Brian Tracy lays out seven keys to building a positive personality: self-talk, visualization, surrounding yourself with positive people, consuming good content, continuous learning, health habits like 30 minutes of daily exercise, and expecting success. He argues that 95% of your emotions come from what you tell yourself.
95%
At least 200 minutes per week (about 30 minutes per day).
Let's talk now about being the best person you can possibly be. The seven Keys to a Positive Personality your physical diet has a large impact on your health and energy levels. 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. You'll be more generally resistant to most diseases. You'll sleep better and you'll feel healthier and 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, information and positive books and conversations, with interesting people and positive audio programs and thoughts, you develop a more positive and effective personality. You become more influential and persuasive. You enjoy greater confidence and self esteem. Those people who work with computers use the expression gigo, which means 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, you 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. You can become someone completely different in a very positive way. 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 to becoming a completely positive person. Number one is positive self talk. Speak to yourself positively. Control your inner dialogue. The words running through your mind like a river use affirmations phrased in the positive, present and personal tense, such as I like myself, I can do it, I feel terrific, I'm responsible. Science proves that fully 95% of your emotions are determined by the way you talk to yourself as you go throughout your day. 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 start thinking about the things that make you unhappy or cause you worry and anxiety, or even make you mad. As we said before, 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 and talk positively to yourself, you'll start to think negatively automatically and without any effort. The second key is positive visualization. Perhaps the most powerful ability that you have is the ability to visualize and see your goals as already accomplished. Create a clear, exciting, picture of your goal and your ideal life. And what? Replay this picture in your mind over and over again until it's accepted by Your superconscious mind as a command. All improvement in your life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures. As you see yourself on the inside, you will be a different person on the outside. The third key to mental fitness 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. Decide today to associate with winners, with positive people, with people who are happy and optimistic and who are going somewhere with their lives. Avoid negative people at all costs. Negative people are the primary source of most of life's unhappiness, including your own. So resolve it from day onward. You're not going to have stressful or negative people in your life. No more jerks from now on. The fourth key to mental fitness 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 cars 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 and educational television programs and online courses and other uplifting material that increases your knowledge and makes you feel good about yourself and your life. The fifth key to mental fitness is positive training and development. Almost everyone in our society starts off with limited resources, sometimes with no money at all. I know I did. 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. The miracle of lifelong learning and personal improvement is what takes you from rags to riches, from poverty to affluence, and from underachievement to success and financial independence. As my friend Jim Rohn once 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 and at which you move upward to greater heights and greater income and a better life in every area. The sixth key to mental fitness is positive health habits. Take excellent care of your physical health and wellness. Resolve today that you're going to live to be 80 or 90 or 100 years old and still be dancing in the evenings. To do that, you must eat healthy foods, natural and nutritious, and eat them sparingly and in proper balance. A nutritional diet will have an immediate positive effect on your thoughts and feelings. Also, resolve to get regular exercise, at least 200 minutes of motion per week, 30 minutes per day, walking, running, swimming, bicycling or working out on equipment in the gym. When you exercise on a regular basis, you feel happier and healthier. You experience lower levels of stress and fatigue than a person who sits on the couch and watches television all evening and especially 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. Now some of the factors that predispose us to negative emotions of all kinds will are poor health habits, sleep deprivation, lack of exercise and non stop work. Seek balance in your life. If you want to become all you can be. The seventh key is positive expectations. Practicing the law of attraction 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.
