you to get through an enormous amount of work in a day. It will earn you a reputation for being the kind of person to give jobs to when someone needs them done quickly.
Fully 95 percent of everything you do throughout your day is based on habit. Successful people are those who have developed the habits of success. Successful people form good habits and ensure that those habits govern their behaviors. Unsuccessful people allow bad habits to form, and these bad habits then lead to frustration and failure.
My friend Ed Foreman says, ''Good habits are hard to form but easy to live with. Bad habits, on the other hand, are easy to form but hard to live with.''
A habit is defined as ''a conditioned response to stimuli.'' It is an automatic way of responding or reacting in a particular situation. You develop a habit by repeating a specific act or way of thinking and reacting. Once it becomes a habit, it becomes easier to do it that way than to do it some other way.What kind of habits do you have?
Successful people are simply those who developed successful habits. They have trained themselves, like athletes, to do certain things in a certain way, over and over again, until they do them automatically, without even thinking about them.You may have heard the old saying:
Sow a thought and you reap an action; Sow an action and you reap a habit; Sow a habit and you reap a character; Sow a character and you reap a destiny.
One of the habits of success is that of early rising. Successful people get up a little bit earlier, read and prepare, plan and organize their day on paper in advance, and get going before the average person has even started.Thomas Jefferson said, ''The sun has never caught me in my bed.''
A woman in one of my seminars some years ago told me that she discovered the magic of early rising. She had found that by going to bed early she could get up at four o'clock in the morning. She could then do the equivalent of a full day's work by seven or eight o'clock, before the average person even got started. In no time at all, she was producing and earning double the amount of her coworkers. She was continually promoted and paid more money because she was getting far more done than anyone else.
Successful people make a habit of getting up early, usually by 6:00 or 6:30 in the morning, sometimes earlier, and then getting going immediately. This gives them a great jump on the day.
The average person, on the other hand, takes a full hour to get up and get going in the morning. Then they drag themselves off to work, thinking about lunchtime, and what they are going to do in the evening.
When your alarm clock goes off, get up immediately and get going right away. Start moving. Develop the habit of rising early and starting right to work on your most important task. This habit can do as much to assure your success as any other habit you develop.
When Vince Lombardi took over the Green Bay Packers, the players had developed the habit of not showing up until the last moment for games or buses. Often they were late, and everyone had to wait. So Lombardi introduced ''Lombardi time.'' This was defined as 15 minutes earlier than the scheduled time. Eventually everyone began arriving early, and the problem was solved.
You should go onto Lombardi time as well. Make a habit of punctuality by resolving to be on time, and then practicing it over and over until is natural and easy. Less than 2 percent of people are punctual, and everybody notices it, one way or the other. Make it a game to be on time - or better yet, early - for every appointment.
Get into work before anyone else gets there, and when you do arrive, begin working immediately. Don't waste time reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, or socializing with co-workers. Develop a reputation for being the kind of person who is always working, and always working on high-priority tasks.
Work all the time you work. Discipline yourself to keep yourself focused on the most valuable use of your time. Don't allow other people to put you ''off your game.''When you have coffee breaks or lunches, have them when they best suit you, not when they best suit the clock.
Here is a powerful three-step formula you can use to double your productivity and perhaps even double your income over the next 12 months. It is simple and powerful, and it works for anyone who uses it.
First, make a decision to come into work an hour earlier. This does not take very much effort, and it allows you to beat the traffic. Have your work planned out for the day so that when you get into work you can then put your head down and go full blast.You will be amazed at how much you can get done before anyone else comes in. Research proves that you can do three hours of office work in one hour of uninterrupted time.
Second, work through lunch, using the hour when your coworkers are all off together eating to get ahead of your work. Resist the tendency to take an hour off at ''lunchtime'' or to go for lunch with whoever is standing there.
Third, work one hour later, after everyone has left. This third uninterrupted hour will enable you to wrap up your work from the day and plan the next day in detail. Also, by working later, you will miss the rush hour traffic.
By starting one hour early, working through the usual lunch hour, and staying one hour later, you will double your productive working time each day.When you combine this with working all the time you work and focusing on high-value tasks, you will more than double the amount of work you get done.You will quickly become one of the most valuable people in your organization.
If you are in sales, schedule your first appointment as early as possible. Many of the most important people you could want to see get into the office at 7:00 and 7:30 in the morning. Arrange to meet them at that time.
A salesman friend of mine, who is at the top of his field, found that the key to getting appointments with the key decision makers was to call their offices at 7:00 or 7:30 in the morning or 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening. He discovered that at these times all the staff either weren't in yet or had gone home. The only people working were the key people. They would answer the phone personally and he would get an opportunity to talk to them and arrange to see them later.
Develop the habit of moving fast. Successful people in every field have a sense of urgency. Only a small percentage of the population moves quickly when opportunity or responsibility presents itself. You must be a member of this small percentage.
When I was younger, I used to think that when my opportunity came along I would take advantage of it at that time. I soon learned that your opportunity never does just come along.
Russell Conwell made this point in his famous story, Acres of Diamonds (Berkley, 1986). In summary, it says that in most cases your greatest opportunities lie under your own feet. They are right where you are. They lie within your current talents, skills, ability, and experience. They lie within your own business or industry. They lie within your own background or career.Your acres of diamonds are very close at hand, and that is where you should begin your search.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, ''Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are.'' This is the key to success. ''Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are.''
Focus on the present moment and on your current situation. Don't wait for things to be ''just right.'' It is you who will make things just right. By throwing your whole heart into what you are doing every minute, you will open up doors of opportunity that are not now visible to you.
Look around you at this very moment and ask yourself, ''What could I do to add value to the most important people in my work life?''What could you do to make things faster, easier, or better for the people who are depending on you? Be proactive rather than reactive. Be the kind of person who reaches out and grabs opportunities, and if you don't have any opportunities, create them personally through your own efforts.
A secretary in Boca Raton, Florida, told me an interesting story at one of my seminars. She had listened to one of my audio programs on personal achievement. As a result, she had set a goal to increase her income by 50 percent over the coming year from her current income of $1,500 per month. She told me that she didn't really think it was possible to earn that much more because she was part of a large secretarial pool where salaries were fixed. Everyone made almost exactly the same.
Nonetheless, she decided to look for ways to add value to her boss. She noticed that he spent a lot of time replying to routine correspondence. One day, she took all of his regular mail and wrote replies to them. She then took the finished letters to him to edit and sign. He was delighted with her work and encouraged her to do more of it. Soon, she was handling 90 percent of his routine correspondence.
She then began to take additional courses to upgrade her skills in word processing, page making, and report preparation. Bit by bit, she began to take his smaller tasks and handle them herself. Each time she took over a smaller task, she freed her boss to work on more important tasks. And he noticed.
After about three months her boss called her in and closed the door. He said that he really appreciated the work that she was doing for him, and he wanted to increase her pay. He asked her not to tell anyone else so that it didn't create any waves around the office. He then raised her salary from $1,500 to $1,750 per month.
She thanked him, and continued looking for ways to help him in his job. Three months later, he increased her pay again, and three months later, he increased her salary once more. By the end of the year, she was earning $2,250 per month, a 50 percent increase, while the other secretaries around her were still earning an average of $1,500.
She said it was absolutely amazing what happened when she began to focus all of her energies on adding value to her boss and to her company. And this same strategy can work for you.
Every job is an opportunity for you to solve problems and to satisfy the needs of other people. Since the problems and needs that people have are unlimited, your opportunities to create value are unlimited as well.
Every fortune begins with an idea to serve people better in some way. Almost all entrepreneurs who start and build successful companies have worked for other organizations where they continually looked for ways to increase their value to the company.
The primary sources of value, the keys to wealth building, are time and knowledge.Your job is to continually increase your knowledge so that the value of what you do becomes greater and greater. Over 400 years ago Francis Bacon said that knowledge is power. But this is only partially true. Only when knowledge is applied to some good purpose is it power.Your job is to gather the knowledge that you need so that you can do your job fast and well.
There is a saying in Texas that goes, ''It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.''
What is most important is not the hours you put in, but the value of the work you put into those hours.Your success is determined by your ability to contribute value to your current job, either as an employee or as an employer, as a company worker or a company owner, that determines your income and your financial future.
In its simplest terms, successful people are more productive than unsuccessful people. Successful people have better habits. They dream bigger dreams.They work from written goals.They do what they love to do, and they concentrate on getting better and better at it. They use their natural abilities to the fullest. They are continually generating ideas to solve problems and to achieve company goals.They focus on using every minute of their time to get maximum results.
Above all, they are constantly looking around them for opportunities to add value to everything they do. They have a sense of urgency and a bias for action.They work all the time they work.They develop and maintain a sense of forward momentum. As a result, they soon become unstoppable.
ACTION EXERCISES
- Identify the most valuable things you do at work. How could you organize your time so that you do more of them?
- Resolve today to develop the habit of punctuality. Go on Lombardi time, and start arriving 15 minutes early for appointments.
- Organize your day so that you come in and get started one hour earlier than your co-workers.Work through lunchtime, and stay one hour later.
- Work all the time you work. Don't waste a minute. If someone tries to distract you, say you have to get back to work, and then do it.
- Look under your own feet for your personal acres of diamonds, opportunities to add more value right where you are. What could they be?
- Resolve today to become financially independent. Become a student of money, wealth accumulation, and wealth creation. Becoming rich is a skill that you can learn.
- Begin today to implement the 40 Plus Formula in your daily work life.Work on your job, or work on yourself to get better at what you do, 50 to 60 hours each week. Put yourself on the side of the angels.
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