Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  Many people have had the experience of losing a job they didn’t like and then going out looking for the identical job somewhere else. I remember losing my job as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a hotel, which was not a great job, and then spending the next few months applying for dishwashing jobs in other hotels.

  It’s vital that you be aware of this homeostatic mechanism. It’s nature’s way of keeping you consistent with the way you’ve been in the past. But all growth and progress requires you to move out of your comfort zone in the direction of something bigger and better. Greater success and happiness are only possible for you when you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable during the process of creating a new comfort zone at a higher level of effectiveness.

  Beware the siren song of old habits, of the comfort zone, luring you to stay where you are, holding you back from all the great things that are possible for you. You must consciously and deliberately counter the pull of the comfort zone as you move upward and onward toward ever higher levels of accomplishment.

  PSYCHOSCLEROSIS

  The second major obstacle to change is a “hardening of the attitudes.” This is rooted in fear, as is much of the homeostatic impulse. Psychosclerosis is your natural tendency to fall in love with your own ideas, and then to vigorously defend them against anything new.

  The opposite of psychosclerosis is flexibility, the willingness to consider other points of view, other ideas, with the very real possibility that you could be wrong.

  This mental flexibility is the mark of the superior person. The very act of considering all options in a particular situation enables you to see much more of what is possible for you. Instead of using your intelligence to find fault with alternative approaches, you suspend judgment long enough to see if you can’t find something beneficial in a different idea, or in a new way of doing things.

  This approach is essential in mental programming, in changing your mind for the better. A major reason people fail to move forward in life is that they become too rigid and inflexible in their ideas, especially in their ideas about themselves and what is possible for them. They then dwell on all the reasons why something would not work for them, rather than why it would. They act as their own prosecuting attorneys, building the case against themselves, and you as well, if you let them.

  A major turning point in your thinking comes when you change your language from “whether” to “how.” When you start thinking about how you are going to accomplish something you want, and you simultaneously refuse to consider whether it’s possible or not, your entire mentality begins to change. You do get what you think about most of the time, and if you continually think in terms of how you can achieve it, and the specific actions you can take to move toward it, you are much more likely to be successful in the end.

  THE POWER OF LOVE

  Much of what you do is done either to get love or to compensate for lack of love, beginning in early childhood. The emotion of love exerts an enormous influence on your every choice and decision. Your self-ideal, the guiding mechanism of your self-concept and the regulator of your behavior, can be understood as your idea of the kind of person you need to be to earn the love and respect of the people you care about. Your self-esteem, what Dr. Nathaniel Branden calls “your reputation with yourself,” is largely determined by how lovable and valuable you appear in your own thinking.

  Many personality problems are rooted in “love withheld.” Your adult personality is largely formed by the amount and quality of love you received during your formative years. Almost everything you do today—the goals you set, the dreams you have, the commitments you make—is influenced by the power of love in your life.

  In fact, you are inevitably drawn toward the people whose love you both want and need, and you are inordinately influenced by their opinions. When you begin the process of reprogramming your mind, everything you do must be consistent with increasing the amount of love and respect you have for yourself, and that others have for you. Only in this way will you be continually motivated to make the effort necessary to become the person you are capable of becoming.

  Who are the people whose love and respect are most important to you? What do you have to do and who do you have to become for them to love and respect you? These are core questions for a happy life.

  THE POWER OF SUGGESTION

  Second only to the power of love in determining how you think and feel is the power of suggestion. Your multidimensional mind is affected by everything that is going on around and within you. Your suggestive environment has an immense impact on everything you become and on everything that happens to you. Any change in your physical, mental or emotional environment can change the way you think, feel and act in moments, and thereby change your results.

  You are immediately influenced by changes in temperature or noise level. You are instantly affected by conversations or confrontations with other people. One unkind remark can put you off for the whole day. One bit of good news can make you happy and cheerful for hours.

  Unfortunately, unless you control them carefully, most of the suggestions in your environment will tend to be negative. The radio, television and newspapers are full of “negative sensationalism.” Most conversations are filled with carping, complaining and condemning. Most people have developed the habit of “ain’t it awful” thinking and talking. Their conversations are negative and critical.

  The key to your mental programming is for you to take systematic and purposeful control of your suggestive environment. It is for you to create a mental world that is predominantly positive and consistent with the person you want to be and the life you want to live. Controlling your suggestive environment requires that you decide the ingredients of your “mental diet,” for the indefinite future.

  There are three additional mental laws you need to understand to effectively reprogram your mind and change your future. They are the Law of Habit, the Law of Practice and the Law of Emotion. They contain vital answers to questions about success and happiness, and they point to many of the solutions that you are seeking.

  THE LAW OF HABIT

  Virtually everything you do is the result of habit. The way you talk, the way you work, drive, think, interact with others, spend money and deal with the important people in your life are all largely habitual. Your behavior in every area of life is based on the accumulation of all your experiences, starting in infancy. Probably 95 percent of your actions and reactions are automatic, unconscious responses to your physical and human environment.

  Your habits are major obstacles to your becoming the kind of person you want to be. Your habitual ways of thinking, feeling, talking and behaving are often roadblocks that stand between where you are today and where you really want to go. They keep you “running in place.”

  The Law of Habit is a vitally important mental law. It explains the comfort zone and success and failure as well as any other single principle. It has its counterpart in physics in Newton’s first law of motion, which states that a body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in motion tends to remain in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force.

  Your thinking and behavior are subject to the same principle. In the absence of an outside force, or a definite decision on your part to do something different, you’ll keep on doing very much the same thing indefinitely.

  You’ll work in the same job, associate with the same people, eat the same foods, take the same route to work, engage in the same leisure activities, watch the same television, read the same books and live very much the same kind of life.

  Habits are only good as long as they serve you, as long as their effect is to continually enrich and improve your life. It is when your habits become the major obstacles to your happiness that you have to modify them or change them completely.

  Some people have developed the habit of being late for appointments or late completing assignments. But successful people are invariably punctual and dependable. People can rely on them. Successful people keep t
heir commitments. And they respect the time of others by not inconveniencing them.

  Others have the “television” or “newspaper” habit. They spend inordinate amounts of time each day watching television or reading the newspaper. Often they do both at the same time.

  The most dangerous habits you can form, however, are mental habits. Because of the fact that whatever you think about continually you create in your life, your negative or self-limiting thoughts hurt you more than almost anything else you can engage in.

  Your habitual modes of thinking are absolutely the most important things in your life. As Shakespeare wrote, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” You live in a mental world. Nothing around you has any meaning except the meaning you give it with your thoughts. If you change your ways of thinking, you change your life.

  Success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, are largely the result of habit, of the automatic ways you respond and react to what’s going on around you. Changing habits that are no longer consistent with your higher purposes is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, and one of the most essential to the quality of your life. But unless you’ve already reached some level of excellence or perfection, you are living today with habits that you must discard if you are going to move forward. Remember, bad habits are easy to form, but hard to live with; good habits are hard to form, but easy to live with. Your job is to form good habits and make them your masters.

  THE LAW OF PRACTICE

  The good news is that all habits are learned, and they can therefore be unlearned. You are today, in every respect, the result of your conditioning, almost like a laboratory animal. You have been trained, or have trained yourself, to be the person you are, and to get the results in life that you’re getting. Your training began before you were old enough to know what was going on, and you are today the result of the training you have engaged in over the years.

  You can change if you want to. The Law of Practice states that whatever thought or action you repeat often enough becomes a new habit. You can develop any habit you consider desirable or necessary. You can become the kind of person you want to be if you can discipline yourself to think and act in a way that is consistent with your new, higher ideals long enough for them to become new habits. This is how you become a new and better person.

  Because your outer world corresponds to your inner world, as you begin to develop more constructive ways of thinking and behaving, people and situations around you will begin to change, sometimes in the most remarkable and unexpected ways.

  A friend of mine was involved in a messy lawsuit over a business matter. The more angry he became, the more determined and unreasonable became the other party, and so did his lawyers.

  He finally decided to change his thinking. He deliberately let the whole situation drop out of his mind. He began to think charitably and compassionately about the other party. When the subject came up, he refused to allow himself to become involved or upset. He let it go.

  Within a few days of his deciding to change his thinking about the lawsuit, the other person called, apologized for any misunderstanding or bad feeling, and proposed a reasonable solution. Instead of their going to court, the matter ended peacefully.

  The new president of a fast-growing company was convinced that one of the executives he had inherited was playing politics and deliberately manipulating people and situations so he would appear to be more competent and more valuable to the organization than he really was.

  The new president was on the verge of letting the executive go when he decided to change his thinking. He deliberately chose to reinterpret the behaviors of the executive in a favorable way. He then examined every action of the executive from the viewpoint of his being a loyal employee acting in the best interests of the company.

  Somewhat to his surprise, he found that the executive’s behavior was much easier to both understand and appreciate from this perspective. He saw that the executive, far from being political in his behaviors, was extremely competent and was running interference for the new president in areas in which he was not yet familiar. The relationship between the two changed immediately, for the better, right after the president changed his thinking and began assuming the very best of intentions on the part of the other man.

  Your ability to take control of your mind and begin thinking the kind of thoughts that lead to the outcomes you desire is the starting point of the process that leads to complete freedom, happiness and self-expression.

  THE LAW OF EMOTION

  Your emotions are the energizing forces behind your thoughts. The more intensely you feel something, the greater effect that thought or circumstance will have on your life. Emotion is like an electric current, or fire, which can be either constructive or destructive, depending on how it is used.

  The Law of Emotion states that 100 percent of your decisions and subsequent actions are based on emotion. You are not largely emotional, or 90 percent emotional and 10 percent logical, as has been assumed. You are completely emotional. Everything you do is based on an emotion of some kind.

  Before I understood this point, I used to think I was doing the logical thing, the practical thing, the thing that “made sense” in a variety of situations. When I learned about the Law of Emotion, I realized that I was really a slave to my emotions, especially if I didn’t take time to think about which emotions had the upper hand in a particular situation or decision.

  Here’s the key point: There are only two main categories of emotions: desire and fear. Most of what you do, or don’t do, is determined by one or the other. And the things you do, or refrain from doing, because of fear greatly outweigh the number of things you do because of desire.

  Most people are immobilized by fears of all kinds. They fear poverty or loss. They fear criticism or disapproval. They fear ill health. They fear being taken advantage of. Above all, they fear failure and rejection to the point where they are willing to “lead lives of quiet desperation” rather than to risk having any of their fears realized. Most of the population lives this way, most of their lives.

  The more you desire or fear something, the more likely you are to attract it into your life. A thought without an emotion behind it has no power to influence you one way or the other. An emotion with no thought to guide it causes frustration and unhappiness. But when you have a clear thought, positive or negative, accompanied by an intense emotion of either fear or desire, you activate the various mental laws and begin drawing whatever it is toward you.

  This is why it is so important for you to keep your thoughts on the things you want and keep them off the things you fear. Happy, effective men and women recognize the power of their thoughts and they are very emphatic about keeping them positive and constructive. Your mind is so powerful that you must control it with great firmness so that it is continually moving you in the direction you want to go, or it will move you away from your desires.

  Changing your self-concept is not easy. It may be the hardest thing you ever do. And the most valuable. But it is not a matter of choice. Once you have made the decision to do something important and valuable with your life, to achieve your own ideal of personal greatness, you absolutely must go to work on changing your own mentality.

  THREE ESSENTIAL CONDITIONS FOR CHANGE

  There are three requirements for developing a new self-concept. These are the keys to changing the direction of your life. First, you must sincerely want to change. You must really want to become totally positive toward yourself and your possibilities. You must have an intense, burning desire to be more than you’ve ever been before.

  Often, people ask me what they can do to get others to change. I remind them that the starting point of change, of accomplishing anything different or better, is desire, and desire is always personal. You can’t want something for someone else, just as you can’t set goals for someone else. It isn’t that change isn’t possible, it’s just that it requires desire on the part of the person who expects to c
hange, or it won’t take place.

  It’s like the question, “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer is, “Only one, but the light bulb must really want to change.”

  The starting point of your becoming a new and better person is for you to feel that the change is desirable or necessary, or both. The change, the goal, the new personality quality must be consistent with your values, your ideals and the person you would really like to be.

  Second, you must be willing to change. Many people say they want to change, but, in their hearts, they are not really willing to give up the old life, the old associations and everything else that goes with them. One person may want to be healthy but may not want to give up cigarettes. Another person may want to be financially successful, but may not want to give up having a good time every night with his or her friends.

  You must be willing to let go of the old person in order to become the new person. You must be willing to stop doing certain things, even if your friends disapprove, in order to start doing the things that are consistent with the new you. You must overcome the twin obstacles of homeostasis and psychosclerosis, of the comfort zone and of inflexible thinking.

  Third, you must be willing to make efforts. You must be willing to persevere for a long time without much evidence of progress. What you are aiming for is a fundamental long-term improvement in your life. It’s taken you many years to become the person you are. You must be willing to work very hard to become someone different.

  MENTAL POWER IN TWENTY-ONE DAYS