by Brian Tracy
Your thoughts are the primary causes of the conditions of your life. Everything in your experience has begun with a thought of some kind, yours or someone else’s.
Everything you are or ever will be, will be as a result of the way you think. If you change the quality of your thinking, you change the quality of your life. The change in your outer experience will follow the change in your inner experience. You will reap what you sow. You are doing it right now.
The beauty of this immutable law is that by accepting it, you take full control over your thinking, your feelings and your results. By applying the Law of Cause and Effect, you bring yourself into harmony with the Law of Control. You immediately feel better and happier about yourself.
Every aspect of business success or failure can be explained by this basic law. If you sow the right causes, you reap the desired effects. If you produce quality products or services that customers want and need and are willing to pay for, and then promote them vigorously, you’ll be successful in selling them. If you don’t, you won’t.
If you do high-quality work and achieve the results that your company needs to grow and prosper, you’ll be successful and happy in your career. If you treat others well, they’ll treat you well. You’ll always get out of life what you put in—and you control what you put in.
3. THE LAW OF BELIEF
The Law of Belief says that whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality. The more intensely that you believe something to be true, the more likely it is that it will be true for you. If you really believe something, you cannot imagine it to be otherwise. Your beliefs give you a form of tunnel vision. They edit out or cause you to ignore incoming information that is inconsistent with what you have decided to believe.
William James of Harvard said, “Belief creates the actual fact.” In the Bible, it says, “According to your faith [belief] it is done unto you.” To put it another way, you do not necessarily believe what you see but you see what you believe.
For example, if you absolutely believe that you are meant to be a great success in life, then no matter what happens, you will continue to press forward toward your goals. Nothing will stop you.
On the other hand, if you believe that success is a matter of luck or accident, then you will easily become discouraged and disappointed whenever things don’t work out for you. Your beliefs set you up for either success or failure.
People generally have one of two ways of looking at the world. The first is what is called a benevolent world view. If you have a benevolent world view, you generally believe that the world is a pretty good place in which to live. You have a tendency to see the good in people and situations and to believe that there is plenty of opportunity around you and that you can take advantage of it. You believe that although you may not be perfect, you are a pretty good person overall. You believe in the future, for yourself and others. You are primarily optimistic.
The second way of looking at the world is with a malevolent world view. A person with a malevolent world view has a generally negative and pessimistic attitude toward himself or herself and toward life. He or she generally believes that “You can’t fight City Hall,” that “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” and that no matter how hard you work, you can’t get ahead anyway because the deck is stacked against you.
This type of person sees injustice, oppression and misfortune everywhere. When things go wrong for them, as they usually do, they blame it on bad luck or bad people. They feel like victims. Because of this attitude, they don’t really like or respect themselves very much.
Needless to say, people with optimistic beliefs tend to be the movers and shakers, the builders and the creators of the future. They tend to be positive and cheerful, and they see the world as a good and bright place in which to live. They have upbeat mental attitudes that enable them to respond positively and constructively to the inevitable ups and downs of day-to-day life. A key part of your journey toward success is the development and maintenance of this benevolent or positive world view.
Perhaps the biggest mental roadblocks that you will ever have to overcome are those contained in your self-limiting beliefs. These are beliefs you have that limit you in some way. They hold you back by stopping you from even trying. They often cause you to see things that simply aren’t true.
You may feel that you are limited in intelligence because you got average or mediocre grades in school. You may believe you are limited in creative capacity, or in your ability to learn and remember. Perhaps you feel that you are not very outgoing, or very smart about money. Some people feel that they cannot lose weight, quit smoking or be attractive to members of the opposite sex.
But whatever your belief, if you believe it strongly enough, it becomes your reality. You walk, talk, behave and interact with others in a manner consistent with your beliefs. Even if your beliefs are totally false, if you believe them, they will be true for you.
I held myself back and sold myself short for years, as many people do, because I didn’t graduate from high school. I looked on university graduates with awe and respect. I unconsciously assumed that my future was limited. Because of this belief, I set only limited goals for myself, and I wasn’t surprised if I didn’t achieve them. After all, I did poorly in school—what could you expect?
One day, I read a true story about a young man from a small town who graduated from high school with straight A’s. He then applied to the state university for admission. As part of the admissions procedure, he had to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, like all the applicants to universities nationwide. A few weeks later, he received a letter from the admissions department informing him that he had scored in the 99th percentile on the test and he was accepted for the fall semester.
He was happy to be accepted but there was one problem. He didn’t know about percentiles and he concluded mistakenly that the 99th percentile was his IQ score. He knew that the average IQ is 100 and he felt he could never do university-level work with his “limited” intelligence.
For the entire fall semester he failed or nearly failed every course. Finally, his counselor called him in and asked him why he was doing so poorly.
“Well,” he said, “you can’t blame me. I’ve only got a 99 IQ.” The counselor had the student’s file in front of him. “Why do you say that?” he asked.
“That’s what it said in my letter of admission to the university,” he replied.
When the counselor realized what had happened he explained the difference between an IQ and a percentile.
“A 99th percentile means that you scored equal to or higher than 99 percent of all the students in America who wrote this test. You’re one of the brightest kids on this campus.”
When the young man realized his error and changed his belief about his intelligence, he became a different person.
He went back into his classes and went to work with a new sense of competence and confidence. By the end of the semester he was on the honor roll and he eventually graduated in the top ten of his class.
This story holds a valuable lesson for you, as it did for me. We too easily accept that we are limited in some way. Then we ignore or reject any evidence that contradicts what we’ve already decided to believe.
A teacher asked a young boy, “Can you play a musical instrument?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I haven’t tried yet.”
In a way, you’re like that young boy. You don’t know either what you can really do. Don’t be so quick to sell yourself short. Refuse to accept limitations on your potential. You can probably do far more than you’ve ever done before.
Most of your self-limiting beliefs are not true at all. They are based on negative information that you have taken in and accepted as true. Once you have accepted it as true, your belief makes it a fact for you. As Henry Ford said, “If you believe that you can do a thing, or if you believe you cannot, in either case, you are right.”
In Chapter Three, you will learn how to build
a strong, confident belief system, one that is completely consistent with what you want to achieve with your life. In the meantime, you should begin to identify any self-limiting beliefs that might be holding you back. Often, your spouse or a trusted friend can help you recognize and identify self-limiting ideas and beliefs that you are unaware of. Remember, they do just as much harm if you don’t know about them as if you do.
4. THE LAW OF EXPECTATIONS
The Law of Expectations says that whatever you expect with confidence becomes your own self-fulfilling prophecy. To put it another way, what you get is not necessarily what you want in life, but what you expect. Your expectations exert a powerful, invisible influence that causes people to behave and situations to work out as you anticipated.
In a way, you are always acting as a fortune-teller in your own life by the way you talk about how you think things are going to turn out. Successful men and women have an attitude of confident, positive self-expectancy. They expect to be successful, they expect to be liked. They expect to be happy, and they are seldom disappointed.
Unsuccessful people have an attitude of negative expectations, of cynicism and pessimism that somehow causes situations to work out exactly as they expected.
In his book Pygmalion in the Classroom, Dr. Robert Rosenthal of Harvard University describes how the expectations of teachers have an enormous impact on the performance of their students. He also found that if students felt that they were expected to do well, they did much better than they would have in the absence of those expectations.
In a famous experiment conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area by Dr. Rosenthal in the late 1960s, at the beginning of a school year, three teachers were called into the principal’s office. The principal told them, in effect, “We have been observing your teaching styles and we have concluded that you are the three best teachers in this school. As a special reward for teaching excellence, we are going to give you each one classroom of the brightest children in this school. These children have been selected on the basis of recent IQ tests, and we expect them to make jumps of 20 to 30 percent in academic achievement over the course of the coming year. But, because we don’t want to be accused of discrimination, we want you to keep this confidential. We won’t tell the parents, and you are not to tell the students that they have been specially selected for this advanced class.”
The teachers were delighted. A teacher’s dream is to have an entire classroom full of gifted children to teach. They went back to their classes with renewed enthusiasm.
For the entire school year, the classes were monitored, and the teachers were observed. The teachers seemed to teach with greater commitment. They seemed to be more patient with students who did not catch on to a new subject right away. They spent more time after school tutoring students. When a child was having difficulty grasping something, the teacher assumed that the problem was in the teaching, not the student.
At the end of the school year, the three classes led not only the school but the entire school district in grades on standardized tests. They had achieved a leap of 20 to 30 percent in academic achievement over the previous year, just as had been predicted.
When the results of the tests were in, the principal brought the teachers back into his office and sat them down. He congratulated them on having had such a wonderful year with their students. The teachers were unanimous in thanking the principal for giving them so many gifted young people to teach. They said that the teaching was easy when you had such fine students, and that they had enjoyed teaching that year more than in any other.
The principal then explained to them that it had all been an experiment. The students were not exceptional at all. Their names had been chosen by lottery out of the school population at large. They had been assigned randomly to the classes of the three teachers. In fact, they were just average students.
Needless to say, the teachers were surprised. How could the students have done so well, just as had been predicted? Then it occurred to them that the reason was that they were such excellent teachers. It was their expertise as teachers that was responsible for the results.
The principal then explained to them that they also had been chosen at random. At the beginning of the school year, the names of all the teachers in the school had been put into a hat and they were the first three that were drawn.
This is what is called a double-blind experiment. The experimenters held constant for everything except expectations. The expectations the principal had of the teachers were clear and explicit. He said, “You are excellent teachers and we expect you to get excellent results from these classes of superior students.”
The expectations the teachers had of the students were implicit and unspoken. They simply treated the children as though they were highly intelligent and expected them to perform in a way consistent with the information they had been given.
In both cases, the expectations were based on false information. However, in both cases, the expectations, because they were created by a believable source, became self-fulfilling prophecies.
This is very important. Your expectations are shaped in direct proportion to your respect for the validity of the source. The more you look up to another person, the greater influence he or she will have on your expectations of yourself.
The teachers taught in an excellent fashion and the students learned at a higher rate than they had ever done before. One of the students in the experiment went from an IQ of 90 to an IQ of 115, a jump of 25 IQ points, by test, in one year under the influence of a teacher who had positive expectations. In experiment after experiment, it has been demonstrated that when teachers expect their students to perform well, the students work hard and live up to their teachers’ expectations.
Many parents who have been through our seminars have transformed their children’s academic lives by asking their children’s teachers to start treating their children as if they were especially intelligent. They have found that the teachers have been, in most cases, more than willing to go along with this idea. The parents have then done the same thing at home.
The results have been astonishing. Children who were getting C’s and D’s have jumped to A’s and B’s in as little as two months. Children who were unmotivated and bored with school because they were doing so poorly have become enthusiastic and excited about learning under the influence of parents and teachers who confidently, positively expected them to do well.
Four Kinds of Expectations
There are four sources of expectations that have an impact on your life. The first is the expectations of your parents. We are all unconsciously programmed to try to live up to, or down to, the expectations that our parents expressed of us when we were growing up. The need for the approval of our parents goes on even after our parents are no longer with us. If your parents expected you to do well, and confidently, positively encouraged you to do your best and be your best, this will have had an enormous influence on the person you have become. If, as happens in many cases, your parents expressed negative expectations of you, or no expectations at all, you may still be unconsciously saddled with the burden of trying not to disappoint your parents.
In one study, 90 percent of prisoners interviewed by psychologists reported that they had been told over and over again by their parents when they were growing up that “Someday, you’re going to end up in jail.”
The second source of expectations that affects your behavior is the expectations that your boss has of your performance. People who work under bosses who have positive expectations are always happier, perform better, and get more done than those who work under bosses who are negative or critical. Because you are inordinately influenced by the expectations of people you are dependent upon for your income, it’s not likely that you will ever be happy or successful working for or with people with negative attitudes and behavior.
The third source is the expectations that you have of your children, your spouse and your employees or staff. You have an enormous impact on
the personality, the behavior and the performance of the people who look up to you for guidance and feedback. The more important you are in the life of someone else, the more powerfully will your expectations affect their performance. Perhaps the most consistently effective and predictable motivational behavior you can use is to confidently and constantly expect the best from others. People will always try not to disappoint you.
I always tell my children, “You’re the best in the West; you’re the best little boy (or girl) in the world.” I tell them that I love them and that I think they are wonderful children and they are going to do great things with their lives.
Does this have an impact on their personalities? You’d better believe it! Try it yourself and see. Many successful people attribute much of their advance in life to the influence of someone they respected who constantly expressed confidence in their ability to be more than they were. Perhaps the kindest thing that you can do for another person is to say, “I believe in you. I know you can do it.”
The fourth source is the expectations that you have of yourself. The wonderful thing about expectations is that you can manufacture your own. You can create your own mental set, your own way of approaching the world, confidently, expecting the very best of yourself in every situation. Your expectations of yourself are in themselves powerful enough to override any negative expectations that anyone else may have about you. You can create a force field of positive mental energy around you by confidently expecting to gain something from every situation.
W. Clement Stone, the multimillionaire, is famous for being an “inverse paranoid.” This is someone who believes that the universe is conspiring to do him good. An inverse paranoid sees every situation as being heaven-sent either to confer some benefit or teach some valuable lesson to help make him successful. This form of inverse paranoia is the foundation of a positive mental attitude. This is the most outwardly identifiable quality of a high-performing man or woman.