Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  When you insist to others that you can or will do something, it has powerful impact on your thinking and your subsequent behavior. Sports teams use this method of verbalization with others to get themselves mentally prepared before a game. They chant and cheer together before they go out into competition.

  Keep your conversation throughout the day consistent with what you really want to happen. Refuse to discuss your fears and misgivings. Be positive and optimistic in everything you say. Be cheerful. You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel and how much more confidently you behave when your language is upbeat and success oriented.

  4. Acting the Part

  The fourth technique of mental programming is to walk, talk and act exactly as if you were already the person you desire to be. Behave as if you have already achieved the goals you’ve set for yourself. Act as if you were recognized and respected by everyone. Act as though you had money in the bank already. The power of this technique is explained by the Law of Reversibility.

  This law states that, when you feel positive and optimistic, your feelings will generate actions and behaviors consistent with them. The opposite is also true. If you do not feel positive, but you act enthusiastically or cheerfully anyway, despite how you feel, your positive behavior will generate positive feelings, just as your positive feelings generate positive behavior. Your feelings and behavior are reversible.

  It is almost impossible to “act the part” of a happy, cheerful person for more than five or six minutes without actually having a “backflow” experience in which your actions create the emotions that are consistent with them. Another way to put it is, “Fake it until you make it.” Behave positively and enthusiastically and you will soon feel positive and enthusiastic.

  The reason this method is so powerful is that, even if you cannot control your feelings at any given moment, you can control your actions. And if you control your actions, by this Law of Reversibility, you will create the emotional state that you desire.

  Using this technique, you can deliberately create in yourself the mental qualities of a high-performing man or woman. You can act with purpose, courage, confidence, competence and intelligence. You can pretend that you already have each one of these qualities, and surprisingly enough, you will soon feel these qualities in yourself. People will then accept you and respond to you exactly as if you were the person you see yourself as being.

  These four techniques are enough in themselves to completely transform your self-concept and your personality: Begin by thinking of yourself as you would ideally like to be. Then visualize yourself in vivid detail, as though you already were the person that you intend to become. Affirm to yourself, and verbalize aloud, strong, positive statements consistent with your goals. Remember as you do this that words do create emotion and crystallize thought. And finally, keep your behavior consistent with your new messages of success, happiness, prosperity and a positive personality.

  5. Feeding Your Mind

  Technique number five in the PMA diet is to feed your mind continually with words and images consistent with the direction in which you are growing. Read books and magazines for personal and professional development. Listen to educational audiocassettes at every opportunity. Watch educational videocassettes. Attend seminars and lectures and take additional courses that accelerate your development of these new habit patterns of thought.*

  The more you read, listen, watch and learn about any subject, the more confident and capable you feel in that area. If you are in management, and you are continually learning how to be a better and more effective manager, you will more and more often see yourself and think about yourself as excellent in your field. If you are in sales, and you continually feed your mind with information and ideas that help you to be better, you will feel better about your ability to perform, and you will actually make more sales. As you improve your inner understanding, you improve your outer results.

  6. Associating with Positive People

  Technique number six is to get around the right people. Associate with winners. Fly with the eagles rather than scratching with the turkeys. Because of the strong suggestive influence that other people have on you, for good or for ill, you must be extremely careful about who you choose to spend time with.

  Dr. David McClelland of Harvard found, after twenty-five years of research, that the choice of a negative “reference group” was in itself enough to condemn a person to failure and underachievement in life. Your reference groups are the people you identify with—the ones you work with, socialize with, live with and get involved with in community or nonwork activities. Like a chameleon, you unconsciously adopt the attitudes, behavior and opinions of the people with whom you most closely associate.

  In selecting the people that you will spend time with, follow Baron de Rothschild’s advice and “make no useless acquaintances.” To meet new, positive people, you usually have to stop associating with your old group. Especially, get away from negative people. They are the primary cause of most unhappiness in your life.

  Staying in a bad relationship can be enough in itself to cut off your full potential for success and happiness. There is no suggestive influence more powerful than the people around you. Select them with care.

  7. Teaching Others

  The seventh technique for internalizing these ideas is for you to teach others what you are learning. You become what you teach. You teach what you are. When you attempt to articulate and explain a new concept to someone else in order to help him or her, you understand it and internalize it better yourself. In fact, you only really know something to the degree to which you can teach it to someone else and have them understand and apply it in their own lives.

  Developing new, positive habits of thought and behavior is not easy. It requires eternal vigilance. You must launch your new habits strongly. Never allow exceptions until the new habit is locked in. When you slip from time to time, the important thing is that you don’t dwell on it. Your job is to keep your mind focused intently on the direction that you are going, on your dominant goals, and on the new person you are becoming.

  Whatever you can hold in your mind on a continuing basis, you can have. Forget the way you were in the past. Discard past labels. It is how you see yourself, how you talk about yourself and how you act now, in the present, that is creating your future.

  If you see yourself now as you wish to be, and you walk, talk, and behave as the very best person you can imagine yourself being, your dominant thoughts and goals will materialize as your reality. You will become what you think about most of the time.

  ACTION EXERCISE

  Select one positive habit pattern or behavior that you would like to develop, and for the next twenty-one days, discipline yourself to think, visualize, verbalize, affirm and behave in a manner consistent with the new habit you want to develop.

  Whatever your goals and ambitions, think and talk in terms of their accomplishment. Read, learn, visualize, affirm and dwell on your goal. Think in terms of “how” you can achieve it. Act as if it were already a reality, if you can. At the very least, behave in every respect as if achieving your goal were inevitable.

  The key to making these methods work for you is for you to demonstrate to yourself, in a specific area, that you can develop one important habit or attitude of your own choosing. Once you have proved this to yourself, you will have the self-confidence and the conviction to make any change or to accomplish any goal that you could set for yourself. Instead of wishing or hoping, you will know that your possibilities are unlimited.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Master Mind

  Your outer world corresponds to your inner world. What happens to you depends to a great degree on what is happening inside you. Your external experience is a reflection of your internal thought patterns. Over time, you create in your life the mental equivalent of your innermost convictions about yourself and what is possible for you.

  As I read story after story of famous men and women, as I reflected
upon their biographies and autobiographies, I was struck by the common thread that ran through all of them. They all seemed to have, or to develop, an unshakable belief in their ability to overcome all obstacles and reach some great height.

  This belief or conviction seemed to give them powers not possessed by the ordinary person. They went on to accomplish remarkable things, often against overwhelming odds and in defiance of the predictions of people around them.

  When I left high school and began drifting from job to job, I had no central aim or purpose aside from somehow “seeing the world.” Like most people, I slipped into the “reactive-responsive mode.” I took whatever job came along. I associated with whoever happened to be around at the time. Instead of planning my life, I just reacted to my external environment and responded to my emotional and physical needs.

  I assumed that this was “all there is.” I came to accept, unconsciously, that what I knew and what I was doing constituted the upper limits of what was possible for me. The best I felt I could do was to react as intelligently and as constructively as possible and try not to make too many mistakes.

  When my studies in psychology, religion and metaphysics mentioned the subconscious mind, I neither understood it very well nor attempted to use it to help me. However, the more I learned about the mental laws that govern our behavior and determine our results, the more I realized there was a hidden dimension of achievement that I was missing.

  The more I understood the importance of the self-concept and learned that everything we do is predetermined by our belief systems, the more I felt I was coming closer to the combination that would open the lock.

  Then I understood the meaning of human potential. If you and I are using only 10 percent or less of our potential for effectiveness and achievement, the other 90 percent or more must be contained in mental powers we have not yet tapped. I concluded that, to get the most out of myself, I needed the “access codes” that would enable me to get into and harness these enormous capabilities.

  Your subconscious mind is enormously powerful. When you use it properly, it can help you to move more rapidly toward the achievement of your goals and desires than you ever dreamed possible. You can use your subconscious mind for creation or destruction, for good or for evil. You can be a prince or a pauper, depending on the way you use your subconscious mind. To fulfill your potential, you must learn how to access it at will and use it for your purposes intelligently and constructively.

  My lawyer was showing me through his offices not long ago. He took me into the typing pool where there were several secretaries typing letters and legal documents. Each of the secretaries was hooked into a minicomputer that was available and accessible to all of them. As we left the room, he explained to me that he and his partners had spent more than one hundred thousand dollars on this computer installation, which they had purchased about two years ago. He told me that when it was installed, all the secretaries working there at that time were given training in how to use the computer to increase the quantity and quality of legal work they could produce.

  Over time, he said, all of the original secretaries had left or gone on to other things. They were replaced, one by one, with legal secretaries who had no computer training. “Because we are so busy,” he said, “no one has had a chance to go back and train these new secretaries on how to get the most out of our computer system, so now instead of using this computer for advanced information and word processing, our secretaries simply use it as a glorified typewriter, typing one letter or one document at a time and spending many hours to produce what the minicomputer could produce in a few minutes.”

  Unfortunately, most people are like those secretaries. They work every day with their minds—but they use their powerful mental computers only for the most rudimentary tasks and then wonder why their work is so hard and why they seem to produce so little.

  When I was washing dishes, I was convinced that the only way I could make more money was by working longer hours and by washing even more dishes. I eventually learned that the belief that you can only improve your life with longer hours and harder work leads you down a blind alley. The answer I found was to work “smarter,” to use more of my mental powers rather than more of my physical powers to achieve my goals.

  Successful people are those who have learned how to operate their conscious and subconscious minds in harmony, enabling them to get the things they want far faster and with much less effort. This discovery changed the focus of my efforts and the direction of my life.

  TWO MINDS WITHIN ONE

  Here is a simple model to help you visualize your subconscious mind, how it operates, how you can control its functions and what it produces in your life.

  Imagine two balls stuck together, a golf ball and a basketball, with the golf ball on top. This picture represents the relative power and capability of your conscious and your subconscious minds, with the basketball being your subconscious. The two minds are essential to each other, but they have their own separate areas of operation.

  In computer terms, your conscious mind is the programmer, inputting data very much like a computer operator, by what it decides to allow in to your thinking. Your subconscious mind is the hardware of your computer, the framework within which data operates. Your self-concept is the software program that determines what you produce in your life. All are necessary and interdependent, and everything that happens to you is determined by your understanding of this special computer language and also your skill at using it.

  THE CONSCIOUS MIND

  Your conscious mind is your objective or thinking mind. It has no memory, and it can only hold one thought at a time. This mind has four essential functions.

  First, it identifies incoming information. This is information received through any of the six senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, touch or feeling.

  Your conscious mind is continually observing and categorizing what is going on around you. To illustrate, imagine that you are walking along the sidewalk and you decide to cross the street. You step off the curb. At that moment, you hear the roar of an automobile engine. You immediately turn and look in the direction of the moving automobile to identify the sound and where it is coming from. This is the first function.

  The second function of your conscious mind is comparison. The information about the car that you have seen and heard goes immediately to your subconscious mind. There, it is compared with all of your previously stored information and experiences with moving automobiles.

  If the car, for example, is a block away, and moving at thirty miles per hour, your subconscious memory bank will tell you that there is no danger and that you can continue walking.

  If, on the other hand, the car is moving toward you at sixty miles per hour and is only one hundred yards away, you will get a “danger” message that will stimulate further action on your part.

  The third function of your conscious mind is analysis, and analysis always precedes the fourth function, deciding.

  Your conscious mind functions very much like a binary computer, performing two functions: It accepts or rejects data in making choices and decisions. It can deal with only one thought at a time, positive or negative, “yes” or “no.” It is continually sorting impressions, deciding which are relevant to you and which are not.

  So, you are walking across the street, you hear the roar of the moving automobile, and you see that it is bearing down on you. Because of your knowledge of the speed of moving vehicles, your analysis tells you you are in danger and that some decision is required. Your first question is, “Do I get out of the way? Yes or no?” If the decision is “yes,” then your next question is, “Do I jump forward? Yes or no?” If the decision is “no,” because of cross traffic, then your next question is, “Do I jump backward? Yes or no?” If your decision is “yes,” this message is instantly transmitted to your subconscious mind and in a split second, your whole body jumps back out of the way, with no additional thought or decision on your part.

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nbsp; You didn’t have to use your conscious mind to think about whether you should put your right foot or left foot back first. Once you gave the command, from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind, all the necessary nerves and muscles were coordinated and put into action in a single instant to obey your decision.

  The mathematician Peter Ouspensky, in his book In Search of the Miraculous, estimated that your subconscious mind functions at as much as thirty thousand times the speed of your conscious mind. You can demonstrate this speed of operation by holding your hand out in front of you and wiggling your fingers. By turning all coordination of movement over to your subconscious, you can do this easily. Then, try to thread a needle, this time using your conscious mind, and see how much mental effort and concentration you must exert to perform a few small movements of your hand, when your subconscious isn’t operating.

  Your conscious mind functions like the captain of a submarine looking at the surface through a periscope. Only the captain can see. Only the captain’s perception of what is going on on the surface is available to the crew.

  Whatever the captain sees, feels and decides is immediately relayed throughout the submarine and the entire crew swings into action to carry out his instructions.

  You often feel limited in what you can do because you are so determined to be “in control.” You are often convinced that the way to get better or different results is to “try harder.” But this isn’t the answer at all.