watch tHe skies

In my mission for transcendence, I am currently reading Brian Tracy’s “Goals! - How to Get Everything You Want — Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible”. It’s all about setting yourself and being aware of targets in your personal and professional life. What interests me is how people become limited by their own beliefs, programmed in to them by society, friends, family etc.

Also of interest is the way that we restrain our achievements by thinking in the negative. That’s not to say that we consciously think negatively, it’s just that most of us (me included) think about what we don’t want to happen, not what we do want to happen.

For example, many people spend their work lives trying not to make mistakes, the view being that failing to make mistakes will result in a secure job. This eventually programs them to be risk averse and stifles their productivity and creativity, whilst the people who embrace new ideas and aren’t afraid to make mistakes will learn quicker and ultimately prove more successful because they aren’t actively avoiding mistake making. This point is reinforced in several books by Management guru Tom Peters who suggests that the most powerful people in an organisation are those that don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t try something different, rather than those who try and play by the book. That’s not to say that these people are rule breakers, it’s just that they take opportunities to try things that aren’t covered by job descriptions and procedures.

Anyhoo, back to Brian Tracy. It is interesting to think that many people in their jobs have their objectives (short and long term) written down, and actively pursue them. Yet in their personal lives, people drift along often without any real purpose, objective or aims. Work life and personal life are both subheadings under life.

And so on to Tracy’s main message in the book:

You get what you think about most of the time.

People who have positive goals and think about them internally, create a fantasy of the person that they want to be, vividly and regularly, will eventually develop the traits and characteristics of their superhero version of themselves, as the mind does not know the difference between a real situation and a vividly imagined one. This is effectively the visualisation technique in NLP put in to an everyday scenario, effectively creating a positive self-fulfilling prophecy.

So in summary, to be the person you want to be and all of the trappings that go with that, decide what you want yourself to be like. Characteristics, looks, job, fantasise about every aspect of your dream life as if you were daydreaming about winning the lottery.

Write it down. What goals will you need to achieve to be that fantasy you?

Think about how you would achieve those goals, think about the timescales and pre-requisites.

Write them down.

And now begin to keep your writings fresh in your head. Return to that super-you when you get a chance, look at opportunities that present themselves every day, and consider how they can help you reach your goals.

Of course, this is just what I’ve read to date. I’ll get back to you with more pearls of wisdom from Tracy as I discover them!

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 10:08 am and is filed under books, nlp & hypnosis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.