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Thinking Like A Winner - by Brian Tracy
After studying the research done in cognitive psychology over the last
25 years, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: The degree to which you
feel in control of your life will largely determine your level of mental
well-being, your peace of mind, your happiness and the quality of your
interactions with people. Cognitive psychologists call this a “sense of
control.” It is the foundation of happiness and high achievement. And
the only thing in the world over which you have complete control is the
content of your conscious mind. If you decide to exert that control and
keep your mind on what you want, even when you are surrounded by
difficult circumstances, your future potential will be unlimited.
Your aim should be to work on yourself and your thinking until you
reach the point where you absolutely, positively believe yourself to be a
total winner in anything you sincerely want to accomplish. When you
reach the point where you feel unshakable confidence in yourself and your
abilities, nothing will be able to stop you. And this state of
self-confidence comes from, first, understanding the functioning of your
remarkable mind and, second, practicing the techniques of mental fitness over
and over, until you become a completely optimistic, cheerful and
positive person.
Italian psychologist Dr. Roberto Assagioli left us two remarkable
pieces of writing, Psychosynthesis and The Act of Will. In those books,
Assagioli brought his remarkable intelligence to bear on the entire subject
of human potential and human happiness. He studied the mind and
personality for his entire lifetime, and he came up with several ideas that
are profoundly simple and powerfully effective in helping you and me to
lead happier, more satisfying lives. In The Act of Will, he laid out a
series of psychological principles, or laws, that can be very helpful to
you in understanding the way your mind works and how you can take
control of it.
The third of Assagioli’s laws is that images or pictures, either from
within or from the outside, will trigger thoughts and feelings
consistent with them. In turn, those thoughts and feelings will trigger
behaviors that lead to the realization of the pictures. For example, when you
become absolutely convinced that you are a total winner and you are
meant to be a complete success in anything that you really want to do,
every picture or image that you see that somehow represents winning to you
will trigger thoughts of what you could do to achieve that same state.
The picture will also trigger the feeling of excitement that will
motivate you to take action.
A friend of mine who was a sales manager had a simple technique to make
new salespeople successful, and it worked in more than 90 percent of
cases. When he hired a salesperson, he would take that person to a nearby
Cadillac dealership and force the person to trade in his current car on
a new Cadillac. The payments on the Cadillac would be substantially
more than the new salesperson had ever imagined paying, and he would
strongly resist getting into the commitment. However, the sales manager
would insist until, finally, the salesperson bought the new Cadillac and
drove it home.
No matter how unsure or insecure the salesperson felt, when his spouse
and friends saw the new Cadillac and he experienced the pleasure of
driving it down the street, he began to think about himself and to see
himself as a big success selling his product. And in almost all cases, it
turned out to be true. Those salespeople went on to become great
successes in their field.
Take every opportunity you can to surround yourself with images of what
success means to you: Get brochures on new cars; get magazines
containing pictures of beautiful homes, beautiful clothes and other things that
you could obtain as a result of achieving the success that you are
aiming for. Each time you see or visualize those images, you trigger the
thoughts, feelings and actions that make them materialize in your life.
Assagioli’s fourth law is that thoughts, feelings and images trigger
the words and actions consistent with them. This is another way of saying
that your inner impressions will motivate you to pursue the outer
activities that will move you toward the achievement of your goals.
Assagioli’s fifth law is that your actions will trigger thoughts,
emotions and images consistent with them. That has been referred to as the
Law of Reversibility. It is one of the most important success principles
ever discovered.
Simply, that law says that you are more likely to act yourself into
feeling than you are to feel yourself into acting. On many days, you wake
up feeling not as positive and optimistic as you would like. However,
if you act as if you already have the feeling that you desire, the
action itself will trigger the feelings and the thoughts and mental pictures
consistent with them.
In her book Wake Up and Live, Dorothea Brande said that the most
important success secret she ever discovered was this: “Act as if it were
impossible to fail, and it shall be.”
In the book, she goes on to explain that you need to be very clear
about the success that you desire, and then simply act as if you already
had it. Act as if your success were inevitable. Act as if your
achievement were guaranteed. Act as if there were no possibility of failure.
The wonderful thing is this: You can control your actions easier than
you can control your feelings. If you choose to exert control over your
actions, those actions will have a “back flow” effect and trigger the
feelings, thoughts and images that are consistent with those of the
person you want to be, of the person who lives the life you want to live.
There is a principle called the Law of Expression, which says that
whatever is expressed is impressed. This means that whatever you say,
whatever you express to another in your conversation, is impressed into your
subconscious mind.
The reverse of this law is that whatever is impressed will, in turn, be
expressed. It will come out. Your conversation reveals an enormous
amount about you, the kind of person you are and the things that you
believe about yourself and others.
In identifying those laws, one of the most important facts I discovered
is that your brain is a multisensory, multistimulated, extremely
complex, interactive organ. Everything that you think, imagine, say, do or
feel triggers everything else, like a chain reaction, or like a series of
electrical impulses going out in all directions and turning on lights
everywhere.
Let’s say that you are driving down the street, listening to the radio
and thinking about a variety of things. Suddenly, you hear a song that
you associate with an old romance that you had many years before.
Instantaneously, your brain reacts and re-creates all the sensations that
were present when you were with that person a long time ago. You
instantly get a mental picture of the person. You see and remember where you
were and what you were doing when the song was playing back then. You
feel the emotion that you experienced at that time. You recall what was
going on around you-the sounds, the season, the lights, the people and
the activities. You temporarily forget whatever you were thinking about
and are transported, in a split second, back across the years.
Sometimes, the emotion that you recall is so intense that it brings you close to
tears or fills you with happiness.
That is the way your mind works. By understanding that, you can make
your mind work for you as a powerful engine of growth and development.
You can consciously surround yourself with a series of sensory inputs
that bombard you with messages and cause you to think and feel like a
total winner.
Thinking like a winner is the first step to living like a winner. You
do become what you think about most of the time. You are not what you
think you are; but what you think, you are. In fact, you are what you
most intensely believe. And if you think like a winner and do the things
that winners do to keep their minds positive and optimistic, you will be
a winner.
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