According to a study by Raj Raghunathan, Ph.D., Associate Professor with University of Texas McCombs School of Business, between 60-70% of self-talk is negative.

And, according to a landmark study by B.L. Frederickson, called The Broad and Build Study, this is a major problem. Negativity, they found, shuts down part of the neocortex, impairing focus, cognitive ability and lowering risk tolerance.

If you are pursuing success, a negative mental outlook acts like an neurological anchor, holding your brain back from optimal performance, thus increasing the odds you will fail.

The reality is, we are often too critical of ourselves. We obsess over mistakes and failures, thinking about them constantly.

The self-made millionaires in my study forged the habit of focusing on their successes in life. Instead of beating themselves up over mistakes and failures, they learn what they can from those mistakes and move on.

Positive thinking opens up your entire mind so that it can see opportunities and solutions rather than just problems. It toggles on the incredible powers of the subconscious mind’s Reticular Activating System, Insula and Thalamus.

These brain centers receive information from the environment through the five senses. If your brain remains preprogrammed for negativity, these brain centers will do their job and focus their search for negative things. As a result, they become blind to opportunities for success or solutions to your most pressing problems.

If, instead, you were to preprogram your brain for positivity, these brain regions will search the environment, via the five senses, for things that will help you realize your dreams and achieve your goals.

I discovered two tools the self-made millionaires in my study used to keep their mind positive, upbeat and optimistic.

The Victory Log  is a listing of all of your successes in life. Its purpose is focus on your successes and not your mistakes or failures. It’s a tool that stops your inherently negatively-biased conscious mind from focusing on the bad. It programs your subconscious to be success-focused and not failure-focused. It’s a psychological pat on the back and it works. Every time you screw up, pull out your Victory Log and begin reading. It will stop you from beating yourself up the rest of the day and prevent you from going negative.

Mistakes and failures are nothing more than valuable learning. They are not a reflection of your incompetence, lack of education, or some character flaw. They are just things to learn from. The Victory Log help put mistakes and failures in their proper context and keeps your mind positive.

A cool modification of the Victory Log is the Dreamer Victory Log, which I’ve written about before.

The Reward Strategy is another way to shift your habitual thinking from negative to positive.

Here’s how it works: every time you experience a success in life, no matter how small, reward yourself. This reward can be anything that you like. New clothes, candy, going out to dinner, the movies, buying yourself a gift, a milkshake, or in my case a Fosters Lager.

By rewarding yourself, you are reprogramming your subconscious for success. Your subconscious receives the message that success is good because it’s rewarded. This programming becomes part of the software code that directs the Reticular Activating System, Insula and Thalamus to begin seeking more success in life in order to receive a reward. Behind the scenes, your subconscious becomes a GPS, searching for opportunities and solutions, through intuition or gut feelings.

In my first job after graduating college, I commuted from Staten Island to New York City by way of the Staten Island Ferry.

Over one thousand people stood inside the ferry terminal, shoulder to shoulder, as they made their way onto the ferry.

I felt like I was part of the herd, and I immediately loathed it.

Outsiders rebel against the herd. And, according to my research data, so do self-made millionaires.

And my research has recently been corroborated.

In an amazing book called The Wealth Elite, author Rainer Zitelmann studied the daily habits of 45 wealthy individuals.

More than 50% of the self-made millionaires in his study had a habit of swimming against the current. They preferred to pursue their own individual path in life rather than be part of the herd.

Self-made millionaires refuse to do what everyone else is doing. That is because they do not want to be like everyone else. The way they see it, everyone who is doing the same thing seems to be eking out a living; just getting by financially in life.

And they want no part of it.

Outsiders find unconventional ways to make their fortunes. They thrive going against the majority. They create unique ways to earn money. They take risks that the herd would never take. They pursue dreams and goals that the herd believes are unrealistic. They are nonconformists.

Your dreams and goals are not unrealistic.

Unleash the rebel inside you. Separate yourself from the herd by pursuing your dreams and goals.

There’s safety and security inside the herd.

But outside the herd is where self-made millionaires are born.

What do you do in the aftermath of failure?

How do you respond to failure?

• Do you wallow in self pity?
• Do you cast blame on others?
• Do you search for excuses?

Those who become success stories, do two things:

#1 Self-Assess

After the emotions of failure subside, those who eventually succeed, go through a period of self-assessment. Their objective is to truly understand what went wrong.

They ask themselves certain questions:

• What went wrong?
• What was my role in this failure?
• How can I prevent this from happening again?

#2 Take Action

After this Self-Assessment period, the successful take what they’ve learned from their failure and that learning becomes another tool in their tool belt – something to propel them towards success.

They put that new learning to use by taking action; action that, in many cases, leads to eventual success.

Being honest with yourself about your failures is a Rich Habit. That honesty reveals all of the mistakes you’ve made. Those mistakes are not a negative thing – they are your new assets. Assets that are then deployed to help you become successful in life.

The only way out of failure is to embrace it. Learn from it. And then take action with the new knowledge you’ve gained from your failure.

One of the reasons self-made millionaires become rich, is they know something about goal-setting that isn’t generally known or taught. And this knowledge enables them to achieve 100% of their goals, every time, all the time.

Unfortunately, most people who set goals, grow frustrated or beaten down and eventually give up on their goals. That’s too bad because if they had just a little bit more knowledge, they could achieve every single goal they pursued. So, what do successful, self-made people understand about goal-setting?

They know that goals are not some future event, milestone, objective or desire.

That’s what dreams are.

Goals are goals when they have two things:

1. Some Physical Action and
2. 100% Achievability

A goal is achievable, only when you possess the requisite skills and knowledge necessary in order to achieve the goal.

It’s the 100% achievability part, however, which causes most to fail in reaching their goals.

Each goal is different. Some goals require minimum skills and knowledge. Others require a much higher level of skill and knowledge and should not be pursued until you improve your skills or increase your knowledge.

 

Example:

This is an exaggerated example, but follow the logic. Let’s say you are about to graduate from college with a pre-law degree. Your big dream is to become an attorney. In order to realize that dream, you must achieve specific goals behind that dream, namely:

1. Take the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT)
2. Score Well on the LSAT
3. Go to Law School
4. Graduate From Law School
5. Take the Bar Exam

Right after you graduate from college, you sit for the LSAT. Unfortunately, you receive a score that is too low and you are denied admittance into law school.

The reason you scored so low was because you did not possess the requisite knowledge to receive a sufficient score. So, that subsidiary goal of Taking the LSAT, actually required another subsidiary goal – studying for the LSAT.

So, you set a new subsidiary goal – Take an LSAT Review Course.

The review course requires that you devote six months in going to review classes, studying and taking practice exams.

After six months, you complete the review course, sit for the LSAT, and achieve a score that gets you into law school.

That’s how the goal-setting process works. You define some big dream, build goals around that dream and pursue each goal until you realize your big dream.

If, along the way, you lack some fundamental skill or adequate knowledge and fail to achieve one of your goals, you must stop and gain the requisite skills or knowledge until that goal becomes 100% achievable.

I spent five years studying the rich and the poor. As a result, I’ve accumulated an enormous amount of data regarding both groups.

I documented how the rich act, think, make decisions, manage relationships, assess and define risk, cope with adversity, pursue dreams/goals, and many other things. I actually have 346 data points that I tracked.

I thought it would be insightful to share some of the wisdom I documented that the rich shared with me: [Read more…]

According to the Tax Foundation, the top 5% in America makes $231,206 a year or more. This same elite group, according to the Federal Reserve Survey, also happens to control 60% of the nation’s wealth.

Like it or not, this 5% controls the lives of the other 95% in America. They call the shots.

So, who are the 5%?

13% are salesmen/saleswomen

18% are senior executives in big publicly-held companies

21% are “A” students

23% love to ski

24% had a career mentor

25% have a post graduate degree

25% travel as part of their job

27% failed at least once in life in business

28% have a professional designation

29% are “C” students

33% grew up poor or middle-class

36% have a vacation home by the ocean

41% are “B” students

47% went to a private college

47% went to private grammar school

51% are small business owners/entrepreneurs

52% have a second home

54% are optimists

56% worked their way through college

57% count calories every day

62% focus on goals every day

63% played competitive sports in high school

63% took a risk in order to become rich

63% watch less than one hour of T.V. a day

64% live in a modest home

67% are frugal

68% have a college degree

70% eat less than 300 junk food calories a day

72% have enough life insurance to replace their income

72% know their credit score

75% are creative

75% developed specific habits to help them become rich

76% exercise aerobically 30 minutes or more each day

80% pursued a major goal or dream in life

84% say they created their own good luck

85% like what they do for a living

86% associate with other rich, successful people

86% go out of their way to avoid negative, pessimistic people

86% work more than 50 hours per week

88% are savers

91% are decision makers at their job

93% who had a mentor, attribute their wealth to their mentors

94% balance their checkbook every month

94% engage in daily self-improvement

96% have ten or more friends who are successful

According to Psychologist Rick Hanson, Sr., fellow of US Berkeley, human brains are hardwired for negativity. This is known as Negativity Bias.

Negativity Bias is the habit of seeing things from a negative perspective.

There’s a good reason why this evolutionary hardwiring exists – negativity keeps the brain alert for dangers within your environment.

A hundred thousand years ago, this was critical to survival. Being negatively biased kept our internal radar systems in search mode for lions, tigers and bears.

However, we live in a very different world today. External environmental threats in the form of lions, tigers and bears are, for the most part, nonexistent.

Unfortunately, the evolution of our brains has not keep pace with the safety upgrades our civilized society affords us. As a result, our brains have held on to this vestigial trait known as negativity bias.

The bad news is that negativity is an insurmountable barrier to success. It is virtually impossible to become successful, as an entrepreneur, if you maintain a negative mindset. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Negativity suppresses your prefrontal cortex, which is critical for creativity, decision-making and seeing solutions rather than just problems.
2. Negativity creates chronic stress which causes inflammation throughout the body and can lead to diseases such as cancer. When you are battling health problems, it’s hard to focus on anything else, much less the pursuit of success.
3. Negativity makes you a toxic person. Other success-minded people, who embrace positivity, will see your negativity as toxic and will avoid doing business with you or associating with you. They will also warn their friends and peers to avoid you like the plague.

The good news is that it is 100% possible to reprogram your mind to eliminate negativity. Here are some ways to do that:

• Avoid Reading Negative News –  Journalists and publishers have hundreds of years of real world experience supporting the fact that negative headlines sell papers. Consequently, most of the media is focused on building headlines and articles that are negatively biased so they can get more readers and, thus, more advertising revenue.
• Read Only Upbeat News – This will dampen negativity and strengthen positivity inside your amygdala (limbic part of the brain which oversees many emotions).
• Listen to Upbeat Music – Music calms the savage beast. Music reduces stress and calms the mind. It also boosts the release of dopamine, one of the happiness neurotransmitters our brains love.
• Read Inspirational Books – Does very much the same as upbeat music.
• Associate With Upbeat People – This is easier said then done, especially if close family members and friends are inherently negative. But, just adding one upbeat friend can mitigate the effects your negative family/friends have on you.
• Meditate – I’m not good at this. It doesn’t work for me, however, the science is clear – meditation reduces stress and calms the mind.
• Exercise – Aerobic exercise boosts dopamine and certain hormones such as Brain Derived Neurotrophic and Endorphins. BDNF increases the myelin sheath around your neurons (brain cells), improving brain cell health and brain performance. Endorphins are only triggered during extended aerobic activity, meaning one hour or more.
• Express Gratitude Every Day – Start looking at the things you have and ignore what you lack. Gratitude is the gateway to positivity. Envy is the gateway to negativity.