Book Summary – ” Maximum Achievement ” by Bryan Tracy

Introduction

There is a proper combination of thoughts and actions that will enable you to accomplish almost anything you really want, and you can find that combination if you search for it. Whatever you want you can have, if you want it badly enough, and if you are willing to persist long enough and hard enough in doing what others have done to accomplish similar things before you. Nature gives you back what you put in, no more no less. Studies have to be aimed at practical understanding. It is a complete and comprehensive approach to the business of living well, of living a life characterized by happiness, harmony, health and true prosperity. You must first become absolutely clear about what you want if you are serious about unlocking the extraordinary power that lies within you. The vision of the future you want to create for yourselves becomes a powerful motivator that drives you onward. All great achievement begins with you deciding what it is you really want and then dedicating yourselves wholeheartedly to attaining it.

Your ideal life is a blending of seven ingredients in exactly the combination that makes you the happiest any particular moment. By defining your success and happiness in terms of one or more of seven ingredients, you create a clear target ton aim at. Peace of mind is your internal gyroscope. When you are living in harmony with your highest values and your innermost convictions – when you are perfectly balanced in life – then you enjoy peace of mind. Don’t try organizing your life around making others happy as it will be an unending exercise in frustration and disappointment. The way to live a happy , productive life is to achieve  your own peace of mind by systematically eliminating the negative people, situations and emotions that make you unhappy. Set peace of mind as your goal and plan everything you do in terms of whether it helps or hinders your attainment of that goal, you’ll probably never make another mistake. If you achieve all kinds of things in the material world, but you lose your health or peace of mind, you get little or no pleasure from your other accomplishments.

A key quality of the fully functioning person is that he or she has the ability to enter into and maintain long-term friendships and intimate relationships with other people. The products, services and customers will change over time. But If you have the right people. The company will continue to prosper. People problems do more to disrupt your peace of mind and undermine your health than perhaps any other factor. To be financially free means that you have enough money so that you don’t worry about it continually, as most people do. It is not money that is at the root of all evil; it is lack of money. You therefore owe it to yourself to develop talent and abilities to the point where you know that you can earn enough money so that you don’t have to worry about it. If you can be perfectly clear about where you want to go financially, you can learn what you need to know and do to get there. Your deepest subconscious drive is the need for meaning and purpose in life. You need to feel that your life stands for something, that you are somehow making a valuable contribution to your world. Self-Knowledge has gone hand-in-hand with inner happiness and outer achievement. To perform at your best, you need to know who you are and why you think and feel the way you do.

Personal fulfillment is the feeling that you are becoming everything that you are capable of becoming. Defining the seven ingredients of success gives you a series of targets to aim at. Love is the most powerful force in the universe, the shaper of character and destiny and the one thing that really matters.

Seven Laws of Mental Mastery

If you want to live a life full of joy, happiness and self-fulfillment, you study the happiest and most successful people you can find and then do what they do until you get the same results in your own life. If necessity is the mother of invention, then pain seems to be the father of learning. To move ahead, you have to both learn and unlearn a few things. You are locked in place at your current level of knowledge and skills. You can go no further with what you now know. Your future largely depends on what you learn and practice from this moment onward. Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are. No one would seriously try to master any complex subject without learning everything possible from those who had gone before and demonstrated mastery in that area.

Natural Laws – Physical Laws ( like electricity or mechanics – controlled experiments and practical activities) and Mental laws ( Experience and Intuition). The law of control says that you feel positive about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life, and you feel negative about yourself to the degree to which you feel that you are not in control, or that you are controlled by some extreme force, person or influence. Self-discipline, self-mastery, self-control all begins with you taking control of your thinking. No person or situation can make you feel anything – it is only the way you think about a situation that makes you feel the way you do. Law of control explains why it is so important for you to be decisive. A person with a clear purpose and a plan always has an edge over someone who is vague or unsure. One of major responsibilities is to get and keep your life under control. This becomes foundation for building great happiness and success inn future. Thoughts are causes and conditions are effects. Belief creates the actual effect. You do not necessarily believe what you see but you see what you believe.

People with optimistic beliefs tend to be the movers and shakers, the builders and the creators of the future. Don’t be so quick to sell yourself short. Refuse to accept limitations on your potential. You can probably do far more than you’ve ever done before. If you believe that you can do a thing or if you believe you cannot, in either case, you are right. You get is not necessarily what you want in life, but what you expect. Successful men and women have an attitude of confident, positive self-expectancy. The most consistently effective and predictable motivational behavior you can use is to confidently and constantly expect the best of others. People will always try not to disappoint you. “ I believe in you. I know you can do it.” You can create a force field of positive mental energy around you by confidently expecting to gain something from every situation. Think how much more positive, optimistic and cheerful you would be if you were absolutely convinced that everything was conspiring to make you happy and successful. You can never rise any higher than your expectations of yourself.

You invariably attract into your life people and situations in harmony with your dominant thoughts. You will tend to meet and become involved with people and situations that are vibrating in harmony with your own dominant thoughts and emotions. The more emotion you attach to a thought, the greater will be the rate of vibration and the more rapidly you will attract people and situations in harmony with that thought into your life. As long as you are clear about what you want and the kind of people you want to be associated with, you’ll draw them into your life. The more excited, or scared you are, the more rapidly thoughts radiate out from you and attract similar situations back into your life. Sow a thought and you reap an act, sow an act and you reap a habit, sow a habit and you reap a character, sow a character and you reap a destiny. Your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. Your external world of manifestation corresponds with your internal world of thought and emotion. One must be something to be able to do something.

The only way you can permanently change the outer things is to change the inner things. William James wrote, “The greatest revolution of my life is the discovery that individuals can change the outer aspects of their lives by changing the inner attitudes of their minds. You eventually become what you think about. First ( Relationships ), Second (Health), Third (Career), Fourth (Financial Achievement), Fifth (Inner Life).

The Master Program

[Inborn Attributes (IA) + Acquired Attributes (AA)] * Attitude (A) = Individual Human Performance (IHP)

You can develop, improve and change your acquired attributes over time through study and practice, but the process is slow and deliberate, requiring patience, discipline and considerable effort. Since the quality of your attitude can be improved almost without limit, even a person with average inborn attributes and average acquired attributes can perform at a high level if s/he has a very positive mental attitude. Your attitude can be improved immediately and almost without limit. Your attitude is under the direct control of your will. A positive mental attitude is generally optimistic and cheerful way of greeting the people, problems and events that you encounter throughout your day.  Circumstances do not make the man; they merely reveal him to himself. Your attitude is determined by your expectations. Positive expectations are mark of the superior personality. Your expectations are determined by your beliefs about yourself and the world you live in.

The law of belief says that your beliefs determine your reality because you always see the world through a screen of prejudices formed by your belief structure. If you change your beliefs in any area of your life, you begin immediately to change in that area. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.” You are as effective as you believe yourself to be in whatever you do. Negative ideas about yourself and your abilities are usually based on false information and impressions you have taken in and accepted as true. You have an individual self-concept for how good you are at prospecting, identifying needs, presenting solutions, answering objections and closing. The comfort zone is the great enemy of human potential. Your self-ideal is a combination of the qualities and attributes that you admire most in other people, living and dead. The clearer you are about the person you want to become, the more likely it is that, day by day, you will evolve into that person. When one looks up to, and respects, the qualities of integrity, purposefulness, courage and action orientation in others, one begins to incorporate those values in oneself.

Self-Image à You always behave consistently with the picture that you hold of yourself on the inside. As you begin to see yourself and think about yourself s more competent and confident, your behavior becomes more focused and effective.

Self-esteem à A person with genuinely high self-esteem can have innumerable difficulties and setbacks in life and still retain a high, positive estimate of himself or herself as a human being. The best measure of self-esteem is how much you like yourself. People with genuine self-esteem get along easily and well with just about everyone.

Develop a brand-new self-concept that was completely consistent with high performance, happiness and life satisfaction. The healthiness of the adult will be largely determined by the quality and quantity of unbroken love and affection that child receives from parents and others during this time. A child who is raised with criticism and punishment will tend to grow up fearful, suspicious and distrustful, with the potential for a variety of personality problems that manifest themselves later in life. Without a continuous and unbroken law of unconditional love, the child’s security is threatened. Destructive criticism is one of the most harmful of all human behavior. Destructive criticism shakes the individual’s self-confidence so that s/he feels inferior, tenses up and makes mistakes whenever s/he attempts anything for which s/he has been criticized in the past. Because destructive criticism undermines the child’s self-esteem and wakens his or her self-concept, effectiveness decreases rather than increases. Constructive criticism is not done for revenge.

Build the person up rather than tearing him or her down. There’s probably no faster way for you to build self-esteem and self-efficacy in others than by immediately ceasing all destructive criticism. The feeling “I can’t” soon crystallizes into the “fear of failure”. Real life begins when you learn that all fears are in mind and there is nothing to be afraid of. The physical manifestations of inhibitive negative habit pattern are usually programmed into your subconscious mind before you are six years old. The more deeply entrenched the negative habit pattern, the more extreme will be your reaction to the situation. Some people accept criticism of themselves unquestioningly as if they were actually true. Talk out your fears with a good friend or spouse. When parents make their love conditional upon the child’s performance or behavior, this compulsive negative habit pattern develops when parents make their love conditional rather than unconditional. It manifests itself in the fear of rejection. If you were raised with conditional love, you will be overly concerned with opinions of others.

Women tend to manifest the fear of rejection in depression, withdrawal and physical symptoms. Men tend of manifest negative habit pattern in what is called “Type A behavior”. The first, the self-ideal, is a combination of the vision, values, ethics and mission of the organization. The second ingredient of the company’s self-concept is the collective self-image. When I deal with companies that are struggling, in the marketplace or for internal reasons, the employees are often like members of a team that is losing too many games. Keep people’s spirits up by continually telling them how good they are. The executive’s job is to keep morale high by putting the best possible spin on events and by keeping people focused on the possibilities of the future, rather than the problems of the past.  This high self-esteem is demonstrated in optimism, energy, creativity, cooperation and commitment. With a high, positive self-concept people are more productive, more resilient, more confident and happier than they could every be without it.

The only good thing about fear, if there is anything good, is that it is learned, and because of this, it can be unlearned. Because of them, you do enough not to be criticized or rejected on the low side, and you stay well within your limits so you can avoid risk or failure on the high side. The more you like yourself, the less you fear failure and rejection. The more you like yourself, the more willing you are to reach out and take the risks that will lead you on to success and happiness. The more you like yourself, the more willing you are to take the actions that propel you out of your comfort zone, and toward the achievement of your real goals and desires.  Because of your self-concept, you become what you think about most of the time. You can change your future at any time by taking control of your conscious mind from this point forward. It has taken you your whole life to get to where you are today, with your current state of mind. To achieve different results, you must become a different person. By the law of correspondence, your outer world will reflect your inner world. You must become a new person on the inside to permanently experience the good you desire on the outside.

This inability to break free of the tentacles of the past is the reason most people accomplish far less than they are capable of and remain unfulfilled and dissatisfied for most of their lives. Moving out of your comfort zone can be so nerve-wracking, in fact, that most people never do it until they are forced to. Greater success and happiness are only possible for you when you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable during the process of creating a new comfort zone at a higher level of effectiveness. A major turning point in your thinking comes when you change your language from “whether” to “how”. “Your reputation with yourself” is largely determined by how lovable and valuable you appear in your own thinking. Everything you do must be consistent with increasing the amount of love and respect you have for yourself, and that others have for you. Only in this way will you be continually motivated to make the effort necessary to become the person you are capable of becoming.

Controlling your suggestive environment requires that you decide the ingredients of your “mental diet”, for the indefinite future. Your habitual ways of thinking, feeling, talking and behaving are often roadblocks that stand between where you are today and where you really want to go. Your negative or self-limiting thoughts hurt you more than almost anything else you can engage in. You live in a mental world. Nothing around you has any meaning except the meaning you give it with your thoughts. If you change your ways of thinking, you change your life. Changing habits that are no longer consistent with your higher purposes is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, and one of the most essential to the quality of your life. Good habits are hard to form, but easy to live with. Whatever thought or action you repeat often enough becomes a new habit. He deliberately chose to re-interpret the behaviors of the executive in a favorable way. You are completely emotional. Everything you do is based on an emotion of some kind. They fear failure and rejection to the point where they are willing to “lead lives of quiet desperation” rather than to risk having any of their fears realized. A thought without an emotion behind it has no power to influence you one way or the other.

Happy effective men and women recognize the power of their thoughts and they are very emphatic about keeping them positive and constructive. Your mind is so powerful that you must control it with great firmness so that it is continually moving you in the direction you want to go, or it will move you away from your desires. Starting point of change, of accomplishing anything different or better, is desire, and desire is always personal. The starting point of your becoming a new and better person is for you to feel that the change is desirable or necessary, or both. You must be willing to let go of the old person in order to become the new person. You must be willing to persevere for a long time without much evidence of progress. For twenty-one days you keep your thoughts, words and actions consistent, all day, every day, with the goals you want to achieve and the person that you would like to become. The second reason you need to practice these methods for twenty-one days is for you to learn patience and persistence. Patience in self-development is the key. If you change your dominant thoughts about yourself for any period of time, your self-concept and your beliefs will begin to change and evolve in that direction as well. But, when you set big, exciting goals for yourself and the person you want to be, and then think about these things every day, you take full control of your mental evolution and direction of your life. You become what you think.

Your visual images become your reality. They intensify your desires and deepen your belief your beliefs. They increase your willpower and build your persistence. They are enormously powerful. People who accomplish extraordinary things visualize their desired results continually. The second element in visualization is vividness. Successful people are very clear about what they want, and of course, this refers to the clarity of their mental pictures. The third dimension of visualization is intensity. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The fourth part of visualization is duration. The longer you imagine a desired future event, the more likely it is to appear. When you combine the elements of frequency, vividness, intensity and duration with your visualizations of anything you want to be , have or do in the future, you actually supercharge yourself and accelerate your movement toward it. You think of how much more confident you would feel, and how much more you would be respected and admired by others when you gave an excellent talk. Your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that you imagine.

The power of visualization works with negative experiences as well. One negative experience, dwelled upon repeatedly, will demotivate and discourage you in that area. If you find yourself lacking confidence in any situation, cancel the negative thought by repeatedly visualizing yourself as calm, confident and relaxed when you’re in that situation. Your fears will gradually diminish and disappear. Design a poster for your wall with either your photograph or a picture of the goal that you wish to achieve in the center. The three “P”s are positive, present tense and personal. When you repeat it continually, it is eventually accepted as a valid description of the reality you desire. Strong, affirmative statements, emotionalized and repeated with conviction, often bring about immediate personality changes. I believe in the perfect outcome of every situation in my life.  It is a wonderful antidote to worry. You cannot change habits overnight. You must be patient and persistent in affirming and visualizing, confidently believing and expecting that, when you are ready, the desired changes will occur, and not before.

Believe as if you have already achieved the goals you’ve set for yourself. Your positive behavior will generate positive feelings, just as your positive feelings generate positive behavior. Fake it until you make it. People will then accept you and respond to you exactly as if you were the person you see yourself as being. Feel your mind continually with information and ideas that help you to be better, you feel better about your ability to perform, and you will actually make more sales. Because of strong suggestive influence that other people have on you, for good or for ill, you must be extremely careful about who you choose to spend time with. Make no useless acquaintances. Get away from negative people. There is no suggestive influence more powerful than the people around you. Select them with care. You become what you teach. Developing new, positive habits of thought and behavior is not easy. It requires eternal vigilance. Forget the way you were in the past. You will become what you think about most of the time. Instead of wishing and hoping, you will know that your possibilities are unlimited.

Master Mind

Successful people have unshakable belief in their ability to overcome all obstacles and reach some great height. They went on to accomplish remarkable things, often against overwhelming odds and in defiance of the predictions of people around them. Try to get access codes that would enable you to get into and harness the enormous mental capabilities. You can use your subconscious mind for creation or destruction for good or for evil. Working harder with longer hours leads one down a blind alley. Working smarter utilizes mental powers more than physical powers to achieve goals. The conscious mind first identifies six senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch or feeling. Secondly, it does comparison and thirdly it does analysis and fourth, it does decide. One should use more of one’s master mind , one’s subconscious powers by understanding how to activate them. Your subconscious mind is subjective. It does not think or reason independently; it merely obeys commands it receives from conscious mind.

Your subconscious mind causes you to feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable whenever you attempt to do anything new or different, or to change any of your established patterns of behavior. Complacency is the great enemy of creativity and future possibilities. Your biggest battle is almost always with yourself and your bigger challenge is in breaking free of your old habitual ways of thinking and acting. When you begin to believe that something is possible for you, your subconscious mind begins broadcasting mental energies and you begin to attract people and circumstances in harmony with your new dominant thoughts. The more emotional you are about anything, the more rapidly your subconscious will alert you to things you can do to bring it into your reality. Discipline your thinking and dedicate yourselves to concentrating on and talking only about what you really want. You can deliberately substitute a positive thought in place of negative thought. Focus your mind on what can be done in future rather than what has happened in the past. Keep saying “I like myself”. The methods of visualization, affirmation, verbalization, acting the part, associating with the right people and feeding your mind with appropriate books, tapes and articles are tested and proven ways to change your thinking about yourself and your possibilities. You need an intense burning desire for personal improvement.

Visualize and affirm positive, constructive messages, the new information seemed to go straight to the subconscious mind. The more you relax and don’t try, the faster the thought seems to be accepted by your subconscious mind and the faster the physical result of the thought or goal appears in your world. Autogenic conditioning and relaxation enable you to conquer worry and fear and to generate feelings of calmness, confidence and self-control. If you can create the feeling, or the emotion, that you would experience if you accomplished a goal or solved a problem, and you can hold that feeling, the feeling will create, in your physical world, the result that goes with it – the result would trigger the emotion if the result had actually occurred. Verbalize and affirm your desired outcome.

  • Visualize and affirm your desired outcome
  • Visualize and clearly see the outcome you desire in this situation
  • Emotionalize your combined affirmation and visualization by creating “the feeling” that you will actually experience when everything is resolved happily.
  • Release the situation completely
  • Realization of the appearance in your outer world of the solution. ‘According to your faith, it is done unto you’.

Once you’ve written out your goals, put down your pen, close your eyes, breathe deeply, and visualize your goal as accomplished, or see the events of the day unfolding satisfactorily. The more you write out your goals, the more rapidly the materialize. You write things, you want as affirmations, in the present tense and in words that are clear and definite. By reviewing your goals, you make your subconscious mind to work on your goals during the night. It will bring you ideas and solutions when you awake in the morning. Quick affirmation technique consists of telescoping the steps to mental preparation we discussed earlier. You get by yourself, close your eyes, affirm the ideal outcome, visualize it, emotionalize it and release it. The next time you actually perform the activity, you will be much more relaxed and confident. You must never allow anyone to say anything to you yourself that you do not sincerely desire to be true. A typical taped affirmation process  is only about twenty minutes long. You should be walking, talking and behaving in a cheerful and positive manner, visualizing and feeling enthusiastic about everything you do. Self-control, self-mastery and self-discipline needed to keep your words, thoughts and pictures off what you don’t want and focused on what you do want.

Get ‘end of movie’ feeling and just relax. Carry yourself with calm confidence and positive feelings of success and happiness, knowing that if you can hold it in your mind, you can have it. And you will. Have a systematic, purposeful control over the thoughts you hold in your conscious mind while refusing to dwell upon the things that you don’t want. The quality of thoughtfulness goes hand in hand with the evolution of character and development of personal effectiveness. Become more alert, more aware and more awake. Assume that whatever your current situation or difficult, it is exactly what you require, right now, to teach you something you need to know before you can continue on your upward journey. Every experience is a positive experience for growth and self-mastery. Law of substitution should be used continually, knowing that your major responsibility in this process is to keep negative thoughts of fear, anger and self-doubt out of your mind. Take time each day to sit and soak your mind in positive and uplifting thoughts, knowing that whatever you dwell upon long enough and hard enough will eventually materialize in the world around you.

The Master Skill

Intense goal orientation is an essential characteristic of all high-achieving men and women, in every study, in every field. Your failure mechanism is your natural tendency to follow the path of least resistance, your impulse toward immediate gratification with little or no concern for the long-term consequences. The bigger your goal and the more intensely you desire it, the more likely you will be to exert your powers of self-discipline and willpower, and the more capable you will be of making yourself do the things that you need to do to get where you want to go. Two things for certain about the price of success. First, in order to get what you desire; however you define it, you must pay the price in full. Second, you have to pay the full price in advance. The primary cause of success in life is the ability to set and achieve goals. You activate the law of attraction by thinking continually about your goals. The law of subconscious activity says that whatever thoughts you hold in your conscious mind, your subconscious mind works to bring into your reality. When you begin using all mental laws behind a clearly defined purpose to which you are totally committed, you become an unstoppable powerhouse of mental and physical energy that will not be denied. With clear, specific goals, you develop and use all your mental powers. You then accomplish more in a few years than most people accomplish in lifetime.

People don’t set goals because they are not serious. Only way a person is serious is shown by her or her actions not words. One person who takes action is worth ten brilliant talkers who do nothing. People also don’t get goals because they have not yet accepted responsibility . Another reason could be deep-seated feelings of guilt and unworthiness. The fourth reason being they don’t realize the importance of goals. The fifth reason being they don’t know how. Someone who knows goal setting down cold will either be very rich or very happy or both. The sixth reason being fear of rejection or fear of criticism. Keep your goals confidential. If you like others to encourage you, take every opportunity to encourage them. The seventh reason is fear of failure. It is impossible to accede without failing. There is a direct relationship between the number of things you attempt and your probability of ultimately succeeding. Approach every difficulty as if it were sent to you at that moment and in that way to teach you something you need to learn so you can continue moving forward. Decide to take every setback as a spur to greater effort, especially in business and sales, knowing that you are getting closer and closer to success with every experience. Leaders never use the word failure or defeat but use words like ‘valuable learning experience’ and ‘temporary glitches’. Temporary setbacks and obstacles are inevitable price one pays to achieve any great success in life.

Congruency – High performance and high self-esteem only happen when your goals and your values are in complete harmony with each other.

Area of excellence – You can achieve your full potential only by finding your area of excellence and then by throwing your whole heart into developing your talents in that area.

Acres of diamond – Your acres of diamonds probably lie right under your own feet if you will take the time to recognize them and then go to work on them.

Balance – You need family and personal goals along with physical and health goals.

Major Purpose in life – The failure of person to choose an overarching, dominating major goal is the primary reason for diffusion of effort, wasting of time and the inability to make progress. When you are excited about achieving a clear major goal, you start to move forward rapidly in spite of all obstacles and limitations.

After you develop some skills in setting and achieving goals, you will quite confidently set goals that may only have a 40 percent, or 30 or 20 percent probability of success, and you will still be motivated and excited as you strive to achieve them.

The following questions can help identify your goals –

  1. What are your five most important values in life?
  2. What are your three most important goals in life, right now?
  3. What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you learned today that you only had six months to live?
  4. What would you do if you won a million dollars cash, tax free , in the lottery tomorrow?
  5. What have you always wanted to do, but been afraid to attempt ?
  6. What do you most enjoy doing? What gives you your greatest feeling of self-esteem and personal satisfaction?
  7. What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?

When you have a specific goal for yourself and then achieved it according to your plans, you change from having an attitude of positive thinking to possessing an attitude of positive knowing. The thrill of achievement, the feeling of having overcome adversity and won through, in spite of the odds, gives you a sense of pleasure and excitement that can come from no other source. You need a proven process that you can use over and over, with any goal, in any situation, to bring all the powers of your mind to bear on accomplishing whatever it is you desire. There is a direct relationship between how clearly you can see your goal is accomplished, on the inside, and how rapidly it appears on the outside.

  1. Develop desire – Intense, burning desire. The law of concentration states that whatever you dwell upon grows.
  2. Develop belief – Because belief is the catalyst that activates your mental powers, it is important that your goals be realistic, especially at first. Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. A five-pound weight loss is believable, whereas a thirty-pound weight loss is so much beyond your current self-concept that your subconscious mind doesn’t take your seriously. If the goal is worth achieving, it is worth working for patiently and persistently. If you continue to do the right things in the right way, you will eventually attract to yourself the people and the resources you need to reach your goal right on schedule.
  3. Write it down – Write down your goals clearly and think about them all the time. Writing them down intensifies your desire and deepens your belied that they are achievable.
  4. Make a list of all ways that you will benefit from achieving your goal. If your reasons are big enough, your belief solid enough and your desire intense enough, nothing can stop you. If you have only one or two reasons for achieving your goal, you will have a moderate level of motivation. If you have twenty or thirty reasons for achieving your goal, you will become irresistible.
  5. Analyze your position, your starting point.
  6. Set a deadline. If your goals are sufficiently realistic and your plans are sufficiently detailed, and you work your plans faithfully, you will achieve your goal by your deadline. Project forward and look backward.
  7. Make a list of all the obstacles that stand between you and the accomplishment of your goal. Ask yourselves, Is there anything about yourselves that you will have to change or any ability that you will have to develop in order to achieve your goal?
  8. Identify the additional information you will need to achieve your goal. One of your responsibilities is to learn what you need to know, so you can accomplish what you want to accomplish. Make a list of all the information, talents, skills, abilities and experience that you will need and then make a plan to learn, buy, rent or borrow this information or skills as quickly as you can.
  9. Make a list of all the people whose help and cooperation you will require. Other people will help you achieve your goals only if they feel they will be compensated for their efforts in some way. What are you going to do for them to get them to help you? The most successful people in our society, in all fields, as those who have helped the greatest number of people to get the things they want. If you take every opportunity that you can to help others. Others will eventually give you all the help you need. The principle of organized effort, working together in harmony with other people toward mutually agreed upon goals, is the basis for all great accomplishment.
  10. Make a plan. A good list gives you a track to run on and dramatically increases the likelihood of your achieving your goal. One of the characteristics of superior men and women is that they can accept feedback and make course corrections.
  11. Use visualization. Clear mental pictures concentrate your mental powers and activate the law of attraction.
  12. Make a decision in advance that you will never, never give up. Develop the ability to persevere in the face of the inevitable obstacles and difficulties that you will face. The longer you persist, the more convinced and determined you become.

The Master Power

Many people launch themselves toward a goal and then allow themselves to slow and stop. The maintenance of momentum, once you’ve begun, is essential to great success and achievement. Nothing succeeds like success. If there are no obstacles, it’s probably not a goal at all, its just a task. The above twelve steps not only activate your positive mind and release your creativity, but also cause all the mental laws to converge harmoniously toward the achievement of your dominant goals. Your mind sparkles with a stream of ideas that flow to you exactly as you need them. Destructive emotions of any kind interfere with the calm, positive attitude your superconscious requires for optimal functioning. Whenever you set a goal of any kind, you will have to grow and develop to the point that you are ready to achieve it. Your superconscious mind will guide you through the experiences you need to teach you the lessons you have to learn, in order, so that when you finally arrive at your destination, it will almost seem like an anticlimax. When you finally reach the position in life that you desire, you will be ready to hold on to it indefinitely. Napoleon Hill found that almost every one of the wealthy men he interviewed had achieved their great success one step beyond what appeared to be their greatest failure.

Superconscious mind gives you unerring guidance. You will pick up a book or magazine or open it to the exact page that has the answer you need. As a speaker, turning to superconscious mind will crystallize in your mind the entire talk and it will turn out to be exactly right thing to say. Any thought, plan, goal or idea help continuously in your  conscious mind must be brought into reality by your superconscious mind, whether positive or negative. Refuse to dwell on anything that you do not want to see manifested around you. Solitude provides the mental medium of calmness and serenity that causes superconscious solutions to spring into your mind full-blown and complete in every detail. It is exactly when you are too busy that you most urgently need to listen to your inner voice. Say it “I believe something wonderful is going to happen to me today”. Successful, happy people make a habit of looking into even the most difficult situation for something positive, something they can learn or some way they can benefit. Superconscious solution is always simple and fairly easy to implement. It appears to be a blinding flash of the obvious. The reason that one hadn’t thought of it before was either that one wasn’t ready or that timing was not right. Superconscious solution comes accompanied by a burst of joy and energy, a feeling of elation that makes you want to take action immediately. When you affirm positively, visualize clearly and believe absolutely, you will be led irresistibly to do and say the right thing at the right time in every situation.

Your thinking determines your attitude, your conduct and your behavior, and they in turn largely determine your success or failure in life. The disease of “Excusitis”, the inflammation of excuse-making glad, is invariably fatal to success. You can never give responsibility away. The only thing that you can give away is control. Self-responsibility is the core quality of the fully mature, fully functioning, self-actualizing individual. People who are failures take credit for their success, but they blame their problems on bad luck, other people or circumstances beyond their control. Top 3 percent in every field treat their company as if it belonged to them seeing themselves as self-employed. A highly responsible person tends to be positive, optimistic, self-confident, self-reliant and self-controlled. There is a direct relationship between how much responsibility you accept in any area of your life and how much control you feel in that area.

Responsibility = Control = Freedom

Responsibility = Positive Emotions

Non-responsible people feel that they are controlled by external forces and by other people. An attitude of irresponsibility, feeling out of control and feeling trapped triggers negative emotions, such as unhappiness, anger and frustration. The elimination of negative emotions is job one for the person who aspires to great success and achievement. Negative feelings would cause the mental laws to work against you. Since, Negative emotions are learned, like most things, they can be unlearned, and you can be free of them. Jealousy is that great destroyer of happiness and relationships. Perhaps, the most valuable quality of a senior executive is his or her ability to function well in a crisis. This ability of solely a result of refusing to get caught up in the emotionality of the moment. The words, “I am responsible”, switch your mind immediately from negative to positive. They enable you to assert complete control over your emotions. Responsibility gives you. A single negative emotion of blame or anger can interfere with your peace of mind indefinitely.

Your world is full of people who are just like a new car with front wheel brake locked. Their lives just seem to go around in circles because they are holding on to at least on key experience from their past for which they are refusing to accept responsibility. The patient is cured from unresolved feelings of anger, guilt and resentment when s/he can identify what is holding him or her back, face it honestly and let go of it. When people tell you about their problems and their frustrations, empathize them and then remind them, “You are responsible. What are you going to do about it?” Your outer world is a physical manifestation of your inner world. Everything you see around you – your health, your relationships, your career, your family and your worldly accomplishments – is an expression of the working of your mind. To unlearn them, however, you must understand the psychological factors that create a fertile breeding ground for negative emotions in the first place. The ability to avoid being overly affected by the criticism of others is a key quality of the self-actualizing person. The rule is that high self-concept parents raise high self-concept children, while low-concept parents raise low self-concept children. The second condition that must be fulfilled for a child to feel fully loved is that his or her parents must love each other. It has been said that the kindest thing that a mand can do for his children is to love their mother, and reverse is also true.

Destructive criticism and lack of love, in combination, create the negative emotion of guilt. Guilt is used on people deliberately for two reasons: punishment and control. The first and most common manifestation of guilt is feelings of inferiority, inadequacy and undeservingness. Your subconscious mind accepts whatever you say about yourself as true. When you constantly criticize yourself, your subconscious mind accepts your words as commands.  Even people you don’t know can pull your ‘guilt-strings’ and make you feel uncomfortable or even acquiesce to their demands. A person with deep feelings of guilt is always making excuses or apologizing. You only accept “I’ll try” when the schedule or outcome is not that important to you. Everytime you use victim language – “I can’t”, or “I have to” or “I’ll try” or “I wish” or “I’m sorry” or “Don’t blame me” or “That’s not my fault” – you are reinforcing the negative emotion of guilt and driving deeper into your subconscious mind. Say “I will” or “ I won’t”. Say “I want to” rather than “I have to”. Say “I can” or “ I will” rather than “I can’t” or “I wish”. Refuse to accept anything self-deprecating. If someone criticizes you, simply say, “I would appreciate it if you not speak to me like that because it’s not true.” Negative statements by yourself or from others, if not canceled out or challenged, set you up for failure in the future.

Guilt throwing or guilt catching is like tennis. It only works as long as you are willing to hit ball back across the net. Discontinuing the use of guilt would give us no choice but to settle down and talk like mature adults. The law of forgiveness states that you are mentally healthy to the exact degree to which you can freely forgive and forget offenses against you. To fulfill your potential, to develop your full metal capacities and to liberate your emotional and spiritual energies, you absolutely must forgive everyone who has ever hurt your in anyway. Forgiveness is the key to the kingdom of mental and spiritual development. The regular practice of freely forgiving everyone for everything makes you a calmer, kinder, more compassionate and optimistic human being. Negative emotions once aroused are always expressed either inwardly or outwardly.

The Master Goal

The starting point of stress management and the achievement of inner peace is for you to accept responsibility for your responses. The response, not the situation, causes the stress. “Eustress” is good stress tat gives you energy, enthusiasm and excitement about what you are doing.  Cognitive control method of using mind to control over emotions and responses makes one a psychotherapist and assures one of life-long enjoyment of inner peace and happy relationships. Worry is a sustained form of dear caused by indecision. Your ability to eliminate worry is your starting point for the happy, healthy, well balanced mental attitude you need to get the most joy from everything you do. Much of your stress is about worrying about things in the future, most of which never happen anyway.

Decide exactly what you want to do and then act as if it were impossible to fail. Thomas Watson said if you want to succeed then double your rate of failure. Success lies on the far side of failure. A child who has grown up with conditional love ( given love and approval only when they did something parents wanted) seeks unconditional approval from others all his or her life. Make a decision that you want to become more relaxed, more productive, more enjoyable person, parent or spouse. Practice complete relaxation or meditation, even solitude , for twenty minutes every day. Its when you feel you have least amount of time to take care of yourself that you are closest to the breaking point. Workaholics are usually doing what they love to do, what they really enjoy. You engage in denial when you don’t want to admit that you have changed your mind. Men and women who squarely confront their problems and difficulties are far healthier than those who evade them. The more willing you are to honestly confront the difficulties and challenges facing you, the happier and healthier you will be.  Because confrontation is so painful, people try to fool themselves. There is always a price you can pay to be free from any unhappiness. Set peace of mind as your highest goal and organize every part of your life around it. Anger is perhaps the most destructive of all negative emotions. When you see yourself as a victim, your natural response will be to become angry. If you become angry repeatedly, your resistance to anger becomes weaker and weaker. Angry outbursts are a mark of weakness. They demonstrate immaturity and a lack of control. Resolve to be more patient, and to withhold judgement until you’ve studied the situation and asked a few questions to slow yourself down.

Sustained anger actually changes the chemical composition of your blood. You may not be responsible for being cut off in traffic but you are definitely responsible for the way you choose to respond. Think optimistically and constructively. Keep yourself calm and positive.

Mastering Human Relationships

The inability to get along with others is the primary reason for failure, frustration and unhappiness in life and work. Deliberately look for the good, freely forgive people. Truly healthy people do not hate, nor do they go around preoccupied with anger and resentment over what happened in the past. A truly healthy person has an ability to get along with a great variety of people with different temperaments, different personalities, different attitudes, different values and different opinions. The more you like and respect yourself, the more you like and respect others. If you want to be happy, do something that makes you happy or makes someone else happy. You can improve health your own personality by taking every opportunity to improve the health of the personalities of others. When you raise the self esteem of others, opportunities will open up before you, and people will help you in ways you cannot now imagine. You impress on your mind whatever you express toward someone else. When you go through your day looking for ways to make others feel important you will be popular and welcome everywhere. Become a positive person by only saying things that build people rather than tearing them down.

No matter what a person has done, or how wrong you think it is, keep your opinions to yourself. Never complain and never explain. What cannot be cured must be endured. Your decision to become agreeable and easy-going person will lower your stress levels and increase your ability to influence others to help you. A man without a smile should not open a shop. The most important thing is to be liked. An attitude of gratitude clears a path before you. The expression of approval, or praise, is one of the fastest and most predictable ways to make people feel happy and proud. When people are genuinely praised by someone they respect, their enthusiasm and alertness increase and they feel much better about themselves. Great leaders, successful business people and excellent parents are all good at praising. Praise immediately or as close in time to the behavior as you possibly can. Praise what you want to see repeated, praise immediately and specifically. People may work harder for more money, but they will crawl over broken glass to get more praise and recognition. If you sincerely want to admire another person for something, you will find endless opportunities to do so. The five As are Agreeable, Acceptance, Appreciation, Approval, Admiration. The very act of paying attention to a person increases his or her self-esteem. Listening is a true measure of attention in human relations. It is only when you listen, and listen well, to another person that you demonstrate to the other person that s/he is valuable and important. Listening builds trust, self-esteem and self-discipline. The more you can discipline yourself to listen without distraction, the more effective you will become in other areas of your life as well. Listen attentively, without interrupting and pause before replying. It’s a great compliment for a speaker to have the listener sit quietly and think about his or her remarks before responding, whatever the response may be. While listening question for clarification –“How do you mean, exactly?”. Provide feedback – “Let me make sure that I understand you. What you’re saying is this?” Interpretive reflection or empathic listening is very helpful. Resist the temptation to criticize, condemn or complain. Be tactful by starting “It seems to me that” or “Some people say that” to indicate that you are open to the possibility that you could be wrong and this way you will find it much easier for others to listen to you and appreciate your ideas.

The very best conversationalists and most enjoyable people to be around are those who are relaxed, positive and completely natural. You can practice admiration by asking people about themselves and then admiring their traits, qualities and achievements. Get out of yourselves and into the lives and concerns of others.

Mastering Personal Relationships

The choice of a mate and the quality of your home and family life, determines your success as a human being as much as or more than any other factor. No success in public life can compensate for failure in the home. There is a direct relationship between the quality of your relationships and your level of self-esteem and self-acceptance. You must be more aware of who you really are before you can accept yourself unconditionally. Love is like money : if you have an ample supply, you don’t think about it very much. Almost all affairs in marriages begin as a result of a need to communicate more fully with another human being. The person who loves less controls the relationship. Making a total commitment requires that you burn the physical and emotional bridges and refuse to consider any other option except making relationship successful. Love is total commitment to the full development of the potential of the other. A wonderful thing about human beings is that we are free emotionally only when we have given up all other options and committed ourselves wholeheartedly to one other person. Couples need to be alone together and need to spend long stretches of time talking and listening in order to keep their communication channels clear.

One of the things that men can do to improve their communication with the women in their lives is simply to refrain from giving advice unless it is clear that this is what she wants. Instead, listen attentively, pause, ask questions, feedback and paraphrase what she is saying to ensure you understand. Expressing a genuine interest in your mate or spouse and then listening carefully to the other person when he or she speaks, deepens understanding and improves communications. If you do to your mater what you would like to see done to you, and if you refrain from doing or saying anything that you would not like your mate to do or say to you, you will be far more aware of the impact of your words and behavior. If a person never received unconditional love of his or her parents or even worse, if the parents rejected or disapproved of the child during the time s/he was growing up, when that person becomes an adult s/he will be very vulnerable to not being fully loved and accepted by others. Usually people who feel self-pity learned it from one of their parents who practiced self-pity as a method of interaction at home. If you are in a relationship in which the other person is feeling sorry for himself or herself, be as compassionate and as understanding as possible and then encourage him or her to get busy doing something that s/he enjoys. The rule is to always expect the best of your partner – “ I love you and I believe in you”. Many of the most successful men and women who have ever lived owe their success to the unshakable positive expectations of their mate. If you find that the laughter and conversation are going out of your relationship, it’s time to take action. Small attentions, little favors, kindness, gifts and other things that make the other person happy actually make you love the person more. Rekindling love through action is called Praxis.

The unwillingness to deal with something so embarrassing and threatening to one’s self-esteem as a failed relationship is a major cause of illness, insomnia, headaches and expressions of negative emotion such as irritability, anger and depression. Many people cause themselves enormous amounts of unnecessary unhappiness by confusing the fact of incompatibility with the problem of incompatibility. The smartest thing you can do is to be perfectly selfish emotionally. If you are not happy and you cannot save the situation, then at least please yourself. Your relationship is a reflection of the person you really are and your assurance of a great future.

Mastering the Art of Parenting

The most important single role of parenting is to love and nurture your children and to build in them feelings of high self-esteem and self-confidence. The growing child develops a healthy personality in direct proportion to the quality and quantity of love s/he receives. All negative antisocial behavior is a cry for help, an attempt to escape the feelings of guilt, anger and resentment that begin with criticism early in life. Tell your children that they have ben sent to us by God and that our job is to love them and take care of them until they grow up. I treat them as if they are precious gifts loaned to me for only a short time. The child’s job is not to conform to his or her parents’ expectations, but to grow and flower and become everything s/he is capable of becoming. What your children are and what they become will be very much a reflection of who you are as a person. Superior parents look to themselves as the primary source of child’s behavior. When the parent begins to accept responsibility for the child’s behavior, real progress becomes possible in solving difficulties the child might be having. Almost all problems with children can be traced to the child’s perception that s/he was not fully loved and accepted by one or both parents. Love deprivation is surely the most serious problem that a child can suffer during his or her formative years.

Make it clear to your child that nothing s/he does could ever cause you to love him or her less than 100 percent. “I love you very  much, but you can’t do this, or you have to stop behaving like that.” Always make it clear that you are unhappy with the behavior, not with the child. Everytime a child hears the words “I love you” from his or her parents, the child feels more secure and confident. Children require four hugs per day for survival, eight hugs per day for health and twelve hugs per day for growth. Boys who receive lots of hugging and physical contact from their parents grow up to be strong, masculine and self-confident. There is a school of thought that holds that much of the extra aggressiveness boys show when they are growing up is related to this lack of hugging and physical contact., in comparison to that received by girls.  Quality time, those precious moments and experiences that you share with your child, comes as the result of spending large quantities of time with your child. And there’s no substitute for it. The most positive influence you can exert in your teenager’s life is to be the primary source of love, support and respect for your child. Praise is like an elixir, or tonic, to the psychological health of your child. When your praise and encourage your child for success, you motivate him or her to achieve even greater successes so s/he can get even more praise and encouragement. Praise gives your child the confidence to try even bigger and better things.

As your child’s self-concept diminishes, his or her level of effectiveness decreases commensurably. Criticism of any  kind can cause your child’s performance to deteriorate to the point where often s/he will avoid the activity altogether. High achieving young people grow up in homes in which their parents are continually telling them how much they believe in them and how confident they are that they are going to do good work and accomplish great things with their lives. It is important to convey to your children that, no matter how well or poorly they do, you love them totally and unconditionally. One determinant of excellent schoolwork is when and where the homework is done. Low achievers came from homes in which instead of taking active interest in helping children, parents sent the children to their rooms to do their homework.  If you ignore his or her homework, the child gets the message that they are unimportant and tends to ignore them as well. Children with high self-concepts, high self-esteem are independent in their thinking. When child feels terrific, S/he develops the ability to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the future. If you want your children to develop patience, calmness, poise and self-control, you need to be a model of these qualities, even under the most trying of circumstances.

Children are extremely sensitive to fairness and justice. They feel angry and hurt when they perceive that they have been treated unfairly or accused unjustly for any reason. When you apologize and say you are sorry to your children, you give them permission to admit that they also make mistakes. They don’t have to invest enormous amounts of emotional energy covering up and defending themselves as most adults do. If you treat your children with love, patience and understanding, you will reap the rewards all the days of your life. Ask if there is anything you do that s/he does not like.

Mastery : The Power of Love

Self-love and self-acceptance make it easier for you to gain greater self-knowledge and self-understanding. The law of belief states that whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality. The law of expectations states that whatever you expect, with confidence, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The attraction states that you invariably attract into your life, people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts. The law of correspondence states that your outer world will be a reflection of your inner world. The law of concentration states that whatever you dwell upon grows. The law of substitution says that you can replace a negative thought with a positive thought. Everything you do to raise your own self-esteem contributes to making you a happier human being. The amount of love and respect you have for others, and they for you, is in direct proportion to how much love you have for yourself.

You can resolve to accept yourselves unconditionally, no matter what you have done or not done in the past. The foundation of self-esteem is self-acceptance. When you become self-reliant, self-responsible individual, you refuse to blame or criticize others, or make excuses for things in your life that you don’t like. The very act of setting goal for yourself raises your self-esteem. The very act of setting the goal is the starting point of becoming the kind of person you want to be. When you treat yourselves well, you treat others well? If a person forgets and starts to take the relationship for granted, if s/he stops doing the things that signify and demonstrate love, the feelings of love can begin to diminish, and problems may begin to arise. Your ability to freely forgive other people, and to let the hurt go, is true mark of integrity, courage, character and a fully developed personality. Obnoxious or unpleasant behavior is usually a cry for help and understanding.

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