Building a Better Self-Concept - 11/2/2008

Most of you are very familiar with Brian Tracy, an internationally renowned superstar speaker, a best selling author and I might add a mentor and personal friend of mine. Brian has been in the Peak Performance business for many, many years and on cassette one of his world-wide famous album entitled, “The Psychology of Achievement,” he talks about building a positive self-concept – and it is this subjects that I want to discuss with you right now. 

He asks why some people are more successful than others?  Why do some people make more money, have more friends, enjoy better health and derive greater satisfaction from life than others do?  The purpose of The Psychology of Achievement is to help you unlock your personal potential to achieve anything you really want in life.

Let’s define what we mean by success.  There are basically six requirements.  The first requirement is peace of mind, freedom from fear, freedom from anger, and freedom from guilt.  The second requirement to success is good health and high level of energy.  If we do not have our health or energy, we do not get very much satisfaction from life.  The third requirement to success is loving relationships; long-term, intimate, mature relationships with other people.  The fourth requirement is financial freedom.  We cannot enjoy life if we are worried of not having enough money. 

The fifth requirement is commitment toward the goals and ideals.  Man’s need for meaning and purpose is the greatest single drive in human nature.  The sixth requisite for success is a feeling of personal fulfillment or self-actualization.  A feeling that we are becoming everything we are capable of becoming.  To get maximum performance from ourselves, we have to understand the basic underlying principles or laws of our being.  Once we understand how we work we have to make an effort to apply what we have learned to achieve far grater levels of accomplishment in our day-to-day lives.

Let’s begin by discussing the basic rules or laws for operating the human machine.  The Law of Control simply says that we feel good about ourselves to the degree to which we feel we are in control of our lives and that we feel out of harmony with ourselves to the degree to which we feel we are controlled by circumstances or other people.  All controls begin by taking control of the thoughts we hold in our conscious minds. 

The second principle is The Law of Accident, which says there is no way that we can control what happens to us; that everything just happens by accident.  Unfortunately, whether or not they realize it the vast majority of man and woman live their lives by The Law of Accident.  They have no goals beyond the short term.  They make no plans.  They do not really feel that they are in control of their own destinies and they just hope that somehow things will all just work out.  

Opposed to The Law of Accident is The Law of Cause and Effect which says that for every effect in our lives there is a specific cause.  We have the ability to control the causes and change the effects to anything we want.  Our thoughts are the primary causes of the conditions or effects in our lives and if we wish our lives to be different in the future, we have to change our thinking in the present. 

The Law of Belief says that whatever we believe with feeling becomes our reality.  Our beliefs form a screen through which we see the entire world and we never allow any information that is inconsistent with our beliefs to pass through that screen.  Even if we have beliefs that are totally inconsistent with the reality because we believe them to be true they become true for us. 

So, all of this begs the following questions and it should for you too.  It says, “Do I have peace of mind?  Do I spend my time and energy worrying about money?  Am I in control of my life?  Do I have abundant energy and good health?  Do I plan my life?  Do I understand how to achieve my full potential?”  Those are good questions and when you sit down and formulate great answers to those good questions your life will change because you will have a positive self-concept.

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