Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (9 page)

People often approach me at my seminars and ask what their goals should be. I reply that only they can decide. It is amazing how many of them tell me how hard it is to set goals, and I agree with them. It is hard, but it is also essential. With clear goals, you can do almost anything. Without them, you can do virtually nothing.

One of the major reasons that people fail in life is because they waste so much of their time doing things of low value or no value at all. And the reason they waste so much time is because they have no real idea of what they really want. Once you have clear goals, your ability to manage your time improves dramatically.

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USE YOUR TIME WELL

Here is a way to decide whether something is a good use of your time. Just ask,
“Does this move me toward the achievement of one of
my goals?”
If the activity helps you to achieve a goal you have set for yourself, it is a good use of time. If it doesn’t, it is a poor use of time.

When you get into the habit of only doing those things that move you toward your goals, your life will take off. Your results will improve. You will soon find yourself busy every hour of every day doing things that are helping you in some way.You will have no time left to spend on activities that aren’t helping you to achieve one of your goals.

When you set clear goals for yourself, and you know exactly what you want, you will become increasingly impatient with activities that are not helping you in some way.You will watch less television. You will listen to less radio. You will read the newspapers quickly, if at all. You will become far more selective with your friends and your social activities.You will spend time only with people you enjoy, people you can learn and benefit from. But, as the old saying goes,
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take
you there.”

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STEP TWO: WRITE DOWN

YOUR GOALS

Write your goals down on paper. There is something quite incredible that happens between the brain and the hand. When you take a paper and pen and write down your goals, you activate the Laws of Expectation, Attraction, and Correspondence simultaneously.

You intensify your belief and deepen your conviction that your goals are possible for you. The very act of writing down your goals gives you a sense of control and personal power. Written goals increase your resolve and determination to do whatever is necessary to achieve them.

The speed at which you will begin to achieve your goals after you have written them down is nothing short of miraculous. The very act of writing out your goals increases the likelihood of your achieving them by as much as 10 times—1,000 percent!

Many thousands of my graduates have written or come back to tell me about the amazing things that have happened in their lives that started immediately after they began putting their goals in writing.

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STEP THREE: BE WILLING

TO PAY THE PRICE

Determine the price you are going to have to pay to achieve your goal. Make a list of everything that you are going to have to do if you want to make your goal a reality.

Are you going to have to start each day’s work a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later? Write it down. Are you going to have to upgrade your knowledge and skills, and take additional courses? Again, write it down. Are you going to have to change jobs, change industries, or change careers in order to achieve everything that is possible for you? Write it down.

The Law of Cause and Effect is the iron law of the universe. For everything that you want, there is a price that must be paid. This price must be paid
in full
and
in advance
. The Law of Sowing and Reaping is not the Law of Reaping and Sowing. You have to
put in
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CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE

before you
get out
. You have to
give
before you
receive
. You have to pay the price before you enjoy the reward.

Your willingness to do whatever you need to do, pay whatever price is required, go whatever distance is necessary, and make whatever sacrifice is demanded is the measure of how badly you really want your goal.

Many people sabotage their own success by deciding that they want a particular goal, and although they are willing to pay a high price for it, they are not quite willing to pay the
full price
that the goal demands. This is like wanting to win in a poker game but not being willing to match the final bet made by the other player. You end up losing the whole hand, just as by failing to make a total commitment people end up losing the entire goal.

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STEP FOUR: MAKE A DETAILED PLAN

Make a plan, in writing. Remember, the ability to develop written goals and create plans for their achievement is the master skill of success. A plan begins with your making a list of all the things that you can think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal. Once you have made your list, you can add new items as they occur to you.

You then organize your list in terms of priority and sequence.

What are the
most important
things on the list that you will have to do to achieve your goal? What are the things that you will have to do
before
you do something else? Which items on your list are dependent on your completing other items
first
?

A plan of action gives you a track to run on. It increases your level of belief and intensifies your desire for the goal. You gradually become convinced that your goal is actually possible and achievable for you. You begin to see possibilities that you may not even have been aware of in the absence of a written plan.

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STEP FIVE: TAKE ACTION

ON YOUR PLAN

Take action of some kind in the direction of your goal. Once you have set a goal, written it down, determined the price that you are ccc_tracy_3_40-51.qxd 6/23/03 2:47 PM Page 49

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going to have to pay, and made a plan, you must take some action immediately. Even if you only make one phone call or collect one piece of information, be sure to do
something
. In the Bible it says,

“Faith without deeds is dead.”

There is something powerful in your willingness to take a specific action, in faith, in the direction of your goal, with no guarantee of success. Your action itself seems to trigger all kinds of other powers and forces in the universe. You activate the Law of Attraction to help you. When you take action, you demonstrate to yourself, and to others for that matter, that you are really serious about your goal.

Until you have taken a specific, irrevocable action of some kind, you have merely engaged in an enjoyable exercise, like day-dreaming. You have put your key into the ignition but you haven’t turned it on.

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STEP SIX: DO SOMETHING EVERY DAY

Do something every day that moves you toward your most important goal. This is a vital success principle that generates energy and enthusiasm. For you to maintain your courage, confidence, and self-motivation, you must be doing something every single day that gives you a feeling of forward motion and progress. Your job is to build yourself up to the point where you genuinely feel
unstoppable
, and the only way that you can do this is by refusing to stop, by doing something daily.

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STEP SEVEN: NEVER GIVE UP

Resolve in advance that you will never quit once you have started toward your goal. No matter how many setbacks or obstacles you experience, make the decision that you will keep on picking yourself up and persisting until you eventually succeed.

By deciding in advance that you will persist, no matter what the difficulty, you give yourself a psychological edge. When the difficulties
do
arise, you will be mentally prepared to plow through them rather than quitting. Your willingness and ability to persist are what will eventually guarantee your success.

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SECRETS OF

SELF-MADE MILLIONAIRES

If money is your goal, remember that most of the people who are wealthy today started out with no money at all, or even deeply in debt. Almost everyone who is on the top today was once at the bottom. Almost everyone who is at the front of the line of life was once at the back of the line. Almost everyone who is wealthy today was once poor.

Most of the five million millionaires in the United States are self-made. That is, they started out with nothing and worked their way up. Our world today has more than 300 self-made
billionaires
and multibillionaires as well. Many of these are people who started with little or nothing, and by changing their thinking, they unleashed their own inner potentials to achieve extraordinary financial results. And almost anything that anyone else has done, within reason, you can do as well. What are
your
goals?

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THE POWER OF COMMITMENT

One of my favorite quotations is from the mountain climber Charles Murray.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw
back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and
creation, there is an elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills
countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment that one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidences
and meetings and material assistance that no man could have
dreamed would have come his way.

He finishes off his statement with these words from Goethe: ccc_tracy_3_40-51.qxd 6/23/03 2:47 PM Page 51

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Are you in earnest? Seek this very minute,
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Only engage and the mind grows heated.

Begin and then the task will be completed.

ACTION EXERCISES

1.
What one great goal would you set for yourself if you were absolutely guaranteed success?

2.

Make out a “dream list”; write down everything you would like to have in your life someday, exactly as if you had no limitations.

3.
Imagine your perfect lifestyle; if you were financially independent and you could live any way and anywhere you wanted, what would you change?

4.
Make a list of 10 goals you would like to accomplish in the next year. From that list, select the one goal that would have the greatest positive impact on your life if you could achieve it right now.

5.
Write your most important goal on a separate piece of paper.

Make it measurable and set a deadline for its accomplishment.

6.
Make a written plan to achieve this one goal. Write out a list of everything you can think of that you will have to do to accomplish it.

7.
Take action on your plan immediately. Once you have started, discipline yourself to do something every day that moves you toward that goal. Never miss a day until you have achieved it.

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C h 4

a p t e r

Decide to Become Rich

Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success,
all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and
of all achievement.

—Claude M. Bristol

We have passed from a world based on material limitations into a world that is determined by
mental
concepts. We have moved from the age of
things
into the “Psychozoic Age,” the age of the
mind
.

Wealth and opportunities are contained more in the person you
are
and the way you
think
than in the assets you have acquired in life so far. Your future lies more in your ability to apply your mind and intelligence to your work and your life than it does in your current job or situation.

Because health, wealth, and happiness are essentially mental, there are very few limits on how much of them you can acquire for yourself. In this chapter, and in subsequent chapters, you will learn many of the simple, practical, proven methods, techniques, and strategies used by high-achieving men and women in every field to accomplish far more than they, or the people around them, ever dreamed possible.You will learn how to break the bonds of limited, conventional thinking, expanding your desires and ambitions so dramatically that you will be able accomplish any goal that you could ever set for yourself.

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THREE MAJOR FORCES

There are three major forces reverberating through our world today, transforming everything they touch and creating unlimited opportunities for the creative minority. These three forces are the incredible growth in
information
,
technology
, and
competition
.

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Information and Knowledge Explosion
The
information
revolution, combined with the speed of computer-ized information processing, the Internet, and wireless communications, is enabling knowledge in every field to double every two or three years. Fully 90 percent of all the thinkers, inventors, engineers, scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds who ever existed are living and working today. The results of their efforts are becoming almost instantaneously available to each other, thereby doubling and tripling their outputs.