Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (7 page)

    
   Begin and end your day positively. Before you go to sleep at night, thank yourself for a great day. When you wake up, the first words in your head should be something like:
I feel absolutely fantastic, and I know today is brilliantly successful for me
.

    
   When no one is within earshot, speak the words aloud. This may feel at first like the onset of insanity, but soon you’ll be able to afford the best psychiatrists that money can hire.

    
   Whenever something irritates or depresses you during the day, take a deep breath, and silently pump yourself back up with an affirming statement. (Editors rightly admonish writers like me about overuse of adverbs and adjectives. Written sentences are better for their omission. On the trip to success, however, they are your best friends. They add emotion to the thought. Saying “I feel well” is acceptable for a novel. In life, saying “I feel absolutely, amazingly, vibrantly healthy!” takes you to a higher level of energy. It pumps you up faster. It is a really, really, really great thing to do.)

So far, we have analyzed the equation in reverse order, and some readers might consider the information on controlling thoughts and words as only a little different than extolling the virtues of positive thinking or the power of positive words. This is, however, something that you can begin right now and change your life. It requires no monetary investment, no time, and only a little effort. From this moment on, before you speak, take a
little breath, smile, pause . . . and then map out your better thoughts in stronger words onto your tongue. Just try it for a day and see how differently things work out for you.

In my experience, people often come to grips with this aspect easily, but very quickly something negative happens at work or home or they take notice of something emotionally draining that is on television, and all the good work is undone in a flash. Controlling our thoughts and words is part of the essential process, but it becomes much more powerful if we can manage the stimuli that trigger them as well.

A thousand things can cause you to have a thought and react with a word, but we only need to make small changes in our lifestyles to achieve great things. In this step, we are concerned with only two main sources of stimuli.

One of the main influences in our immediate environment is the chronic complainer. Nothing unites people more closely than a common dislike, which means we often find ourselves bonded to people who are
against
something or someone. That becomes a downward-spiraling energy wave, leading back to quicksand.

The other main influence is the media, in all its forms. Some of it may be harmless entertainment, but whether selling a product or an ideology, it is clear that political, religious, and business institutions understand how to sculpt common thinking. The people who work in those institutions may not know they can control their own destiny, but they are fully aware of their ability to make groups of people behave in a certain way. They go to great effort and expense to invade your environment and march unopposed against your mentality.

Why should we care about these influences? It is because thoughts must become matter that returns to the owner of the thought. So, if you see something in the media or hear something from a person nearby, that causes you to trigger a negative thought-image, and the material realization of that comes into your life, not the thing or person that caused your thought.

The problem is compounded by the simple fact that, in order to influence us, people or media must hold our attention long enough to create a reaction. Fear paralyzes. It works better than any other emotion to keep us entranced long enough for whatever message they have. Media and people tend to hold us fixated by making us feel anxious, perhaps with gossip, a rumor, or a dramatic headline.

The effects of fear are important to understand if you want to get out of the quicksand. As soon as you feel fear, the amygdala (a small, almond-shaped organ in the center of your brain) sends signals to your autonomic nervous system, producing a wide range of effects. Your heart rate increases, your blood pressure goes up, your breathing gets quicker, and stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are released.

Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neuroendocrinology at Stanford University, has focused his research on issues of stress and neural degeneration. He has won many honors for his papers that show links between long-term stressful life experiences, long-term exposure to hormones such as cortisol, produced during stress, and shrinking of the hippocampus area of the brain.

The hippocampus is a mass of neurons, each with multiple branch-like extensions (dendrites and axons) that make connections (synapses) with other neurons all across the brain. The hippocampus is also one of the few regions of the brain known to be able to produce new neurons, a process called neurogenesis.

Professor Sapolsky has shown that enduring a high stressor,
like watching fearful news or listening to someone spread a stressful rumor at work, for more than thirty minutes, negatively impacts the hippocampus in various ways. To begin, sustained exposure to higher than normal levels of cortisol results in the pruning back of the number of branches and synaptic connections of hippocampal neurons. By a variety of mechanisms, these conditions also increase the rate of cell death in this region of the brain.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, recent research is demonstrating that sustained increases in glucocorticoid levels also have negative effects, impairing the hippocampus’s ability to create new neurons. Over a period of time, all of this results in the shrinking in size of the hippocampus with associated declines in cognitive function, including the ability to retain new information and adapt to new situations,
which is exactly what you don’t want when you are attempting to reinvent your life
.

Fortunately, according to Sapolsky, the negative effects of excessive stress can not only be stopped but reversed “once the source, psychological or physical, is removed or sufficiently reduced.” Simple! Change a little, change a lot.

Think about the day you have had so far. How many times did someone complain about something to you directly or within your hearing? It may have been a trivial matter like the weather or something significant they saw in the newspaper such as the state of the economy. How often did you automatically join in? Did you start a chat by having a little moan about something? Think about all of your Twitter posts, texts, and emails and which of them were critical of a thing or person.

Although the criticisms may be slight, they accumulate in the course of a day into an avalanche of negativity that raises anxiety.
It is scary when you stop to think about it and realize how many of the words being mapped out are negative. Whether verbal, written, or electronic, they have the same impact.

Many people revel in gossip and rumor mongering. It bonds them quickly and is the easiest way to make allies. Because it’s so contagious, we can slip into the habit innocently. It holds groups together like glue, and you cannot reinvent yourself as part of a group. The aim is for you to become an individual again.

Gossip is toxic to our mentality. Every time we allow a complaint into our brains, it triggers a negative thought that has no choice but to return more of what is being complained about to us. If someone bemoans the economy, and you think “I agree with that,” then events will transpire in your life that give you even more reason to moan about it . . . even though you did not initiate the topic and were thinking of something completely different earlier.

Another good exercise is to sit with friends or family and listen to their comments as you all watch a soap opera or reality television show. Almost everything is negative because the shows are designed and written to trigger that reaction. I did this with two relatives once and counted more than a hundred negative statements from them in less than a half hour.

Every criticism is a form of being
against
. As painful as it is to consider, whatever someone is against comes back like a boomerang to the thrower, which increases exposure to the harmful effects of stress even more. Of course, if you say something positive, that shows up in your life also, but the challenge is that nothing unites people more than a common dislike. Positive people are a rarity and, unfortunately, most successful people must walk a solo path.

If you reached the end of your days, then added up the beneficial vs. harmful thoughts and came out 51 percent to 49 percent in favor of beneficial, you would have lived a grand
adventure. Most people, however, would be more than 80 percent negative, and their lives would be a reflection of that. Our aim with this step is just to shift the balance more toward neutral. If you doubt it, spend a day and a night keeping score. Make a note of every positive comment you hear and every negative one. It will shock you.

This is a national and cultural disease in the Western world. We are a society of complainers. I am not complaining about it. I am just stating a fact. I find complainers a source of amusement, and usually tease them mercilessly by reacting completely differently to the way they expect. In a recent comment on this subject in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, I read:

That writer was onto something, because whatever we allow into our minds begins to rewire our neural networks. A recent study, published in
Behavioural Brain Research
, September 2011, conducted by researchers from the Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany, measured the neural effect of negative and positive words versus neutral words. This functional MRI study showed positive vs. negative words led to increased activation in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with risk, fear, and decision-making processes, while negative vs. positive words induced increased activation of the insula, which is thought to impact perception, motor control, self-awareness, cognitive functioning, and interpersonal experience.

In business, I am always looking for the “so what” aspect to everything.
Don’t give me facts and features—tell me the benefit
is the
mantra of any successful sales consultation. With these sort of studies, I am often left with a “so what” feeling, like a great film without a conclusion. What does it really mean?

In his book on neuroplasticity,
The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
, Norman Doidge, M.D., states plainly that the brain has the capacity to rewire itself and/or form new neural pathways—if we do the work. Just like exercise, the work requires repetition and activity to reinforce new learning.