Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (30 page)

Imagine, for example, that your goal is to earn a certain amount of money. Project mentally into the future and see yourself earning this kind of money.
See
the larger house, the bigger car, the better clothes, the nicer restaurants, and the more elegant lifestyle that you will enjoy when you are earning this amount of money. Imagine how you would feel if you were already enjoying all these ingredi-ents of success. Imagine the feelings of pride, happiness, satisfaction, pleasure, joy, and gratitude that you would experience once you achieved this goal.

Just like a person soaking in a hot bath, soak your mind in these feelings, exactly as if you were already at your destination. These emotions will then trigger thoughts, desires, and actions consistent with them. Each will reinforce the other.

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THE COMBINATION IS POWERFUL

When you combine all three—a mental picture, a verbalization, and an emotion—you activate your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind then passes this impression on to your
superconscious
mind, which works on your goals 24 hours per day.

When you practice combining verbalization, visualization, and emotionalization on every goal, you will be absolutely astonished at the things that begin happening to you, and the goals that you accomplish.

Once you activate your superconscious mind, you will receive a continuous stream of insights and ideas that you can use to solve your problems and achieve your goals. This mind will show you how to remove, get around, or climb over any obstacle that appears on your path. It will bring you the information that you need, at exactly the right time for you. It will give you intuitions and hunches that guide you to make the right decisions. Your superconscious mind ccc_tracy_10_179-200.qxd 6/23/03 4:16 PM Page 196

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will give you a steady flow of energy, enthusiasm, and motivation that will drive you toward your goals.

The way you activate this process and unleash all your mental powers is by continually idealizing, verbalizing, visualizing, and especially emotionalizing.

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DREAMS COME TRUE

The fifth element in this five-step power process is
realization
, to actually achieve your goals and to have your wishes come true.

This is the most important part of the process. But you must be aware that every goal takes a certain amount of time to materialize.

Some goals can be achieved quickly. Some require weeks and even months of patient, steady work. Others are long-term goals, requiring several years to bring to fruition. Your attitude toward the time required for goal attainment has a major impact on whether and when you accomplish them.

In the realization phase, after you have practiced the first four steps, you simply relax and let go of the process. You allow your goal to appear in its own time. Exactly the things that you want and need will come to you at exactly the time that you are ready for them.

Successful people eventually develop an attitude of calm, confident expectation. They are never rushed or hurried. They are relaxed and confident, and they absolutely believe that everything is conspiring to bring them exactly what they want, at exactly the right time for them. This must be your attitude as well.

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MULTIPLY YOUR POWERS

You can get even greater benefit from this five-step process for achieving your goals by using special techniques in response to the things that happen to you each day.

First of all, no matter what happens,
look for the good
in every situation. Seek the valuable lesson. Look for what you can gain from any temporary setback or obstacle.

Napoleon Hill studied and interviewed successful men and ccc_tracy_10_179-200.qxd 6/23/03 4:16 PM Page 197

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women for 25 years. He found that they had one characteristic in common. Each of them had developed the habit of continually looking into every difficulty for the seed of an equal or greater benefit or advantage. They constantly looked for the silver lining of even their darkest cloud.

When you are looking for something good to come out of every problem situation, you will respond to difficulties in a more positive, creative, and constructive way.You will be more optimistic and confident. If you think that you are going to benefit from everything that happens to you, you will develop the attitude of the possibility thinker. As a result, no matter what happens, you will almost always find something good that you can turn to your benefit or advantage.

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THE RUDDER OF THE DAY

Just as you become what you eat, you also become what you feed into your mind. Your mind is most receptive to new ideas first thing in the morning. You can accelerate the process of changing your thinking by starting off every morning by reading for 30 to 60 minutes in something uplifting and inspirational before you start your day.

Just as vigorous physical exercise in the morning will prepare you to be stronger and more resilient
physically
during the day, positive mental exercise in the form of inspirational reading will prepare you to be more
mentally
fit during the day.

The first hour of the morning is called the “rudder of the day.” Whatever you put into your mind in this “golden hour” sets the tone of your thinking for the rest of the day. When you get up in the morning and, instead of reading the newspaper or watching television, you read something positive, constructive, and inspiring, you preprogram your mind for the hours ahead.

Throughout the day, things will go better for you. You will be calmer, more creative, and more alert. You will be more resilient in the face of difficulties. You will respond more effectively when you face the inevitable ups and downs of your daily life. Your early-morning reading will have prepared you mentally to perform at your best.

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LEAVE NOTHING TO CHANCE

You can become a more optimistic person by planning each day in advance. This exercise frees your mind from the stress of trying to remember what you have to do. It gives you a sense of control over your work and your life. It puts you in charge.You become proactive rather than reactive. And all it takes is a list!

The ideal time to plan is the night before. Make a list of everything you have to do the following day. Go over the list and organize your work by priority. Select your most important task so that you can start in on it first thing.You will be amazed at how much better you sleep and how much better you feel when you awaken if you have already preplanned your day so that you know what you are going to do and in what order.

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START YOUR DAY RIGHT

Start your day with healthy, nutritious food. Eat more fruits, veg-etables, and high-quality protein foods, such as eggs. Drink more fruit juice and water. Eat whole-grain breakfast cereals, muffins, and yogurt. Avoid fatty foods that are hard to digest, and which tire you out.

The standard American breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast, is one of the very worst combinations you can eat in the morning.

Within an hour after eating these foods you will start to become drowsy again. All the blood in your brain will rush to your stomach to try to break down these heavy, fatty, overcooked proteins, fats, and starches.You will then compensate by drinking coffee all morning to wake up.

But when you start each day with a light, healthy, nutritious breakfast, you will have more energy. You will be more alert and cheerful. You will be more eager to get on with the day. You will be more creative because more of your blood is available to your brain.

You will be brighter and sharper. You will see more possibilities in everything that is going on around you. You will be a more optimistic person.

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GET LOTS OF REST

In addition to good mental and physical nutrition, you need to get plenty of rest. Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers football coach, once said, “Fatigue doth make cowards of us all.” When you are not getting enough rest, you are far more likely to be negative, irritable, and lacking in self-confidence.

But when you are fully rested and eating well, when you are feed-ing your mind with positive messages continually, when you are reading inspirationally and constantly visualizing your goals as a reality, you become a more positive, optimistic, and cheerful human being.

You will wake up in the morning with the feeling that there is nothing that you cannot do if you put your mind to it. If you hold that thought long enough and hard enough, it will become true in your life.You will begin to feel
unstoppable
.

ACTION EXERCISES

1.
Resolve today to talk to yourself positively, using affirmations phrased in the positive, personal, present tense. Be your own cheerleader.

2.
Make a set of three-by-five index cards with each of your goals written out in the form of an affirmation. Review these cards twice a day, morning and evening.

3.
Look for something good in every problem or difficulty. Practice being an inverse paranoid, convinced that there is a vast conspir-acy to make you successful.

4.
Create a mental picture of your most important goal, exactly as if it were already a reality. If possible, cut pictures of your goal out of magazines and study them regularly to program them into your subconscious mind.

5.
Get the feeling that would go with the success or the goal that you desire. Imagine that you have to pretend the emotion of joy, happiness, or satisfaction in an audition for a role in a movie.

Fake it until you make it!

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6.
Imagine that your life was perfect in a particular area. What would it look like? How would you feel? How would you describe it?

7.
Before falling asleep each night, mentally rehearse the key events of the coming day. Visualize and emotionalize them turning out perfectly in every way. Then go off to sleep with a smile on your face.

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Create Your

Own Future

The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be
found in their industry, application, and perseverance
under the promptings of a brave and determined spirit.

—Mark Twain

There can be no great courage where there is no
confidence or assurance, and half the battle is in the
conviction that we can do what we undertake.

—Orison Swett Marden

Every successful person has experienced countless temporary setbacks, obstacles, and even outright defeats, in the course of his or her life. But it has been the ability to respond positively and constructively to these defeats and to bounce back that ultimately has assured success. This quality of bouncing rather than breaking will determine your success as well.

Dr. Abraham Zaleznik of the Harvard Business School did a study some years ago on the role that
disappointment
plays in life.

Many people had researched and written on motivation and its relationship to success. But Zaleznik was the first person who looked at the other side of the coin.

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THINKING AHEAD

If you are a normal, intelligent person, you will organize each area of your life to avoid failure and disappointment as much as possible. You will think ahead and anticipate what could go wrong. You will then take the necessary precautions to guard against setbacks and problems. You will weigh and balance different options. You will select the course of action that offers the greatest likelihood of success.

Nonetheless, no matter how well you think and plan, things will not always turn out the way you expect. Murphy’s Law says:

“Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Of all the things that can go
wrong, the worst possible thing will go wrong at the worst possible time
and cost the most amount of money.”
Cohen’s Law then adds:
“Murphy was an optimist!”

Therefore, disappointment comes unbidden. Disappointment comes in spite of your best efforts to avoid it. Disappointment is inevitable and unavoidable. As sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, you are going to experience disappointments in life.

And the more goals you set and the more things you try, the more difficulties and problems you will have.

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THE ONE THING YOU CAN CONTROL

What Dr. Zaleznik discovered was that successful people
respond
to disappointment differently from unsuccessful people. His conclusion was that the way you deal with disappointment is an extremely good predictor of whether you will achieve success in your field, or in life overall.

Since you can’t always avoid disappointment, no matter what you do, the only thing that matters is how you deal with the disappointment when it comes upon you, unwanted and unexpected. Do you let it overwhelm you? Do you blow up, become angry, and blame or attack other people? Or do you roll with the punches, and respond effectively?

Successful people deal with disappointment by taking it in stride. Unsuccessful people allow disappointment to stop them.

Successful people recover and continue forward. Unsuccessful peo-ccc_tracy_11_201-221.qxd 6/23/03 3:38 PM Page 203

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ple often quit and go back. Motivational speaker Charlie Jones says,