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You and me are own worst enemy.
… and it’s all in our minds!
…Especially when we let negative feelings put up walls to achieving our personal and professional goals.
We see this every day – person A begins talking enthusiastically about a new opportunity and immediately persons B and C shoot the idea down by focusing only on the negative outcomes that could potentially result.
I’m guilty of this – big time!
I’m a pessimist (learned from experience) about a lot of business stuff – since most businesses fail I think I’m justified – because it is far easier to get it wrong than get it right!
In the big-picture however, I am a relentless optimist. I know that each new plateau of success requires overcoming unwelcome challenges.
That’s life. Check your own experience to corroborate my opinion – it will probably match-up.
Case-in-point (non-business): I sucked at guitar when I started. With each new accomplishment in skill, dexterity, or comprehension of musical principles more finicky challenges presented themselves – and could only be overcome with dedicated practice and self-assessment.
And some days I just felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all… sometimes for weeks.
Then… Big Breakthrough – I would find myself looking back at my experience of playing guitar just a few weeks before and marvel at how much better I sounded with my new insights.
Sometimes this is called a “quantum leap” – and a certain school of thinking goes thus: we may practice skills and be frustrated at our apparent progress – but we are really laying the foundation for a quantum leap: a sudden upgrading of our “operating system” that enhances our results, and often grow our self-esteem by leaps and bounds.
You have to be careful. Be realistic about the W.O.R.K. success demands – and preserve your core positivity about getting what you want.
One Exercise I do often is to imagine where I want to be in 3 years, or a year, or ten years… visualizing the life I hope to have created my then.
This works… you probably won’t get exactly what you envisioned because life throws curve-balls at all of us, our goals change, and… well – this is my opinion – the details don’t matter so much as getting to a place where you FEEL you’ve accomplished what you’ve set out to do.
You might visualize yourself driving a hot red Ferrari with a beautiful blonde in the passenger seat in 3 years…. but when you get there you might find yourself married to a great person with little kids and you are driving a Volvo and not the Ferrari – because your priorities shifted.
That’s growth.
It’s a good thing.
Overall growth is something you can look forward to with unmitigated enthusiasm.
Weaving Optimism And Positive Thinking Into Success
Positive people tend to draw towards other optimistic people, and of course negative people cluster together like schools of fish.
The difference between the two groups is that the optimistic ones tend to progress through life with greater confidence; whatever challenges they encounter they are prepared to face and overcome.
Optimistic people never worried about encountering problems with anything. They understand that things happen, more importantly they also understand that there is a solution out there somewhere. Their goal is to simply resolve the issue as quickly and efficiently as possible, which they know they will be able to do some way, somehow.
It’s for this reason that those who think positively and optimistically are far more likely to be successful in both their business and personal lives. They can’t help but know that everything is going to work out the way they expected to, if not even better – they expect to encounter obstacles along the path however and it is the end-goal that matters…
…and as we know “getting there is half the fun”.
Since you can’t realistically skip the journey to success and become instantly wealthy and skillful, it makes sense to pursue the wealth and lifestyle you want with a patient attitude towards the process.
In most cases it’s the immaturity of wanting “INSTANT SUCCESS” that holding most people back from getting the results they want at all.
There is also the issue of what Napoleon Hill terms “ACCURATE THINKING” – because while positive attitude is essential, when you examine the patterns of behavior of successful people you will see that clearly all of them have an accurate notion of the WORK involved, and of the possibilities for failure.
I have failed many times in business myself. I’ve failed even more in my personal life – but I usually learned more from my failures than I did from my successes.
“Easy come, easy go,” they say.
Loren Woirhaye prefers to play gypsy music on guitar or accordion – but when he isn’t doing that he writes direct-response copy, consults with clients to help them make money with their websites, coaches people who want to fire their employers and blogs about success, life, his personal foibles, and online marketing at http://malibumentor.com
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.
