Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement

CHANGE YOUR LIFE

How to Unlock Your Full Potential

for Success and Achievement

B R I A N T R AC Y

JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.

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CHANGE YOUR THINKING,

CHANGE YOUR LIFE

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CHANGE YOUR THINKING,

CHANGE YOUR LIFE

How to Unlock Your Full Potential

for Success and Achievement

B R I A N T R AC Y

JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.

ccc_tracy_fm_i-xviii.qxd 7/7/03 3:22 PM Page iv Copyright © 2003 by Brian Tracy. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web a
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Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, e-mail: [email protected].

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. The publisher is not engaged in rendering professional sevices, and you should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Tracy, Brian.

Change your thinking, change your life : how to unlock your full potential for success and achievement / Brian Tracy.

p.

cm.

ISBN 0-471-44858-3 (alk. paper)

1. Success—Psychological aspects.

I. Title.

BF637.S8T634

2003

158.1—dc21

2003006625

Printed in the United States of America.

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To my wife Barbara,

from whom I have learned so much

about the importance of love and family.

You are my mainstay

and my greatest inspiration.

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Foreword

If you are ready to leverage yourself to greatness and achieve giant results, you have the right road map in your hands.You have before you the DNA of your future. All you need to create a wonderful future for yourself is to read this book, decide how you are going to apply it to your own life, write out a plan, and then go forth with enthusiasm and make it happen.

I have a confession to make. I am one of Brian’s raving fans. I have studied him, his brilliant work, and the extraordinary results he has achieved. I am also one of his close colleagues and friends.

We have worked together on many platforms, and met and talked with each other on numerous occasions.

Brian is one of the finest thinkers and writers on inner development and personal success in the world. I know; I have sold over 82

million books aimed at helping people get the most out of themselves.

Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
shows you how to discover your extraordinary inner resources and tap your incredible powers.You will learn how to attract into your life all the people and resources you need to achieve any goal you can set for yourself.

You will absolutely amaze yourself as you start to achieve new and better results by employing these concepts and ideas in everything you do. These are the same concepts used by all big-time winners, self-made millionaires, and leaders in every field.

In this book, you will learn a step-by-step process to great success that you will eventually implement, easily and effortlessly. This strategy for success is so logical, so inviting, and ultimately so fulfilling and omni-beneficial that it is virtually a breakthrough in personal performance.

As long as you are going to think anyway, why not think great thoughts and get great results?

Brian is a shining light in the speaking and writing world. He has done incredible thinking and achieved amazing results, for
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FOREWORD

➤

himself and many hundreds of thousands of other people. Brian’s thinking in this book will inspire you to do the same or more.

Get ready for one of the great adventures and explorations into the last great frontier, and the first—your mind! You are about to have a wonderful experience.

MARK VICTOR HANSEN

Author,
Chicken Soup for the Soul

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Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

xiii

Chapter 1

Change Your Thinking

1

Chapter 2

Change Your Life

18

Chapter 3

Dream Big Dreams

40

Chapter 4

Decide to Become Rich

52

Chapter 5

Take Charge of Your Life

77

Chapter 6

Commit to Excellence

90

Chapter 7

Put People First

118

Chapter 8

Think Like a Genius

136

Chapter 9

Unleash Your Mental Powers

154

Chapter 10
Supercharge Your Thinking 179

Chapter 11
Create Your Own Future 201

Chapter 12
Live A Great Life

222

Summary and Conclusions

249

ix

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CONTENTS

➤

Bibliography

256

Index

260

Advanced Coaching and Mentoring Program
268

About the Author

269

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Acknowledgments

The writing of this book has taken many years of work, reading, teaching, and experience. Many people have contributed to my thinking and have been invisible guides as these chapters came together. I would like to first thank my friend Mark Victor Hansen, who introduced me many years ago to Emmet Fox, perhaps the finest spiritual thinker of the twentieth century. Ernest Holmes, founder of Science of Mind, opened my eyes and heart to the incredible universe of potential contained within each person when they
changed their
thinking and changed their lives
. Great spiritual teachers such as Charles Fillmore, Neville, Eric Butterworth, Wayne Dyer, and Roberto Assagioli have had a profound influence on my thinking.

I would also like to thank those great practical thinkers on success who have had such a wonderful influence on me—and on the world—such as Napoleon Hill, Maxwell Maltz, Claude Bristol, David Schwarz, W. Clement Stone, Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, Dennis Waitley, and Charlie Jones.

Business thinkers such as Peter Drucker, Andrew Grove, Ken Blanchard, Warren Bennis, Tom Peters, Nido Qubein, and Marshall Goldsmith have greatly enriched me with their ideas and insights.

I would like to thank my editor, Matthew Holt of John Wiley & Sons, for his unflinching support of this book, and his constant encouragement over the many months that it has taken to write and edit.

Not least, I thank my wonderful wife Barbara and my fabulous children—Christina, Michael, David, and Catherine—for their support and patience during the long hours away from them to finish this book.

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Introduction

There is nothing on earth that you cannot have once you have
mentally accepted the fact that you can have it.

—Robert Collier

■
THE TRUTH ABOUT YOU

You are a thoroughly good person.You deserve a wonderful life, full of success, happiness, joy, and excitement. You are entitled to have happy relationships, excellent health, meaningful work, and financial independence. These are your birthright. This is what your life is meant to include.

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.

■
GET REAL!

How did you react to the preceding three paragraphs? You probably had two responses. First, you liked what they said, and your fondest wish was for them to be true for you. But your second response was probably one of skepticism and disbelief. Even though you deeply
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desire to live a wonderfully healthy, happy, prosperous life, when you read those words, your doubts and fears arose immediately to remind you of reasons why these dreams and goals may not be possible for you. Well, join the crowd!

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.

■
THE GREAT PRINCIPLE

Perhaps the most important mental and spiritual principle ever discovered is that
you become what you think about most of the time.
Your outer world is very much a mirror image of your inner world. What is going on
outside
of you is a reflection of what is going in
inside
of you. You can tell the inner condition of a person by looking at the outer conditions of his or her life. And it cannot be otherwise.

■
THOUGHTS ARE THINGS

Your mind is extraordinarily powerful. Your thoughts control and determine almost everything that happens to you. They can raise or lower your heart rate, improve or interfere with your digestion, change the chemical composition of your blood, and help you to sleep or keep you awake at night.

Your thoughts can make you happy or sad, sometimes in an instant. They can make you alert and aware, or distracted and de-ccc_tracy_fm_i-xviii.qxd 7/7/03 3:23 PM Page xv
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pressed. 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.

■
THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, AND DESIRES

You are a complex bundle of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, desires, images, fears, hopes, doubts, opinions, and ambitions, each of them constantly changing, sometimes from second to second. Each of these elements of your personality affects the others, sometimes in unpredictable ways. Your entire life is the result of the intertwining and interconnecting of these factors.