Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (27 page)

■
FIRST THING IN THE MORNING

If you generate 20 ways to achieve your major goal in the morning before you start out, you will find yourself thinking creatively all day long.Your mind will be sharper and more alert.You will see solutions to problems and obstacles as fast as they come up. You will ccc_tracy_9_154-178.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 174

174

➤

CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE

activate the law of attraction and begin drawing into your life people and resources that can help you to achieve your goal.

If you practice this exercise each day for five days, you will generate 100 new ideas to help you achieve your goals in the next week.

If you then select one idea per day, you will be initiating five ideas per week. That is more ideas than the average person generates in a month, or even a year.

If you generate 20 ideas per day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year, you will come up with an astounding total of 5,000 new ideas to improve your life and work each year. If you implement only a single new idea each day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year, you will be using 250 ideas per year to help you solve your problems and achieve your goals.

The average person lives with very little creativity. He is usually a victim of
psychosclerosis
and
homeostasis
, content to keep on doing the same things in the future that he has done in the past, whether doing so is working or not. When you practice mindstorming on a regular basis, you will soon have so many good ideas that there will not be enough hours in the day to carry them out.

More people have become rich using this 20-idea method than any other method of creative thinking ever discovered. All that is necessary for this method to work is for you to practice it regularly in your own life. All that is required is your willingness to use mindstorming regularly, and then to try out the ideas you generate until this process becomes a normal part of your life.

■
BRAINSTORMING WITH OTHERS

Mindstorming is an exercise that you can do by yourself. Brainstorming is something that you do with others. Brainstorming is a form of mindstorming done in a group, but it has slightly different rules.

Brainstorming was originally developed by advertising executive Alex Osborn, and was first described in his 1946 book,
Applied
Imagination
. It has since proliferated and is used all over the world, in every type of organization and situation, to generate ideas for a variety of reasons. It is a very simple process to learn and use.

ccc_tracy_9_154-178.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 175

Unleash Your Mental Powers

➤
175

➤
Six Steps to Brainstorming

Step One:
Assemble the group. The ideal number of people in a brainstorming session is four to seven. Below four, you don’t have enough minds to generate a large enough variety of different solutions to the problem. With more than seven people, the group becomes too large for participants to get sufficient opportunity to contribute.

Step Two:
Do not permit criticism or ridicule. The essential part of brainstorming is that no evaluation of the ideas takes place during the brainstorming session. The entire focus of the brainstorming session is on generating the greatest
quantity
of ideas possible within a short period of time.

Nothing kills a brainstorming session faster than the tendency of people to criticize the ideas as they are generated. As soon as one person’s ideas are criticized, the brainstorming session comes to a halt. No one wants to be criticized. No one wants to be humiliated or ridiculed in front of others. That is why you must concentrate on the quantity of ideas and leave the evaluation of them to another time, or to other people.

Step Three:
Set a specific time limit. The ideal length for brainstorming sessions ranges from 15 to 45 minutes. One of the jobs of managers and team leaders is to sit their staff down on a regular basis to brainstorm certain problems. Call everyone together and announce that you are going to brainstorm a particular goal or situation for 15 minutes and then everyone is going to go back to work.You’ll be amazed at the results.

Step Four:
Select a leader for the group. The leader’s job is to encourage everyone to contribute as much as possible. One of the best ways to lead a brainstorming session is to go around the table and encourage each person to contribute an idea—almost like playing cards, where you encourage each person to bet or pass. Once you have gone around the table a couple of times, people will start generating ideas at a rapid rate.

ccc_tracy_9_154-178.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 176

176

➤

CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Step Five:
Select someone to keep track of the ideas. A key function in a brainstorming session is that of the
recorder
. This is the person who writes down the ideas as they are generated.

Step Six:
Be punctual. Start and stop the brainstorming session exactly on time, no matter how well it is going. At the end, you gather up all the ideas and take them away to be evaluated at a later time.

■
IDEAS ON INDEX CARDS

In another type of brainstorming session involving dozens of people, we break the group up and distribute index cards to each subgroup. Each of the smaller groups is assigned to generate ideas in answer to the question or problem. Afterward, the index cards containing the ideas are collected. They are then shuffled and handed out to the subgroups again, completely mixed up.

In the second phase of the exercise, each subgroup is asked to take the ideas on the cards that they have received and evaluate them, rating them in terms of their value prior to reporting back to the overall group.

In a session with 20 or 30 people, two or three hundred ideas will be generated in 30 minutes. When those ideas are gathered, distributed, evaluated, and reported back to the overall group, the results are absolutely astonishing! I have worked with companies that have come up with so many solutions to problems that had been stumping them that they did not have enough hours in the day, or enough people, to take action on more than a small number of them.

■
THE HOME TEAM

If you are in a good relationship with another person, the two of you can form an excellent ongoing brainstorming team. A husband and wife, or any two people, together can generate a continuous flow of ideas, as long as they do not attempt to evaluate or criticize the ideas at the same time they are generating them.

ccc_tracy_9_154-178.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 177

Unleash Your Mental Powers

➤
177

■
IDEAS ENERGIZE YOU

There are two parts to unlocking your mental potential and har-nessing the genius that lies within you. The first is to accept that you are extremely intelligent in your own way. The second is for you to use the methods and techniques described in this chapter until they become second nature to you. Like a muscle that grows and becomes stronger with use, your mental muscles grow and become stronger every time you practice one of these exercises.

There is something exciting and uplifting about generating ideas that help you to achieve your goals. The more ideas you generate, the more energy and enthusiasm you have. The more energy and enthusiasm you have, the more confident you become that you can achieve any goal you can set for yourself. The more ideas you generate, the faster you change your thinking about what is really possible for you. Eventually, you will reach the point in your own thinking where you will be
unstoppable
.

ACTION EXERCISES

1.
Define your most important goal or problem in the form of a question and write it at the top of a page. Then, generate at least 20 answers to your question.

2.
Make a list of your most pressing problems or obstacles to achieving your goals. What is the simplest and most direct solution to each one?

3.
Think of your most important goal and ask, “Why have I not achieved that goal already?”

4.
Identify the constraints or limiting factors that determine how fast you increase your income. What can you do right now to alleviate these constraints?

5.
What are the
intelligences
that you seem to be better at than others? How could you organize you life and work so that you are capitalizing more on these intelligences?

ccc_tracy_9_154-178.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 178

178

➤

CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE

6.
What have you been good at in the past? What activities give you your greatest feeling of importance?

7.
What parts of your work give you the highest
return on energy
?

How could you structure your work and your life so that you are spending more time in these areas?

ccc_tracy_10_179-200.qxd 6/23/03 4:16 PM Page 179

C 10

h a p t e r

Supercharge

Your Thinking

Each problem has hidden within it an opportunity so
powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest
success stories were created by people who recognized a
problem and turned it into an opportunity.

—Joseph Sugarman

The way you think about yourself and your life determines almost everything that happens to you. Your primary responsibility is to take full control over your thinking and to keep your words and thoughts clearly focused on the things that you really want. Simultaneously, you must refuse to think about the things that you don’t want. This simple formula is the real key to health, happiness, and personal prosperity.

This chapter is about “possibility thinking.” This is the process of looking at everything that is going on around you in terms of possibilities and opportunities rather than as difficulties or problems.

Your goal is to make this a habitual way of thinking, and, like all habits, it is learnable. You can develop it with constant repetition.

Eventually, you will become a completely positive and constructive person in everything you do.

179

ccc_tracy_10_179-200.qxd 6/23/03 4:16 PM Page 180

180

➤

CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE

■
POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE

A positive mental attitude is closely associated with success in every area of life. The kind of people we like the most and want to associate with tend to be people who are generally cheerful and optimistic about their work and personal lives. No one wants to spend time with a negative, pessimistic, complaining person.

Unfortunately, it is easy to slip into the habit of criticizing and complaining. We are bombarded continuously with negative information, from radio, television, newspapers, and magazines and in our daily interactions with others. It may not be easy to rise above the flood of negativity that engulfs you, but it is absolutely essential to do so if you want to keep your spirits up and your mind clear and positive.

■
RESPOND CONSTRUCTIVELY

TO STRESS

A positive mental attitude can be defined as a
constructive response to
stress
. It doesn’t mean that, no matter what happens, you are happy and cheerful all the time. Having a positive mental attitude instead requires that you deal with the inevitable problems of your daily life in a more effective way than the average person.

Stress is inevitable. Problems are never ending. Failures and disappointments happen to everyone, all the time. The only thing over which you have any control is how you respond to these stressful events. If you respond in a positive, constructive way, you will maintain a generally positive attitude. When your mind is calm and clear, you will be more creative and alert. You will be more likely to see more ways to solve your problems, and to keep moving toward accomplishing your goals.

When you respond in a negative or angry way to a problem or difficulty, you trigger a series of nervous reactions that shut down the most creative parts of your brain. Instead of going into a “react and respond” way of thinking, you develop a “fight or flight” mentality.

ccc_tracy_10_179-200.qxd 6/23/03 4:16 PM Page 181

Supercharge Your Thinking

➤
181

■
FIVE STEPS TO PERSONAL POWER

There is a five-step power process that you can use to keep yourself positive and to achieve your goals faster. This five-step process brings together several of the very best techniques ever discovered for permanent mind change. It contains and illustrates all of the key principles that you need to know to become a highly effective, positive “possibility thinker” in your own life.

The five steps are: first, to
idealize
; second, to
verbalize
; third, to
visualize
; fourth, to
emotionalize
; and fifth, to
realize
. Let me explain how they work one at a time, and then, altogether.

■
IMAGINE YOUR PERFECT FUTURE

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to creating a wonderful life is “self-limiting beliefs.” Everyone has them, and some people have so many of them that they are almost paralyzed when it comes to taking action.

A self-limiting belief is an idea you have that you are limited in some way, in terms of time, talent, intelligence, money, ability, or opportunity. As a result of these beliefs, most of which are probably not true, you hold yourself back from taking the steps necessary to create the kind of life you really desire.

The way you free yourself from these negative brakes on your potential is to change your thinking about who you are and what is truly possible for you. You put aside any thought of limitation and begin to idealize and imagine the kind of life that you want to have a week, a month, a year, and five years from now, as if anything was possible.