Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  The way to really improve your life is to use more of your master mind, your subconscious powers, by understanding how to activate them. To do this, you need to know what your subconscious does and how it works.

  YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

  Your subconscious mind is like a huge memory bank. Its capacity is virtually unlimited. It permanently stores everything that ever happens to you. By the time you reach the age of twenty-one, you’ve already permanently stored more than one hundred times the contents of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Under hypnosis, older people can often remember with perfect clarity events from fifty years before. Your unconscious memory is virtually perfect. It is your conscious recall that is suspect.

  The function of your subconscious mind is to store and retrieve data. Its job is to ensure that you respond exactly the way you are programmed. Your subconscious mind makes everything you say and do fit a pattern consistent with your self-concept, your “master program.”

  Your subconscious mind is subjective. It does not think or reason independently; it merely obeys the commands it receives from your conscious mind. Just as your conscious mind can be thought of as the gardener, planting seeds, your subconscious mind can be thought of as the garden, or fertile soil, in which the seeds germinate and grow.

  Your conscious mind commands and your subconscious mind obeys. Your subconscious mind is an unquestioning servant that works day and night to make your behavior fit a pattern consistent with your emotionalized thoughts, hopes and desires. Your subconscious mind grows either flowers or weeds in the garden of your life, whichever you plant by the mental equivalents you create.

  Your subconscious mind has what is called a homeostatic impulse. It keeps your body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, just as it keeps you breathing regularly and keeps your heart beating at a certain rate. Through your autonomic nervous system, it maintains a balance among the hundreds of chemicals in your billions of cells so that your entire physical machine functions in complete harmony most of the time.

  Your subconscious mind also practices homeostasis in your mental realm, by keeping you thinking and acting in a manner consistent with what you have done and said in the past. All your habits of thinking and acting are stored in your subconscious mind. It has memorized all your comfort zones and it works to keep you in them. Your subconscious mind causes you to feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable whenever you attempt to do anything new or different, or to change any of your established patterns of behavior.

  Your subconscious mind functions like a gyroscope or a homing beam, keeping you in balance and on track based on the data and instructions that you have previously programmed into it.

  You can feel your subconscious pulling you back toward your comfort zone each time you try something new. Even thinking about doing something different from what you’re accustomed to will make you feel tense and uneasy.

  Applying for a new job, testing for a driver’s license after several years, calling on new customers, taking up a new, challenging assignment or approaching a member of the opposite sex and feeling nervous or awkward—all are examples of your feeling out of your comfort zone.

  A major difference between leaders and also-rans is that superior men and women are always stretching themselves, pushing themselves out of their comfort zones. They are very aware how quickly the comfort zone, in any area, becomes a rut. They know that complacency is the great enemy of creativity and future possibilities.

  For you to grow, to get out of your comfort zone, you have to be willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable doing it the first few times. If it’s worth doing well, it’s worth doing poorly until you get a feel for it, until you develop a new comfort zone at a new, higher level of competence.

  If you aren’t willing to face feeling clumsy and inadequate initially—in sales, in management, in sports, in personal relationships—you will get stuck at a low level of achievement. Your biggest battle is almost always with yourself and your biggest challenge is in breaking free of your old habitual ways of thinking and acting.

  In Chapter Two, I introduced seven mental laws and explained how everything that happens to you begins with your thoughts. In Chapter Three, I explained how your master program, your self concept, determines how you think in the first place, especially the origination of your fears. Your subconscious mind contains the hard disc where the instructions for these laws are stored. In addition, there are three more laws that help to explain who you are today, and why things happen to you the way they do.

  THE LAW OF SUBCONSCIOUS ACTIVITY

  The Law of Subconscious Activity states that any idea or thought that you accept as true in your conscious mind will be accepted without question by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious will immediately begin working to bring it into your reality.

  Your subconscious mind is the seat of the Law of Attraction, the sending station of mental vibrations and thought energy. When you begin to believe that something is possible for you, your subconscious mind begins broadcasting mental energies and you begin to attract people and circumstances in harmony with your new dominant thoughts.

  Your subconscious mind regulates the type of information from your environment that you will see, hear and be aware of. It will sensitize you to any information that you’ve told it is important. And the more emotional you are about anything, the more rapidly your subconscious will alert you to things you can do to bring it into your reality.

  For example, if you decide that you want to buy a red sports car, you will suddenly start to see red sports cars at every turn. If you start to plan a foreign trip, you will begin to see articles, information and posters on foreign places everywhere you go. Your subconscious mind works to bring to your attention the things you may need to make your desires a reality.

  When you begin thinking about a new goal, your subconscious takes this new thought as a command. It begins to adjust your words and actions so they are more consistent with your achieving it. You begin to do and say the right things at the right time to help you move toward it.

  As you change your self-concept, and your beliefs about your possibilities, your subconscious mind gradually makes you feel more comfortable, more confident as the new, better person you are becoming. You actually create a new comfort zone for a better, higher level of personal performance.

  THE LAW OF CONCENTRATION

  The Law of Concentration states that whatever you dwell upon, grows. The more you think about something, the more it becomes part of your reality.

  This law explains much of success and most of failure. It is a paraphrase of the Law of Cause and Effect, or sowing and reaping. It says that you cannot think one thought and get a different result. You cannot plant oats and get barley. Successful, happy people are those who have developed the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing, and to stay with it until it’s complete. They discipline themselves to think and talk only about what they want, and to keep their minds off what they don’t want.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A man becomes what he thinks about most of the time.” Effective people guard the doorways of their minds diligently. They remain focused on what’s really important to them. They dwell on their desires for the future and refuse to entertain their fears and doubts. As a result, they seem to accomplish extraordinary things in the same amount of time that the average person spends just living from day to day.

  When I became excited about my own personal development, I went from focusing on too little to reading and getting involved in too much. I scattered my energies everywhere. I diffused my focus. I was busy, committed and overactive. I was positive and excited about many possibilities and I was negative and critical about others. I was like a car careening from one side of the road to the other, often ending up in the ditch.

  I eventually learned that “more is less.” I learned that the Law of Concentration is very powerful and that I couldn’t be working on several things at once and end up doing any o
f them particularly well.

  So I cut back. I stopped every activity except for the one or two that were most important to me. Most of all, I disciplined my thinking and dedicated myself to concentrating on and talking only about what I really wanted.

  Here is a test for you: For one day, twenty-four hours, see if you can think about and talk about only the things you want. Resolve to keep your conversation free of all negativity, doubt, fear or criticism. Discipline yourself to speak cheerfully and optimistically about each person and each situation in the world around you.

  It won’t be easy. It might not even be possible for you, at first. But this exercise will show you how much of your time and energy is spent thinking and talking about things you don’t really want. This exercise, repeated, will open your eyes and prepare you to get the most from the ideas coming in the chapters ahead.

  THE LAW OF SUBSTITUTION

  This is one of the most important of all the mental laws. It is an extension of the Law of Control. It states that your conscious mind can hold only one thought at a time, and that you can substitute one thought for another. This “crowding out” principle allows you to deliberately replace a negative thought with a positive thought. In so doing, you take control of your emotional life. This law is your key to happiness, to a positive mental attitude and to personal liberation. It can change your relationships, your conversations and the predominant content of your conscious mind. Many people have told me this law alone has changed their lives.

  Your conscious mind is never empty; it is always occupied with something. By using the Law of Substitution, you can replace any negative or fearful thought that may be troubling you. You can deliberately substitute a positive thought in its place.

  This powerful method of mental control is how you keep your mind calm and at peace. You choose to think about something uplifting, like your goals, whenever you are faced with a situation that would normally upset you.

  In using the Law of Substitution to change your mind from negative to positive, the fastest way is simply to stop talking and thinking about the problem and to start talking and thinking about the solution. Focus your mind on what can be done in the future rather than what has happened in the past.

  Thinking about a solution is inherently positive. When you think about what you can do, what action you can take, rather than dwelling on what has happened, your mind becomes calm and clear in an instant. Thinking about someone you care about, or your next vacation, is another way to use this law. Your objective is to find ways to keep your mind positive by consciously choosing to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. And you are always free to choose your thoughts.

  One of the most powerful things you can say, over and over, to build your self-esteem and improve your overall self-concept is, “I like myself! I like myself! I like myself!”

  Whenever things go wrong, or you feel unhappy for any reason, you can neutralize the feelings with the words “I like myself.”

  Every time you say, “I like myself,” and especially when you say it with enthusiasm and conviction, your subconscious mind accepts it as a command. It then works to override and cancel any previously recorded messages you may have taken in that are inconsistent with high self-esteem and peak performance.

  Many of our seminar graduates have transformed their personalities by simply repeating “I like myself!” fifty or one hundred times every day. You’ll feel good about yourself the first time you say it, and as you repeat it over and over, you’ll feel better and better.

  ACCELERATING SUBCONSCIOUS ACTIVITY

  In Chapter Three, on the master program, we talked about several methods of self-concept development, and how you could take control over your own personal evolution by saturating your mind with messages and inputs that are consistent with the person you want to become.

  The methods of visualization, affirmation, verbalization, acting the part, associating with the right people and feeding your mind with the appropriate books, tapes and articles are tested and proven ways to change your thinking about yourself and your possibilities. They work consistently and predictably. They should become as natural to you as you go through your day as breathing in and breathing out.

  These techniques of mental programming are similar to the commands you use when you are operating a computer. They are straightforward and effective, and they enable you to get results faster than in any other way. They are indispensable to your personal and professional growth.

  But they are not enough. They are “basic commands.” There are even faster working methods. Just as there are “power commands” in computer programs that allow you to accelerate the process of generating output, there are a series of special techniques you can use to greatly speed up the process of subconscious reprogramming. These techniques enable you to change your self-concept and your attitudes of mind at a speed that is often amazing. And since your outer world quickly reflects your new inner world, you immediately begin to see changes in your external reality.

  In times past, many of these principles and techniques were guarded and only made available to a small number of carefully selected people. Some of these methods of rapid reprogramming have only been developed in the last few years. The one thing they have in common is that they have been proven to work by countless thousands of people through the ages. They are the keys to the lock in the door of personal transformation.

  To benefit the most from these techniques, you need intense, burning desire for personal improvement. You need the ability to trust, and to persist patiently, confidently, knowing that there is a cumulative effect to all of your efforts, and that you will ultimately achieve the riches and rewards that you desire.

  THE DISCOVERY OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS

  The first giant step in the field of personal transformation was made by Doctor Emile Coué in Geneva in 1895. His clinic was achieving recovery rates averaging five times faster than any other similar hospital or clinic in Europe. His technique was so simple that for a long time, it was not believed or accepted. He simply taught each of his patients to say, “Every day in every way, I’m feeling better and better.”

  The doctors and nurses would greet each patient by saying, “Every day, in every way, you are looking better and better.” As simple as this sounds, it worked wonders in bringing about rapid healing and recuperation from a variety of major and minor illnesses.

  The success of Dr. Coué led to further work by a German doctor, Johannes Shulz, on methods to accelerate healing. Dr. Shulz was a psychologist and was looking for ways to help people overcome depression, neurosis, anxiety and other mental conditions that were interfering with their happiness. What he discovered was that the more relaxed one was while talking to oneself and saying, “Every day in every way, I’m feeling better and better,” the faster one recovered.

  Dr. Shulz eventually developed the process known as “autogenic (self) conditioning.” He found that if you used a systematic process to relax the patient and then encouraged him or her to visualize and affirm positive, constructive messages, the new information seemed to go straight to the subconscious mind, and once it was accepted by the subconscious, rapid and noticeable improvements in physical and mental health could be seen.

  Over the years, autogenic conditioning was developed extensively in Europe and it is now extremely popular in most European countries. It has reached such a sophisticated level today that it is now used to help people with a variety of things, from mental disorders of all kinds to sales effectiveness, public speaking and athletic training.

  The East Germans developed autogenic conditioning to the highest level of any country in the world. Their techniques were so advanced that they were treated as state secrets. By using these techniques, the East Germans won more gold medals per capita in the Olympics than any other country in the world. Autogenic conditioning enabled them to program their athletes to perform at extraordinary levels.

  One of the reasons autogenic conditioning works so
well is that it uses a vitally important mental law, the Law of Relaxation. This law states that “in all mental working, effort defeats itself.”

  This is the opposite of the way things work in the physical world. If you wish to drive a nail into a board in the material realm, the harder you hit the nail, the faster and deeper it will penetrate.

  However, if you wish to develop a new pattern of thought, the opposite is true. The more you relax, or “don’t try,” the faster the thought seems to be accepted by your subconscious mind and the faster the physical result of the thought or goal appears in your world.

  Here is an example of a technique based on the principles of autogenic conditioning and relaxation that has had an incredible impact on my life and the lives of many others. It is so powerful it should be taught to everyone. It is almost infallible in enabling you to achieve your goals. It will enable you to conquer worry and fear and to generate feelings of calmness, confidence and self-control.

  This technique is based on another application of the Law of Reversibility. You recall the first application of this law. It states that, just as feelings generate actions, actions generate feelings. You can act your way into feeling, and the feeling will then generate the actions consistent with it. Either one can create the other. This is an essential aspect of accessing your master mind and unlocking your potential.

  The second application of the Law of Reversibility is that, just as an objective state, an actual accomplishment or a success of some kind, creates a subjective state, the feeling of happiness and achievement, the subjective state will also create the objective state.

  To put it another way, if you can create the feeling, or the emotion, that you would experience if you accomplished a goal or solved a problem, and you can hold that feeling, the feeling will create, in your physical world, the result that goes with it—the result that would trigger the emotion if the result had actually occurred.