Positive Or Negative Focus
Look in any bookshop at their Best Seller list today, and you’ll see a mass of autobiographies of the rich and famous. From empire builders to glamour models to footballers, they all tell a different story, but each has a thread in common – they focused on the positives and overcame adversity.
That’s the way of the world; life’s achievers allow positive reasons why ‘they can’ to flood their consciousness, and drown out negative reasons why they can’t.
This attitude to studying is paramount for the student. To successfully complete a training program, an optimistic mindset is the biggest tool in a trainee’s workbox. A positive approach brings about all sorts of possibilities, circumstances, answers and opportunities to achieve. By contrast, a pessimistic outlook blocks our learning receptors and thwarts creativity .
This is down to our Reticular Activation System – an automatic mechanism in our brain that tells us what to focus on. Throughout our lives, we’ve experienced many things that no longer stay in the forefront of our minds – the bulk of what we’ve learned moves from our conscious mind to our sub-conscious mind, a kind of store cupboard stocked up with all our past knowledge and beliefs.
When we attempt to do something consciously, our Reticular Activation System (RAS) will go through our sub-conscious mind for any associated information it holds, and bring it into focus. As we’re walking down a road, we’re made aware only of things that are relevant to us – anything else is just background noise.
So if our conscious mind has regularly been transferring upbeat, positive messages to our sub-conscious mind, then that’s what will come back. But if our sub-conscious has been fed a bunch of downbeat, defeatist messages, then that’s equally what will come back.
It seems that achievers are able to manipulate the messages filtered through to their sub-conscious minds by deliberately programming their RAS and choosing the exact messages the conscious mind sends. This makes it an essential tool for achieving goals, as the sub-conscious mind can’t distinguish between real or imaginary events.
In other words, we need to create a very specific picture of our goal in our conscious mind. The RAS will then pass this on to our subconscious – which, as it believes everything it’s told, will then help us achieve the goal. It does this by making us aware of all the relevant information which otherwise might have stayed as ‘background noise’.
The writer Napoleon Hill said that we can achieve any realistic goal if we keep focusing on that goal, and stop dwelling on any negative thoughts about it. Obviously, if we keep thinking that we can’t hit a goal, our subconscious will help us not to achieve it.
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