Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (24 page)

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GIVE YOURSELF THE EDGE

According to the American Booksellers Association, fully 70 percent of American adults have not visited a bookstore in the last five years. The average American reads less than one book per year; 58

percent of adult Americans never read another book from cover to cover after they leave high school.

Meanwhile, in the information age, if you are not reading continuously you are in serious danger of being made obsolete by the passage of time. However, if you read one hour per day, one book per week, you will be getting the equivalent of a Ph.D. in your field every year.You will become one of the smartest, best-informed, and most productive people in your business.

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BEATING THE DRUM

Some years ago, I had a good friend who read very little. He was not convinced that reading would make any difference to his life or income. He had gotten out of the habit of reading after he left school. He argued with me that reading wasn’t that important.

Meanwhile, he struggled to make a living. He was continually frustrated. He was continually losing business to his better-informed competitors.

For almost three years, I kept at him, encouraging him to begin daily reading. Finally, he gave in and began to read each morning, just for a few minutes. He was amazed at how helpful the reading was, and how much more knowledgeable he was when he spoke to his clients.

He soon began reading, as I had recommended, an hour per day, one book per week. Within a year, his income had doubled. After two years, his income doubled again. Today he is one of the highest-paid people in his field. And he is proud to tell me every time I see him that he very seldom meets a client who is as well in-ccc_tracy_8_136-153.qxd 6/23/03 2:48 PM Page 151

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formed as he is about their business. And the more he reads, the more competent and confident he becomes.

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TO EARN MORE, YOU

MUST LEARN MORE

The rule is that
to earn more, you must learn more
. You cannot move ahead in your field further or faster than you are doing today except to the degree to which you learn and practice something new.

The second part of your personal and professional development program consists of audio learning programs. If you travel in your work, you spend between five hundred and one thousand hours per year in your car. If you turn this driving time into learning time, you will get the equivalent of three to six months of 40-hour weeks of additional education, just driving from place to place. I have met countless people who have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled their incomes by the simple act of listening to audio learning programs as they drive around.

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TAKE ALL THE TRAINING

YOU CAN GET

The third key to continuous learning, and to unlocking your mental potential, is for you to take all the training you can get. If a training program is offered in the public arena, it has already been proven to be highly effective. The person presenting the program has probably acquired many years of experience, and may have spent hundreds of hours assembling the program that you can take in a half or a full day.You can sometimes save yourself weeks, months, and even years of hard work by attending a seminar given by an expert who explains to you state-of-the-art ways to get your job done faster and easier.

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When you combine these three: regular reading, regular listening to audio learning programs, and regular and continuous training, you have a dynamite combination that can propel you forward at a greater speed than you ever could without them.

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KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

As mentioned earlier, Francis Bacon said that
knowledge is power
.

This is only partially true. In fact, only knowledge that can be applied to practical purposes for someone else is actually power. The libraries are full of knowledge that does no one any good.

To change your thinking in a positive and constructive way, you must continually feed your mind with new ideas.You must stay current with your field.You must regularly associate with other leading people in your area of specialization. You must be continually looking for ways to do your work better, faster, cheaper, and easier. You must be continually seeking ways to serve your clients and customers better.You must stay on the cutting edge of your field so that you are, and you continue to be, one of the most valuable people in your business.

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NO-LIMIT THINKING

In the information age, knowledge is everything. And the amount of knowledge that you can gather and apply to your life is limited only by your own personal ambition. There are really no limits on what you can accomplish except for the limits you set for yourself.

The more you learn, the more you earn. The more knowledgeable you become about your field, the more courage and confidence you will have to implement your skills in your work. The more courage and confidence you develop, the higher will be your self-esteem and your sense of personal power. You will become virtually
unstoppable
in everything you do.

ACTION EXERCISES

1.
Begin today to create your own personal library of books in your field. Read 30 to 60 minutes each day, underline, and take careful notes.

2.
Examine your recent unexpected successes and failures in your business. Could they be indicative of a trend that you can take advantage of?

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3.
Approach each problem in your life systematically. Imagine that the solution is exactly the
opposite
of what you are currently doing.

4.
Continually expose your mind to new ideas and viewpoints. Ask lots of questions. Consider the possibility that you could be wrong.

5.
Listen to educational audio programs in your car. Turn your car into a mobile classroom, a “university on wheels.”
6.
Select an area where expertise can help you to move ahead in your career. Develop a plan to study and learn everything you possibly can in that area. Be the best at what you do.

7.
Associate only with positive, optimistic, creative, happy people who are going somewhere with their lives. Get around winners if you want to be one.

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C h 9

a p t e r

Unleash Your

Mental Powers

The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean
unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of
possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward
some great good.

—Brian Tracy

Every change in your life will come about as the result of your mind colliding with a new idea. Ideas are the keys to the future. Ideas contain the answers to all of your problems and the ways to achieve all of your goals. Your need is to become an idea generator, so that you are continually coming up with new and better ideas to deal with the continuous changes and opportunities taking place around you.

Fortunately, you are naturally creative. It is an innate quality.

You are born with it. But creativity is subject to the Law of Use, which says,
“If you don’t use it, you lose it,”
at least temporarily. The good news is that you can reignite your creativity by practicing the specific methods and techniques discussed in this book.

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PROJECT FORWARD

AND THINK BACKWARD

Changing your thinking requires that you expand your ideas and imagination about the person you could be, the things you could
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do, and the things that you could have. Every person who accomplishes anything worthwhile in life begins with a big dream or a vision of what is possible for him or her. They rise above their current surroundings, their existing limitations and problems, and instead they imagine themselves sometime in the future living the kind of life they would like to live.You need to practice this way of thinking as well.

Earlier, we talked about your
ideal future vision
. You create this by projecting forward five years and imagining that all of your dreams have come true. What would your life look like if it were ideal in every way? Where would you be? Who would be there with you? What would you be doing? How much would you be earning?

And so on.

You then return to the present day and your current situation.

You think of specific steps you could take to capitalize on your opportunities and to overcome your limitations and obstacles. This is the primary use of creative thinking. It is to solve your problems and trigger mental breakthroughs that you can use to move faster toward achieving the goals that are most important to you.

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THREE MINDS IN ONE

You think and operate your life with three different minds. The first is your
conscious
mind. You use your conscious mind to take in new information, compare it with your current knowledge, analyze it in terms of its value or relevance to you, and then decide to act or not to act. This is the mind with which you direct your life. This is often referred to as the
objective
mind.

The second mind you use is your
subconscious
. Your subconscious mind is a huge data bank that records every thought, idea, emotion, or experience that you ever have throughout your life. This is called the
subjective
mind. Its role is to keep all of your words and actions consistent with your self-concept and with your current attitudes, beliefs, fears, and prejudices. Your subconscious mind does not reason; it only obeys your commands.

Your subconscious mind is also responsible for the operation of all of your bodily functions. It controls your autonomic nervous system and your heart rate, breathing, digestion, basic memory, and so ccc_tracy_9_154-178.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 156

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on. It is like a huge computer, so powerful and precise that it can process a hundred million commands per second. It maintains a precise balance of hundreds of chemicals in each one of your billions of cells, 24 hours a day.

Your third mind is your
superconscious
mind. This mind is your direct connection with infinite intelligence. It contains all knowledge, and can bring you all the ideas and answers you will ever need to achieve any goal that you can set for yourself. This mind is the source of all inspiration, imagination, intuition, and hunches. It operates 24 hours a day, and will bring you exactly the right answer to your problem or question, exactly when you are ready for it. It is stimulated by clear goals, vivid mental pictures, and clear, positive commands in the form of affirmations.

When you use all three minds in harmony, with each mind performing the functions for which it was designed, you will accomplish more of your goals, faster than you have ever imagined. The proper utilization of your three minds is central to your changing your thinking and changing your life.

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THREE TRIGGERS TO CREATIVITY

There are three main factors that trigger creativity.You can use each of them regularly, in everything you do. They are: first,
intensely desired goals
; second,
pressing problems
; and third,
focused questions
.

When you use them all, you begin to generate ideas at a rate that will amaze you.

By using these three methods of mental stimulation—goals, problems and questions—you activate all three of your minds simultaneously and you begin to function at much higher levels than the average person.

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INTENSELY DESIRED GOALS

The first factor is a clearly defined,
intensely desired goal
. You must know exactly what you want, set a deadline, make it measurable, and develop a plan for its achievement that you work on every day. There is a direct relationship between how clear you are about your desired goal and how many ideas you will come up with to achieve it.

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One of the most powerful ways to harmonize the activities of your three minds, and to activate your creative powers, is for you to rewrite your goals in the present tense each morning.

Get a spiral notebook. Each morning, after your daily reading, take a few minutes and rewrite your major goals in the present tense, exactly as if they already existed. Take a few seconds after rewriting each goal to visualize it as though it were already accomplished. See each goal in your mind as if it already existed. Then, smile, relax, and let go.

This method of rewriting your goals each morning, visualizing them as if they had already been achieved, and them letting them go with complete confidence is a vital part of creating the mental equivalent of the things you want.

By using this method, you will help your goals to materialize exactly when you are ready for them. By writing and rewriting your goals, you burn them deeper and deeper into your subconscious mind. At a certain point, you activate your superconscious mind. At that point, you begin attracting into your life people and circumstances that can help you to achieve them.

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GET THE FEELING

Emotion is the key. The more intensely you desire a goal, the more rapidly it materializes. Combining your idea of your goal with the intense emotion of desire or excitement is like stepping on the ac-celerator of your mental potential.Your mind will speed up and generate ideas for goal accomplishment. The more positive, excited, and enthusiastic you are about achieving anything, the more rapidly your mind goes to work to bring it into your life.