Our lives reflect our beliefs of unlimited success come from an unlimited belief system.
Sometimes our inner resistance to success surprises us, one might be surprised by the negative inner monologue, which most people relentlessly repeat out of habit. Most people repeat these negative monologues of habit and most people do not know they are doing it. That is not a criticism; that is not judgment on my part, but that is a statement of fact. We need to pay attention to the excuses we make surrounding the reasons why we are not playing your biggest game as a human being. We need to pay attention to the self-talk that comes up when we have an opportunity in the middle of our day to raise the bar, to reach for excellence, to be greater than we really are and we do not do it! It is an illusion that all that chatter is nothing more than the voice of fear within our unconscious mind.
I recommend to many of my coaching clients that they take some time every morning by getting up a little earlier and take 30 minutes to an hour for themselves. This is the time of renewal, reflection, self-examination, you can workout, you could meditate, but also I ask them to journal and I ask them what happens when they do this. I ask them to journal about their stained glass window; their false assumptions, about their core beliefs, their excuses and where they originated from; about their success, and their belief about money, and authenticity, their limitations, and all the things that are keeping them small and preventing them from connecting to the life they know deep in their heart they were destine to live.
Our lives reflect our beliefs. We must believe that we can reveal high levels of success in order to experience the same in our lives. We must want to achieve our goals as much as we want to stay alive. Desire is a huge factor in the levels of success. I want to emphasize that; you need to really, really, really want your goals to come true before they ever will.
There is a story about a student who went to see a wise man and asked him, “What does it take to find wisdom”. The wise man took the student’s hand and lead him to the riverbank where he put the student’s head underwater until it appeared that the student would drown. Finally, the wise man took the student’s head out of the water. He asked the student what he wanted most at that moment of time. The student replied, “To breathe!” The wise man then said, “That is exactly how much you must want wisdom. You must want it as much as you want air.” One of the critical success factors is for any league performer or executive is the burning desire to achieve his or her goals and dreams.
No, matter what we think the unconscious – not outside circumstances – is responsible for individual success or failure. It does not matter how many books we read or how many courses we attend, or what our conscious mind tells us if our unconscious mind and our self-image beliefs will never succeed this is bound to be our reality. Our unconscious mind was influenced in profound ways; during our early childhood as we received suggestions from our parents, from teachers, from the media, from religious figures, from our peers and from the world around us. Once these messages are assimilated within the unconscious mind, the unconscious mind executes this program based on the message it has received. If you have received messages such as you do not deserve success or money is bad, or be like everyone else and do not dare to be different or do not listen to your heart. No matter how hard we try, there will be a self-sabotaging mechanism setup within us that will limit us from our genuine life and the life of our dreams. We might not even know this limiting thought if we have not spent the time investing in ourselves. It is very important; we need to get to know ourselves, our inner image and the nature of our unconscious mind. As we change in our inner life, our outer life will change with it.
Most people have more imagination and time for conjuring up problems that prevent them from realizing their dreams than for recognizing their opportunities for success. Stephen Covey, author of the seven habits of highly effective people, emphasizes this point:
Habits have tremendous gravity pull. Like any natural force, gravity pull can work with us or against us. The gravity pull of some of our habits may currently be keeping us from going where we want to go. Breaking deeply imbedded habitual tendencies such as procrastination, impatience, criticalness or selfishness that violate basic principles of human effectiveness, involves more than a little willpower and a few minor changes in our lives. It takes tremendous effort to break free from the gravity pull of such habits, but once you do, our freedom takes on a whole new dimension. Change, real change, comes from the inside out. It comes from striking at the root, the fabric of our thought, the fundamental, essential paradigms, which give definition to our character and create the lens through which we see the world (our stained glass window).
The power of affirmations and the power of self-suggestion is a tool to rescript the unconscious. I have used affirmations during many periods of my life to re-create and refocus my mind, and create the desires of my own heart. Remembering that the world is a mirror and we do not get from life what we want, but we get from life who we are. As you go deep and rescript the inner scripting of your mind, your life begins to change almost as if by magic.
The quote, “In every day in every way I am getting better and better” by French pharmacist Emile Coute is a phrase I have used with some modifications in my own life with exceptional results. When I was senior manager and I was driving to work under my breath, (not out aloud in case someone was watching or listening!!) I would simply be repeating this phrase over and over and over again. It had some wonderful effects in my own life and I really commend them to my clients today.
Discipline and positive mental programming lead naturally to developing your own methods and ways of generating our personal working pace, precedent and establishing that habit of success. Replacing one habit or negative thought with another new habit becomes second nature. Success will then interestingly be attracted to us.
The British writer William Makepeace Thackeray said it brilliantly: “Sow a thought, and you reap an action; sow an action and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character, sow a character and you reap a destiny.”
Creative visualization is an important concept. It is very important to spend some time in silence and dreaming about the life you want to create personally, professionally, economically and spiritually. I spend a lot of time in my own life reflecting on what I want to achieve. I have also taken the time to built a success collage where I put specific pictures of what I want to see occur in my life. Recently I pulled out my success collage for this year, which I keep in my journal, and I looked at it and was truly astounded by how many of the images that I had glued into that journal nearly 12 months ago had manifested themselves in my life. I must say that this really works. I use this with my coaching clients and they tell me they had experienced striking results through this simple technique.
In her powerful book Creative Visualization, Shakti Gawain writes, “creative visualization is the technique of using your imagination to create what you want in your life.” All successful people pictured themselves successful before achieving their dreams. No matter how poor they were in the beginning, no matter how little education they had, no matter how few contacts they had, all of them pictured themselves successful. They became convinced they would be successful. Life answered their dreams in accordance with their self-image and the faith they had in their success. Because of this direct correlation between your self-image and what life offers you, it is extremely worthwhile to work on your self-image, so that every day in every way, you are getting better and better. This affirmation does wonders for your self image. You can change your self-image at any time, according to your aspirations.