Powerful Success Tools: Meditation, Mastermind, and Mindset | Jack Canfield

Hi, I'm Jack Canfield. And today I've got three powerful success tools to share with you that will help you be as successful as possible at almost any endeavor you choose. These three success tools are Mindset, Meditation, and Mastermind. Okay, let's start with the first one. Mindset. You know, study after study has shown that the mind is an extremely powerful instrument. Time and again, what most people thought was impossible was later achieved by scientists, athletes, business people, and everyday individuals simply because they believed they could and they persevered. You may have heard the famous quote from Napoleon Hill, the author of the classic book Think and Grow Rich, who said, whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve. And that belief, by the way, is, is a choice. It's simply a thought you decide to think over and over again until it becomes automatic. Let me repeat that belief is simply a choice to think something more empowering than you did in the past. In fact, scientists now know our belief about whether or not something is possible is actually a byproduct of our earlier life experience. And through a lifetime's worth of events, our brain actually learns whether what to expect next. And because our brain expects something to happen in a certain way, we often achieve exactly what we anticipate. That's why it's so important to have a believing mindset, a positive mindset. Believing it's possible to achieve something in your life and things will very often turn out exactly as you believe they will. Of course, there's also a negative aspect to belief. Believe that failure or disaster will befall you, and guess what? It usually does. So positive and negative outcomes are why it's so important to hold positive expectations in your mind. When you replace your negative expectations with positive ones. When you begin to believe that what you want is possible, your mind will actually take over the job of figuring out how to accomplish that possibility for you. Now, next, let's talk about our second powerful success tool, meditation. When I lead meditations at my training events, I use a process called guided visualization. I actually help my attendees meditate in a deeply relaxed state on the images, the scenery, and the emotions they'll eventually be experiencing once they've achieved the lifestyles and the milestones that they're dreaming about. Guided visualization as a meditation tool has been repeatedly proven to enhance self esteem, to expand awareness, increase memory, facilitate optimal performance, evoke a more positive attitude, and accelerate the learning of difficult subject matter. In one of the most well known studies on creative visualization in sports, Ohio State University divided 15 basketball players into three groups of five players each, they tested each student to establish their average free throw percentage. And then they asked group one to practice shooting free throws and every day for 30 minutes. Group two was not to touch a basketball for 30 days. And group three was to not touch a basketball for 30 days, but instead to visualize shooting free throws and to see each shot going into the basket perfectly, never missing a shot. And at the end of the study, they had the players shoot free throws again and compare the results. Group one, which had practiced 30 minutes a day, showed 24% improvement. Group two, which had not touched a basketball for 30 days, showed no improvement. Not very surprising. But group three, which had only visualized shooting perfect three throws, showed a 23% improvement without any practice whatsoever equal to the group that had actually practiced. So what we learned here is your body can literally not tell the difference between a real event and a vividly imagined event. So here's the point. You can literally build skills, improve performance, and actually program yourself to do the things that are necessary to do. You also will see more opportunities that become available, and you're going to start having creative ideas about the things that are necessary to achieve the goals you want. Now, the final success strategy I want to talk about today is one of the most powerful tools ever used by successful people. One of the world's richest industrials from the 20th century or today's modern icons of business. It's called the mastermind group. Napoleon Hill first talked about mastermind groups in his classic book Think and Grow Rich. And it's the one concept people most reference when they credit any one thing that helped them become a millionaire. You know, Andrew Carnegie had a mastermind group. So did Henry Ford. Ford, in fact, would mastermind with brilliant thinkers like Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone, who started Firestone Tires, and others in a group that they held in their winter mansions and in Coral Gables, Florida. They knew, as millions others have discovered since, that mastermind groups can focus special energy on your effort in the form of knowledge, resources, and spiritual energy as well. And while you must always do the work of becoming a great success, A mastermind group can harness and maximize the spiritual forces behind your success. And it's this spiritual aspect that Napoleon Hill wrote about extensively. In fact, he said that we're in tune with the mastermind when we do this. And the mastermind is God. Universal power, source energy, infinite intelligence, whatever you call it, it's an all powerful life force and we have availability to that. We can use it to significantly improve our circumstances and Focus that on the achievement of our goals. Now, in short, mastermind is both the power that is coming to us from above, from the God Force, you might call it, but it's also the power that comes to us from each other when we meet together in a mastermind. Together, we can know more and focus more energy than any one of us can simply do by ourselves. Now, to assemble a mastermind group, choose people who are already where you'd like to be in your life or who are at least one level above you. If your goal is to become a millionaire, you're not going to get a lot of help from people in your mastermind group who are only making 50 or 60,000 a year. Of course, you might ask, why would anyone want to be in a mastermind group with me if I'm not making as much money as they are? The answer is that you're the one that's putting the group together. You're creating this experience that they wouldn't have available to them. You're organizing it, supporting it, and building a forum for their growth as well as the growth of others. And the truth is, many people at a higher level will want to become involved simply because they can get to play at a game that might, they might never organize for themselves. And you're doing the organizing for them. Now, the other people you're going to invite are people they would like to be around as well. So you can invite other people and you let people know. Once you have one person, tell them, I've got this person. I'm asking these other people, would you like to play too? Most people will try it out. So make a list of ideal candidates and start asking today. Now, if your goals are centered on a specific subject, like starting a new business or investing, investing money, you might want to start a mastermind group solely focused on entrepreneurship or one focused solely on investing. Now, you can always launch a general mastermind group just to work on everything. Or you can have a second mastermind group as well, centered on a specific topic, like investing, entrepreneurship, et cetera. So the ideal size of a mastermind group, how big it should it be? Well, five to six people. If it's too much smaller, it's going to lose this dynamic if one or two people aren't there. And if it's bigger, it gets unwieldy. Everyone doesn't get a turn. It takes too long. Some people's needs go met, Then basically what happens is it tends to fall apart. So I've used masterminds in my life many, many Many, many times to start Chicken Soup for the Soul. I remember I didn't know what I was going to do. We got rejected by a whole bunch of publishers. And in my mastermind group, someone said, you know, you told me that your publishers that you talked to said they'd have to know they could sell 20,000 books in order for them to want to sell or, you know, buy the book for you. In other words, give you an advance and publish the book. And they didn't think that book would sell that many. What if you were to get 20,000 pieces of paper signed by individuals saying, I promise to buy one copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul when it's published. So literally over the next year, Mark, Victor Hanson and I, every talk we gave, we put out sheets of paper on every sheet, every chair, and said, I promised to buy X number of copies of chicken cerebrasol. Some people wrote in 10, one person wrote in 1,000 and he actually did that. And as a result of that, we got the book published because we were able to show up with 20,000 pre orders, if you will. When we started to sell the book again, our mastermind group said, have you put your book in catalogs? Maybe you should associate a charity with the book so people will feel that they want to contribute because you're giving 10% of the proteins to a charity they care about. Some people taught us about affiliation marketing where other people could sell our books for us. All that came from our mastermind group, which over the course of a couple years led up to selling over 13 million copies in one year. So masterminding is critical. Remember, all of us know more than any one of us. Now, here's your homework. I want you today to create a list of five to 10 people who you'd like to be in your mastermind group. Now, you, you don't want to end up with 10, but you want to have a list. So if someone says no, you go to the next name. And remember, these should be people who you feel would help to elevate you to where you want to be. Now, to help you get started in forming your own mastermind group, conducting the meetings, and planning the best outcome for yourself for the masterminding process, I've got a free download for you. It's a comprehensive guide, complete with a script for inviting others to join the group, plus an agenda and tutorial on exactly how to conduct the meetings and so everybody benefits. Now you can download it by clicking the link on the screen or in the description. And soon you could be assembled with a group who are with you at the top of their game and who are eager to help you improve, so make sure you do that. So thanks for watching and remember, nothing will change for the better until you do. Now, if you found this video helpful, make sure you like it, share it with a friend who may need it, and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this one, and for some additional resources on how to use the Law of Attraction and the Power of the Mastermind Group to get what you want, visit my website@jackcampfield.com.