Do you feel like you are always talking yourself out of success?  As soon as you start to set goals for yourself, do you suddenly have nagging thoughts about how you aren’t up to the task or how you simply aren’t qualified to carry it through?

If you have ever experienced either situation, you need to change the way you respond to your inner dialogue.  Instead of obeying your negative commands, you can use positive self-talk to counter the negativity and overcome nearly all anxious thoughts.

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Setting Goals and Sticking to Them with Positive Self-Talk

Are you initially filled with excitement when you first set goals for yourself? Are these thoughts then followed by self-doubt and self-defeating thoughts that stop you in your tracks before you even get started?

It can be difficult to make the most of your life when you are constantly talking yourself out of being a success.  It can be frustrating and discouraging to have these thoughts constantly plaguing you. Many of us, in fact, don’t even realize we have them! All we know is that we don’t have the confidence to stick to our plans and reach our goals.

But there’s another way!

Positive self-talk is an effective way to set goals and ensure that you stick to them, even if you have never been able to do this before. The way this works is that you decide what goal is important to you, and then you plan the logistics of how you are going to attain this goal.  When self-doubt starts kicking in, you will respond with affirmations that prove your success without surrendering to the negative pressure. Since you’re reading this article, it’s clear that you’re no quitter and you’re certainly not a failure, so start believing in yourself!

Re-Programming Your Brain

Affirmations are essentially positive statements that re-program your mind for the positive. The moment you have a self-defeating thought you’d be able to counter the negative with a motivating statement. An example of a positive affirmation is: “I am worthy of great success,” or “I am in the winner’s circle.”  What this does is replace negativity with thoughts that will help you move toward your goals instead of further away from them.

Positive self-talk is easier to implement than you might think. You may not be aware of the severity of the negative dialogue currently within your mind. However, once you begin with positive self-talk, you will suddenly realize that you are self-sabotaging the goals you set for yourself from the minute that you make them. This process can open your eyes to exactly how much this inner conversation has been interfering with your life. You’ll feel hopeful that you can now set goals and surpass them.

Through positive self-talk you will be able easily set long and short-term goals for yourself. And when you use affirmations, you’ll have accessible tools to help you push yourself further than ever before. Learning to quiet negativity with positive thoughts is a great move toward setting and attaining future goals with ease.

Related posts:

1. 7 Ways to Accept Yourself for Who You Are
2. Are Your Goals Buried In The Garden?
3. Your Brain Believes What You Feed It

Of all the wisdom I have gained, the most important is the knowledge that time and health are two precious assets that we rarely recognize or appreciate until they have been depleted. As with health, time is the raw material of life. You can use it wisely, waste it or even kill it.

To accomplish all we are capable of, we would need a hundred lifetimes. If we had forever in our mortal lives, there would be no need to set goals, plan effectively or set priorities. We could squander our time and perhaps still manage to accomplish something, if only by chance. Yet in reality, we’re given only this one life span on earth to do our earthly best.

Each human being now living has exactly 168 hours per week. Scientists can’t invent new minutes, and even the super rich can’t buy more hours. Queen Elizabeth the First of England, the richest, most powerful woman on earth of her era, whispered these final words on her deathbed: “All my possessions for a moment of time!”

We worry about things we want to do – but can’t – instead of doing the things we can do – but don’t. How often have you said to yourself, “Where did the day go? I accomplished nothing,” or “I can’t even remember what I did yesterday.” That time is gone, and you never get it back.

Staring at the compelling distractions on a television screen is one of the major consumers of time. You can enjoy and benefit from the very best it has to offer in about seven total hours of viewing per week. But the average person spends more than thirty hours per week in a semi-stupor, escaping from the priorities and goals he or she never gets around to setting. The irony is that the people we are watching are having fun achieving their own goals, making money, having us look at them enjoying their careers.

Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire today. If you’ve just frittered away an hour procrastinating, you will still be given the next hour to start on priorities. Time management contains one great paradox: No one has enough time, and yet everyone has all there is. Time is not the problem; the problem is separating the urgent from the important.

Every decision we make has an “opportunity cost.” Every decision forfeits all other opportunities we had before we made it. We can’t be two places at the same time.

In their excellent management book Tradeoffs, Drs. Greiff and Munter discuss the difficult options that face us in all areas of our lives. One case in point illustrates a common opportunity cost. It’s a true anecdote they call, “Bicycle vs. Mother:”

“John is a precocious eight-year-old boy. Both his parents work. His mother is a management consultant and travels frequently. After being away for several days, she arrived home late one night and hugged her son.

“He said, ‘Mom, I missed you. Why were you away so long?’

“She smiled and replied, ‘One of the reasons I was away was to make enough money to buy you the bicycle you wanted.’

“Young John looked at her reflectively and stated, ‘Mom, I really did want the bicycle. But mothers are more important than bicycles. So please stay home more.’”

Even though we all are aware of the tradeoffs of “quality time vs. quantity time” in our relationships, we are not used to thinking specifically about how our decisions cost us other opportunities. Without this understanding, our decisions will often be unfocused and unrelated to helping us achieve our most important goals.

You may have heard the story about the analogy of the “circus juggler” to each of us as we try to balance our personal and professional priorities. I have heard the story repeated by many keynote speakers and have used it in previous books, but have never been able to trace the identity of the original author.

When the circus juggler drops a ball, he lets it bounce and picks it up on the next bounce without losing his rhythm or concentration. He keeps right on juggling. Many times we do the same thing. We lose our jobs, but get another one on the first or second bounce. We may drop the ball on a sale, an opportunity to move ahead, or in a relationship, and we either pick it up on the rebound or get a new one thrown in to replace what we just dropped.

However, some of the balls or priorities we juggle don’t bounce. The more urgent priorities associated with self-imposed deadlines and workloads have more elasticity than the precious, delicate relationships which are as fragile as fine crystal. Balance involves distinguishing between the priorities we juggle that bounce from the ones labeled “loved ones,” “health,” and “moral character” that may shatter if we drop them.

The reason I always ask my seminar attendees to list the benefits of reaching their goals is so they can arrange them in the true order of importance to them and give them a sufficient amount of attention as they juggle them within their time constraints. Handle your priorities with care. Some of them just don’t bounce!

To live a rich, balanced life we need to be more in conscious control of our habits and lifestyles. Actualized individuals have a regular exercise routine. They pay attention to nutrition, with lean source protein and fiber-based carbohydrates as their basic food choices. They relax through musical, cultural, artistic, and family activities. They get sufficient sleep and rest to meet the next day renewed and invigorated.

In addition to blocking periods of time for recreation and vacations, they also schedule large, uninterrupted periods of work on their most important projects. Contrary to popular notions, most books, works of art, invention, and musical compositions are created during uninterrupted time frames, not by a few lines, strokes, or notes every so often. Every book or audio program I have written has been done with the discipline of twelve to fifteen hours per day during a specific block of time.

True enough, I may have sacrificed a ski trip or an escape vacation once or twice. But by trying to focus on prime projects in prime time, the opportunity costs have been outweighed by the return on invested resources.

With your material, time and energy resources allocated well, you should be able to use your innovative powers to focus on goal achievement. Effective priority management creates freedom. Freedom provides opportunity to make decisions. We make our decisions and our decisions, over time, make us.

Freedom from urgency …. that’s what will allow us to live a rich and rewarding life. You may have thought your problem was “time starvation,” when in truth, it was in the way you assigned priorities in your decision-making process. Have you allowed the urgent to crowd out the important?

Each day we will continue to encounter deadlines we must meet and “fires,” not necessarily of our own making, we must put out. Endless urgent details will always beg for attention, time and energy. What we seldom realize is that the really important things in our life don’t make such strict demands on us, and therefore we usually assign them a lower priority.

Our loved ones understand when we are preoccupied with our urgent business, but it’s hard for us to understand, many years later, whey they appear preoccupied when we finally find some time for them. Harry Chapin’s classic song, “The Cat’s in the Cradle,” is still a mirror reflecting our priorities.

All the important arenas in our life are there awaiting our decisions. But they don’t beg us to give them our time. The local university doesn’t call us to advance our education and improve our life skills.

I have never received a call or e-mail from the health club I joined insisting that I show up and work out for thirty minutes each day. My bathroom scale has never insisted that I lose thirty pounds. The grocery clerks have never made me put back on the shelves the junk food I put in the cart, nor has a fast-food restaurant ever refused me a double cheeseburger and large fries because of my high cholesterol.

Nor have I ever been subpoenaed by the ocean or the mountains to appear for relaxation and solitude. Yet I receive hundreds of urgent phone messages and e-mails each week from people with deadlines.

You see, it’s the easiest thing in the world to neglect the important and give in to the urgent. One of the greatest skills you can ever develop in your life is not only to tell the two apart, but to be able to assign the correct amount of time to each.

Beginning tomorrow, throughout the day, and every day thereafter, stop and ask yourself this question: “Is what I’m doing right now important to my health, well-being and mission in life, and for my loved ones?”  Your affirmative answer will free you forever, from the tyranny of the urgent.

Reproduced with permission from Denis Waitley’s Weekly Ezine. To subscribe to Denis Waitley’s Weekly Ezine, go to www.deniswaitley.com or send an email with Join in the subject to subscribe@deniswaitley.com Copyright © 2005 Denis Waitley International. All rights reserved worldwide.

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1. 3 Steps to Defining Your Life Purpose

Whilst we have good intentions at the beginning of a new year in setting goals, it’s a bit like planting something in your garden.

We love what we’ve planted and so we begin to water it and look after it. There’s a growth spurt so we water it some more. Then some distractions enter our life, and we forget to water it, suddenly the weeds encroach on what we’ve planted, and it dies. It’s a bit like goals.

Harvard Medical School conducted a study and the results were quite amazing. 70% of people who set goals don’t achieve them. However, 98% of people who call them Promises achieved their goal.

That’s a startling difference, don’t you agree? Would you prefer to be in the 98% or the 30% who achieve their goals?

America’s billionaire, Bill Bartmann (named as “One of the Top 100 Entrepreneurs of the Last 100 Years”), has a fantastic 10-step process for setting and keeping your Promises:

1. Ensure it’s YOUR goal, your vision, your quest; not someone else’s. “Our life is the most precious asset we have” Bill Bartmann. Don’t give up your dreams to make someone else happy.
2. Call your goals a ‘PROMISE’. Our brain is an amazing instrument. It is usually inherent within us to keep our promises… when we promise to do X by X date, our brain and our heart kicks in and we want to fulfil that promise. On the other hand, our brain can associate goals with failure. Think about that for a minute. How many times have you promised something either to yourself or someone else, and you fulfilled that promise? Then think about how many times you have set goals and the amount of times you achieved those goals. Promises will outweigh goals.
3. Clearly identify your Promise. Don’t be vague. Instead of saying I would like to lose weight, be specific… how much weight would you like to lose and by when?
4. Use the tools around you as motivators to keep you going. Positive motivators may be the people you love – negative motivators may be those who say you can’t do it;  prove them wrong and use it as a driving influence.
5. Create a Promise Plan. Promises aren’t promises until you’ve written them down. Define what your Promise is; when you will achieve your Promise; where you will be when it happens; why you want it; who you need help from to fulfil your Promise; and an ongoing list of how you will fulfil your Promise. It is not necessary to know ALL of the how… have faith that you will find the answers as your travel through the journey. Bill Bartmann provided a great story as it relates to the how:

   You have set off on a 200 mile trip in the dark. Your headlights are on which shines a 200ft path for you, which you follow. You don’t need the headlights to shine up the whole 200 miles… you only need to know each 200ft to get there. Your ‘how’ is like the 200ft path. You don’t need to know the whole 200 miles.

   
   

6. Review your plan and Promise on a regular basis: 20 MINUTES EVERY DAY. By doing so, the how will materialise and the pieces come together. You are melding your conscious and subconscious which will give you the answers you need. Create a Tangible Vision of your Promise and stick it in a prominent place where you can see it every day.
7. Remove any negative thoughts from your mind and tell yourself you WILL succeed. Feed your mind with positive affirmations. You could do this by sticking them near your computer, on your mirror or wherever else you see fit. Another great method is recording your affirmations and then playing them as you drift off to sleep.
8. Inform others of your Promise… don’t hide them in the cupboard! Commit to your Promise and share your vision.
9. Envision the results. Play your own mind movie and picture yourself already there. Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen cite a great exercise in their book ‘Cash In A Flash’. Write an article (from a journalist’s perspective) that appears about YOU and your Promise… imagine a journalist writing about your accomplishments – it’s made front page news!
10. START! Do something now, today, to begin your Promise Journey.

What tools and resources do you use to accomplish your Promises? Share with me your thoughts

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1. Reprogramming Your Brain To Conquer Any Goal
2. Top 5 Success Traits of the Super Successful

What would you do if you knew it was impossible to fail?

Please ponder that question and allow your thoughts to free-fall.  What would your life look like if you left all the doors open instead of pulling them shut, one by one?

How would you be living your life today if you walked through those doors?  If you knew that on the other side of that door, you could have whatever you dreamed or wanted, as long as you took the step and walked through it, rather than turn away and shut the door.

So let me ask the question again; what would you do if you knew it was impossible to fail? Failure is a euphemism for quitting or not trying – so it is impossible for you to fail if you walk through those doors.

Is it Fear that is stopping you from taking the leap through that door?  It might be fear of failure, fear of change, fear of success.

FEAR =

False
Expectations
Appearing
Real

American Novelist, Marilyn French, aptly said “Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self knowledge if we explore them.”

I urge you to hold onto your goals and dreams, have faith in your abilities, and start running through those doors that represent each area of your life.  Fling back the door, feel the adrenalin pumping through your veins, and excel in the fact that you took action to make your goals and dreams a reality.

Remember: fear is an emotional response to something that appears real, and taking action – like walking through those doors – leads to change.

How is your life starting to look?  Are your doors open or shut?

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1. Turning Dreams Into Reality

Can you remember when, as a child, you would lie on the grass, stare up to the clouds and dream?  What happened to your dreams from your youth?  Did they slip away on the wind, forgotten?

Some of us today think dreams are silly, that they won’t come true.  Then others say that they don’t have a dream at all.  However, most of the wonderful events in our lives, both past and present, have resulted out of dreams.

“I have a dream!” Martin Luther King exclaimed.  He went on to change a nation.  Henry Ford dreamt that a motor car could be affordable for everyone.  Thomas Edison dreamed of a light globe that could be operated by electricity.  Before he succeeded he failed more than ten thousand times.  The Wright brothers dreamt of a flying machine.  The evidence is around us today.

The secret to their success was BELIEF and PERSEVERANCE.

Your dream may not be as big as that of Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, or even a child’s.  Nevertheless, what you have now is important to YOU and can be accomplished if you have the desire to do so.

D  on’t be afraid to commit to your dream.
R  ecord your dreams on paper.
E  njoy the small successes along the way.
A  motivating factor is picturing the dream in your mind.
M  ake sure everyone knows your dream – you’ll want to succeed!
S  ee things as a learning experience – never as a failure.

Never be misled by another’s perception of your dreams.  When Marconi was discovering how to transmit sound through the airwaves, friends took him to a psychopathic hospital to be examined!  He didn’t let this distract him.  He believed in what he was doing.

What is your dream?  Write it down and pin it where you can see it every day!  If, the first time round, you don’t succeed, never think of it as a failure and stop.  It is merely a stepping stone to success – a learning experience.

There is a French Proverb: “It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom.”  Prove to yourself that your rose can bloom too.

Article by Tara West © 1994

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