Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  By combining the discoveries of Lozanov with a combination of affirmations, music and relaxation, you can vastly accelerate the speed at which you achieve your goals and develop the personality characteristics you desire. This form of heterogenic conditioning is the use of taped affirmations with music.

  There are two ways you can use this particular method. The first is by listening to subliminal tapes, which I do not recommend. You simply do not know what message is on the tape. Some of the expensive tapes sold in the mass marketplace have been found to have no messages on them at all.

  The second method of taped affirmations with music is called “progressive relaxation.” With this method, a clear voice counts you down into a state of deep relaxation against a background of gentle classical music. This combination of words and music activates your right brain and drops you into the alpha state. While you are in this state of relaxed awareness, the positive messages, combined with the music, bypass your critical, conscious mind and go straight into your subconscious, where they bring about rapid personality change.

  Taped affirmation with music is healthy and refreshing in its own right. At the end of a series of positive messages, the voice on the tape counts you back to full alertness. You open your eyes feeling relaxed, refreshed and happy.

  Taped affirmation is effortless and easy. A typical taped affirmation process is only about twenty minutes long. It is a form of active meditation. If you practice it twice a day, morning and evening, you will be more positive, more relaxed, more creative and in far better control of your emotions. Many of your minor ailments will clear up, and I am aware of cases in which major illnesses disappeared when people started using this technique regularly.

  You can create your own affirmation tapes* and put your own goals onto them. You simply play relaxing music that you enjoy on one record or tape player, while you read your affirmations, with the music in the background, onto a second tape player. It is very hard to make a mistake, and even a homemade tape can be very effective in programming you to achieve your goals.

  COMBINING DIFFERENT METHODS

  Sometimes people ask me which of these methods they should use. My answer is that you should use as many of them as you feel comfortable with, and whichever one is most convenient for you at any given time. Ideally, your entire day should be one continuous affirmation. You should be walking, talking and behaving in a cheerful and positive manner, visualizing and feeling enthusiastic about everything you do.

  Your mental movies, combined with emotionalization, are the previews of your life’s coming attractions. Your biggest single job is to exert the self-control, self-mastery and self-discipline needed to keep your words, thoughts and pictures off what you don’t want and focused squarely on what you do want. Add to this a dash of confident expectations and you are on your way to a positive mental attitude and a happy, satisfying life.

  PUTTING THESE TECHNIQUES TO WORK

  Take a specific situation in your life, an upcoming event or something that is worrying you and causing you stress. Each time you think of the situation, apply the quick affirmation technique and then release it. Do this until the event has passed successfully or the situation has been resolved satisfactorily.

  Next, get yourself a package of three-inch by five-inch index cards. There are packages available with spiral binding that you can make into your own affirmation book. Write out your goals, one per card, in clear, present-tense language. Review them twice per day using the standard affirmation technique until you see your goals materializing around you.

  Make your own relaxation tape with music and listen to it regularly, until the messages are firmly embedded in your subconscious mind and you begin to see the results in the world around you.

  As you go through your day, behave as if you are already the kind of person you want to be, and as if you have already achieved the goals you want to achieve.

  Get that “end of the movie” feeling and just relax. Carry yourself with calm confidence and positive feelings of success and happiness, knowing that if you can hold it in your mind, you can have it. And you will.

  AN OLD FABLE

  Many years ago, in ancient Greece, a traveler met an old man on the road and asked him how to get to Mount Olympus. The old man, who happened to be Socrates, replied by saying, “If you really want to get to Mount Olympus, just make sure that every step you take is in that direction”

  The moral of the story is simple. If you want to be successful and happy, just make sure that your every thought and action are taking you in that direction.

  Sir Isaac Newton is generally considered to be the greatest scientist who ever lived. His breakthroughs in mathematics and physics laid the groundwork for the modern age. In his later years, he was asked how it was that he, one man, had managed to make such significant contributions to the world of science. He replied: “By thinking of nothing else.”

  In its simplest terms, success begins with you exercising your power of choice to take systematic, purposeful control over the thoughts you hold in your conscious mind. By rigorously disciplining yourself to think and talk only about what you want, and by refusing to dwell upon the things that you don’t want, you begin your journey toward the stars.

  THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

  The quality of thoughtfulness goes hand in hand with the evolution of character and the development of personal effectiveness. The mental laws we’ve discussed so far are tools to think with. They make you more aware of who you are, how you got that way, and more important, how you can get to where you want to go in the future.

  Most people spend their lives in a form of sleep. They go busily about their daily activities almost totally preoccupied by a continuous stream of disorganized thought. You’ve experienced this phenomenon when you’ve gotten into your car and driven to work or across town, lost in thought, with almost no memory of the trip at all.

  Many of your habitual routines and conversations take place with a low level of awareness, almost as if you were in a mental fog, and with your having little or no recollection of the particular flow of events.

  Sometimes, this preoccupation and busyness is deliberate. You use it to avoid thinking about parts of your life that you would rather not confront or deal with. Sometimes it is simply automatic. You have been going through the motions for so long that your thought processes are automatic.

  You only wake up temporarily when you are shocked or surprised, such as when you are cut off in traffic, or scared or caught off guard, but as soon as you recover your composure, you slip back into the warm, gentle stream of waking sleep and your thoughts just flow past amid a continual collage of feelings and images.

  To become all you can be, you must live more consciously. You must become more alert, more aware and more awake. You must take more control over your thought processes so that the combined power of the various mental laws is moving you in a direction of your own choosing rather than steering you blindly on a form of mental autopilot.

  AWAKENING FROM SLEEP

  You begin this process of awakening by reflecting on parts of your life—past, present and future. As an exercise in awareness, start by imagining that, before you were born, somewhere on the other side of the cosmos, you had evolved over many lifetimes to become a particular type of person with a particular set of qualities, interests, talents and abilities. It doesn’t matter what you think about the idea of reincarnation. This exercise is just that: an exercise with a point that will become clear.

  Continuing this line of thought, imagine that you deliberately chose your parents, that you chose the situation you were born into and brought up in. You did this because, at your stage of personal growth and evolution, there were specific lessons about yourself, about life and about other people that you had to learn, and which you could learn in no other way.

  Imagine also that the person you are today, especially the good qualities you’ve developed, evolved largely or partially as the result of the di
fficult experiences you had growing up and especially as the result of the problems you had with one or both of your parents.

  Here is an important question: If you learned that you had deliberately chosen your parents and that the person you are today has come about as a direct result of your choice, how would this discovery change your attitude toward your parents and the experiences of your childhood? Would you be more positive and accepting of them? Would you see yourself and your past experiences in a different light? Would you become more philosophical and objective toward what might have appeared, up to now, to have been a difficult time of your life?

  As you begin to think about this idea, about having deliberately chosen your parents, you begin to see possibilities that you had totally ignored up to now. Instead of seeing yourself as a passive agent or victim caught up in circumstances beyond your control, you begin to see yourself as an active participant in your own evolution.

  Let’s take this exercise a little further. Imagine that you are here on this earth to do something wonderful with your life, to become an exceptional person and to make an important contribution to your world. Imagine that this is all part of a great master plan that has been carefully designed with your best interests in mind, and that every event and circumstance of your life is an indispensable part of a big jigsaw puzzle, the outline of which you can only begin to see when you stand back and start to look at your life from a higher plane.

  Assume, as a general rule, that whatever your current situation or difficulty, it is exactly what you require, right now, to teach you something you need to know before you can continue on your upward journey. With this perspective, you can see that every experience is a positive experience if you view it as an opportunity for growth and self-mastery.

  Now, project backward, and with calmness, clarity and a positive mental attitude, think about how every previous experience and situation of your life might have been sent to you, at exactly the right time for you, to teach you something you needed to learn so that you could continue moving toward the wonderful life that awaits you.

  Imagine that the events of your life could not have been otherwise than they were, especially if you were operating on autopilot most of the time. As you stand back and appreciate the incredibly complex, interconnected events that have brought you to where you are in life right now, you will begin to develop the perspective of the philosopher, of the superior intellect. You begin to superimpose on your experience what is called a “sense of coherence,” an attitude and a feeling that your life is part of something greater than yourself and that everything fits together and happens for a reason.

  As you think of your life as a series of events and experiences that are conspiring toward your achieving some great goal or making some great contribution to mankind, you begin to develop a “sense of destiny,” the hallmark of potential greatness as a human being.

  PUTTING THE LAWS TO WORK

  These mental exercises enable you to begin unlocking the powers of your subconscious mind. They enable you to put these laws to work in a deliberate and systematic way.

  You activate the Law of Control by choosing consciously to view yourself as an active creative influence in your own life. When you take mental control, you place your hands firmly on the steering wheel of your own destiny. You become the architect of your own future.

  You free yourself from the Law of Accident when you become aware of the role of your own thoughts in directing the course of your life.

  You activate the Law of Cause and Effect when you stand back from your day-to-day life and reflect upon the incredible number of coincidences that have shaped you into the person you are today. You see that nothing happened by accident. You realize that everything happened, and is happening, as the result of immutable law—even if you can’t see clearly where your life is going at the moment.

  You trigger the Law of Belief when you accept that your life and your experiences are leading you toward the accomplishment of something important. The more you think about this as inevitable, the more likely it is to come true for you. Your beliefs do become your realities.

  You apply the Law of Expectations when you confidently expect to gain something worthwhile, if not invaluable, from everything that happens to you. This attitude of confident self-expectancy makes your life into more of an adventure, with unpredictable but happy events occurring to move you toward some positive outcome. You become more optimistic and cheerful, as well as calm and relaxed, and your expectations do become self-fulfilling prophecies.

  Your positive, future-oriented thinking triggers the Law of Attraction. You begin drawing into your life people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts of hope and optimism and confidence. The more you think of yourself and your life as uniquely blessed and important, the more you attract to yourself the ideas, opportunities and people that make your dreams come true.

  Consistent with the Law of Correspondence, you see yourself as a special person put on this earth with a special purpose, and your outer world of relationships, health, work and material accomplishments begin to reflect your inner attitudes of mind.

  As you plant these thought seeds into your subconscious by continually holding them in your conscious mind, by the Law of Subconscious Activity, your subconscious begins to make all your words, feelings, actions and even your body language fit a pattern consistent with your new self-concept and your new goals.

  You use the Law of Substitution continually, knowing that your major responsibility in this process is to keep negative thoughts of fear, anger and self-doubt out of your mind. You do this by holding thoughts of faith, hope and love instead, until these new thoughts are firmly rooted and growing with a life and power of their own.

  You apply the Law of Concentration by dwelling continually on thoughts of courage and confidence, of hope and love and on the wonderful future life has in store for you. You take time each day to sit and soak your mind in positive and uplifting thoughts, knowing that whatever you dwell upon long enough and hard enough will eventually materialize in the world around you.

  YOU CAN DO IT

  Your greatest need is to be patient, calm and trusting. These mental laws are the most powerful forces ever discovered. You will achieve what you are meant to achieve when you are ready for it, when your mind is thoroughly prepared. Whatever you want, wants you. Whatever you desire is moving toward you right now, just as you are moving toward it. Your primary job is to decide exactly what you want, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 5, and then to get out of your own way, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 7.

  Developing a positive, constructive way of looking at your life requires thoughtfulness. Developing a superior way of thinking requires that you become more alert, more aware and more awake. Harmonizing all these mental laws so that your life improves in every way requires a new attitude toward yourself and your possibilities.

  It may be difficult at first, but the payoff for you will be a heightened sense of self-control and self-mastery, a more positive mental attitude, and a tremendous feeling of empowerment in every part of your life.

  ACTION COMMITMENT

  Take a sheet of paper and make a list of all the things that you want to see in your life. Write down everything that you can think of. Happiness, health, good friends, travel, prosperity, financial success, popularity, recognition, the respect of others ... let your imagination run freely.

  Here is the hard part: For the next twenty-four hours, think and talk only about the things on your list. See if you can get through one entire day without criticizing, condemning, complaining or getting angry, upset or worried about anything. See if you have the willpower and strength of character to think about only what you want for one whole day.

  This exercise will give you a real insight into where you are in your development, and it will also show you how far you have to go. In the next chapter, you will learn the master skill of success, and how to achieve virtually any goal you could ever set for y
ourself.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Master Skill

  The ability to set goals and to make plans for their accomplishment is the master skill of success. Developing this skill will do more to ensure your success than anything else you could ever do. In twenty-five years of study and experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that success equals goals, and all else is commentary. Intense goal orientation is an essential characteristic of all high-achieving men and women, in every study, in every field. It’s not possible to realize even a fraction of your potential until you have learned how to set and achieve goals as normally and as naturally as you brush your teeth or comb your hair in the morning.

  Everything we’ve talked about in this book so far has been intended to bring us to this chapter on goals. It has been part of the necessary preparation for you to put the master skill to work in every part of your life. All the material concerning the clearing of your mind and the development of a calm, optimistic attitude toward yourself and your possibilities has been essential. Learning how your mind works, and how the elements in your thinking, based on your past experiences, can affect your behavior and your outcomes today has gone to lay the foundation for what lies ahead.

  I was twenty-three years old before I first learned about goals. I knew they existed in sports but the idea of mapping out my life using goals and plans had never occurred to me.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t have goals, nor was it that I hadn’t achieved any. I had already traveled three-quarters of the way around the world, including going from the West Coast of the United States to Capetown, South Africa—by land and sea—and then traveling from London, England, to Singapore the same way.