You will never reach your goal

Have you ever almost reached your goal, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath your feet just when that goal was in sight?

Have you ever actually reached your goal, but before you can start to enjoy it you find something has happened to make you walk away from it?

Be honest here.  These are two very common problems faced by most people.  If this has never happened to you then all I can say is that you are very lucky and are in a very small minority.  And just because it has not happened yet, this doesn't mean it will never happen to you in the future!

As this is such a common problem I feel it is very important to address it again, even though I have referred to it in a number of different blog articles.  What can you do to stop this happening, or at least to minimize the chance of it happening?  The first step is to recognize the problem.  If you understand the causes you have a much better chance of moving in a different direction and stopping the "self sabotage" from happening in the first place.

There are three distinct reasons here, any one of which can result in the prize of your achievement being snatched away, and all of which can work together to make it virtually impossible for you to realize your dreams.  If you do not address them I would go as far as to say you will never achieve your goals.

The first I will call "Fear of Failure".  The second is "Fear of Success".  The third is "Incorrect Goal Identification".

Fear of Failure

Fear of Failure is very common.  I would go as far as to say virtually everyone suffers from Fear of Failure.

Recently I read a novel by Celeste Ng called "Little Fires Everywhere".  This is a well written novel with quite a complex plot line.  But to me the strongest element was the self-destructive instincts of a mother who was afraid her youngest daughter would not develop in the way she hoped.  You could almost say she loved her daughter too much, although I personally don't believe in the concept of "loving too much", but only of allowing that deep love to express itself in inappropriate and destructive ways.  Because she was so afraid that certain things would happen, the mother unintentionally caused those very things to happen.  If she had simply expressed her love for her youngest in the same way as she did for her other children, my reading of the novel is that her youngest daughter would have grown up as "completely normal" rather than the maladjusted child she became.

This is very typical of all of us.  We are afraid that we won't achieve what we want to achieve.  This causes us to focus on all the things that could go wrong rather than on all the things that we could do to ensure we are successful.  Often we get very close to success despite all that wrong focus.  But eventually the wrong focus comes home to roost.

We often see this in the way a lot of relationships go wrong.  One party fears the other might stop loving them and find someone else.  They have no logical reason for this fear, but gradually it grows and takes over their life.  Instead of being the beautiful positive thing it should be, the relationship becomes toxic.  The party who feels this way begins to read the wrong signs into everything.  If their other half smiles at someone they believe this means they are transferring their affections to that other person.  Every innocent action is given a completely different reason, building a picture of betrayal - a betrayal that simply doesn't exist, yet!  The more this goes on, the more toxic the relationship becomes.  The other party is almost forced into a position where they stop loving the other, or at least find that love considerably diluted.  They cannot understand what has happened, but simply know that the relationship is not working.  And so they start looking for a better relationship elsewhere - the very thing that the person responsible for this change feared would happen.

The same thing can, and often does, happen with other life goals, not simply relationships.

You want to become wealthier.  At first you are excited by this goal, imagining you now have all the things you could have if you WERE wealthier.  Having imagined having them, you then imagine them being taken away or never having managed to get them in the first place.  This makes you feel rotten.  But you now believe this is the most likely outcome.  You think of all the things that can go wrong and stop you achieving your wealth goal.  Your focus changes from what you can do to get wealthier, to what can stop you getting wealthier.  All the negatives seem to add up to something much more powerful than the positives.  Eventually, the Universe gets the message - you are focussed on not getting wealthy, so that is what it is going to ensure happens to you.

Be aware that this not only CAN happen, but very often does.  Defeat it by focussing again on the goal and the pleasure it will bring, and don't allow all those negative voices to take your power away from you.

Fear of Success

Fear of Success is really a kind of evolved Fear of Failure.  You recognize that when you achieve what you want to achieve you can easily lose it.  So you then focus on how that would make you feel.  Your impression is that if you achieve it and then lose it you will be a lot unhappier than if you never achieved it in the first place.  I think you can immediately see where this is leading.  The closer you get to success, the stronger you feel this worry about how achieving and then losing is worse than not achieving at all.  So your subconscious decides the best thing is to ensure you never achieve success in the first place.  Once your subconscious makes this decision you may as well give up trying.  You cannot defeat your subconscious - it is far more powerful than your conscious mind.

The answer, of course is to ensure you do not send this kind of message to your subconscious in the first place.

The reality is that we win and lose things all the time in the game of life.  Take pleasure from your wins, and don't focus on the losses.  Don't allow the very real fear that something in the future will change and take away what you have initially achieved, to stop you from achieving in the first place.

Incorrect Goal Identification

Again this is something I have covered many times in different blog articles.  But it is extremely important.  If you don't give a great deal of thought to the goals you are working towards I can almost guarantee they will be the wrong goals.  The desire for success comes from deep within.  As it rises to the surface it becomes modified.  And when it reaches your conscious mind it is usually something completely different from the original intended goal.  

When you then start going after what you think is your goal, your subconscious sees it is not the original goal.  So it doesn't try to help you achieve it.  Even worse, in many cases the modified goal will be counter-productive and will move you away from what the true goal should have been.  If so, not only will your subconscious not help you achieve it, but it will actively work to stop you achieving it.  In the unlikely event that you achieve the goal, you will never be really happy with it, as it is not the goal you really wanted to achieve even though you never knew this.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to dive deep within yourself and find out what that original true goal is.  You do this by noting down what you think are your goals and then sit still and meditate on it.  As you do so you will be going deep within yourself where you are more likely to find the true goal itself.  When you come out of that meditation, note down your feelings and thoughts arising from the meditation.  You will probably need to do this many times before you truly identify your real goals, but every hour you spend doing this is an hour very well spent.  Identify your true goals and you will be setting yourself up for really achieving them.

Failure

Always think in positive terms, not negative.  Use positive thinking to focus on what you want to become, not on the negative things you want to remove.  This is a major plank of Law of Attraction philosophy and is something to which I subscribe wholeheartedly.

So why have I named this blog article "Failure"?  Isn't that a very negative way to start?

Actually, failure isn't negative at all.  I hope by the time you have read this article you will agree.

Listen to the words of Charles Kettering, who was head of research at General Motors, inventor of the electric starting motor, and a holder of 186 patents.  Kettering said "Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. One fails toward success."

Or how about this comment from Thomas J Watson, the man who turned IBM into an international business to be reckoned with, and who was hailed as the world's greatest salesman.  Watson said "The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate."  He was certainly speaking from experience.  Watson failed in his first job as a teacher - he gave up after only one day!  If you read his biography you will realize he failed many times, at many things, but that didn't stop him from becoming the richest man in the world.  In fact, he believed that was why he became the richest man in the world!

How successful was Abraham Lincoln?  He went to war as a captain and returned a private!  He failed as a businessman.  He failed as a lawyer.  He failed when he tried to become a congressman.  He failed when he tried to become a senator.  He failed when he tried to become vice-president.  But all those failures were steps in his progress to becoming one of the greatest presidents of the United States.

Perhaps the most famous example of failure leading to success is Thomas Edison.  Edison designed the first commercially practical light bulb.  But only after failing to create one 1,000 times.  When he was asked how he felt about failing 1,000 times, Edison said that each of those 1,000 failures was a step towards his success.

And that is the key.  Failure is not something negative at all.  It is a step towards success.  Often, a necessary step.

Learn from your failures.  Edison found 1,000 ways a light bulb would not work, which is the reason he was eventually able to find one way it would work.

Don't try to avoid failure.  Embrace it.  See it the way Edison saw it.  Each failure is one step you have made closer to your ultimate success.

Luck or Skill?

I want you to imagine you are watching a group of people playing poker.  Don't worry - I am not encouraging you to gamble, but just using this to illustrate a very important point!

One of the players, Fred, keeps winning.  He shows top hand after top hand.  A Royal Straight Flush, which is the best hand you could possibly have in the game, comes up twice!  The probability of just having one Royal Straight Flush is 0.000154% and he has two, one after the other.  The next two hands he loses.  Then he wins again with four aces, which is also a very rare, powerful hand.  After another losing hand he wins with a Full House (a percentage chance of 2.6% for this).  That is 4 winning hands in a series of 7.  In the first 3 winning hands he gains a lot of chips.  Fewer players throw chips at him when he wins with his Full House, but he still leaves the table having gained around 10 times the amount of money he brought to the table.

Another player, Stephen, loses quite a lot of his "stack" of chips in the first couple of hands.  One of those hands was three kings, and he bet a lot of his "stack" on that hand.   He wins the third hand with a pair of 10s, gaining most of the chips he originally lost.  He wins again on the fourth hand, but as everyone folds to him we cannot see what his hand was.  His winnings now have increased his "stack" to around double what he brought to the table.  He doesn't enter the last three hands at all.

Fred walked away having increased his funds tenfold.  Stephen doubled his funds.  Which of these two players would you feel was the better poker player and is likely to end up with the most money if they keep on playing for many hundreds of games?

The poker players among you may say I have not given you enough information to be certain of the answer.  True.  But you probably have enough to make a fairly reasonable guess.

If you have answered "Stephen", then congratulations!  From the very limited evidence before us he is probably the better player and will probably eventually make more money.

Fred was just very lucky.  The only times he won he had extremely rare hands.  That was the reason he won so much, as other players could reasonably have assumed they had the best hand and were probably right to bet heavily against him.

The thing about luck is that you cannot rely on it.  Skill, on the other hand, you CAN rely on.

A good poker player knows that when he loses money at the table that doesn't necessarily mean he was playing badly.  He will try to learn from the experience, perhaps realizing after the event that there were some body language signals he could have picked up to tell him just how good a hand his opponent had.  But he will also recognize that the best poker player in the world does not win the majority of hands he (or she) plays.  Even the best players lose more hands than they win.  But those hands they DO win eventually ensure they win a lot more money than they lose.

Life is like this too.  No matter how experienced you are in using the Law of Attraction you will not always win every single "battle" in your life.  But if you remain positive and apply the Law of Attraction properly you will win the "war" itself.  Each of your failures is just another step towards success.

Be very thankful when you are lucky.  Make sure the Universe (or God, if you prefer) knows you are very grateful for that luck.  Believe yourself to be a very lucky person.  Know that "lady luck" is on your side.  But also accept your failures gracefully.  Look at them carefully to see what, if anything, you can learn from them, but never be discouraged.  Accept that sometimes luck works against you but that a series of unlucky events is not a pattern of bad luck that will continue.  Your next lucky event is only just around the corner.

Your Philosophy

Jim Rohn: Your Philosophy

an original article by Jim Rohn

"Your personal philosophy is the greatest determining factor in how your life works out."

If you want to know how an Idaho farm boy can make it to Beverly Hills, then take the journey toward achievement by discovering the cornerstone for total and lasting success: building your philosophy. I was broke at 25 and a millionaire by 31. At 25, there was nothing in my bank and I needed to provide for my family. As I was considering what to do, I met John Earl Shoaff, a wealthy entrepreneur who became my employer for the next five years. He revolutionized my life and taught me the importance of developing my philosophy. It isn’t a complex or mystical process, but a principle that can make a difference in how your life turns out. As we go forward on this journey toward success, remember you need to keep looking for those few things that make the most difference in your life, and spend most of your time doing those things. Effective time management is the best-kept secret of the rich. While there are five major puzzle pieces for success, without the first — developing a sound philosophy — the other pieces are of little value.

 

Set Your Sail

The winds of circumstance blow upon all of us. We all have experienced the winds of disappointment, despair and heartbreak, but why do people arrive at such different places at the end of the journey? Have we not all sailed upon the same sea?

The major difference isn’t circumstance; it’s the set of the sail, or the way we think.

In spite of our best efforts, we have moments when things just seem to fall apart. The rich and the poor have the same challenges that can lead to financial ruin and personal despair. It isn’t what happens to us that determines the quality of our lives, it’s what we do after we’ve set our sails and the wind decides to change direction. When winds change, we must change. We have to struggle to our feet and reset the sail in a manner that will steer us in the direction of our own deliberate choice. The set of the sail, how we think and how we respond, has a far greater capacity to destroy our lives than any challenges we face. How quickly we respond to adversity is far more important than adversity itself. The great challenge of life is to control the process of our own thinking.

Learn From Success and Failure

The best way to establish a new and powerful personal philosophy is to objectively review the conclusions you’ve drawn about life. Any conclusion you’ve drawn that isn’t working for you could be working against you. The best way to counteract misinformation and wrong data is to input new and accurate information. Gather information from personal experience. If you’re doing something wrong, evaluate what you did wrong and change things.

Seek an objective, outside voice about how you are and what you’re doing. An objective opinion from someone you respect can lead you to early and accurate information about your decision-making process. Listen to the freshness of an outside voice — someone who can see the forest and isn’t lost in the trees.

Observe the successes and failures of other people. If people who failed were to give seminars, it would be helpful. You could see how people mess up and you wouldn’t do what they did. You could find out what poor people read and decide not to read it. Past failures and errors prompt us to amend current conduct so we don’t replicate the past.

Study from people who do well. Each of us should be in a constant search for people we admire and respect and whose behavior we can model. It’s far better to deliberately choose the people we will permit to influence us than to allow bad influences to affect us without our conscious choice.

 

Read All You Can

People from all walks of life who’ve had some of the most incredible experiences have taken the time to write of these experiences so we can be instructed and amend our philosophies. There are two books you need to read to build your philosophy: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason. The contributions of other people enable us to reset our sails based upon their experiences. Books offer treasures of information that can change our lives, fortunes, relationships, health and careers for the better.

 

Keep a Journal

A journal is a gathering place for all of our observations and discoveries about life. It’s our own handwritten transcript that captures our experiences, ideas, desires and conclusions about the people and the events that have touched our lives. The past, when properly documented, is one of the best guides for making good decisions. The very act of writing about our lives helps us think more objectively about our actions. Writing tends to slow down the flow of information and gives us time to analyze and ponder the experience. The intense scrutiny of journal writing can enable us to make refinements in our philosophy that are truly life-changing.

Jot down what you learn and be a buyer of empty books. It’s the small disciplines that lead to great accomplishments.

 

Observe and Listen

Pay attention during your day, watch what’s going on and become a good listener. Find a voice of value and stay for a while. Surround yourself with people you respect and admire. Find people whose personalities and achievements stimulate, fascinate and inspire you, and then strive to assimilate their best qualities. This is called the skill of selecting. Don’t waste your time on the silly and the shallow.

One of the major reasons people don’t do well is because they keep trying to get through the day while a more worthy cause is to get from the day. We must become sensitive enough to observe and ponder what is happening around us. Be alert. Be awake. Often the most extraordinary opportunities are hidden among seemingly insignificant events.

Be a good listener. With so many voices vying for your attention, you need to develop the skill of selective listening and only dial into the radio station that appeals to you. If a voice is not leading to the achievement of your goals, exercise caution in how long you listen.

 

Be Disciplined

Every day is filled with dozens of personal crossroads, moments when we’re called upon to make a decision regarding minor as well as major questions. These decisions chart a path to a future destination. With careful mental preparation, we can make wise choices. The development of a sound philosophy prepares us for making sound decisions. When we eat healthy foods, we experience positive results in a short time. When we start exercising, we feel a new vitality almost immediately. When we begin reading, we experience a growing awareness and a new level of self-confidence. New disciplines practiced daily will produce exciting results. The magic of new disciplines causes us to amend our thinking.

 

Don’t Neglect

Neglect is the major reason people don’t have what they want. If you don’t take care of things in your life, neglect becomes a disease. If you neglect to do good things with your money, you probably neglect to do good things with your time. If you don’t know what’s going on with your health or your bank account, you could be at risk. Set up new disciplines to change your life. Don’t neglect.

Everything is within our reach if we will read books, use journals, practice the disciplines and wage a new and vigorous battle against neglect.

Build your philosophy. Commit yourself to a new journey and say, “I’m going to change my life.” Once you do, you’ll never look back.

The Winner's Edge

Do you sometimes feel despondent when you look at your attempts to achieve your goals in life?  Do you sometimes regard yourself as a failure?

But did you realize that success DEPENDS on failure?  That the very failures that get you down can be the levers that propel you into success if only you will let them?

Take a few minutes to watch this video by Denis Waitley.  As a former Olympic sports psychology coach he really knows what he is talking about, and if you take note of what he says, this could be the turning point for which you have been waiting.