Category Archives: Goals

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Help From Napoleon Hill

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Napoleon Hill talks about “Applied Faith” in his “Keys to Success“. As I was skimming through the chapters I saw this and felt it would be perfect as we continue on our positive path for 2012.

It’s called “Demonstrating The Power of Your Faith” and I’m just going to list the steps he talks about in order to build your faith and your “PMA” (Positive Mental Attitude):

1) Adopt a definite major purpose and begin to attain it. This is what we’ve been working on for the past 5-6 weeks now.

2) Affirm the object of your desire through prayer, morning and night. See yourself already in possession of it. You will achieve precisely the success you can envision for yourself.

3) Associate as many as possible of the ten basic motives with your definite major purpose. Give yourself a compelling motive for doing what you want to do. Bring that motive into your mind frequently through the day. Here are the 10 basic motives toward action:

  • Self-preservation
  • Love
  • Fear
  • Sex
  • Desire for life after death
  • Freedom for mind and body
  • Anger
  • Hate
  • Desire for recognition and self-expression
  • Wealth

4) Write out a list of all the advantages of your definite major pupose and bring them into your mind as often as you can.  This will make you success-conscious by the power of self-suggestion.

5) Associate with people who are like-minded.

6) Don’t let a day pass without making at least one definite move toward attaining your major purpose.  This is what he calls persistent action. It is key to take action. You can’t sit around and think that your denials and affirmations will make your desire come to pass. It just doesn’t work that way.

7) Choose a “pacesetter”.  Pick someone prosperous, self-reliant and successful and make up your mind not only to catch up with that person but to pass him or her by.  Don’t tell anyone your goal (we’ve told you that many times).

8) Surround yourself with books, pictures, mottoes and other suggestive devices.  Pick things that symbolize and reinforce achievement and self-reliance.  Keep adding to your collection, move things around, always making it fresh in your mind.  Keep a notebook or diary program around to write down things that inspire you.

9) Never run away from disagreeable circumstances. Fight them with all your resources.

10) Recognize that anything worth having has a definite price tag. The price of self-reliance is eternal vigilance in applying your faith.

Cloe the door of fear behind you and you will quickly see the door of faith open before you.

Write out (or print out) these ten steps and review them daily. Then put them all into practice. Each night you should review this list and see how you are doing with applying your faith!

Terrie

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It’s Time to Reassess

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Ok, so it’s the end of January. Now is the time to reassess your “success” list. What has happened in the past month? What have you accomplished?

If you’re well on your way to achieving your successes, great! Maybe you want to revisit the 2012 Success List in order to tweak it or refine it a bit now that you’ve had a month to think about it. But maybe you have uncovered several limiting beliefs this month. If so, use the next week to work with denials to clear them. While you are doing your week’s worth of denials, start working on the wonderful affirmations you want to say AFTER your denials. But don’t say them yet, just start thinking about them. Repeating this process frequently.  In fact, I would like you to consider taking the first week of every month to clear more land and start planting new stronger and healthier seeds. This will keep your ground clear and fertile. You’ll also be surprised at what you discover.

So what if this has not been a great month for following your Success List? What if you ‘gave up’ early on? What if nothing’s happened and you’re discouraged? Should you just stop and wait for next New Year’s Day? Heck no! It’s just time to reassess.

Hopefully you haven’t gotten so upset that you threw out the list. Before you take that list out and go over it, I want you to go back to your inventory list – the one we made at the beginning of the process. Start a new page and date it today’s date. Make an inventory of where you were on 31 December and then write down where you are today. Also write out what’s happened to you this month. This will be easier in the future if you record things every day (a great use for the Gratitude Journal). So what’s been going on in your life? I bet you’ll be surprised at the great things that have happened in this short time. Sometimes all it takes is to look at this inventory to realize that things aren’t as bad as you thought they were. Maybe everything didn’t go perfectly but I bet your attitude about them is much different and more positive. That’s a step in the right directions. Remember that you are not what you think but you are what you thought. So this month’s positive thoughts are producing great things in your life – you just may not be able to see them yet.

But what should you do now?

After you’ve made this inventory, you need to make sure that the items on this list are really yours. We talked about that before but maybe you didn’t really know or you thought the success list items were yours but they aren’t. Check your inner feelings again. Is it you who wants to achieve such and such or is it your wife, your parents, your doctor, etc? If it’s not yours, cross it off. None of this “well, it should be mine even if it isn’t”. That won’t work until it really IS yours. I finally quit smoking when I woke up one day and said “enough, I’m ready to stop this” and then it was easy. But all the other times I tried to stop were unsuccessful because I did not OWN them then. Once I made MY decision, then it was easy – even after 26+ years of smoking.

That would be the first place to start. Examine your list and see if these are things YOU really want. Be honest with yourself. It will mean the difference between success and feeling as if you can’t accomplish anything. Ask yourself if you really want this thing. Where did the idea come from? Has it been a long standing desire? Or something that just developed recently. If it’s long standing, it might have its roots in other people’s encouragement.

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What’s Being Recorded In Your Subconscious?

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As there is 1 1/2 more weeks left in January 2012, I continue to point out things that might have derailed you from your 2012 Success List. If you make it through January still on track, you’ll have a great chance of accomplishing your “successes”.

Emmet Fox wrote about “The Dictaphone” and I think that’s worth discussing today.

He proposed an imaginary experiment. Suppose that without your knowledge an invisible dictaphone was strapped to your shoulders the first thing tomorrow morning. You carry it with you all day long and every word you said was recorded. Tomorrow the recording was played back so you could hear every single word that you said. If you’re an average human being you’ll probably be a bit embarrassed. Think what would happen if the dictaphone also recorded every THOUGHT you had as well as every word you spoke.

Your subconscious mind absorbs EVERYTHING you think and say. Remember what I like to say “You are what you thought”, not really what you think. It’s what went into your subconscious before now that has molded your being and experience.

I emphasize that you need to monitor all your words – both spoken and thought. This is one of the most common reasons for “failure” in achieving your “Successes”. You set out with great intentions and do the groundwork of denials and affirmations but then go right back to your old ways of thinking and acting – using the same old phrases and thoughts – many of which are downright negative or have negative connotations. That will derail you as surely as quitting your pursuit. That’s why I’m emphasizing the “Words of Wisdom” series of posts. See what phrases we use in life on a daily basis, analyze what they mean and then wipe them from your vocabulary.

There is no way around it. You have to pay attention to what you’re saying and thinking. I suggest you get a small notebook you can carry in your pocket or purse and write down everything you hear and think as it happens. Then each night review this list and note the ones you want to eliminate and also think about the reason you need to do that. This will help you identify other phrases and thoughts you want to get rid of too. Things such as “I’m fed up”, “I’m sick and tired”, “You’re killing me”, “I can’t afford to….” etc.

Work on this for a week and see what changes in your life.

Terrie

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In Spite Of

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Here’s a great Emmet Fox post:

Success consists in the overcoming of difficulties. All men and women who have made a success of any kind have done so by overcoming difficulties. Where there are no difficulties to be overcome, anybody can get the thing done, and doing so cannot be called success.

There was a time when laying a telegraph line from New York to Boston presented many complicated changes. Then there was a time when doing that was easy, but laying the Atlantic cable was a great achievement, because of the perplexing areas which had to be overcome. Later on, marine cable laying became a routine business, but radio across the ocean presented problems which for a time seemed insurmountable. Then those difficulties were overcome too.

There are no personal areas that cannot be transformed by quiet, persistent, spiritual treatment, and the appropriate wise activity.

If you have a personal experience that seems to keep you from success, do not accept it as such, but capitalize it and use it as the instrument for your success.

H. G. Wells had to give up a dull underpaid job because of ill health, so he stayed at home and wrote successful books and became a world-known author instead. Edison was stone deaf and decided that this would enable him to concentrate better on his inventions. Beethoven did his work in spite of his deafness.

Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly child and was told he would have to lead a careful retired life. He was a very short-sighted and nervous little boy. Instead of accepting these suggestions, however, he worked hard to develop his body and became, as we know, a strong husky open-air man and big game hunter. Gilbert wrote Pinafore on a sick bed, wracked with severe pain.
The owner of a fashionable dress business in London started with northing but good taste in clothes and a belief in prayer, and is a wealthy and successful woman today.
Whatever you think your disadvantage is, capitalize it. Spiritual treatment and courageous determination can overcome anything.

Emmet Fox

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What You Expect

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As we continue with our 2012 Success List I wanted you to read this post on “What you Expect”.

All of our lives we have put in our expectancy that we couldn’t do it ourselves, that somebody outside of us had to help us, had to give it to us.  That God sitting on the mountaintop had to help us.

We should be saying, “Wait a minute, God’s stuff outside of us is the energy force, the life force, the divine substance of the universe.”  And this divine substance is what responds when we say “OK”.  That’s all we have to say.  We have to accept the ideas that come in, and we keep saying that I am the will of God in action, versus, I don’t want to do my will, I want to do God’s will.

If we say, “I don’t want to do my will, I want to do God’s will”,  then we are separating ourselves from God.  And yet Jesus told us, “All things I do, you can do also, and even greater.”  The same Christ that was in Jesus is in us.  That is the divine substance that we talk about.  That is the Christ itself, that is the individualized Christ.  The individualization of God in human beings.

Now, when we get that in our mind and we realize that there’s something in this world that is giving us ideas, and every time we brush it aside or say we can’t,  or we don’t know how, or we don’t want to do that, or it’s too much, it’s too  hard, it’s too whatever, then we push that idea away.

This is what’s so important to teach childern not to ever say, “I can’t” but to always say, “Show me how.  Show me the way.  Show me what I can do.  Show me the next step to take.”  Any of these things that open up, give you that expectancy with you keeping your eye on the goal.  The expectation that that goal is on its way to you, and pulling it in closer and closer and closer.  The ideas that we have are ours to do, to be, to accept.  When we allow ourselves that freedom to do that, we take out all of the negative.  It’s like a clear tunnel that we can go through with no interferences.