Posts Tagged ‘Napoleon Hill’
What’s so good about a MasterMind Group?
A MasterMind Group is sometimes known as a peer group mentoring forum or a Boardroom forum.
These groups simulate the many different roles that it takes to run a successful business and giving a business owner independent advice from people with no hidden agenda.
I often get asked, “Why would anyone want to join a mentoring group with people who know nothing about each other’s businesses?”
There are three excellent answers to this:
1) The product or service a business delivers may be different but the process of running and growing a business has many generic activities. Almost everyone who starts a business has had experience of other businesses and brings many skills and lots of expertise to a group.
2) The process used in the most successful MasterMind Groups produces a situation where solutions are created from the combined efforts of the group members and do not rely on one person’s pre-existing knowledge.
and
3) One of the major benefits of a well run MasterMind Group is accountability. The members commit to certain actions and keep each other on track.
If people have heard of MasterMind Groups its usually in relation to Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich”.
Hill established that many of the successful people he interviewed in the 1930s attributed part of their success to meeting with a peer group on a regular basis to discuss ideas and create new solutions to problems. He describes the process as ” When two people come together to discuss ideas it is a s though a third person appears with ideas that the others would not have thought of on their own.”
What do a potter, a metalworker, a doctor an engineer and a preacher have in common?
There are many wonderful examples of MasterMind Groups working to create success for their members but for me, one of the most powerful examples occurred long before Napoleon Hill wrote his famous book.
When the potter is Josiah Wedgewood, the metalworker is Matthew Boulton, the doctor is Erasmus Darwin, the engineer is James Watt and the preacher is Joseph Priestly the ideas produced quite literally changed the world.
Steam trains, electricity, canals, mass manufacturing, the discovery of new gases, processes and materials accompanied dramatic social and educational reforms in the middle of the 18th Century that brought about the Industrial Revolution and great wealth but for the original group of friends the support they gave each other was crucial.
Known as the Lunar Society because they met when the moon was full to aid their journeys, these men worked together to break down physical, social and educational barriers.
The internet has brought down even more of these barriers and made it easy to collaborate, to produce great ideas and to take the idea of MasterMinds to new levels.
When Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich” he meant think as in develop the ability to think, to process ideas and solve problems. By rich he meant not just monetary wealth but knowledge, discipline and fulfilment of potential.
All of this is achieved by mastery of the mind.
A Master Mind Group is exactly that: an opportunity for you to develop mastery of your mind, to think and grow rich with the support of a peer group.
If you would like to join us or have questions about how to get involved, just give me a call on 07711 705038.
Posted in Mastermind Groups | 
Tags: 1930s, Boardroom, Business Owner, Generic Activities, Group Members, Growing A Business, Hidden Agenda, Independent Advice, Josiah Wedgewood, Mastermind Group, Mastermind Groups, Matthew Boulton, Mentoring Group, Napoleon Hill, New Solutions, Peer Group, Preacher, Successful Business, Third Person, Well Run | 
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Are you Dreamer or an Achiever?
In the 1920′s and 30′s, a young journalist called Napoleon Hill, interviewed 500 of the most successful people in America. He found that people who create success have many things in common. These are some of them as described in his best-selling book, “Think and Grow Rich”
- Decide what you want. Desire is the starting point of all achievement. Desire is a crazy mad emotion that you absolutely have to satisfy, not a rational reasoned argument for doing something.
- Believe that you can get what you want. Self doubt will prevent you from taking action. No-one is born with a sense of what they can’t do. Limiting beliefs are learned and they can and must be unlearned. It is usually easier to overcome other people’s judgements than our own.
- You don’t have to do it all yourself. As Mother Teresa famously told Bob Geldof, “I can’t do what you do and you can’t do what I do but together we can change the world.” Surround yourself with people who can do what you can’t and who respect you for what you can do. Start or join a MasterMind Group with like minded people.
- Make practical use your imagination. Work out how to turn your dreams into reality. Everything, everything, starts out as an idea. Ideas are the beginning point of all achievement but they need to be harnessed into practical action.
- Create a plan, organise your ideas and take continuous action. Most people put more effort into planning a holiday than planning their life. Successful people don’t just react to things that happen to them, they question whether something will take them closer to their goal before acting on it or rejecting it.
- Avoid procrastination and make decisions. The ability to make decisions comes back to understanding exactly what it is that you want, to the burning desire and definite purpose that underpins all achievement. Successful people in all walks of life decide quickly and firmly and the world has a habit of making room for the person who knows where they are going and why.
- Persist. Things will go wrong, people will let you down. If your desire is strong enough you will find a way through all difficulties to achieve your desire. Don’t keep doing the same things and expecting different results. Find different ways to achieve your goals. Paulo Coelho was committed to a mental asylum by his parents three times and subjected to electro-convulsive therapy because they thought he must be mad to want to become a writer instead of a lawyer. He persisted and his book, The Alchemist, sold over 40 million copies.
- Aquire power and learn how to use it. The ability to lead others in a spirit of harmony to achieve a definite objective is a major source of success but successful people say that personal power and self mastery are most important.
- Understand that sex is the most powerful of human desires. When this desire is harnessed into a creative process it can be the source of genius. It can also be a huge temptation and has destroyed many great people. Successful people say that they are able to transmute its power into a creative force that helps them to produce and action ideas that in many instances makes their fortunes.
- Learn to use the power of the subconscious mind. Everything we have ever experienced is kept in the vast storehouse of our sub-conscious. It can work for or against us but when we learn how to harness this power it makes us unstoppable. What we think of the world and ourselves makes us not only who we are but who we can be.
- Develop and learn to trust the ‘sixth sense’. Intuition can help us to avoid dangers and grasp opportunities. Intuition is part of our nature and many successful people admit that intuition is a big part of their success including Donald Trump, Oprah, Richard Branson and even Bill Gates. Einstein and Edison described their creative process as having original ideas that didn’t come from the rational foundation of the mind. Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, says, ‘The intuitive mind tells the logical mind where to look next.’
- Deal with fear, the major obstacle to achievement. Almost every feeling of fear we experience is as the result of an IMAGINED situation, not a real one. In almost every case, the imagined situation that we most fear never happens. When a situation that we had feared actually materialised, most of us deal with it without any real consequences. The only thing holding most people back is their own imagination!
Is it ever too late to do the things you once dreamed of doing?
Mary Wesley, best-selling author, took up writing at 70
Charles Darwin’s first book wasn’t published until he was in his 50’s
Colonel Sanders was in this 60’s when he franchised Kentucky Fried Chicken
Ray Kroc was in his 50’s when he launched McDonalds
Agatha Christie was 62 when she wrote The Mousetrap
Julia Child was 50 before she took up cooking professionally
Benjamin Franklin was 78 when he invented bifocals.
Life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years. There is no longer an official retirement age. If you go to college at 40 and qualify at 45 you could still have half your life left to work at what you love. It’s never too late to become an achiever instead of a dreamer!
Posted in Inspiration | Tags: Best Selling Book, Bob Geldof, Burning Desire, Continuous Action, Decisions, Definite Purpose, Dreamer, Emotion, Habit, Journalist, Judgements, Like Minded People, Many Things, Mastermind Group, Mother Teresa, Napoleon, Napoleon Hill, Nbsp, Procrastination, Self Doubt, Use Your Imagination, Walks Of Life | No Comments »
How to be Unique in Business
To be unique in business you just need a good idea!
Where do good ideas come from?
Some people are creative and some people aren’t, right?
Look, we can prove it:
Put your palms together, interlace your fingers, note which thumb is on top.
If your left thumb is on top of the right one you are very creative.
If the right one is on top you aren’t. Do you believe that?
The exercise above is a complete lie. It’s just made up.
Everyone is born equally creative but the older we get and the more schooling we have, the more we believe we are either academic or creative but rarely both.
This isn’t a fault with us. It’s a fault with the system of education in most western cultures. The system is still based on the 19th Century requirement for factory fodder which needed people to do as they are told, start and end work in response to a whistle or bell, not talk to each other or collaborate and accept a judgement on their aptitudes and abilities based on a very narrow set of tests.
How do you think a child feels when they are told at school that they’re not very good at drawing, or singing or playing an instrument? Mostly they believe it. They often believe it for the rest of their lives.
Creativity is most often associated with the arts but scientists and engineers are amongst the most creative and innovative people in the world and yet most education systems segregate the arts from the sciences so that students have to choose to be one or the other.
The work of Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein and Mozart all display a mix of art and science and are designated ‘genius’.
“Most great achievers are practical dreamers” said Napoleon Hill in 1937 after interviewing 500 amazingly successful people. So why do we tell our children and our staff to stop daydreaming and get on with what they are ‘told’ to do? Do you believe that you are creative? Or do you believe that you aren’t? To paraphrase Henry Ford, whatever you believe, you’re probably right.
Lots of things could be open to you that you believe might not be.
What does this mean for you if you are running a business?
Telling everyone about your great customer service doesn’t work. It’s what they expect.
Telling them you are passionate about what you do doesn’t work. Who cares except you?
Your products, your packaging or your pricing could be unique for a while but if they’re any good they’ll be copied.
Being unique is more than having a USP.
There are some great examples of people who have used their own unique style to stand out from the crowd:
The Wine Critic
Gary Vaynerchuck
increased the turnover of his family business by several million dollars by recording wine reviews on YouTube. His brash, straight talking style was so different to the elite mystique of the wine world that he stood out a mile just by being himself.
The Chef
In a world of bullying, egotistical chefs braying about ‘classical training’, young Jamie Oliver, an Essex lad to the core, scruffy, almost inarticulate and severely dyslexic made good, uncomplicated cooking available to millions of people. His vulnerability, curiosity and ability to connect to people through a shared delight in food has revealed a young man of exceptional values, who has grown into a great role and a powerful campaigner for social change.
The Accountant
Accountancy isn’t usually associated with fun but if you were to meet Kelly Anstee, a beautiful young woman who likes to party and who also happens to be an accountant, you might take another view of this world. Kelly connects with people on Facebook and Twitter by talking about music, parties and social gatherings as well as her work. The warmth of her personality shines and the referrals come tumbling in. Her employers at Tyrrell and Company in Cambridge are savvy enough to encourage her to just be herself and don’t try and make her fit the mould of traditional accountant and so everybody wins.
The Professional Speaker
The presentation that inspired this article was given by profession speaker, Ayd Instone. There are many thousands of motivational speakers in the world with slick PowerPoint presentations, a holier than thou attitude and a slew of improving proverbs but Ayd’s performance is unique because he doesn’t preach, he sings. He doesn’t borrow tired aphorisms, he writes his own thought provoking songs. Most importantly, he teaches creativity by being creative and does it all with a light touch that brings laughter and fun to his audience.
Innovation and creativity are often thought to be the result of a ‘eureka’ moment but they can also be the result of a ‘slow hunch’ that takes time and the right circumstances to develop. Finding the right people with whom to collaborate, regularly seeking ways to be inspired, being open to new ideas, taking time out for ‘re-creation’ are all proven ways of increasing creativity.
Making ‘space’ for creativity is important
This is increasingly being recognised as so important that a number of innovative ideas are growing to accommodate it, one of which is called a ‘jelly’. It’s an informal gathering of people who usually work alone who come together with no agenda, just to see who they meet and what’s going on. There is no obligation to talk to anyone or share anything but just being in a collaborative space can be very inspiring. There’s a great example of this at CamJelly at Ideas Space in Cambridge.
Ayd Instone asks these questions:
- How can YOU be more innovative and imaginative to create a better future?
- What untapped resources do you have, linked to your own uniqueness?
- What great ideas are lurking just our of your conscious reach?
Share your thoughts with us, add to the discussion, be creative!
Posted in 12 Steps to Success | Tags: 19th Century, Aptitudes, Art And Science, Creativity Test, Dreamers, Education Systems, Einstein, Fodder, Genius, Great Achievers, Henry Ford, Interviewing, Judgement, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mozart, Napoleon, Napoleon Hill, Palms, Paraphrase, Thumb, Western Cultures, Whistle | No Comments »
The Role of Sex in Success
We all know that sex sells almost everything and that PR and Marketing people are always talking about making messages sexy.
This can only work because sex is something most of us find interesting. If it wasn’t interesting, none of these sexy messages would work on us.
For many people sex has become a dirty word; a powerful and entirely natural human instinct has been exploited and used to make money and in the process has been degraded and made to appear shameful. This leads to a conflict. Sex is something we can’t help but be interested in and yet in most ‘polite’ societies it is not generally acknowledged as anything linked openly to success.
In the 1930s Napoleon Hill interviewed 500 of the most successful multi-millionaires in America. He found that people who create success have many things in common, one of which is a high sex drive, but the really interesting thing is how they described the extra edge this gave them.
Instead of using this most powerful of human drives simply as nature intended, these successful people all said that they were able to transmute its power into a creative force that helped them to produce and action ideas that in many instances made their fortunes.
While a high sex drive may or may not lead to determined action it is widely acknowledged that castration has the opposite effect in most species.
Controlling our urges
Sex and Money AdamHawkins anodizeproductions.com
Most of us have heard the debates about whether sports coaches allow their stars to have sex before a game or a match, many believing that the energy and passion associated with having sex can be transmuted and give their subjects a winning edge. While there is no conclusive proof that this happens, what is interesting is the discipline associated with not simply giving in to passions but in channelling thoughts and actions to a desired outcome.
Napoleon Hill cites George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Burns, Thomas Jefferson, Oscar Wilde, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson and Enrico Caruso as examples of people with a high sex drive who used it to great creative effect if not always in the disciplined way the subjects of his study describe.
The attitudes we have to sex in today’s media frenetic society may explain why not many high achievers in the modern world are keen to attribute their success to the same source but it is easy to find examples where the same drive that leads to great creativity is also used in a destructive fashion and families, businesses, fortunes and even countries have been destroyed as a result.
Sexy by Adam hawkins http://anodizeproductions.com
Women’s sexuality
Hill’s observation that the way women use their sex drive primarily to influence men is very controversial in the 21st Century and there are lots of double standards and hypocrisy about women’s sexuality. There are more examples of high achieving women now than when Napoleon Hill interviewed the subjects of his study but still no where the same number as high achieving men. Most studies suggest that this is more likely to be a result of social, political and economic factors than anything to do with sex drive or ambition.
Despite the fact that the media seems intent on reporting that high achieving women have miserable relationships and disappointing sex lives, these reports are not supported by any real evidence. One recent piece of research that proves just the opposite is a study of 500 couples that found that the highest levels of sexual satisfaction were among couples who both worked and experienced high rewards from their jobs.
If success is intricately linked to transmuting a high sex drive into taking action to bring creative ideas into being, how can it be used by a wide range of people? Given that sex is the most powerful driver in most human beings and most of the time is controlled rather than given free rein, we must all be transmuting our sex drive in some way. Perhaps the fascination with celebrity sex lives and soap operas is simply a voyeuristic way of indulging what we deny ourselves.
Sex and Creativity
Play by Adam Hawkins AnodizeProductions.com
Creative expression takes many forms and is another way of transmuting this powerful force but whether it is in creating a garden, an empire or a fortune there is no doubt that it is there for us to use and the only difference is in scale and both talent and ambition are an essential part of this.
So, the key to using sex as part of our formula for success is, as in most other things, discipline. Unfortunately, this had become another dirty word to many and history is littered with stories of successful and creative people who destroyed themselves because they lost control and allowed sudden passions to overtake their better judgement. The successful people that Hill interviewed all knew how to control their thoughts and desires and they consistently used all of their resources to take them closer to their goals.
To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. (Poem often attributed to Emerson but most likely to have been written by Bessie Stanley)
What do YOU think? Is the ability to use our sex drive creatively a major part of success in today’s world? Leave a comment below – I’d love to hear some other opinions on this.
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The other common factors in success that Napoleon Hill identified are:
- Define your sense of purpose and all-consuming goal
- Create the self confidence and belief that you can achieve what you desire
- Acquire the specialized knowledge that will achieve your goal
- Outwit the ghosts of fear
- Make practical use of your imagination
- Use organised planning to put desire into action
- Master procrastination and make decisions
- Develop persistence and overcome obstacles
- Acquire and learn how to use power
- Understand the role of sex in success
- Learn how to control the subconscious mind
- Develop your sixth sense to avoid dangers and grasp opportunities.
Posted in 12 Steps to Success | Tags: 1930s, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Bright Lights, Castration, Conclusive Proof, Creative Force, Debates, Desired Outcome, Dirty Word, Enrico Caruso, Fortunes, George Washington, Having Sex, High Achievers, High Sex Drive, Instances, Many Things, Millionaires In America, Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon Hill, Natural Human Instinct, Oscar Wilde, Passions, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Burns, S Media, Sex And Money, Sex Game, Sexy Messages, Thomas Jefferson, Washin, William Shakespeare, Winning Edge, Woodrow Wilson | 10 Comments »
Power – an essential ingredient for success
Photo by Adam Hawkins http://anodizeproductions.com
Who has power over you and how do you use your personal power?
Power and success seem to be inevitably entwined and yet successful people are the first to acknowledge that the most important part of this is to learn how to have power over themselves.
Self mastery of thoughts, emotions and actions are more important than any poerr we have over others.
There is much complexity behind power. Why do people comply with power? What motivates people to allow others to have power? It might be the promise of riches, a share in the power, or meeting other personal needs. It might be part of a plot to form a coup to wrest power from the incumbent.
From the reasons for compliance we learn much about personal motivation and reward.
What are the positive uses of power in business? What examples do you have of its use in creating success?
Posted in 12 Steps to Success | Tags: Ambition, Benefit, Business Point, Complexity, Compliance, Conscription, Coup, Emotions, Essential Ingredient, Failure, Harmony, Human Voice, Incumbent, Mayfair, Motivation And Reward, Napoleon, Napoleon Hill, Oratory, People Power, Personal Feelings, Personal Motivation, Personal Needs, Personal Power, Personal Success, Persuasiveness, Photo, Point Of View, Prime Ministers, Sacrifice, Self Mastery, Teenage Son, Tony Blair, What Motivates People, Why Do People, Winston Churchill | 1 Comment »
How to master procrastination and make decisions
Why making decisions is crucial to success
The procrastination I’m talking about is not about putting things off but rather about not making decisions. Until a decision is taken no action is possible and it is the lack of action that causes most failures. Procrastination is a complex psychological behavior that affects everyone to some degree or other. While it can be a minor irritation for some people it is a source of considerable stress and anxiety for others.
An analysis of over 25,000 people who had experienced some kind of failure revealed that the inability to make decisions was near the top of the list of reasons. (Napoleon Hill ‘Think and Grow Rich’)
Henry Ford was renowned for attributing his success to his ability to make decisions quickly and stick to them, often despite fierce opposition from his advisors.
Are you easily swayed by others?
If you find you are easily swayed by the opinions of others and constantly change your mind because you are afraid of what others might say or think about you, procrastination will cripple you and stop you from making a decision and more importantly, from taking action. The ability to make decisions comes back to understanding exactly what it is that you want, to the burning desire and definite purpose that underpins all achievement.
Leaders in all walks of life decide quickly and firmly and the world has a habit of making room for the person who knows where they are going and why.
Have you worked out how you make decisions?
Do you work from logic, from gut instinct or do you take advice from others? Recent studies have shown that decision making can be affected by our prejudices, our past experience and even our surroundings.
However, the reason that most people put off making a decision is the fear of getting it WRONG.
Procrastination leads to inaction. Inaction leads to failure. Failure leads to loss of confidence which make it hard to make decisions. The only way out of this loop is to have courage, make a decision in the full knowledge that whatever happens you will deal with it and remember that most fears are about things that never happen.
Steps to Success
(Inspired by Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich”)
1. Decide what you want. Desire is the starting point of all achievement.
2. Believe that you can get what you want. Self doubt will prevent you from taking action.
3. You don’t have to do it all yourself. Surround yourself with people who know what you don’t know and who can do what you can’t do.
4. Make practical use your imagination. Work out how to turn your dreams into reality.
5. Create a plan, organise your ideas and take continuous action.
6. Avoid procrastination and make decisions. Use information and knowledge from others but let the decisions be your own.
7. Persist. Things will go wrong, people will let you down. If your desire is strong enough you will find a way through all difficulties to achieve your desire.
8. Aquire power and learn how to use it. The ability to lead others in a spirit of harmony to achieve a definite objective is a major source of success.
9. Understand that sex is the most powerful of human desires. When this desire is harnessed into a creative process it can be the source of genius.
10. Learn to use the power of the subconscious mind which can work for or against you but which can be controlled.
11. Develop and learn to trust the ‘sixth sense’. Intuition can help us to avoid dangers and grasp opportunities.
12. Deal with fear, the major obstacle to achievement.
Join us at our next event for more Inspirational Ideas
Posted in 12 Steps to Success | Tags: Burning Desire, Decision Making, Definite Purpose, Gut Instinct, Habit, Henry Ford, Inability To Make Decisions, Inaction, Making Decisions, Minor Irritation, Napoleon, Napoleon Hill, Opposition, Prejudices, Procrastination, Stress And Anxiety, Stress Anxiety, Surroundings, Time Management, Walks Of Life | No Comments »
How to outwit the six ghosts of fear
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”
Franklin D Roosevelt
You don’t have to look far to find something to be afraid of – the internet is full of dire warnings and also, strangely enough, its also full of people who’d like to sell you the things that can protect you from the very things of which they tried to make you afraid.
Newspapers TV and radio are no better except that they often seem to peddle fear just for the hell of it, under the guise of ‘news’.
Everyone must, at some time in their lives, have experienced the gut wrenching, heart stopping sensation that we call fear and yet, for all the scary stuff that is manufactured by others we are the main culprit when it comes to creating our own fears.
It is the thing that most people acknowledge is the major factor that holds them back from achieving their full potential and they give it all sorts of names: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of losing what they’ve got, fear of the unknown, etc., etc., etc.
What are most people afraid of?
Writing at the end of the Great Depression in 1937, Napoleon Hill suggests that most people have six basic fears. They are: fear of poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love, old age and death.
When questioned if these are still relevant today, it was fear of poverty that caused the most dissent amongst a group of business owners. There was a strong argument that in our modern Western world, poverty is a relative term, even when we have lost all our material possessions. However, there was an equally strong argument that it is this fear of losing everything that is the biggest driver in our society, especially for people in business who seek to create a sense of security by being in control of their own means of earning a living.
Looking at Hill’s list again, all those fears related to losing something: our material possessions, pride, independence, status, love, connection, and of course, life itself.
What became clear is that almost every feeling of fear we experience is the result of an IMAGINED situation, not a real one.
Moreover, in almost every case, the imagined situation that we most fear never happens.
When a situation that we had feared actually materialised, most of us dealt with it without any real consequences.
Beyond the survival instincts that keep us safe, there appears to be only one real fear and that is the fear that we won’t be able to handle whatever happens to us. The fact that most people do handle even the most horrendous occurrences indicates that most fear, which usually concerns a future event that never happens, is completely unnecessary.
Bob Newhart had his own suggestion for how to deal with this:
Coping Strategies
In all the suggestions that proliferate in how to deal with the physical symptoms of fear (usually manifested as stress) no one mentions, booze, sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll but I’m guessing that at some point, most people will use at least one of these in an attempt to banish fears and anxiety.
The thing that everyone agreed on was what doesn’t work is trying to ignore it, suppress it or pretending the fear doesn’t exist. This can often result in real physical damage – perhaps that’s why booze, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll weren’t offered as serious means of coping!
Strategies to cope with fear usually involved taking action to arrive at a point where the fear is no longer felt as a physical sensation. This involved a whole range of activities from talking and sharing the fear – being talked off the ledge, as one person described it, to strenuous exercise to deal with the excess adrenaline. Some people are able to use relaxation techniques or meditation to calm themselves while others seek the help of a range of physical therapies that often results in them being able to talk about their fears.
Why do we need strategies to cope with IMAGINATION?
Having established that most fears are about thing we only imagine MIGHT happen or how we imagine we’ll cope if our worst fears are realised it seems a little strange that we need external coping mechanisms.
If we create the fear in our heads, surely we can get rid of it the same way? The six ghosts of fear (or however many we allow ourselves to have) are just that – GHOSTS. They aren’t real, they only exist in our heads.
Human beings have control over only one thing – our thoughts. Whatever we allow into our heads creates emotions and physical reactions and so the person who is able to discipline their thoughts has a huge advantage in controlling how they deal with both real and imagined situations.
This is not the same as the parroted phrase that has become popular with fans of The Law of Attraction – the one that says “Thoughts Become Things”. If that were true, teenage boys would get lucky several times a day, no-one would be sick and everyone would have as much money as they wanted.
Many unexpected and unwanted things happen to us in a lifetime and they are not the result of what we think. It is the way we choose to deal with them that is in our control and this means we need to exercise discipline over our thoughts. To catch a thought as it is formed and ask, “Is this useful to me or not?” and develop it or reject it accordingly means that the time wasted on fearful thoughts that paralyze and impoverish us can be freed to use on creating new ideas and enriching our lives.
When we believe and prove to ourselves that by controlling out thoughts we will cope with whatever life throws at us we truly have nothing to fear.
Posted in 12 Steps to Success | Tags: Business Owners, Culprit, Dissent, Earning A Living, End Of The Great Depression, Fear, Fear Of Failure, Fear Of Poverty, Fear Of Success, Franklin D Roosevelt, Ghosts, Great Depression, Guise, Ill Health, Love Connection, Material Possessions, Napoleon Hill, Newspapers Tv, Relative Term, Scary Stuff, Sense Of Security, World Poverty | 3 Comments »
Influencing the subconscious
Look below the surface – you’ll be amazed at what you find!
Napoleon Hill suggested that one of the things that successful people do is use their imagination to create a belief that they can have what they desire and to communicate between the conscious the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is protected
– which is usually a good thing as it contains all the things we have ever learned and we wouldn’t want to have to re-learn most of them. However, it also contains less useful things that may stop us from achieving all that we might otherwise be capable of.
Anything that comes to us through our five senses is unlikely to affect the subconscious so how do we reach and change those things that are not useful to us?
Hill suggests (long before NLP was invented) that in order to create the belief that we can have something we must imbue it with emotion, imagine that we already have it and create the experience of already having it.
Vividly imagine having whatever it is you desire and experience how that will feel and what you will see, hear, taste and smell. The emotions and physical reactions caused by these thoughts are generated internally rather than coming to us externally through our senses (and could be described as non-sense) and so are more likely to escape the gatekeeper of the subconscious mind.
There has been vigorous research into how emotions cause physical reactions, how physical sensations trigger emotions and how both emotions and physical reactions can be produced by thought alone. Belief may not move mountains but it can remove limitations and control physical experiences.
One of the most popular sayings arising from these theories is that “Thoughts Become Things” and while it is undoubtedly true that this can be the case, it can also be too simplistic. I have seen already distressed people puzzled and hurt at the implication that they have brought misfortune on themselves because their thoughts are not positive enough. Moreover, if we all got what we focused on most of the time, teenage boys would live in a constant state of bliss!
However, that doesn’t change the fact that we are still discovering amazing things about the power of the mind and by using it to create useful thoughts and emotions there is no doubt that we can make life easier and more satisfying.
Posted in 12 Steps to Success | Tags: Belief That, Critical Faculty, Emotion, Emotions, Fear Of Failure, Five Senses, Gatekeeper, Imagination, Napoleon, Napoleon Hill, Networking, O Marie, Personal Development, Physical Sensations, Possibilities, Sanjay, Subconscious Mind, Taste And Smell, Vigorous Research | 1 Comment »
Missed opportunities
Edwin C Barnes was a penniless salesman who had a DESIRE to go into partnership with the inventor Thomas Edison.
He had the chance to be one of Edison’s salesmen but that wasn’t what he wanted. He waited until the opportunity came and Edison’s other salesmen decided that they couldn’t sell the latest invention – a dictating machine.
Barnes showed Edison that he could market and distribute the machine in partnership with Edison and made a fortune.
When his opportunity came, it was in a different form and in a different way to what Barnes was expecting.
Barnes knew what he wanted and had the determination to stand by his desire. Opportunity has a habit of slipping in the back door and can sometimes come disguised as misfortune or temporary defeat. Perhaps that is why opportunities are sometimes not recognised and missed.
What is it that you have a burning desire to be, do or have?
Posted in Inspiration | Tags: Amp, Back Door, Barnes, Burning Desire, Desire, Dictating Machine, Edwin C, Fortune, Habit, Inventor Thomas Edison, Latest Invention, Misfortune, Napoleon, Napoleon Hill, Partnership, Salesmen | No Comments »
