What you think becomes what you see

Your Belief Becomes Your Reality

Perhaps the most powerful single factor in your financial success is your beliefs about yourself and money. We call this the Law of Belief. It says simply this: Whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality. Whatever you intensely believe becomes your reality. That we have a tendency to block out any information coming in to us that is inconsistent with our reality.

What we've discovered is that successful people absolutely believe that they have the ability to succeed. And they will not entertain, think about, or talk about the possibilities that they'll fail. They do not even consider the possibility of failure.

You always act in a matter consistent with your beliefs. The most important belief system you can build is a prosperity consciousness where you absolutely believe that you are going achieve your financial goals. We call this positive knowing versus positive thinking. Positive thinking can sometimes be wishing or hoping. But positive knowing is when you absolutely know that no matter what, you will be successful.

Another principle related to your beliefs is willpower. We know that willpower is essential to any success. Willpower is based on confidence. It's based on conviction. It's based on faith. It's based on your belief in your ability to triumph over all obstacles. And you can develop willpower by persistence, by working on your goals, by reading the biographies of successful people, by listening to audio programs, by reading books about people who've achieved success. The more information you take into your mind consistent with success, the more likely it is that you will develop the willpower to push you through the obstacles and difficulties you will experience.

Remember that success is rare. Only one person in one hundred becomes wealthy in the course of a lifetime. Only five percent achieve financial independence. That means that the odds against you are 19-to-1. The only way that you're going to achieve your financial goals is if you get really serious. To succeed, you must get serious. You must get busy. You must get active. You must get going. Remember, everything counts.

Self-mastery, self-control, self-discipline are essential for anyone who wants to achieve greatly. And control over your thoughts is the hardest exercise in self-mastery that you will ever engage in. See if you can talk and think about only what you desire and not talk or think about anything that you don't want for 24 hours. Then you'll see what you're really made of. It's a hard thing to do but with practice, you can reach the point where you are thinking about your goals and desires most of the time. Then, your whole life will change for the better.

Inner Talk

Over recent times I have been battling the small inner voice inside. It has been saying strange things. This reminded me of the things I say to myself...my inner talk.

One of the more frequently faced challenges experienced by people is performance expectation. They express frustration that they often possess identical, if not superior, physical attributes to their competition, yet they're consistently being out performed by the competition. In many of these cases the factor that separates their performance from the competitions has been found to be rooted in their belief as to their ability to outperform the competition.

In other words they are operating with a limiting belief as to their athletic ability and level of their performance. Yet it is well documented that an individual's core beliefs in any given area of their life will ultimately determine the reality they draw into their life-positive, negative or stagnant.

So how does one go about changing a limiting belief to a positive one -- one that will result in improving your performance? It has been established by psychologists and neuroscientists that every person in the world carries on an ongoing dialog, or self-talk, of between 150 and 300 words a minute. This works out to between 45,000 and 51,000 thoughts a day. Most of out self-talk is harmless thoughts that serve our daily activities like, "I need to stop at the cleaners."

The danger is when inner dialogue takes on a negative connotation such as, "I'll never be as good an athlete as he is," "I don't have the mental toughness to compete at this level," or "I'll never be that fast." The ongoing negative reinforcement created by habitual negative self-talk results in the creation of a limiting belief(s) that goes on to become self-fulfilling prophecy.

Beliefs -- positive or negative -- are literally etched into our brain in comfortable grooves or neural pathways. Incoming data from our senses travel on these neural pathways on the way to interpretation in the brain. Therefore, if you desire to change an unresourceful/limiting belief into an empowering belief, you must rewire the negative neural track created in the brain.

This can be accomplished in precisely the same way the tracks were created: by using self-talk or, more specifically affirmations. An affirmation is a statement of fact or belief -- positive or negative -- that will lead toward the end result you expect. Anything that follows the phrase "I am," such as "I am a peak performance athlete" or "I am quick and agile," is an affirmation. The simplicity of affirmations often causes them to be overlooked. Nonetheless, affirmations are regularly used by professional athletes and successful business people.

The process for changing a limiting belief to a resourceful belief using affirmations is a simple one. First, identify the areas of your life which are not working to your satisfaction.

Next, write out the affirmations that represent things the way you desire them to be, they will be the vehicle for creating new resourceful/positive pathways.

Basic to formulating a new self-suggestion is that your affirmation is short and to the point -- simple enough that a five year old child will understand it -- and is always stated in the positive. Further, your affirmation should be stated in the present tense -- as if it has already happened, for example, "I am a strong athlete."

Now you are ready to begin your daily (minimum) reprogramming process:

• Sit upright in a comfortable chair.
• Close your eyes and take a couple of minutes to progressively relax.
• Release your body's tight sharp focus on the physical world by taking yourself to an even deeper level of relaxation.
• Speak your affirmation aloud from five to twenty times (depending on the time you have and the number of beliefs you are reprogramming).

By speaking your affirmation aloud you are down-stepping your thoughts to the brains electrical network to speech, and you are involving more of your brain by including two more of your senses: auditory and kinesthetic. It is important that you trust this process and give your affirmation(s) time to achieve their desired outcome. Worry or self-doubt as to whether your affirmations are working only conveys to your subconscious worry and the belief that your desire may not come to pass or the affirmation may not succeed. Be patient, success is on the way.

In conclusion, remember that your beliefs are what produce your life's experience and can lead you to performance enhancement, not the other way around. Orchestrate your beliefs using affirmations to create a life filled with successful experiences that reinforce the beliefs that created them.

Till next time

It is up to me....

Over the past few days I have been thinking about my choices. I know what to do. Yet sometimes I don't. I know I should exercise. Recently I haven't. I should do this and or that. It is so easy to blame others. I was thinking these thoughts and then I cam across this article.

Anthony Robbins: It Is Your Choice

Take control of your decisions and your life with these strategies.

What is the single force that shapes the quality of our lives? What power do we have that can change everything? As you and I both know, the answer is the power of choice.

During the past 30 years I’ve had the privilege of working with an incredibly diverse group of people, from presidents of countries to professional athletes, from managers to moms, from gang members to high-powered business executives. I’ve had the unique opportunity to see people in the midst of real challenges, whether it’s the professional athlete who wants to regain his competitive edge, the business leader who wants to expand her influence or the political leader who struggles with a difficult decision. I may not have all the answers (who does?), but after working with so many people and observing the patterns that make them succeed or fail, one thing I am sure of is this: It is our decisions, not our conditions, that determine the quality of our lives.

Take a look at your own life. Are you where you want to be? Are you as healthy or financially secure or as happy in your relationships as you would like to be? Or, even if things are going well, are you looking for that extra edge to retain the competitive advantage? Perhaps you feel that in spite of your success, there’s more out there for you, but for some reason, you haven’t grasped it yet. Your first instinct may be to blame the economy, or the housing market, or someone who has treated you unfairly.

Before we go any further, we need to understand that we are where we are today because of the decisions we’ve made—decisions about what to focus on, decisions about where to place our priorities, decisions about what things mean and decisions about what to do. For example, if your business or career has been affected by the recession, do you feel that you are being punished or challenged to find a new path? What are you going to do about it? Are you going to give up or give more? No matter what we have experienced in the past, our history is not our destiny—we all have the power to make new decisions today.

Here’s another way to look at it: Success is a result of good judgment; good judgment is a result of experience, in most cases. And what about experience? Yes, experience is most often a result of bad judgment.

So here’s the good news: The experience gained from bad judgment and bad decisions is unbelievably valuable—it’s priceless! So don’t waste time beating yourself up over poor decisions you’ve made; learn from the experiences. Really, failure is actually one of the best ways we learn. When people succeed, they celebrate. When they fail, they ponder. They stop and think, What happened here? What could I have done differently? It’s only through self-evaluation that we learn how to make better decisions. So, when you make mistakes, learn from them; use your experience to improve your judgment and make better decisions.

The Path to Freedom—Financial or Otherwise

We’re living in extraordinarily difficult times. Every day we read about and experience more challenges, often related to things we can’t control, whether it’s the economy, the environment or unemployment. We can allow the stress and uncertainty caused by these events to overwhelm us or we can transform our lives by making different decisions.

One of the decisions we can make is to live with a mindset of abundance. What I mean by this is if we live as though wealth has more to do with what’s in our minds than what’s in our wallets, if we understand that how we feel is more important than what we have, we can discover an immense sense of freedom and happiness.

Think about it: Do you know anyone who has a lot of money but doesn’t feel free, doesn’t feel loved, doesn’t feel like he has a choice? Sure you do. You may even feel that way yourself. That feeling happens when you’re not in control of your emotions because you’re looking for someone or something external to fill internal needs.

I don’t care what you’ve achieved or how much money you’ve earned, if you live with an attitude of scarcity and limitation, if you wait for someone or something else to fulfill you, you’re not going to be happy. You must make the decision to live with a mentality of abundance, and you will experience true freedom.

It’s Your Time

Everything that happens in your life—what you’re thrilled with and what you’re challenged by—began with a decision. Your life is the outcome of the decisions you’ve made and the actions you’ve taken as a result of those decisions. Different decisions produce different results.

If you want to control the direction of your life, you must consistently make good decisions. It’s not what you do once in a while that has an impact on the direction of your life—it’s what you do consistently. Make decisions today about how you are going to live in the years to come. For your decisions to really make a difference in your life it’s imperative to decide what results you’re committed to—and know specifically how these results will transform your life. It’s equally critical to decide what kind of person you’re committed to becoming. Get clear about what you want to be, do and have, and what your life will be like after you accomplish this. With that clarity, you’ll find it becomes easier to make the kinds of decisions that will move you in the direction you desire.

What are your standards? What will you demand from life? Decide today if you’ll accept life as it is or if you’ll live your life on your own terms, at the edge and at the highest level

Excellence

Fo those who know me well, know that something I strive for and expect of myself is Excellence. I recently came across this outstanding article and wanted to share it with you:

Quality Is Not a Thing, It's a Way

By Harvey Mackay

I recently had the opportunity to speak to members of the Food Processing Suppliers Association. In doing my preparation, one thing that kept coming up was food safety. One mistake can destroy a company.

How would you like to deal with that kind of pressure? I bet if you asked most businesspeople if they could be 99.9% perfect, they'd take it. In some industries that might cut the mustard, but it certainly won't in others.

If everyone achieved 99.9% quality, according to Insight Syncrude Canada Ltd., this is what could happen:

· Two plane landings daily at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago would be unsafe.

· The IRS would lose two million documents this year.

· 22,000 checks would be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.

· 1,314 phone calls would be misplaced every minute.

· 12 babies would be given to the wrong parents each day.

· 268,500 defective tires would be shipped this year.

· 103,208 income tax returns would be processed incorrectly this year.

· 2,488,200 books with the wrong cover would be shipped in the next 12 months.

· 5,517,200 cases of soft drinks produced in the next 12 months would be flatter than a bad tire.

· 3,056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal would be missing one of the three sections.

· 18,322 pieces of mail would be mishandled in the next hour.

· 880,000 credit cards in circulation would turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strips.

· 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions would be written in the next 12 months.

· 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes would be shipped this year.

· 107 incorrect medical procedures would be performed by the end of the day today.

When I founded Mackay Envelope Company many years ago, every time we landed a new account we checked and double-checked the first order to make certain it was correct. Nothing is more destructive to a company's bottom line and its relations with customers than defective products. We still test throughout the manufacturing process and then test again just before shipping. Then we test the testers to make sure they know what they're doing.

Quality is a mindset. It must be an obsession. It has to be part of a company's culture. You can't just talk about it. You have to practice it every day for years.

As Aristotle said, "Quality is not an act. It is a habit."

Have you ever seen a team run on the field yelling, "We want to be number two?" Everyone wants to be #1. Those who actually achieve it are those who are willing to put the blood, sweat, and tears into their effort.

The American Society for Quality Control published a booklet many years ago called "The Hare and the Tortoise Revisited: The Businessman's Guide to Continuous Quality Improvement." One story tells about a Japanese quality expert who stresses the need for patience and discipline. He likens the quality process to farming bamboo. Once the bamboo seed is planted, the farmer waters it every day. He does that for four years before the tree even breaks ground. But when it finally does, it grows 60 feet in the next 90 days.

It's that kind of commitment to the long view that marks the companies which have been most successful in achieving outstanding quality.

Bottom line: Quality products and quality service begin with quality thinking, and it's the same in any business. Everyone talks about quality, but customers can quickly figure out who is willing to make the required effort. And those businesses have a very good chance of sticking around for a very long time.
Quality comes from pride. Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. So you need to autograph your work with excellence.

If it's almost right, it's wrong.

Mackay's Moral: The difference between failure and success is the difference between doing a thing nearly right and doing it exactly right.

Food for thought.

Have you hit a road block....feeling stuck?

The other day I mentioned the need for keeping on keeping on. Some days we feel down and like we are doing the same old same old.
Darren Hardy just wrote a great piece which I wanted to share:

I saw something absurd the other day. A highly engineered and specially designed high-performance race car stuck on a 35-mile-an-hour downtown street.

That is not what that car was made for. That is not what its creator (Enzo Ferrari) envisioned for it.

This 6-speed, F140 Aluminum V12, 4700cc engine with 660hp was built to go 0-60 in 3.8 seconds and race at 217 miles an hour (2010 specs). But here it is… stuck.

I see this absurdity every day.

But not only in the streets—in office cubicles, conference rooms, huddled behind computer screens, and dragging luggage through airports.

People who were specially engineered and designed with special talents, skills and abilities who are traveling down the wrong road, with their potential stuck in first gear; trapped and unable to race.

That is not what their creator had envisioned for them either.

Are you…

1. Stuck. Traveling down the wrong road? Are you in a job, company or business that has you boxed in on the slow lane? Is it keeping you from being able to get out of first gear and challenge your greater abilities?

Sometimes it’s not the car; it’s the road the car is on.

2. Traveling with Pintos? Are you going slow because you are keeping pace with ordinary cars, when you were designed for racing?

Sometimes it’s not the car; it’s the cars it travels with.

3. Are you even aware that you are a race car? You were specially engineered and designed for speed… to race. You were built for greatness. I’m not kidding. You are a miracle of machinery. Yes, you… the one reading this. It’s likely you have never even experienced half of what your top speed is.

Sometimes it’s not the car; it’s the one given the responsibility to drive it.

If you ever really gripped the wheel, braced your neck and punched the pedal with all your might… the awesomeness of your innate potential will shock and exhilarate you.

Punch it. NOW!

Its time to refresh ourseleves and get in alignment with the desires in our heart and as a result the passion will start flowing again.