3 Simple Techniques To Keep Negativity Out Of Your Life

If you don’t control your mind, you will never control your life.

It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, everything that gets inside your mind has a tremendous impact on how you feel, think and act. On what you achieve or don’t achieve. On who you become or don’t become.

Sometimes it’s so instantaneous that a great day becomes a nightmare after you hear a demotivating word or someone looks at you with an angry face.

Your mind starts doing its work, turning the seed that has been planted into something huge and out of control.

Do you feel that this situation is familiar?

This is the natural state of an unguarded mind.

The 2 Keys For Taking Control of Your Mind

You are exposed to thoughts and ideas all the time. Your mind picks the ones that have a bigger impact, positive or negative, and starts working on them until it receives something more impactful to replace them with.

This is one of the saddest elements of human nature I have found, but also one of the most encouraging.

If you are not aware of what’s going on in your mind, your life feels like a roller coaster, and your destiny is at the mercy of external factors.

So, how do you lock out all the negative factors and influences you are bombarded with all day, so they don’t impact you?

Simply put, you can’t.

If someone shouts angrily at you on the street, it’s going to impact you.

But what you can do is DECIDE whether your mind is going to pick that thought and turn it into a monster that ruins your day, or pick something optimistic and inspiring that lets you flow seamlessly through your day instead.

There are 2 key factors for taking more control over your subconscious:

1. Reaction: How you react to your environment. How aware you are of when a bad thought is starting to grow in your mind and how fast you can take action to replace it with the thought you want to have there.
2. Action: Placing in your mind the thoughts you want it to work on. Then letting them repeat, amplify and grow until you soak them up completely and they push you towards the goals you define for yourself.

After years of testing techniques to master my mind, I have collected a few that produce great results.

Here are three of my favorites:

1. Word Amplification

The simplest way to interact with your mind is by repetition of words.

If you detect your mind working on an idea that makes you feel bad, start repeating a word or sentence that makes you think immediately about something that inspires you or makes you smile.

For instance, if you would love to go to Japan on your next vacation, start repeating the word “Japan, Japan, Japan…” or the sentence “I’m in Japan.” It will make you feel better immediately and move your mind and feelings to a different place. .

A curious thing I have found is that using the exact opposite thought doesn’t work as well as using a thought that represents something different and positive for you.

If, for instance, you find yourself thinking that you don’t like your body and start repeating “I’m fit,” it will be harder to make yourself believe it and you will have to struggle to replace the negative thought.

If, instead, you avoid the fight and focus your mind on a different thought, you will forget the original thought more easily and soon everything will start to revolve around the new one.

Whenever you find yourself trapped by a negative thought, stop everything you are doing and repeat to yourself 10 or 20 times the most uplifting words you can find. Let your mind do its magic before coming back to your daily routine with renewed vigor and focus.

2. Painting The Picture Of What You Want To Achieve

This is a habit many successful people have used all their lives. In some cases, it is the only one they have kept after becoming extremely rich.

Write down your goals in the morning, at night, and every time you cannot remember clearly what you are aiming for and realize you are doing something that is not taking you closer to your goals.

After you have them in writing, take a minute to visualize each of them. If it’s hard for you to do this on your own, find some related pictures on the Internet.

This will help you start quickly producing bigger ideas for achieving your goals, what will get you out of your negative mental processes. Remember that the trick is to offer yourself thoughts that are bigger, more inspiring, and more exciting than the ones you are busy with at the moment.

Between two fruits, the monkey in your mind will always pick the one with the strongest flavor.  And guess what, he doesn’t care if it’s sour or sweet.

3. Acting Like the Person You Want to Become (AKA Playing The Part)

You can call this technique “playing the part” or “fake it till you make it.”

Your goal here is to trigger a mental reaction from your physical actions. You have to ask yourself what the perfect version of yourself would be doing if they were in your shoes right now.

Then do it.

Well, you may ask, “What if I don’t know the details about the person I want to become?”

Let me give you some support and ask you a few questions to help you remember how you would like to be, or what you would like to have right now.

• What do you hate about your life? What would you like to have instead?
• What is missing in your life?
• What are the attributes and habits you would like to have?
• What do you enjoy doing but can’t do right now?
• If you had all the money and time in the world, how would you choose to spend your days?

There you have some food for thought to help you describe the perfect version of yourself.

Now forget about money and material things and think only about that human being. What would that person be doing now?

Start acting the part, and soon you will find that your thoughts seem to be more aligned with that person. You may start having thoughts that seem to come from a far more developed person, and that’s simply because you are acting like that.

Source

3 Simple Techniques To Keep Negativity Out Of Your Life

If you don’t control your mind, you will never control your life.

It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, everything that gets inside your mind has a tremendous impact on how you feel, think and act. On what you achieve or don’t achieve. On who you become or don’t become.

Sometimes it’s so instantaneous that a great day becomes a nightmare after you hear a demotivating word or someone looks at you with an angry face.

Your mind starts doing its work, turning the seed that has been planted into something huge and out of control.

Do you feel that this situation is familiar?

This is the natural state of an unguarded mind.

The 2 Keys For Taking Control of Your Mind

You are exposed to thoughts and ideas all the time. Your mind picks the ones that have a bigger impact, positive or negative, and starts working on them until it receives something more impactful to replace them with.

This is one of the saddest elements of human nature I have found, but also one of the most encouraging.

If you are not aware of what’s going on in your mind, your life feels like a roller coaster, and your destiny is at the mercy of external factors.

So, how do you lock out all the negative factors and influences you are bombarded with all day, so they don’t impact you?

Simply put, you can’t.

If someone shouts angrily at you on the street, it’s going to impact you.

But what you can do is DECIDE whether your mind is going to pick that thought and turn it into a monster that ruins your day, or pick something optimistic and inspiring that lets you flow seamlessly through your day instead.

There are 2 key factors for taking more control over your subconscious:

1. Reaction: How you react to your environment. How aware you are of when a bad thought is starting to grow in your mind and how fast you can take action to replace it with the thought you want to have there.
2. Action: Placing in your mind the thoughts you want it to work on. Then letting them repeat, amplify and grow until you soak them up completely and they push you towards the goals you define for yourself.

After years of testing techniques to master my mind, I have collected a few that produce great results.

Here are three of my favorites:

1. Word Amplification

The simplest way to interact with your mind is by repetition of words.

If you detect your mind working on an idea that makes you feel bad, start repeating a word or sentence that makes you think immediately about something that inspires you or makes you smile.

For instance, if you would love to go to Japan on your next vacation, start repeating the word “Japan, Japan, Japan…” or the sentence “I’m in Japan.” It will make you feel better immediately and move your mind and feelings to a different place. .

A curious thing I have found is that using the exact opposite thought doesn’t work as well as using a thought that represents something different and positive for you.

If, for instance, you find yourself thinking that you don’t like your body and start repeating “I’m fit,” it will be harder to make yourself believe it and you will have to struggle to replace the negative thought.

If, instead, you avoid the fight and focus your mind on a different thought, you will forget the original thought more easily and soon everything will start to revolve around the new one.

Whenever you find yourself trapped by a negative thought, stop everything you are doing and repeat to yourself 10 or 20 times the most uplifting words you can find. Let your mind do its magic before coming back to your daily routine with renewed vigor and focus.

2. Painting The Picture Of What You Want To Achieve

This is a habit many successful people have used all their lives. In some cases, it is the only one they have kept after becoming extremely rich.

Write down your goals in the morning, at night, and every time you cannot remember clearly what you are aiming for and realize you are doing something that is not taking you closer to your goals.

After you have them in writing, take a minute to visualize each of them. If it’s hard for you to do this on your own, find some related pictures on the Internet.

This will help you start quickly producing bigger ideas for achieving your goals, what will get you out of your negative mental processes. Remember that the trick is to offer yourself thoughts that are bigger, more inspiring, and more exciting than the ones you are busy with at the moment.

Between two fruits, the monkey in your mind will always pick the one with the strongest flavor.  And guess what, he doesn’t care if it’s sour or sweet.

3. Acting Like the Person You Want to Become (AKA Playing The Part)

You can call this technique “playing the part” or “fake it till you make it.”

Your goal here is to trigger a mental reaction from your physical actions. You have to ask yourself what the perfect version of yourself would be doing if they were in your shoes right now.

Then do it.

Well, you may ask, “What if I don’t know the details about the person I want to become?”

Let me give you some support and ask you a few questions to help you remember how you would like to be, or what you would like to have right now.

• What do you hate about your life? What would you like to have instead?
• What is missing in your life?
• What are the attributes and habits you would like to have?
• What do you enjoy doing but can’t do right now?
• If you had all the money and time in the world, how would you choose to spend your days?

There you have some food for thought to help you describe the perfect version of yourself.

Now forget about money and material things and think only about that human being. What would that person be doing now?

Start acting the part, and soon you will find that your thoughts seem to be more aligned with that person. You may start having thoughts that seem to come from a far more developed person, and that’s simply because you are acting like that.

Source

Want to Be Successful? Quit Being So Positive.

“You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.” 

- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Medical School, from the best-seller Wherever You Go, There You Are

What do you get when you combine positive psychology and strengths-based leadership? Deluded people who will never realize a fraction of their full potential. And if they happen to be entrepreneurs, there’s a very good chance they’ll fall flat on their faces and take their businesses down with them.

Truth is, any fad that teaches you to focus on one aspect of reality and ignore its opposite is likely to be destructive.

There is a natural balance to all things: life and death, good and bad, happiness and sadness, pleasure and pain. The very idea that you should focus on positives and ignore negatives, likewise with strengths versus weaknesses, is not only delusional; it’s a recipe for disaster.

Let me tell you a couple of stories to show how dealing with reality as openly and genuinely as possible is the path to success and happiness, while focusing only on the positives and strengths can destroy your career and your company.  

It’s no secret that Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1984 because his management style had become toxic to the company. Much later, Jobs would come to realize that getting fired from the company he cofounded “was the best thing that could have ever happened” to him. He called it “awful-tasting medicine” that “the patient needed.”

He also likened it to life hitting him in the head with a brick.

That forced Jobs to look in the mirror and see the truth – that he wasn’t as capable or as strong a leader as he could be. And as he addressed the issues that stood in his way, the result was the founding of NeXT and Pixar, his eventual return to Apple, and the greatest turnaround in corporate history that built the most valuable company on Earth.

He also met the love of his life.

It’s sort of easy to miss the obvious connection staring us right in the face, that it wasn’t just Apple that had hit a wall, fallen on hard times, and found itself in need of a turnaround. The same was true of Jobs. And there was an undeniable connection between the two.

It’s also easy to miss the insightfulness of Jobs’ realization that none of his later achievements would have occurred if he hadn’t faced reality. That sort of introspection only comes from someone who’s had some sort of intervention and gone through gut-wrenching change as a result.

Not to compare myself with Jobs, but the truth is I’ve gotten a couple of those bricks to the head myself. I’ve been fired more than once and lost my wife early in our marriage. But in every case I looked in the mirror, faced what I saw, made some changes, and bounced back stronger than ever.

If I’d just tried to stay positive, focused on my strengths, and searched for the silver lining in the clouds, I never would have figured out what was wrong and become a better person, a better husband, and a better leader. I never would have achieved so much in my career or won my wife back. (We recently celebrated our 25th anniversary.)

If only those two success stories were the norm. I’ve known dozens of CEOs, founders, and business owners who were never willing to upset the apple-cart of their fragile egos. They instead chose to focus on the positives and lived in denial. As a result, they never achieved self-awareness and self-destructed along with their companies. 

Not only are none of us perfect, we all have significant issues that stand in the way of achieving our full potential. Besides, life is full of challenges and pitfalls. That goes for your personal life and your business life. And if you’re an entrepreneur, the life of your company will tend to mirror your own.

While life is full of ups and downs, one thing is certain: If you attempt to filter your consciousness and disallow negative thoughts or make believe the weaknesses holding you back don’t exist, you’ll never get past those hurdles and get to the next stage in your personal and professional development. And neither will your business.