Archives for July 2014

With so much negativity surrounding our every waking moment, it is easy to fall victim to the Negativity Loop – a habit of focusing on the negative. The Negativity Loop damages our ability to succeed in life. It actually works against us, preventing us from realizing success in life. It turns us into pessimists. To break this Negativity Loop we must make it a daily habit of focusing on those things in life that are going right in our lives. Starting today, make a list of everything that is going right in your life, starting with things that went right yesterday, last week, last month, last year etc. Keep adding to this list as new thoughts emerge from your long-term memory. This is important because it forces the neocortex (your executive brain) to shift your thinking from negative to positive. You give your brain a directive to search for happiness events, anything good that happened in your life, and like a dedicated servant, your brain goes to work searching its library of experiences and memories for good stuff. It won’t take longer than a week of doing this before you feel its affects – a shift in your thinking from negative to positive. This shift will help you see things in an optimistic light and shut down the Negativity Loop.

We’ve been conditioned by our education system that mistakes are bad. Too many mistakes and you can fail a course. Too many failed courses and you could find yourself being left behind a grade. This system continues in the workplace, where mistakes often mean lost revenue. Too many mistakes and you receive a bad review. Too many bad reviews and you could find yourself on the unemployment line. It’s a system focused on the negative. No wonder so many of us wallow in negative mindsets as adults. Mistakes should be embraced. They represent the true learning experiences. The only real purpose in focusing on mistakes is to learn from them and then move on to make more mistakes, and then continue to embrace each one like a precious learning experience. The truly best mistakes are the huge ones. They offer the best learning experience. Mistakes should be encouraged and met with positive emotions, not anger. After learning how the wealthy embrace their mistakes, I made a point in my own business and life to embrace mistakes, write them down and cherish them. I now keep a binder on all of the mistakes I make and then list next to each one the right thing I should have done. Start your own Mistake Binder today. Review it once a month so the education is reinforced. When we learn to embrace our mistakes it shifts our thinking from negative to positive and will help us move forward in life, one mistake at a time.

Neuroplasticity is the process in which the brain changes over time. Our brains have stunning powers of neuroplasticity well into adulthood. When we form a new habit, neuroplasticity occurs. Our brains become re-wired. By changing our behavior or by changing the way we think, we change our brains. None of us are locked into life’s circumstances due to our DNA. We can change. We can become smarter, better, a much bigger person well into adulthood. Neuroplasticity can enable the poorest and least educated the ability to change their circumstances in life by simply changing their behaviors and their thinking. We all have the capacity for success, no matter our age.

Visualization of an outcome does not work. Visualizing actions to be taken to reach an outcome is the only way to realize a goal, major purpose or lifelong dream. Seeing yourself complete the steps necessary in achieving your goals is the key to achievement. While keeping the end in mind is important, more important is the means to those ends. How you get there, the action you must take in achieving your goals, is what you should be visualizing and focusing on.

To the wealthy, relationships are like gold. Relationships are the currency of the affluent. Whenever they meet with an old or new acquaintance their objective is to gather as much information about their acquaintance as possible. They ask a lot of questions about the lives of their relationships and make a point of adding that newly mined relationship information to their contact database or cell phone’s contact information. One strategy that will help you turn this into a Rich Habit is to carry around a small notepad everywhere your go to help you gather this relationship information. Mine is incorporated into my wallet – see here: Wallet Crash #5: Tom Corley – Author of Rich Habits –  http://www.budgetsaresexy.com/2014/02/wallet-crash-5-tom-corley-author-rich-habits-rich-habits/ via @budgetsaresexy. The more you learn about those relationships that are important to you, the more opportunity you will have to grow and leverage those important relationships down the road. Start carrying around your notepad today everywhere you go. There’s gold to be found in every relationship. Start mining for it today!

One of the most important characteristics of the wealthy, which is responsible for so much of their success in life, is being open-minded. Without it they would be just like everybody else, poor or middle-class. Open-mindedness is what drives their thirst for knowledge and learning. The wealthy are continuously challenging their beliefs. A common response I got from many of the wealthy in my study was, “the more I learn the more I realize how little I know”. This is important mindset because it enables them to pivot quickly to see and take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. If they were stuck in ideological thinking, like 95% of the population, that part of the brain which is engineered to pick up such opportunities (the Reticular Activating System), would never be tuned in to see those opportunities. If you want to become wealthy and successful you need to be open-minded and challenge every one of your beliefs. You need to be open to new ideas and new thinking. You must cast aside the yoke of ideological thinking and pursue knowledge without prejudice.

Successful people invest in themselves. This investment takes three forms:

1. Taking a risk with their time and money, with a very uncertain outcome.
2. Devoting time, every day, to learning and perfecting a marketable skill.
3. Creating something of value to society.

These investments take time to bear fruit and often requires dedicating time every day toward this investment. This may come at the expense of doing pleasurable things in the short-term, but in the long-term the payoff means having more time and more money to enjoy life. Delaying gratification until their efforts pay off is a cost successful people are willing to bear for a better life down the road.