Brian Tracy outlines seven ways to build a positive personality: positive self-talk, visualization, surrounding yourself with positive people, consuming positive content, continuous learning, healthy habits, and maintaining positive expectations. He gives concrete tactics like daily affirmations, visualizing your goals, and regular exercise.
Questions this video answers
95% ("psychologists say that fully 95% of your emotions are determined by the way you talk to yourself").
At least 200 minutes per week ("That's 30 minutes per day ...").
Chapters
Hello, I'm Brian Tracy and I want to give you seven great keys to a positive personality. Remember, a positive personality will have more of an impact on your success and happiness than perhaps any other factor. Now, your physical diet has a large impact on your levels of health and energy. If you eat fresh, healthy, high quality foods of all kinds and avoid the foods that are bad for you, you'll have more energy, be generally resistant to most diseases, sleep better, and feel healthier and happier. In the same way, your mental diet largely determines your character and your personality and almost everything that happens to you in life. When you feed your mind with positive ideas and information and books and conversations with positive people and audio programs, preferably Brian Tracy audio programs and positive thoughts, you develop a more positive and constructive personality. You become more influential and persuasive. You enjoy greater self confidence and self esteem. Those people who work with computers use the expression gigo or garbage in, garbage out. But the reverse is also true. Good in, good out. When you make a clear, unequivocal decision that you are going to take complete control over your mind, eliminate the negative emotions and thoughts that may have held you back in the past and become a completely positive person, you can actually bring about your own personal transformation. Your job is to be the best you can be. Now, mental fitness is like physical fitness. You develop high levels of self esteem and a positive mental attitude with training and practice. Here are the seven keys I promised you to becoming a completely positive person. Number one is positive self talk. Speak to yourself positively. Control your inner dialogue. Use affirmations. Positive statements phrased in the positive, present and personal tense. My favorites are I like myself. I like myself. I can do it. I can do it. I feel terrific. I am responsible. This is how top people think most of the time. Now, psychologists say that fully 95% of your emotions are determined by the way you talk to yourself as you go through your day. This is called your inner dialogue. It's the stream of words and thoughts and feelings that course through your day like a river going through your mind. The sad fact is that if you do not deliberately and consciously talk to yourself in a positive and constructive way, you will by default think about things that will make you unhappy or cause you worry and anxiety. Remember, your mind is like a vacuum. It will not remain empty. If you don't fill it with positive thoughts, it will fill with negative thoughts. And you. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Your mind is like a garden. If you do not deliberately plant flowers and tend them carefully, weeds will grow without any encouragement at all. If you don't think positive thoughts and can take good care of them, negative thoughts will grow in your mental garden without any effort on your part. The second key is positive visualization. Now, perhaps the most powerful ability that you have is the ability to visualize and to see your goals as already accomplished. See your life as ideal in every way. The way you do this is you create a clear, exciting picture of your goal and your ideal life and replay this picture on the screen of your mind over and over again. The rule is that all improvement in your outer life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures. And you completely control the pictures that you play on the screen of your mind. As you see yourself on the inside, you will start to be that person with those accomplishments on the outside. The third key is positive people. Your choice of the people with whom you live and work and associate will have more of an impact on your emotions and your success than any other factor. Why? It's because they control your self talk and your mental pictures. So decide today to associate with winners, with positive people. With people who are happy and optimistic and who are going somewhere with their lives. On the other hand, avoid negative people at all costs. Negative people are the primary source of most of life's unhappiness. So resolve that from day onward you are not going to have stressful or negative people in your life. That one decision alone can transform your thinking. The fourth key is positive mental food. Just as your body is healthy to the degree to which you eat healthy, nutritious foods, your mind is healthy to the degree to which you feed it with mental protein rather than mental candy. Read books, magazines and articles that are educational, inspirational or motivational. Feed your mind with information and ideas that are uplifting and that make you feel happy and more confident about yourself and your world. Listen to positive, constructive CDs and audio programs in your car and on your MP3 player or iPod. Feed your mind continually with positive messages that help you think and act better and make you more capable and competent in your field. Watch positive and educational DVDs, educational television programs, online courses, and other uplifting, enriching material that increases your knowledge and makes you feel good about yourself and your life. Did you know that every time you learn something new that you feel can help improve your life, your brain releases endorphins which are called nature's happy drug, and you actually feel happier. Even before you take action on a new piece of idea, you feel happier that you have learned a new idea in the first place. Now the fifth key is positive training and development. This is what I love. Almost everyone in our society starts off with limited resources, sometimes with no money at all. Virtually all fortunes begin with the sale of personal services of some kind. All the people who are at the top today were once at the bottom, and sometimes they fell to the bottom several times in their journey through life. The miracle of lifelong learning and personal improvement is what it takes to get you from rags to riches, from poverty to affluence, and from underachievement to success and financial independence. As Jim Rohn said, formal education will make you a living. Self education will make you a fortune. When you dedicate yourself to learning and growing and becoming better and more effective in your thoughts and actions, you take complete control of your life and dramatically increase the speed at which you move upward to greater heights. Now, the sixth key is positive health habits. Take excellent care of your physical health. Resolve today that you're going to live to be 80 or 90 or 100 years old and still be dancing in the evenings. The way you do this is you eat excellent foods, healthy and nutritious, and you eat them sparingly and in proper balance. An excellent diet will have an immediate positive effect on your thoughts and feelings. Resolve to get regular exercise. At least 200 minutes of motion per week. That's 30 minutes per day of walking, running, swimming, bicycling or working out on equipment in the gym. When you exercise on a regular basis, you feel happier and healthier and experience lower levels of stress and fatigue than a person who sits on the couch and watches television all evening, especially in this busy world. Get ample rest and relaxation. You need to recharge your batteries on a regular basis, especially when you're going through periods of stress or difficulty. Vince Lombardi once said, fatigue makes cowards of us all. Some of the factors that predispose us to negative emotions of all kinds are poor health habits, fatigue, lack of exercise and non stop work without rest. Seek balance in your life now. The seventh key is positive expectations. Having positive expectations is one of the most powerful techniques you can use to become a positive person and to ensure positive outcomes and better results in your life. Your expectations become your own self. Fulfilling prophecies. Whatever you expect with confidence seems to come into your life. Since you can control your expectations, you should always expect the best. Expect to be successful. Expect to be popular when you meet new people. Expect to achieve great goals and create a wonderful life for yourself. When you constantly expect good things to happen, you will seldom be disappointed.
