Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (28 page)

In
idealization
, you consider each of the key areas of your life and imagine what each would look like if that area of your life were exactly as you would want it to be, in every respect.

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SHOW ME THE MONEY

Start with your income. How much do you want to be earning one, two, three, and five years from today? Look around you and ask,

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are they doing differently from me?” If you don’t know or you aren’t sure, go and ask them. Do your homework.

What knowledge, skills, and abilities would you have to have to be able to earn that amount? What kind of work would you, or could you, be doing to achieve that kind of income? What position will you have in your company? How high up will you have to be in your field or profession? If you are in sales, how much will you have to be selling, and to whom?

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DESIGN YOUR PERFECT LIFE

Imagine your perfect lifestyle. If you had no limitations at all, how would you like to live, day in and day out? If you were financially independent, what kind of home would you like to live in? What kind of car would you want to drive? What kind of life would you like to provide for your family? What sort of activities would you like to engage in throughout the week, month, and year?

How much time would you want to take off on vacation, and where would you like to go? What would you like to do? What sort of activities do you most enjoy? If you were forced to take a month off from work and you had all the money you needed, how would you spend that time?

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FAMILY PLANNING

Involve your family in your design of an ideal lifestyle. Make this an ongoing part of your relationships. The more people get a chance to discuss a course of action, the more committed they will be to whatever is finally decided.

Some time ago, a good friend of mine sat down with his wife and children to discuss the fact that he was working too much and not spending enough time with the family. They imagined how they would spend their time as a family if they had no limitations. Everyone contributed ideas, including the young children.

As a result of this exercise, they made some decisions about both time and lifestyle. They decided to move out of the city to a larger home with a bigger yard in the country. He reorganized his workweek so that he worked four days per week in the city, 10 to 12

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hours per day, and then worked only three or four hours on one day in his office at home in the country. He ended up spending much more time with his family and getting far more satisfaction out of life. The best part was that both his results and his income actually increased with this new plan.

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TURN YOUR IDEAL INTO REALITY

When you sit down and design your ideal lifestyle, you can then compare it to what you are doing today and notice the differences.

You can then start thinking about how you could bring your
real
or current lifestyle closer to your
ideal
.

When you idealize your income and your lifestyle, you develop a vision for your life. You begin to practice a key quality of personal leadership.You begin projecting into the future and making plans to turn your future dreams into a current reality.

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HEALTH AND FITNESS

You should idealize about your health, as well. Imagine your health was perfect in every way. How would you be different from today?

Exactly how much do you want to weigh, and what level of fitness do you want to enjoy? How does that compare with where you are today? What steps will you have to take, and what changes will you have to make in your health habits in order to become the ideal person that you desire to be personally? This description then becomes your ideal future vision for yourself.

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THE PERSON YOU BECOME

Create an ideal future self in terms of your personal and professional development. What kind of a person do you want to be in the future? What additional knowledge and skills do you want to acquire? In what areas would you like to become absolutely excellent?

What subjects would you like to master? What do you need to learn to move to the top of your field? What is your growth plan to get from where you are to where you want to go?

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YOUR MISSION STATEMENT

When you conduct personal strategic planning for yourself, you always begin with a
mission statement
. This is clear definition of exactly what you want to be and accomplish at some future date. To develop your mission statement, you project forward and imagine that you have been completely successful in achieving all your goals in a particular area.You then describe your life and activities in this area exactly as if they were already true today.

For example, your personal mission statement could be something like:
“I am a happy, healthy, positive person who does excellent
work, is paid extremely well, is highly respected by his customers and co-workers, and is deeply loved by his family.”
This kind of mission statement can then serve as an organiza-tional blueprint for your life. You can use it to make decisions by comparing what you are about to do to see if it is consistent with your mission. If it is not consistent with your mission, or with your ideal image of the very best person you could possible be, you would not do it.

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A BENCHMARK FOR

DECISION MAKING

I conducted a strategic planning session for a large corporation not long ago. The executives had more than 250 potential projects on their drawing boards. After we had defined the values, vision, and ideal mission of the company, they were immediately able to discard more than 200 of those potential projects. It was clear to everyone at the meeting that these projects were not consistent with who they were as a company and where they wanted to be in the future. This can work for you as well.

One of your problems today is that you are overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time. You have too many things to think about. You are swamped by too many problems, possibilities, and opportunities. When you idealize and become crystal clear about what your perfect life would look like sometime in the future, you will immediately start to make better choices in your day-to-day ccc_tracy_10_179-200.qxd 6/23/03 4:16 PM Page 185

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activities. You will immediately begin eliminating activities that are not consistent with where you really want to end up.

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A KEY TO HAPPINESS

A clear definition of your ideal, in any area of your life that is important to you, is the starting point of making better decisions in the present that will lead to greater success and happiness in the future.

As you feel yourself moving toward the achievement of a worthy ideal, you will feel happier and more confident. The more progress you make toward a clear goal or set of ideal conditions, the more energy and enthusiasm you will have.

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THE DEFINITION OF INTELLIGENCE

Some years ago, the Gallup organization interviewed 1,500 very successful men and women in a search for some of the common denominators of success. But when they asked them to define “intelligence,” they got an unexpected answer.

The top people in the survey defined intelligence not so much as IQ or good grades in school, but more as
a way of acting
. Intelligent behavior was defined as doing only those things that moved them toward their goals. They defined intelligence as the ability to systematically eliminate those time-consuming activities that did not help them to achieve their goals, or even worse, moved them
away
from their goals.

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GET SMART

Whenever you are doing something that is moving you in the direction of your own self-professed goals and ideals, you are acting intelligently. This is true irrespective of your education or your IQ.

This is why there are many people of average intelligence or who did poorly in school who are accomplishing far more than people with university degrees. These high achievers focus more and more of their time and energy on activities aimed at accomplishing only those goals that are most important to them.

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PUT IT IN WORDS

The second part of this five-step process is for you to
verbalize
clearly the person you want to be, the things you want to do, and the goals you want to achieve. You verbalize with positive affirmations. Because you can completely reprogram your subconscious mind with affirmations, by using them repeatedly you will find that your potential is unlimited.

The Law of Subconscious Activity says that whatever you repeat over and over to yourself in your conscious mind will eventually be accepted by your subconscious mind. Once your subconscious mind accepts your conscious thoughts as commands, it passes them on to your superconscious mind, which then works 24 hours a day to bring those goals into your life.

With positive affirmations, you can take full control over the content of your conscious and subconscious minds. You can activate all your mental powers. You can tap into a great universal mind that can help you to move more rapidly toward your goals of higher income, better health and relationships, and greater success in your field.

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THE THREE Ps OF

POSITIVE PROGRAMMING

A positive affirmation is phrased using the “three Ps.” This means that for maximum effectiveness, an affirmation should be
personal
,
positive
, and stated in the
present tense
.

Your subconscious mind is like a special computer. It can be accessed and activated only with words and commands that are presented in a specific language. It accepts only positive commands that are phrased in the personal, present tense, as though the goal has already been achieved. It knows no past or future tense.

My favorite affirmation is,
“I like myself!”
repeated over and over again in a spirit of complete confidence. When you repeat, “I like myself!” several times per day, you send this message deep into your subconscious mind. The more you like yourself, the higher will be your self-esteem. The higher your self-esteem, the better ccc_tracy_10_179-200.qxd 6/23/03 4:16 PM Page 187

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you will perform in every area of your life. The more you like yourself, the better you will do, and the better you do, the more you will like yourself.

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BECOME YOUR OWN CHEERLEADER

To improve your performance in your work, or in any other area requiring skill or ability, continually repeat the words,
“I’m the best,
I’m the best, I’m the best!”
By talking to yourself as if you were already the person you want to be sometime in the future, you become your own cheerleader.You will then find yourself doing better and better at whatever you attempt.

Another powerful affirmation you can repeat every morning before you start off is,
“I love my work!”
Sometimes when you wake up in the morning, you won’t feel particularly excited about the coming day. But you can take control over your mind and emotions by repeating, “I love my work!” until it actually feels true.

Even better, you can start every day with the words,
“I like myself and I love my work!”
This affirmation, repeated enthusiastically several times every morning, will rev you up and get you excited about getting to your job.

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CONTROL YOUR SELF-TALK

Fully 95 percent of your emotions are determined by the way you
talk
to yourself. Dr. Martin Seligman’s book
Learned Optimism
says that your “explanatory style” is the critical factor in determining whether you are a positive or negative person.

Your explanatory style is defined as
how you explain things to
yourself
. If you explain or interpret things to yourself in a positive way, you will be positive. If you explain them in a negative way, you will be negative. What Seligman concluded is that optimistic people, when something goes wrong, always explain the event or experience to themselves as though it were a temporary, specific situation, rather than a long-term, general condition.

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of time. If you are a
positive
person, you will say something like,

“Well, it’s just one sales call.” This makes it temporary. You will say, “The customer is probably having a bad day.” This makes it specific. You then say, “I’ll be more successful on the next call.” This focuses you on the future. When you dismiss temporary setbacks in this way, you keep your mind positive. You remain confident and optimistic.

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DON’T TAKE THINGS PERSONALLY

When
negative
people experience problems, setbacks, or difficulties, they interpret them differently from confident, optimistic people.

When they fail temporarily, which is inevitable, they immediately interpret this as a personal statement about their deficiencies. If the sales call is not successful, they say, “I must be a terrible salesperson. The product is no good. Customers are not interested in what we have to sell. I’ll never succeed in this field.” In other words, they overgeneralize and overdramatize a small failure rather than dismissing it as a temporary setback and going on to the next call. They interpret the experience negatively. It then has a negative effect on their self-image: “I’m no good.” Their work performance declines and they do even worse next time.