Determination and belief are the starting points for success. They open you to new opportunities to do and be anything you desire, and you only need a subconscious thought to plant the seed. How do we do this?
The first and most important element of success is to ...open your mind.
A closed mind seals off creative solutions and eliminates any possibility for new opportunities. A closed mind keeps you where you are in life, where you always have been, and will continue to be. A closed mind creates:
• Constant struggle to achieve or get ahead,• Constant conflicts and obstacles, the ever-present resentments that rear their ugly heads for each new situation you encounter,
• Remorse of not doing or having what you truly dream, and
• The envy you feel each time you meet, read or hear about someone more successful than you, knowing you should be in that person’s shoes.
None of these feelings are conducive to success. Envision wild horses pent up in a corral. They yearn to be free. As long as the fences are up and the gate is locked, the wild horses that desire freedom more than life, itself, will never be free. What does this do to them? They become angry and willing to trample the person who caged them, just to get free. They blame and resent their keeper for their situation. Each time they see other horses roaming free in the distance, all their anger, resentment and hatred surfaces; and they envy the freedom of the other horses. Now, see these wild horses as you and your dream for success, corralled and caged by your closed mind. Can you see how, as the horses, you become angry, resentful, hating, and envious? Can you see how a closed mind and the emotions it provokes affect your reactions to situations? Wild horses will kill their keeper for freedom and react viciously at seeing other horses that are free. What reactions do you have to situations, where you feel anger, resentment or blame?
All the horses need to gain their freedom is to unlock and open the gate. All you need do to be on your path to achieving success is to open your mind.When you truly open your mind, the anger, resentments, hatred and envy are gone; however, it takes some work on your part. Let’s look at how the mind works.
A thought, just like an action, is energy in motion. Emotional thoughts carry even more energy. When you create a thought, especially one you feel emotional about (such as your dream of success), you have created energy that goes out to the universe1and allows you to explore, create and grow the thought. The process takes care of itself.
We all have thoughts, but we don’t all achieve our dreams. That’s because thoughts may be negative or positive in nature. Even thoughts you believe are positive may, in truth, be negative to achievement. For example, your dream is to own a new home. The thought you constantly hold is, “I want to buy a new home.” This sounds like a positive thought, but it’s actually keeping you from getting your new home. Why? The phrase “I want” keeps you wanting to buy a new home, rather than actually buying it. So, you continue to want to buy it — never achieving your goal.
1 We use the term “universe” in this book to include all readers. The term could just as easily be God, Allah, Yahweh, or any other source you believe controls this universe in which we live.
Focus is another problem in how thoughts are formulated in our thoughts. You constantly think about that new home you “want” to buy. You look at different homes and floor plans, comb the “for sale” home classifieds, pick out the color you’ll paint the outside, look at landscaping ideas, and so on. You would believe that this is a positive focus, because it keeps the goal constantly in your mind and you actions are that of someone who is buying a new home. The problem, however, is that the focus is on “getting” versus “doing”. Rather than moving toward your goal, you are dreaming about it.
(We’ll cover both of these negative thought patterns, as well as other elements covered in this chapter, and how to make them positive in the chapter entitled, “Rewriting Your Reality”. Here, we want to emphasize the power of your mind, and how thoughts create your reality.)
With an open mind, you plant the seed, distance yourself from it, and let the universe do the rest. You must, however, be open to all possibilities without exception. That means only positive thinking, no attachments, and no labeling.
An open and positive mind allows the universe to act upon your inner thought energy and create that which you seek. It’s like watching a little miracle take place. It can astound you, when you realize it’s happening.
Years ago, after a divorce from a financially irresponsible spouse, Beth wrote down goals for her children and herself — to have enough food on the table, a good roof over their heads, and a decent car to drive in ten years. Many years later, she was preparing to close on a townhouse and had just picked up a new car. Then, it hit her — she remembered those long-ago goals that she hadn’t even thought of since. She counted the years and was amazed. The closing on her house would be exactly two months shy of ten years from the divorce date. Beth realized then that she should have written in five years instead of ten!
As you can see, distancing yourself from the goals and just working toward them brings success. Beth determined; then, she believed, because she could do no less for her children. She just kept working to do better. The process took care of itself. Yet, Beth never saw it coming, until it already had arrived. However, Beth probably missed a lot of opportunities along the way and went through a lot more struggle, because she wasn’t consciously moving toward her goals.
Let’s look at some elements of thinking that hold us back from consciously moving toward success.Energy Expands
Your thoughts become energy. If your thoughts are negative, the energy is negative; if positive, then the energy is positive. When emotions become involved with the thoughts, the energy is even stronger. The energy, however, doesn’t remain dormant — it expands. It expands each time you think your thought. Remember our example, “I want to buy a new home.” The more you think this thought, the energy expands and builds, and the stronger the thought becomes. Dreaming of your “want” builds the energy more.
As energy builds and gains strength, it begins to attract like energy. Like a magnet, the energy attracts other like matter to it. Since the energy is inside you, it attracts the like matter to you. If your thoughts lean toward the negative, then you are attracting negative matter — dead end jobs, horrible bosses, bad relationships, never achieving that which you most want, constant struggle, conflicts, built up anger, and so on. Whereas, if your thoughts are positive, you attract positive outcomes and situations.
As you can see, negative thoughts and energy weaken you and your ability to achieve. Positive thoughts and energy empower you. Whatever you think, you attract back to you in greater degrees. Literally, your thoughts do create your reality. Evidence is all around you. Are your thoughts negative or positive? Do negative or positive situations, events and people surround you?
Beyond Thoughts. If your thoughts and the energy attached to them are negative, what type of speech and actions will you put forth? Negative! What is inside you (thoughts) is how you respond to life. If your thoughts are negative, then your speech and actions are negative, too. Likewise, if your thoughts are positive, then so is your speech and actions, which also add to the building and attracting of like energy.
For example, if you keep “wanting” to buy a new home, you become frustrated, angry and begin to blame others for not achieving your goal — not paid enough at work, lenders won’t give you a break, and so on. These emotions spill out into your speech and actions, especially your reactions. A lender turns you down, and you become angry. He might have planned to tell you what you needed to do to become eligible or suggest a particular lender who might be able to help, but you blew up and took your frustration out on him.
This is called a missed opportunity ... all because the negative built internally, spilled out at the wrong time, and at the wrong person. Your thoughts not only define your reality, but they define who you are and how you act, as well.
Enculturation ProgrammingAnother element of thinking and having an open mind is our programming through enculturation. Enculturation is our environment from the time of our birth to this moment. It includes our culture, friends, the people we have met along the way, family (especially, our parents), authority encounters (teachers, police officers, etc.), education — virtually every person, place or thing we have encountered within our lifetime!
That’s a lot of influence, and this influence has a way of programming our minds to be something other than who we truly are. It causes prejudices, dislikes, and believing certain things are “right” while others are “wrong”. It leaves many choices unexplored, many opportunities missed, and many pathways labeled as “wrong”.
Enculturation programming, especially at an early age by your parents and family, enable you to fit within your culture, your community, and the type of life they expect you will have. It’s done with the best of intentions. Some is done outwardly. Some is subconscious. Most is done, because their parents did it to them. We accept it in our youth, rebel against it in our teens, and usually do it to our own children because it helped us turn out okay.
Some of this programming is necessary to keep us safe, healthy and sane. However, a lot of it clogs our thinking and suppresses creativity. It’s this part that causes a closed mind, holding you back and keeping you attached to the past. Once you can let go of this programming, doors of possibility and success open to you.
A lot of this mental programming is easy to recognize. Each has a recorded tape that runs in your mind. Do you ever catch yourself sounding just like your mother or father? Say a phrase your grandmother always said? Do something, because someone else always did it that way? Feel a particular way about someone or something, because that’s the correct way to feel? Become repulsed by something, because you’ve always felt that way? These are all programming tapes. You need to begin recognizing them and eliminating them from your mind.
Programming causes attachments to the past — essentially, attachment to the programming that was done in the past. These attachments cause negative thoughts, limiting self-speech, limiting actions and responses, and the need to “be right”. None of these traits are conducive to being open or to achieve your goals.
Self-Speech. This is what we mentally say to ourselves and to others about ourselves. It limits us by our own self-labels.“I’m not good enough to do that job.”
“I’m not attractive enough to get that girl to date me.”
“I’m too shy.”
“I always fail at that.”
“My father was right. I’ll never amount to much.”
“My pastor says we’re not deserving of good things. God will provide
These are only a fraction of the negative things we say to ourselves. You could probably list many pages of your own limiting self-speech. Most comes from our programming, as the examples above. From there, we create our own negative labels about ourselves. In this wonderful world in which we live, it’s amazing how very few people truly like themselves. Their self-speech defines them, just as surely as it defines their reality. It’s called a ...
self-fulfilling prophecy — you say you are, and so you become!Self-fulfilling prophecies, usually from your early programming, causes the doubt and fear whenever you wish to take a leap of faith and risk something. They pull you back to your comfort zone and keep you in your corral. They keep your expectations for yourself, others and events low, including limiting your capabilities, talent, potential and opportunities. They keep you from listening to crazy schemes that just could be your path to success. Your parents would never have considered such schemes, and you’re not about to either!
Need to Be Right. This is a symptom of attachments and enculturation programming, generally from a very influential person, such as a parent. Whether you believe it or not, you have to be right! The programming is so strong that it’s a conditioned reflex. You’ll argue your point until you’re blue in the face. Ever have a time when you wondered why you argued about the topic at all — it wasn’t even important to you afterward, or you could actually see the other person’s point? This is a result of programming; and unfortunately, doesn’t make you many new friends (unless, they are forced to be around you).
To have an open mind and achieve your goals, you must let go of this need to be right, the limiting self-speech, the programming, and the negative thoughts. You may determine to achieve a goal, but all of this negativeness will keep you from believing it.
You cannot develop an open mind without a bit of mental work. We provide exercises at the end of each chapter to help you. The results of the exercises you do here are used in later exercises. Don’t worry about your answers — no one else need see them. Be as honest as you can be. It will assist you greatly to take a spiral notepad and use as a journal for this work. You may find it helpful in later months to have your notes to review from time to time.
Exercise #1 — Examine Your ThoughtsLook at your current situation and the success you seek.
• Write down in your journal your success goal (if you have several, choose only one for the exercise and use it for all the exercises within this book).
• Make several copies of the table on page 16.• For the next seven days (do not skip any days), jot down all negative thoughts, speech and actions you have in the first column of your table, whether you believe they may affect your goal or not. Use as many pages of tables as needed. At first, you won’t always catch yourself. As the week passes, you’ll begin catching your negative thoughts, speech and actions more often.
What:Using the table from Exercise #1, do the following:
• For each negative listed in column one, determine if it came from programming, from whom, and how you may have caused the situation.
• Then, determine what self-speech you contribute to keeping this programming alive within your life and why you need to be right about it. Begin the “need to be right” statement with, “If I’m not right, then ...” The example continues on the next page.
See an example of a completed table on the next page.
Once you have completed all the exercises in the
book, you may wish to continue Exercises #1 and
#2, until you begin to see the negative thoughts,
speech and actions substantially decrease. Keep
them in your journal.
