Change Your Thinking Change Your Life: How To Unlock Your Full Potential For Success And Achievement – Brian Tracy
To achieve anything meaningful in life, be it financial freedom, happy relationships, career advancement, good health, business success, traveling the world, or helping people in need, it all begins in your thinking. The book, Change Your Thinking Change Your Life, with the rider “How To Unlock Your Full Potential For Success And Achievement by Brian Tracy will help you focus your thinking rightly to achieve your goals.
Brian Tracy needs no introduction. He is credited to have helped millions of people the world over to discover their true potential and change their lives much more than they ever thought possible.
As is expected from Brian Tracy, the book is loaded with ideas and proven principles to help you achieve your greatest goals this year. I encourage you to read it. Here is an excerpt from it, enjoy it!
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 continous 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.
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 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.
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 on. It is like a huge computer, so powerful and precise that it can process a hundred million commands per second. It maintain 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 accelerator 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.
Think about how you would feel if you had achieved your goal. Would you feel proud, happy, relieved, joyous, or exhilarated? Whatever the emotion would be, you should confidently and happily imagine yourself enjoying the exact feeling that you would have if your goal were already a part of your life.
If you want to earn more money and achieve a higher standard of living, imagine that you are already there, living the life you desire. Imagine how you would fee. Close your eyes and get the feeling of happiness, joy, and inner satisfaction.
When you can combine a clear mental picture of your goal with the same emotion that you would have if it were achieved, you activate your higher powers of mind. You trigger your creativity. You get insights and ideas that will help you to achieve your goal far faster.
Problems As Opportunities
The second factor that triggers your creativity and activates your positive mind is pressing problems. It is only when you are experiencing the pressure of problems and obstacles that you are motivated to perform at your mental best. Facing and solving the inevitable problems and difficulties of life make you stronger and smarter, and bring out the very best in you.
Most people do not understand the nature of problems. Problems are a normal and necessary part of life. They are inevitable and unavoidable. Problems come in spite of your best efforts to avoid them. Problems, therefore, come unbidden.
The only part of a problem over which you have any control is your response to your problems. Effective people respond positively and constructively to problems. In this way, they demonstrate that they have developed high levels of “response-ability.†They have developed the ability to respond effectively when unexpected or undesired difficulties occur.
Problems of all kinds bring out your very best qualities. They make you strong and resourceful. The more pressing your problems, and the more emotion you invest in solving those problems, the more creative you will become. Each time you solve a problem constructively, you become smarter and more effective. As a result, you prepare yourself for even bigger and more important problems to solve.
Think On Paper
One way to improve your ability to solve problems, and to trigger your creativity, is for you to think on paper. Take a few moments to ask, “What exactly is the problem?†Then write the answer down in such a form that it describes the problem exactly.
You can then ask, “What else is the problem?†You should beware of any problem for which there is only one definition. The worst thing you can do is to solve the wrong problem. The more different ways that you can state a problem, the more amenable it becomes to a solution.
Whatever difficulties, obstacles, challenges, or factors that are hindering you or holding you back in any way, define them clearly in writing. As they say in medicine, “Accurate diagnosis is half the cure.â€
Sometimes, when you begin to define a problem, you will find that it is actually a “cluster problem.†That is, it is a single large problem surrounded by several smaller problems. Most problems you deal with will be composed of several smaller problems. Often in a difficult situation, there is one large problem that must be solved before any of the smaller problems can be solved.
The best approach to this type of situation is for you to determine the main problem and then define the individual parts of the problem separately. You identify the core problem that must first be solved and then deal with the smaller problems in order. Sometimes solving one part of the problem leads to the resolution of the entire situation.
This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you.