5 Keys to Personal Power #ThrowbackThursday

I have a question for you. Why is it that some people are more successful than others? What results do you have to get to get from where you are to where you want to go? We no longer live in a physical economy. We live in a mental economy. We live in an economy where brain power is the critical tool for earning a great living. Hello, I'm Brian Tracy. Throughout all the ages of man, the greatest thinkers have looked forward to what they thought would be a golden age. What people hoped would be a golden age where all the great problems of mankind, the wars and revolutions and famines and pestilence and disease and poverty would be eliminated. And you know, the very best thinkers today are suggesting that we are now entering into the golden age, especially the golden age in the Western world. Because there are more opportunities today for you to achieve your goals, to become successful in any way that you want to define it, than have ever existed before in all of human history. Harvard University Three predictions. Number one is there'll be more change in the next year in your field than there's ever been before. Number two, there'll be more competition in the next year in your field than there's ever been before. And number three, there'll be more opportunities in your field in the next year than has ever been before. And it doesn't matter what your field is. Why is this? It's because simply the greatest number of experts, technologists, scientists, researchers, inventors, creators, writers and thinkers that have ever existed in human history, the greatest percentage are working today to develop new products and processes which turn into opportunities. For you and I, the problem is not opportunities and there have never been more of them than there are today. The greatest need of all is greater self confidence. In study after study that we've done, we find it isn't that people lack talent and ability, it's they lack the self confidence to take that talent and ability and use it to the very best that they possibly can. In this session today, I'm going to give you some ideas, some things that you can do that are practiced by all high achieving men and women to build up and maintain high levels of optimism, self confidence and enthusiasm that keep them moving forward and that help them accomplish more in a few years than most people accomplish in a lifetime. Now as you know, in 30 years I've developed hundreds and hundreds of ideas. I want to give you five of what you might call the biggies. These five are critically important. These five are practiced by all men and women who are highly successful. And these five can be easily learned by you and when you learn them, you'll develop self confidence to a level where you will be unafraid to tackle anything. Here's the first. Top of the list, most important of all is to dream big dreams. Dream big dreams. I can't tell you how important this is. In every study that I've looked at of successful men and women, you find that often they go on for years and years and then they begin to dream. They actually begin to fantasize. They begin to say, why not me? If he or she could do it, why can't I accomplish it? I used to joke with my audience about the brother in law phenomenon. Guy goes on for years and years and he doesn't accomplish very much. And one day his brother in law, who he doesn't think very much of, shows up at their home in a brand new Cadillac because why? Because he got into a new business, he took a new opportunity, he embraced a new challenge, he made a change in his life and now he's doing better than he's ever done before. And, and that person gets mad and says, if my brother in law can do it, then I can do it as well. That person changes their life because they begin to dream. Your job is to become a dreamer. Don't think that dreaming is for kids. When we're kids, we dream all the time. The most sophisticated and intelligent and knowledgeable and successful men and women in our society dream all the time. They take courses in how to let their minds float free. So the starting point of learning how to dream is very simple. It's so powerful and practical, it'll blow you away. It's called a dream list. Now a dream list is a phenomenal little thing. It's a list of your dreams. What does it mean? It means you ask yourself, what would I dream of if I had no limitations? And this is the key. Remember the limitations that you have or that you think you have are the greatest obstacles to your success in reality. Your limitations exist mostly in your own mind. They don't exist in reality. Limitations are things that we impose on our own mind from negative or what my friend Zig calls stinking thinking. Now a dream list is this. Take a piece of paper in front of you and imagine that you had all the money and all the time. You had all the contacts and all the resources. You had no limitations in terms of knowledge and skill and talent and ability. Anything that you could be, have or do was possible for you. And say, if I had no limitations, what would I really want in my life today, tomorrow Next week, next year, five years and so on. And write it down, write it down, write it down. Write as fast as you can. Write everything that you can imagine and remember. Decide what's right, decide what you really want before you stop to analyze and determine what's possible. If you're married, sit down with your spouse and the both of you sit down and take an afternoon, take an evening, take a trip and write down your dreams. What would you like to accomplish and be and have or do with your relationship with your kids, with your family, with your future, with your intellect and your mind and your health and your body and your home and your car and your lifestyle and your work and everything else? Allow yourself to dream. And when you start to dream, what we have found is this is your self concept actually improves. Your self image gets better. You actually see yourself in better terms because you are allowing yourself to think of yourself as the kind of person who can accomplish things by the very act of dreaming. We also find that your self esteem goes up, you like yourself better, you respect yourself more, you feel happier and more confident about yourself as you begin to dream and fantasize and just play with what is possible for you. Here's a great technique for dreaming. After you've done your dream list, stop and visualize and engage in what we call back from the future thinking. Now these techniques, by the way, I wish I could say I invented, they're just used by the most successful and the happiest and the most wealthy people in our society. And back from the future thinking is something that comes in interviews. You find that they practice it all the time, although many times they don't describe it or even identify it. It's imagine that this is you here and up here is your goal, your star, your dream, maybe five or 10 years away. And what you do is you project yourself forward. Almost as if in a trajectory, in a rocket. You project yourself forward into the future, to the future, like you're standing on top of a mountain. And then you look all the way back down to where you are today and say, here's where I am today. And you look down and you say there's where you are right now. And from this vantage point of being five years in the future, you ask yourself, what would I have to do to get from there, to get up to the top of this mountain? What path would I have to follow to accomplish my goals? Seeing where I am now, seeing where I want to be today, what could I see to do? This is a really neat technique. I tell You, I've tried it myself. And when you reverse it and look back from the future, you actually see things that you can do and will have to do steps that you'll have to take, like climbing up a mountain by looking at the mountain from the top rather than the bottom. You'll see things that you cannot see from the mental vantage point of looking from the bottom up. So then you will see that there's a path that you can follow. You'll actually see the steps that you will have to take in order to get up the mountain again, just like a mountain climber looking at the bottom. And then your job is to take those steps one step at a time and on a regular basis. Project yourself forward to the top of the mountain to your goal as though it were already accomplished, and imagine what you would have to do. And you'll be amazed at how much better you get at every step of what you do. You'll be amazed at how much more confident you are at anticipating difficulties when you practice back from the screws. Future thinking. Now, in addition to this, there's another method of thinking. It's called blue sky thinking. Blue sky thinking has been identified as a peak performance quality or characteristic. Blue sky thinking is where you allow yourself to float. You imagine that you have the whole blue sky above you. You imagine that you have no limitations. It's almost like you're floating through space. And you imagine that everything is possible, a little bit like a dream list, if you like. But it's a very powerful way of throwing off limitations and saying, if we were starting over, if we could do and be and have anything, if we had no previous constraints, if we hadn't committed ourselves or our resources in this direction or that direction, if we could do anything, what would we do? This is the basis, by the way, of reinventing corporations. And it's very much the basis of reinventing your life. Imagine if you were starting your life over today and you could do or be, have anything, and you could have no limitations or constraints at all. What would you choose to do? Let your mind float freely. Here's another exercise, and it's called the Rip Van Winkle Exercise. Now, you remember the story of Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep for 20 years and woke up and was astonished to find what had happened around him after he had woken up. But I'm not going to suggest that you fall asleep for 20 years, but I'm going to ask you to imagine and remember the ability to fantasize and to imagine and to play with Ideas is the mark of the superior mind, the superior mentality. All the great geniuses of history, by the way, have been studied, and you know what they find? They have the characteristic of allowing themselves to think like children, to play with ideas almost like they were little children, and. And to fantasize with them almost as if they were completely innocent. So, therefore, when you begin to fantasize with fun ideas, you start to move into the ranks of the best thinkers in history. And here is this Rip Van Winkle exercise. Imagine that we had a fairy dust or a magic wand. And we could spread it or wave it. And you would fall asleep right where you are for five years. You would just go out completely unconscious for five years. And in that five years, the whole world would go together and conspire to create your world perfectly in every respect. Everything would happen. And when you woke up after five years, everything in your world would be fabulous. Everything would look great. Everything would be wonderful. You would have your right home and car and house and relationships. The question is, if you fell asleep for five years and you woke up and your life was perfect in every respect, who would be there with you? What would you be doing? Where would you be working? How much would you be earning? What kind of a house would you be living in? What kind of physical health would you have? What kind of relationships would you have with the important people in your life? When you imagine this and you think about it, you may find that if everything was perfect in your life, it would be very different from the way your life is now. So give that some thought. Play with the idea. The final point with dreaming big dreams has to do with clarity. We talk about clarity all the time. And you need clarity in one special area. You need clarity with regard to your ideals. You need clarity with regard to your values. You need clarity with regard to your goals. And the more clear you are about who you are and what you believe in and what you care about and what is important to you, the more likely it is that you'll move rapidly to their accomplishment. There have been hundreds of biographies and autobiographies that have been written by men and women and about men and women who've accomplished great things. And what they found is that they all have one thing in common. All great men and women seem to either have or develop a sense of destiny. They develop a sense or a belief deep down inside that their life stands for something important, that it means something, that. That they're here to do something really special with their lives. And everything they look at, they Say, is this part of the unique and special reason that I've been put on this earth? A friend of mine said recently with regard to this, he said that life is God's gift to man. And what you do with it is your gift to God. So why are you here? What are you supposed to do? What is your dream? Now, the second key to great success practiced by all high achievers is to develop your special talents. Develop your special talents. You see, every person comes into the world unique. You come into the world genetically so complicated that you know the odds against there being someone else like you are 50 billion to one. In other words, in all of human history, there will never be someone just like you. Your blood is so complex and has so many hundreds, if not thousands of chemicals that there will never be another single person in the world that has exactly the same blood that you have in your veins. No one will ever think the way you do. No one will ever have the multi billion cellular construction that you have. You are so unique as to be absolutely phenomenal. You have abilities and talents that have been programmed into you way before you got here that will enable you to be and have and do virtually anything you want. You know, there's an old saying, God don't make no junk. And the other old saying is that no one is here by accident. Everybody comes here for a purpose. In fact, Wayne Dyer has a wonderful line. He says every child is born with secret orders. Every child comes into the world with secret orders. In other words, you've been brought into this world to do something remarkable with your life. And the only question is, are you going to do it? You know, the great tragedy is that only about 5%, maybe 1% of people ever fulfill the potential that was given to them when they were born. So here's a good question to ask yourself. What do you most enjoy? What do you most enjoy? You see, just like we are given physical health as an indicator to help us to avoid physical disease, we're given happiness as a way to tell us what is right for us. The smartest men and women of all are those who listen to their inner voice and look at what it is they most enjoy doing and organize their lives so that they do more and more of those things. So if you want to discover your unique talents and abilities, you ask yourself, what do you most enjoy? What do you most enjoy doing? What makes you the happiest when you're doing it? In fact, here's an interesting exercise. If you project yourself back to when you were in the ages of 7 to 14, you will find that what you most enjoy doing as a child is what you probably put on this earth to do and will most enjoy doing as an adult. Not long ago, I mentioned this in a seminar and I had a gentleman come up to me, very successful businessman. He said, it's interesting you should say that, he said, because when I was a child, he said, I love model planes. That's all I loved was model planes. Taking them apart and putting them together and building them and. And adding onto them. He said, I'm now 35 years old. I'm an aeronautical engineer. I own three companies. I own several planes. He said, I've designed several innovations in aeronautics. He said, all my life has been geared around airplanes. And between the ages of 7 and 14, that's all I thought about. So here's the key. Think about what you most enjoyed during your formative years and ask the people who are around you, especially your mother. Ask her what it is that you preoccupied yourself with during that period of time. And. And then look around today and say, is there anything that I could do or be today that would be consistent with it? I promise you this. The very act of going through this exercise will start to make you happy and excited with regard to talents and abilities. There's a wonderful line that says the very best direction to ride a horse is the direction in which it's going. The very best direction for you to develop your talents is in the natural direction that they're going. And. And those will be the things that come easy to you. So here's another question. What comes easy to you when you do it, when you've attempted to learn to do it from childhood up to now? What's easy? What do you find? Just flows naturally? You don't have any difficulties with it. You have a natural facility with it. Some people are good at math. Some people are good at designing things. Some people are good at painting. Some people are good at writing. Some people are excellent at organizing other people. Some are wonderful at speaking and communicating. What is it that you do naturally that is so easy that you don't even need to be trained in it? Actually, you don't even need lessons. You seem to just have this natural facility. And again, if you look around you, you find the things that you get the most excitement and happiness from are the things that come the most easy to you. These are often things, by the way, that are difficult for other people. And they say, boy, you do that easily or you make it look easy. It's because that's where your natural talent lies. And the best way to ride your natural talent is in the direction in which it's going. Here's another great question for you. What would you do if you won a million dollars in the lottery today? What if you do, if you won a million, you won a million cash and you got the million dollars cash tax free, how would you change your life? Let's say you got the million dollars and the person said, well, in order to give you the money, you're going to have to tell us exactly what you would do with your life with a million dollars. And you had to quickly think that if I win this million dollars, this is what I'd do. This is a very powerful question because if your first answer is that you quit your job, it means you may be in the wrong work. It may mean that you are in danger of wasting your life. But it could be that you would say, I would do this more, I would do it better, I would change, I would start this, I would get into that, get out of that. What would you do if you won a million dollars? That will often tell you where your natural talents and abilities lie. Now the final question is what sort of activities give you your greatest feeling of importance? What give you your greatest feeling of importance? When you're engaging in these activities, you feel terrific about yourself, you feel happy about yourself, you feel important, your self esteem goes up, you feel in command and control of your life. Dale Carnegie once said, you tell me what gives a person their greatest feeling of importance and I'll tell you their entire philosophy of life. I'll tell you if you tell me what gives you your greatest feeling of importance. I'll tell you what you should probably be doing with your life, or at least the general area. Well, here's the third key to great success. We've talked about five great keys practiced by high achievers. It's to do what you love to do. Do what you love to do. Do what you love to do. In interview after interview with the highest performing, most successful people in America, Self made millionaires, great stars, great talents. They never worked a day in their life. They always did what they love to do. You know, people come to me all the time and they ask an interesting question. They say, how do I get motivated? You know, I want to get motivated. How do I get my son motivated, my daughter motivated, my spouse motivated? I'll tell you something, you can't motivate people. Motivation requires motive and motive requires desire. And desire requires the person wanting to do it. And wanting to do it because they love not only the possible result, but they love the very act of doing it. If you're doing your work because you hope that by doing your work you'll be able to do something that you like, you're in danger of failing in life. Because all successful people do what they love to do so they can do more of the things they love to do. And in many cases, what they do, they love so much that they don't really care if they do other things. So what is it that you love to do? What is it you love to do? You and I, as adults and as grown children have certain responsibilities. And one of our key responsibilities as an adult is to decide what we most enjoy doing. In fact, one of our responsibilities is to ask, what is it that I enjoy doing the most and how can I get a well paying job doing just that? How can I organize my life? What kind of training can I get? What kind of courses can I take? What kind of schools can I go to? Who can I ask? What books can I read so that I can become really good doing what I really enjoy and get paid really well doing it? And I can tell you story after story after story of men and women who said, oh yeah, but if I did what I love to do, I wouldn't make any money. Nonsense. If you do what you love to do, you'll be supreme happy, you'll be supremely successful, and you'll be extremely respected in your field. And that's worth more than an awful lot of money. Finally, the third part of determining what it is you love to do are the words attention, interest and absorption. Attention, interest and absorption. If you really love what you're doing, it will hold your attention, you'll draw your attention. You'll want to read about it and talk about it, think about it. You'll want to be around people and you'll look up to and admire people who are successful in it. There'll be something in you that causes you to look at those people because it's the right thing for you. You'll be interested in it. You'll like to read about it and learn about it. You'll like to study about it and go to courses and take and listen to audio cassettes and read books. In fact, one of the true marks of whether or not you're in the right field is this. If you're in the right field, you'll have an insatiable desire to learn more about it, to study the field. I work with corporations and with many professionals all over the world every year. And I'm always amazed to find that many people in a particular occupation or profession avoid learning anything more about it. They dislike the the profession, they don't like to read, they have to be forced to go by requirements that threaten to pull their licenses if they don't take additional training, and they look upon it as a real burden. The challenge here is people who have that attitude toward their field, people who don't automatically want to learn more about it, are in the wrong field. And the final letter, the final word is absorption. Attention plus interest equals absorption. You will find that if you're in the right field, you'll be absorbed by it. You'll be so absorbed by it, you'll often forget what time it is. In fact, you will find that. Here's the test. When you're doing what you are meant to do, time stands still. Sometimes you forget to eat, you forget to rest, you forget to sleep. You are so involved and committed to it that time stands still. What sort of activities cause time to stand still for you when you're engaged in those activities? What kind of activities cause you just to forget everything else that's going on? What sort of activities? Over the course of your life, from the time you were young to the time you're older, people had to say, come for dinner, or aren't you finished with that yet? Or leave it alone and get back to it later and you didn't want to get away. That could be the key to the great success that you're here to accomplish now. The fourth great key. After dreaming big dreams and developing your unique talents and doing what you love to do, the fourth great key is to accept 100% responsibility for your results. You'll hear us talk about this again. It's one of the major issues in the world today whether or not you accept responsibility. In fact, there are many people when you tell them that they're responsible for their lives and their where they are and what they are because of themselves, they become very angry and very resentful. But of course, it can't be otherwise. If you become what you think about and you're in control of your thoughts, then everything that happens to you must be your responsibility. Because only you thought the thoughts, only you engaged in the actions. I heard a great line a couple of years ago. It said that the true mark of maturity is when you finally realize that no one is coming to the rescue. No one's coming to the rescue. Many people say, boy, when the right person or Situation comes along, then I'm going to change. No, they're not coming. When they see you, they're going to keep on going. The great motto, one of the most powerful success mottos in seven words ever developed are if it's to be, it's up to me. If it's to be, it's up to me. That means no blaming, no excuses. It means I'm in charge of my own life. It means continually saying I am responsible, I am responsible. And finally, number five is single minded concentration. Single minded concentration is so important that we'll come back to it at other times. But single minded concentration seems to go hand in hand with all great success in statistics. They have a saying that a condition is sufficient. It is necessary, but not sufficient. In other words, you have to have it, but it isn't all you have to have. I can say this about single minded concentration is it's something that you absolutely must have. In fact, the ability to concentrate single mindedly is probably the number one quality of success. Why is it that goals are so important? It's because goals enable you to concentrate. Why is it that priorities are so important? It's because they enable you to sort through what you have to do and to set very careful priorities on what is most important. Why is it the training is so important? Because you learn the disciplines that lead to concentration. By the way, the underlying characteristic of success is self discipline. And self discipline ultimately means the ability to force yourself to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. Ask yourself continually, what is the most valuable use of my time right now? What's the one thing that I, and only I can do that, if done well, will make a real difference? Once you've determined the most important thing that it is, practice single handling on everything you do. Single handling means once you begin with a task, you stay with it until it's done. Because we find that if you can identify your most important task and then concentrate single mindedly on it and stay with it until it's done, you'll get a burst of energy in three enthusiasm and self esteem. You feel great about yourself. You feel more confident in your ability to accomplish great things. You will cause you to dream big dreams. Because the more you feel you can achieve big goals, the more you'll dream big dreams. It'll cause you to look into your unique talents and to develop your unique talents and abilities. It'll cause you to act and say, what is it that I most love to do? And focus all of your time and attention on doing what you most love to do. It'll enable you to allow your talents to go so that you can accept 100% responsibility and make no excuses and don't blame anybody else. And finally, when you concentrate single mindedly, you develop the habit of concentrating single mindedly. And the more you develop the habit of concentration and force yourself to stay with a major task until you win through and actually realize your dream, the more positive and happy and confident and optimistic you become and the more successful you will be in every part of your life. And your self esteem is defined as how much you like yourself, how much you respect yourself, how much you value yourself in your interactions with other people.