The Psychology of Achievement by Brian Tracy

The Psychology of Achievement by Brian Tracy

Many people have described this program as “Getting another chance at life”

Let’s start by answering the question: What do we mean by success?

There are Six Requirements for success:

1. Peace of mind – Freedom from fear, anger, and guilt. Going to sleep completely at peace and harmony and waking up the feeling the same way.
2. High levels of health and energy – we must be healthy or it won’t be satisfactory
3. Loving Relationships – long term intimate relationships which are the hallmark of success
4. Financial Freedom – enough money that we don’t worry about not having enough money.
5. Worthy goals and ideals – we cannot function as humans without having worthy goals and move toward them
6. Feeling of personal fulfillment – Maslow’s “self actualization”

Why is it that people still lead lives of quiet desperation? Less than 5% achieve real success in life. 80% of people who retire, retire flat broke, penniless and dependent on someone else. We live in a world that provides the most opportunity to prosper, achieve financial success and psychic fulfillment.

One reason – we come into the world with no instruction manual, no directions for getting the most out of ourselves. We spend the vast part of our lives trying to figure “it” out and by the time that we do figure “it” out, we are in our 50’ and 60’s.

Basic rules or laws that operate our human machine:

1)  The Law of Control – the degree of control we feel we have is in direct proportion to the amount of mental health that we have and the level of fulfillment we feel we have achieved. We feel good about ourselves to the exact degree to which we feel we have control over our lives. Conversely, we feel unfulfilled and have a deficient level of mental health when we feel we have little if any control over our lives.

Control begins with our thoughts which lead to our feelings.

2)  The Law of Accident – any fact that there is no way that we have control. Unfortunately a vast majority of us live our lives in this mental state. We fail to plan and therefore, plan to fail. We have no sense of control.

3)  The Law of Cause and Effect – for every effect in our lives there is a specific cause. Irrespective of knowing why something happens, there is a cause for everything. This is consistent with the law of control and opposed to the law of accident.

There is one major application of this law – Thoughts are causes, conditions are effects. We control our lives by our thoughts; if we wish our lives to change in the future we have to change the way we are thinking in the present.

Three Mental Laws in addition to these laws:

1)  The Law of Belief: Whatever you believe with feeling becomes your reality. You are the sum total result of all your belief system to this moment and your beliefs form a screen of logic, a screen of prejudices through which you see the entire world. What you believe becomes real for you. Bible – “As a man thinketh ….., according to your belief…. .” This law is so powerful in our lives that even if we have belief on totally false information it will have a total impact on our lives. The most important single application – if we have self limiting beliefs, irrespective of whether or not they are based on reality, the degree to which we believe them determines or predicts if they will become true for us. Most of the beliefs that we have that limit us are based on false information, from childhood onward. Our minds rule out or block out what we do not believe even if they are false.

2)  The Law of Expectations: Whatever we expect, with confidence, becomes our own self fulfilling prophecy. We are continually acting as our own fortune tellers by the way we talk to ourselves, about how we think things are going to turn out in our lives. People who enjoy high levels of accomplishment are continually talking to themselves and visualizing their success.

Three key areas where expectations affect our results

·  The expectations our parents had of us has an impact on us and how we perform today. As adults, the expectations of our bosses have a dramatic impact on how we think of ourselves and how we perform in our workplaces.

·  Expectations we have of our children, our spouses, our subordinates, and the people who look up to us. People who look up to us always try to fulfill the expectations we have of them.

·  Expectations that we have of ourselves, whether they are high or low, whether they are positive or negative. That is why it is so important that in everything that we do to always expect the best from ourselves, always expect ourselves to continue to grow to get better, to improve, to throw off past mistakes and failures because we will always fulfill our own mistakes, we will always be the fortune tellers in our own lives.

3)  The Law of Attraction: Each human being is a living magnet. We radiate thought energy and we invariably attract into our lives the people and circumstances that harmonize with our dominant thoughts. Our lives are right now today surrounded by our representations of our thought patterns. If we wish to attract different people, circumstances, events, we have to change what is going on in our minds and thought patterns. These happen by law and not by chance!

Attitude – since we know that we become what we think about, the most distinctive characteristic or manifestation of what we are thinking about is our attitude. A positive mental attitude is an absolutely indispensable prerequisite for our success!

Our attitudes come from our expectations about outcomes. If we expect things to turn out well, we have positive attitudes. If we expect things to turn out poorly, things have a tendency to turn out that way.

Even when our expectations are false, even when we manufacture our own positive expectations, even though we have no information upon which to base it, if we make a habit to always expect something good to happen, our outcomes will improve and provide positive results.

Where do our expectations come from? Our expectations come from our beliefs about the world around us. In other words, our expectations are manufactured to the degree to which we believe the source. If a person that we trust and have their confidence tells us that we will be successful, then we are more able to believe it.

More importantly, where do our beliefs about ourselves come from? Our beliefs are based on our self-concept. Every single one of us has a self-concept which is the single controlling factor on our performance. We always perform in a manner consistent with our self-concepts. Our self-concepts precede and predict our levels of performance and effectiveness in everything that we do. We can never perform in a manner that is inconsistent or contradicts that self-concept. Our self-concept is a culmination of all our ideas, thoughts, pictures of ourselves that have happened to us over the course of our lives that comes together to form a competent image of the person that we believe ourselves to be. We always act in a manner consistent with our self-concept.

Two Very Important Mental Laws:

1)  The Law of Concentration – whatever you dwell upon becomes what you experience; whatever you think about on a continuing basis becomes a part of you and part of your experience. You become what you think about and the more you concentrate on it, the more you bring it into your life.

2)  The Law of Substitution – Because the conscious mind can only hold one thought in your mind at a time, either positive or negative, if we consciously and deliberately substitute a negative thought with a positive thought then that is what will grow in our lives. All success begins with our taking systematic purposeful control of the thoughts that we allow to occupy our conscious minds. If we keep our conscious minds focused on where we want to go and what we want to accomplish that is what begins to come into reality in our lives. The most positive thing we can do for ourselves is to think “I like myself, I like myself, I like myself” and then it is impossible to fill our minds with the things we fear.

The Process of changing our thoughts from negative to positive thoughts:

The Psychology of Becoming – nobody stays the same for any period of time. We are continually evolving and growing as human beings and we are always changing in the direction of our ideal self, of our dominant thoughts and our dominant goals.

Our job in this process is to keep very clearly in our mind a picture of the people we would like to be and the goals we would like to accomplish.

Two Habits of Mind we must carefully avoid if we are going to continue to grow and evolve toward the full development of our potential:

Homeostasis – the condition of clinging to the status quo, the unwillingness to let go of the past, the desire to keep things exactly the way they are. The whole idea of change is scary and our natural tendency is to dig in and resist change. We must be willing to let go of the old person and to become the new person and to make efforts in that direction.

Psychosclerosis – Hardening of the attitudes. A case that sets in when we become rigid in our thinking, we become inflexible and dogmatic and we will not allow any change to come into our lives.

These two maladies hold us to be our original selves and they prohibit our growth. In order to continue growing we have to let go of our old selves and decide to change our minds by developing new patterns of thinking about our selves. It only takes something like 10 to 21 days to develop brand new habit patterns of thought. We do it by thinking and talking and acting continuously in the manner consistent with the person we would like to be with the attributes and characteristics we would like to have.

Techniques we can use in terms of moving towards or becoming our ideal person:

·  Form a clear mental picture of how we would be and how we would behave with the new characteristics and attributes.

·  We begin to think about ourselves as though we already have those qualities and characteristics.

·  We begin to look at other people and think of other people who have those qualities and characteristics and see us acting that way.

·  As we begin to do that we begin to change our self image by replacing the picture that we have in our mind of the individual with the negative habit pattern with the picture of ourselves with the positive pattern that we wish to develop.

Three methods we can use to accelerate this process of personal development:

1)  Affirmation – positive present tense affirmations gives us unlimited potential! Affirmations are positive assertive statements that say yes to our potential. It is repeating these affirmations over and over again strongly with feeling, with confidence, with belief, with enthusiasm that drives them deep into the subconscious.

The Law of Subconscious Activity – whatever the conscious mind believes and accepts, the subconscious mind immediately goes to work to bring into our physical reality. The subconscious mind is a mechanical agent that acts and obeys our instructions. Our instructions are always the content of our conscious minds.

Our lives are directed by the content and quality of our thoughts just like we turn the steering wheel on a car. Our thoughts have inordinate power on the people around us, a magnetic energy that actually causes change in individuals around us. We have to keep talking to ourselves as though we already have what we desire.

Affirmations in order to be accepted by the subconscious mind, always have to be couched by the Three P’s:

·  Personal – It has to be “I”. We cannot say you or somebody else, we always have to talk in the first person singular.

·  Positive – The subconscious mind cannot take in an instruction that is a negative. For example, we don’t say “I don’t eat desserts any more.” We say “I only eat foods that are healthy and that are consistent with a slim trim figure.”

·  Present Tense – We cannot say “I will earn $100K per year.” We say “I earn $100K.”

With regard to affirmations, when we write out our goals and rewrite our goals we also write them as though they exist right now, as though they exist in the present moment, rather than at a future time.

2)  Visualization – the most powerful single capability that human beings have is visualization. Visualization is the ability to form a clear, precise, vivid, mental picture of the things that we want to be, have or do and to hold that picture very clearly in our minds. Whatever ever you can picture in your mind and hold on to you can accomplish.

Napoleon Hill said “whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.”

Einstein said “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”

The key to visualization is to already have a clear mental picture of what you want.

Prior to every critical situation, take a couple of minutes to play a clear mental picture of the ideal you in the upcoming situation. See a clear precise picture of yourself and see exactly what your result will be.

In sales, for example, actually create a mental picture of the client signing the deal. Always visualize the result at the end of the situation.

3)  Act the Part of the Person that we would like to be – with the characteristics/attributes we would like to have. If we feel in a certain way, we tend to act that way. Our inner feelings become our outward expression. However, even if we do not feel enthusiastic, we can act our way into feeling enthusiastic, we can pretend that we are enthusiastic and, within five or ten minutes we will feel that way and have the feelings that are consistent with that action.