Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  Throughout the first day of our seminar, during which we explained the concept of forgiveness, he sat silently. He got up and left that evening without saying a word. The next day, however, when he came back into the room, he was a different man. He was relaxed and smiling. He greeted other people and introduced himself. He told me privately that he had sat up for three hours the night before writing the letter. He then got up and walked several blocks to mail it. He said that it had worked exactly as I had described in the seminar. From the minute he dropped the letter in the mailbox, he felt like a totally different person.

  After the seminar, he went out on his first date in four years, with a woman he met in the class. Later, he told me that his relationships with his children had been transformed. They all forgave the mother for leaving, and then resolved to get on with the rest of their lives, together. They were happy again for the first time in years.

  The third person that you have to forgive is yourself. You have to forgive yourself for every foolish or hurtful thing you have ever said or done.

  Remember, you are not perfect. You make mistakes. You say and do a lot of foolish things in the course of growing and maturing. If you had them to do over, you would have done them differently. But remorse and regret over previous mistakes serves no purpose. It is a sign of weak character. Remorse is often used as an excuse for not moving ahead. All wise and mature men and women have made silly, foolish mistakes. That’s how they became wise and mature. And now you must forgive yourself for everything.

  Forgiveness is the key to the kingdom of mental and spiritual development. When you practice being a totally forgiving person, you are emulating the character traits of the greatest men and women who have ever walked the earth. You are putting yourself on the side of the angels. The act of forgiveness begins the process of washing away all the accumulated residue of guilt, anger and resentment that breed negative emotions in your subconscious. The regular practice of freely forgiving everyone for everything makes you a calmer, kinder, more compassionate and optimistic human being.

  GOOD FOR THE SOUL

  Finally, if you have done anything to hurt someone else and you still feel badly about it, go to him or her and apologize. Say, “I’m sorry.” Repentance is good for the soul. It frees you from the feelings of guilt and unworthiness that go with the knowledge that you have done something that is not consistent with your highest ideals.

  It doesn’t matter how the other person reacts or responds. All that matters is that you have had the courage and character to accept responsibility for your actions, to apologize and say that you’re sorry. You can then get on with the rest of your life, and let the other person get on with his or hers.

  PUTTING THE PRINCIPLE INTO PRACTICE

  Here is an exercise: First, take a sheet of paper and make a list of everybody you can think of who has hurt you in any way. Second, go down the list, read the name, think of what happened, and say, “I forgive him or her for everything; I now let it go.” Repeat these words two or three times for each person on your list. Then put the list away. From now on, whenever you think of that person or that situation, immediately cancel the negative emotion associated with it by saying, “I forgive him (her) for everything, I forgive him (her) for everything,” and then get your mind busy elsewhere.

  Your whole life begins to open up for you when you finally forgive and let go. Forgiveness is the key to the kingdom of inner peace, the hardest thing you ever do, and the most important.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Master Goal

  Your ability to manage the day-to-day stresses of your life is essential to your happiness and success. Performing at your best requires calmness, clarity and an ability to maintain a certain amount of objectivity about yourself and your work. In this chapter you will learn how to be your own psychotherapist. You will learn how to control your thinking processes so you can minimize your stress and maximize your energy and optimism. You will learn how to be happy and effective no matter what is going on around you. The master goal is the achievement of peace of mind, the ultimate aim of all your efforts.

  THE HIGHEST HUMAN GOOD

  The highest human good is peace of mind. Your ability to achieve and maintain your own peace of mind is perhaps the best single measure of how well you are doing as a person. Peace of mind is the essential precondition for happiness and for getting the maximum amount of enjoyment and pleasure out of your work and your personal life. When you make inner peace your highest goal and organize all your activities, decisions and behavior around it, you will be happier and more effective in your life and career than under any other circumstances.

  The opposite of inner peace is negativity. Negative emotions are the main cause of unhappiness in life. Negative emotions are the “robber” emotions. They rob you of peace, happiness and enjoyment. They make you sick. They shorten your life. All stress, tension and anxiety is ultimately manifested in negative emotions of some kind. Negative emotions, once aroused, are always expressed, either inwardly or outwardly. You either make yourself sick or you poison your relationships with others.

  One of your major goals in planning your life must be to eliminate negative emotions and become a truly happy, healthy person. And the way you eliminate negative emotions is, first, by understanding the root causes of negative emotions, and, second, by learning how to neutralize them at will.

  COURAGE AND HONESTY

  You need courage to be your own psychotherapist. You require tremendous honesty. You must be willing to look deep into yourself for the real cause of any stress or negativity that you may be experiencing. You must accept complete responsibility for both your inner and your outer life, and for how you feel about them. This requires tremendous strength of character but it pays off in terms of the best kind of life you could want for yourself.

  Hans Selye, the pioneer in stress management, defined stress as “any nonspecific response to internal or external stimuli.” The key word in this definition is “response.” Stress is not contained in external events; there is no such thing as an inherently stressful situation. There are only stressful responses. Stress is not contained in what happens to you. It is the way you respond to what happens to you. You can choose to respond in a stressful way or you can choose to respond in a nonstressful way. The choice is yours.

  The starting point of stress management and the achievement of inner peace is for you to accept responsibility for your responses. It is not what happens to you but how you think about what happens to you that causes your response, positive or negative, stressful or unstressful. And this is your decision, your choice, your responsibility.

  For example, on any given day, two people may be stuck in traffic on the way to work. One person will be impatient and angry, while the other person will remain calm and relaxed.

  Here you have the same situation but two ways of responding to it. The response, not the situation, causes the stress.

  Or the same person may be upset and angry if he is stuck in traffic on the way to work on Monday, and be quite calm if he is stuck in traffic on the way to work on Wednesday. Here you have the same person and two different responses to the same situation. The choice is always up to the individual.

  A HIGH PRICE

  You pay a high price for poor stress management and the loss of inner peace. Easily 80 percent, and perhaps as many as 95 percent, of physical illnesses are psychological in origin. Modern medicine has almost eliminated most of the major diseases—typhoid, typhus, cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, polio and many others that used to shorten the natural life span. Yet in spite of this, we have more sick people and more of our gross national product being spent on health care than at any other time in our history. And a large part of the reason for this is the inability of the average person to manage the rigors and stresses of daily life in our dynamic and fast-paced modern society.

  The leading cause of death in America is heart disease, killing more than five hundred thousand men and women each
year. Yet experts such as Dr. Kenneth Cooper, of the Cooper Clinic in Dallas, have concluded that there is little incidence of death from heart disease before age seventy in the absence of the high-stress, or Type A, personality. High stress has also been closely linked to cancer, strokes, ulcers, colitis, hyperthyroidism, skin diseases and breakouts, migraine headaches, arthritis and a variety of other life-threatening and degenerative ailments.

  STRESS CAN BE UNLEARNED

  If there is anything good about stress it is the fact that no one is born with any. Have you ever seen a stressed-out baby? All stressful responses are learned over the course of our lifetimes as the result of experience and conditioning. And if you have learned to respond to certain situations in a stressful way, you can also learn to respond to them in a more positive and constructive way.

  In any case, stress is not all bad. The only people who are completely free from stress are those in the cemetery. Stress is an unavoidable part of being alive. But there is both good stress, or what Dr. Abraham Maslow called “eustress,” and bad stress, the kind that is harmful to your health. Good stress gives you energy, enthusiasm and excitement about what you are doing. Bad stress makes you tired, irritable and unhappy. It often makes you feel overwhelmed by your work.

  A MATTER OF CONTROL

  The key issue in stress management is the subject of control, or what is called the “locus of control.” You feel positive about yourself and your life to the degree to which you feel you are in control of what is happening. You feel negative about yourself and your life to the degree to which you feel you are not in control, or that you are controlled by external factors, such as your boss, your bills, your relationships, your health or your other problems. (We discussed this key idea in Chapter Two.)

  If you think about your personal and work life, you will find that the areas in which you experience the greatest peace of mind and satisfaction are the areas in which you feel you have the greatest amount of control, or ability to exert influence, over what is going on. You will also find that the areas in which you are most unhappy, or experience the most stress, are those in which you feel you are not in control, or in which you feel there is little that you can do to solve the problem or remove the irritation.

  The most effective method of stress management that I know of is called the “cognitive control method.” In a way, we have been talking indirectly about this method throughout this book. “Cognitive control” means that you use your mind, your ability to think, choose and decide, to exert control over your emotions and over your responses to difficult situations. It is in using the cognitive control method that you become your own psychotherapist and assure yourself life-long enjoyment of inner peace and happy relationships.

  SEVEN SOURCES OF STRESS

  There are seven major causes of stress and negative emotions. These seven stressors cause probably 95 percent, perhaps even 99 percent, of all of the unhappiness you will ever experience. Once you learn how to identify them, and deal with them, you will feel more positive, more optimistic and more cheerful in everything you do. You will feel that you are back in control of your inner and outer lives.

  WORRY WEARS YOU DOWN

  The first major source of stress is worry. Worry is a sustained form of fear caused by indecision. Often people learn to worry from one of their parents and, by worrying repeatedly, they become chronic worriers. They worry about almost anything, almost all the time. And worry of any kind tends to depress your body’s immune system and make you susceptible to all kinds of illnesses, from colds and flu all the way up to life-threatening diseases and infections. Your ability to eliminate worry is your starting point for the happy, healthy, well-balanced mental attitude you need to get the most joy from everything you do.

  When people are asked what they worry about, they usually give the following percentages: 40 percent are things that never happen; 30 percent are in the past and can’t be changed in any case; 12 percent are needless worries about health; and 10 percent are petty worries about unimportant matters.

  That only leaves 8 percent, of which half, or 4 percent, are things about which nothing can be done. Only 4 percent of the things that most people worry about can be changed. How do your worries measure up against these percentages?

  LIVE ONE DAY AT A TIME

  One of the best ways to stop worrying is to live in “day-tight compartments.” Live one day at a time. In the Bible it says, “Sufficient unto the day are the cares thereof.” Much of your stress is a result of worrying about things in the future, most of which never happen anyway. Cross the bridge, whenever possible, when you come to it, not before. And not repeatedly.

  THE “WORRY BUSTER”

  Perhaps the best method for dealing with worry is the “Worry Buster.” This simple four-step process has helped more people to gain control and eliminate worrying than any other method.

  First, clearly define your worry situation in writing. Sometimes when you write out a clear definition of the problem, you see an obvious solution.

  Second, determine the worst possible thing that could happen as a result of this situation. Often you will find that the worst possible outcome is not that bad. Just defining it clearly and considering it as a possibility often reduces the stress and worry associated with the problem.

  Third, once you have determined the worst possible thing that could happen, resolve to accept it, should it occur. Once you have determined that you are “willing to have it so” you then have nothing left to worry about.

  And fourth, begin immediately to improve upon the worst. Begin to do everything you possibly can to minimize the worst possible outcome. In business, this is called the “minimax” solution. It requires that you minimize the maximum worst possible consequences of any decision.

  John Paul Getty, at one time the world’s richest man, gave one of his secrets of success as this: In every business deal or transaction, identify the worst thing that can possibly go wrong, and then make sure it doesn’t happen.

  The only real antidote for worry is purposeful action. Once you have made a decision about what you can do to resolve your situation, get so busy working on the solution that you no longer have time to think about the problem.

  The Law of Substitution states that you can substitute thoughts of positive action for thoughts of worry and drive the worry thoughts out of your mind. The key is to get busy. “Take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them,” as Shakespeare said in Hamlet. “I must lose myself in action lest I wither in despair,” said Tennyson after the death of his best friend, Arthur Hallam.

  MEANING AND PURPOSE

  The second major cause of stress and negativity is having no clear meaning and purpose in life. It is having no clear goals to which you are committed. In business, a major source of stress is poor time management, which is almost invariably caused by a lack of clarity concerning goals and priorities. You can’t plan and organize your time efficiently and effectively if you are unsure about what it is you are trying to accomplish.

  Perhaps 80 percent of all the problems and unhappiness that you experience occur because you are unclear about where you’re going and what you want to accomplish. The very act of selecting a major definite purpose, and making a plan for its accomplishment, is often enough in itself to snap you out of the feeling of negativity that you experience in the absence of a goal.

  There is an old saying that is corny but true: “Feeling listless? Make a list!” The very act of sitting down and making a list of ten things you would like to accomplish over the next twelve months will get you excited. Your blood pressure and your heart rate will go up. You will become more alert and aware. You’ll be happier. Your mind is structured in such a way that you feel good about yourself only when you’re working toward achieving something that is important to you.

  THE “INCOMPLETE ACTION”

  The third major source of stress and negativity is the “incomplete action.” Each of us has within us a “compulsion t
o closure” or an “urge to completion.” We feel happy and contented when we finish a job, or achieve a goal. We feel unhappy and stressed when we leave something undone or incomplete. Engaging in an incomplete act, or doing a job only partially, can cause you enormous stress. Even watching someone engage in an incomplete action is stressful.

  A famous courtroom lawyer, when it appeared that his client was going to be found guilty, would arrive in court on the final day with a big cigar. As the district attorney began his summation to the jury, the lawyer would begin to puff on his cigar, and the ash would begin to grow. As the ash grew longer and longer, without falling off, the attention of the members of the jury would begin to focus on the ash. The lawyer would continually make motions and objections with the hand that contained the cigar so that it kept moving back and forth in the air.

  In no time at all, the eyes of the entire jury would be fixed on the growing ash and they would stop paying attention to what the district attorney was saying. When the district attorney was finished, the lawyer would put his cigar down in the ashtray and then get up and give his final closing defense arguments to the jury. In many cases, the jury would bring back a verdict of not guilty.

  After the jury had left the courtroom, the lawyer would remove a long, thin wire that he had placed down the center of the cigar. The wire had been holding the three inches of ash. There was no doubt that this wire had saved his clients in many marginal cases. The tension of watching the ash was so great for the jury members that they were unable to listen to the summation of the case by the district attorney.