If you’d like to become a winner, you’re not alone. Winners are the icing on the cake of society, the cherry in the cocktail of life and overall just the coolest people on earth.

But what is a “winner”, actually? Is Bill Gates a winner? How about Mother Theresa? Or Gandhi? What about Vincent van Gogh, who hardly sold any paintings during his life time? Can you be declared a winner in retrospect? And who declares the winners in the first place?

Ah… hold on. I think we may finally have found the right question: Who declares the winners?

Is it God? Does he point his finger to draw a line between winners and losers? Or maybe it’s a highly regarded group of success gurus who make the decision? Do they publish a list of winners online? And do you have to buy their training course to earn your winner badge?

What about your friends? Surely, what they think of you must be right? But what if you find new friends who think differently?

The one with the right to judge you

Darn… this is getting complicated. We might actually have to stop asking questions and start facing the truth. You might have to accept the harsh reality that there’s only one single person who has all the power to decide whether you’re a winner or not. Someone who can determine your fate, who has the right to judge you and who can change your life with his or her thoughts alone.

It’s you, of course. Which really doesn’t make things any easier. I mean, what are you supposed to think of yourself? Who tells you what you should think? Is it God? Or maybe a group of highly regarded — ok, let’s not go through all that again.

The bottom line is this: It’s all on you. You’re the only one who gets to decide and nobody else has the power to “help” you with your decision.

By now, we realise that our starting question doesn’t quite fit. “Are you a winner?” isn’t really a question anyone can answer. Why don’t we replace it with “Do you feel like a winner?”. If you’re the only who gets a say in this anyway, then your feelings and thoughts are all that matters, aren’t they?

So, do you feel like a winner? I certainly do. Sometimes. At other times, I feel like a total failure: weak, vulnerable and helpless.

My guess is that you’re like me. I think that you try to think well of yourself, and often succeed — but not always.

How to feel like a winner

To help you feel like a winner more often, I’d like to show you a little exercise that has helped me personally a lot. In order to do so, I’ll build on the exercise that Douglas Cartwright has suggested for changing the way we look at problems.

Here’s what to do:

Step 1:

In writing, make a list of your successes in life. Start with your childhood. How you learned

to swim, or to ride a bike. Then work your way up to today. Your first kiss, your high-school

graduation. The first job. Your first promotion. You get the picture.

Steps 2 – 1,000,000:

From now on, every time you experience a new success, read through the whole list again. Then

add the new success to the list.

This activity shifts your thinking significantly. Instead of registering your successes as isolated events, your mind will start to interlink them.

As a result, you don’t just think “Wow, I’ve achieved a success” whenever you have a success-experience. Instead, you think “Wow, I’m a successful person” — a winner.

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin — real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

Father Alfred D’Souza

Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking once offered to show a young man in despair a place where thousands of people had no problems at-all.

The young man, eager to hear about such a place, was not so pleased when he found out where it was.

It was Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Peale argued that if you’re alive you’re going to have problems. Using a reframe that might be a stretch for some he further said: “If today you have no problems, I urge you, go home as fast as you can. Go into your room, lock the door, fall to your knees and cry out to the Lord, “What’s the matter Lord? Don’t you trust me any more? Give me some problems!”’

Yes, I can hear you making some barely printable comment or more charitably muttering saying ‘”Sheesh!” Give me a break. Who’d want more problems?’

And you’d be right – most people don’t want more problems.

But I’m betting you are not most people. You are interested in taking your development to the next level (or you wouldn’t be reading this blog!) and while I hate to say it – problems are one of the routes to get there.

But I still don’t want problems!

Am I channeling Larry Winget (author of Shut up, stop Whining and Get a Life) when I say wishing they were gone won’t get rid of them? We will never be without problems* so the sooner you face up to that fact the sooner you’ll be focusing beyond them to solutions.

Therefore it’s in our best interests to develop a good robust mindset for dealing with problems. As the quote says ‘these obstacles ARE your life” and the quality of your life can improve in proportion to your attitude to problem solving.

We have framed problems as terrible, awful, something to moan about etc.  And so we “as we think so we are” and problems and inconveniences produce uncomfortable and so-called negative feelings – and accordingly are experienced as awful events that just get in the way of us having what we want.

I tell you – when you visit a third-world economy country – and then come back to seeing people having a fit in the superstore because they had to wait five minutes to pay for their piled high trolley of food – it puts things in perspective.

Many things we think of as problems are merely reflections of our lack of patience and our spoilt brat expectations of getting our own way. A life with so few problems is a luxury of the West and not reality for most of mankind.

But the fact remains – We will always have problems. If we’re going to succeed we need to learn to love them.

Love my problems? Yeah, right?

I will be the first to admit this process can seem HARD and it seemingly goes against the grain. But that only exemplifies the power of the case we’ve built up against them.

If….if you can learn to approach problems with excitement and verve, IF you can LOVE them – you can gain a tactical advantage over 90% of people in the world**.

More on how to do this further down.

Problems can make you rich.

It has been said “Don’t become a millionaire for the money, make a million for the person you will become in the process.”

Now, hopefully you’re planning to be an ethical, philanthropic contributor to society rather than paranoid billionaire locked in a room with talons for fingernails (sorry Howard) but either way – to get there – you’ll need to overcome lots and lots of problems to get there.

Millionaires (unless they inherit) get paid for solving problems. You can get paid for solving problems. In fact, you DO get paid for solving problems – think about it.

The more problems you can solve (and the bigger those problems) the more value you can add – and the more you can get paid. Imagine if you were the person who invented the wheel – think of the royalties from that…!

Adding value to other peoples’ lives increases the impact you can have in this world. And since ‘making a difference’ is so often on peoples’ list of values when you are known as an avid problem solver you will win people to you.

You can lead in your field. You can be a servant leader, providing for mankind in some area. And you can feel a whole darn lot better about your life.

So how do we change our attitude to solving problems?

Change our reaction to problems

Paul Stoltz in The Adversity Quotient suggests we retrain our brain’s reactions to hearing about problems. Instead of groaning he advises we sound klaxons like this one:

Likewise, we can also force ourselves to rejoice when we have a problem:

When I was training to be a coach the trainers would have the class raise their hands in the air and shout “How fantastic!” when they had an insight.

Doing this when you realize you have a problem to solve helps break the neuro-linguistic-semantic state that used to get you down.

Yes, it’ll feel weird at first like laughing when something isn’t funny but you’ll get used to it.

If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. If you don’t feel the love, fake it until you do!

Increase your ability to bear pain

Peter Daniels is a 78 year-old Christian billionaire who is one of the four-hundred richest men in the world.

When asked on a talk show what one of the secrets to his success was, he said “my willingness to bear pain”. Daniels said that to be a success you need to be willing to bear pain, suffering, humiliation and ridicule.

Although he didn’t specifically mention problems it is obvious he had overcome numerous odds to get where he was. Did I mention he had gone bankrupt 4 times and was illiterate until age 27?

He once asked an audience member on his show if he thought he could make a million pounds in two years. The guy said ‘no’. He then asked the participant if he could make the money if his wife and three kids would be killed if he didn’t. The guy said ‘of course’.

And there you have it. With a powerful enough motivational source you could overcome most any problems in your life or give it such a good go you wouldn’t feel bad if you failed!

But what would drive you to endure, to pursue solutions with the same intensity you would have if you’re loved ones would be killed?

What would be so important not to loose, what would be a loss so grievous you would do almost anything to avoid it?

Conversely, what do you value so much you would live for?

“Let someone else get killed!” “Suppose everyone on our side felt that way?” “Well then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?” “Englishmen are dying for England, American’s are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can all be worth dying for?” “Anything worth living for,” said Nately, “is worth dying for.” “And anything worth dying for,” answered the old man, “is certainly worth living for.”

Joseph Heller, Catch 22

What are you willing to endure for your goal?

Identify yourself as a problem solver

This one comes from Switch by Chip & Dan Heath. People who identify themselves with an idea become more likely to behave in a way congruent with that idea.

Remember a time when you really loved solving a problem. Perhaps you didn’t identify it as a problem but it was a situation in need of a solution so it could be defined as a problem.

When you see what you saw, hear what you heard and feel what you felt, adjusting your body to allow the maximum experience of this you can stand, imagine what it would be like having this feeling as you approach other problems?

For example, if you enjoyed planning a holiday, what if solving that knarly work issue felt like the joyful anticipation of a week on the beach?

If you choose to accept the definition, you acted as a problem solver that time.

Now, think of all the problems you have solved throughout your life. Everything you have had to work out how to do is a problem you have solved. From walking, to baking a cake to figuring out how to fund that holiday in three months rather than six, these are all examples of how you have used your problem solving abilities. Don’t dismiss it, you did those things and what seems effortless to you may be hard for someone else.

In the field of NLP we call using a strategy that was successful in one area in another ‘mapping across’. If you want a real in depth discussion of how you can develop new strategies try NLP Volume 1.

Redefine your meanings of problems and pain

As I alluded to earlier, a good frame to have is: “I love problems because they make me rich!”

Additionally, here are some frames you could use:

• Problems are solutions waiting to be found
• I’m bigger than any problem
• Don’t tell me a storm is coming, tell the storm my God is coming
• What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
• Problems are opportunities: in the middle of every adversity is the seed of its own solution (Napoleon Hill).

If you have a particular problem (ha!) with your concept of problems and pain, get the Change your Concepts Change your Life which will help you map out and redefine your conceptual states of mind – leading to a change in your behavior.

Redefine your expectations of ‘settling’

At what point do you want to stop solving problems?

I ask because, truly, perhaps you’re satisfied with where you’re at in life?  Perhaps you really don’t need to solve some of the problems that others insist are part of everyday life.

You could be happy to rent not buy, normal in some parts of Europe.

You might be happy being single when everyone tells you that marriage is wonderful (it is!)

But you get my point.

Or perhaps you’re conflicted inside because you don’t want to venture outside your comfort zone but know you need to in order to grow.

You need to give yourself permission to redefine your expectations of where you stop.

This can be as simple as putting your attention inside your head and telling yourself in an authoritative voice: “I give myself permission to press on, even though I feel uncomfortable.”

I mean, imagine what would open up to you if you didn’t value listening to your problems any more…!

So here you have some thoughts on problems. We will always have them, so let’s step up and learn to love solving them, if not the issues themselves.

Our entire futures can be changed by the issues we solve for ourselves and those we love. So problems? Bring it on!

*(Yes, if you like you can reframe this to “I don’t have problems I have solutions waiting to be found” – fine, if that works for you. )

Update: Please click on this link for more information about The new Mind Alchemy course. All the links to the downloads have now been removed. I would like to thank all 800+ readers who expressed an interest in this course and for everyone who completed the course the first time round, it is becasue of you I could make the course better.

Before we start

A few readers are now blogging about their experiences on the course, and it would be great to lend your support:

Stacy Claflin – Grow With Stacy

Marty BoneIdol – Living Life in Chapters

Derek Breuning – Tech Life

Stephen – New Life Starts Here

Read the interview I have done with Angela Artemis from Powered by Intuition

Read the interview I have done with Sandi Faviell from DevaCoaching

Watch an interview I made with Suzie Cheel on Mind Alchemy

Mind Alchemy Day 7

Welcome to day 7 of Mind Alchemy.

We’re going to continue with the mind workout, before taking a relatively restful and fun day on day 8.

Daily routine – if you haven’t done so already take 10-15 minutes to go over your outcomes.  Remember this forms a part of your daily routine and the quicker you get into the habit the quicker your life will change.

The Nature of your thoughts

90% of what you were thinking yesterday will be the same thoughts you think today.

Today I would like to talk about the nature of our thoughts and how we go about changing our thoughts.

Over the last 6 days you’ve seen how to inject new thoughts into your mind, thoughts that will have a viral effect and start you on the path of thinking about what you want in your life.  You can’t have two thoughts at the same time, actually you can have two thoughts at the same time but you can’t focus on two thoughts at the same time, so the more you focus on what you want in your life the less wasteful thoughts you will have.

Your prodigal thoughts

According to some scientists we have around 60,000 thoughts per day, and 95%-98% of those thoughts are the same ones day in and day out, or rather the same types of thoughts.  Let’s do some math here:

95% of 60,000 = 57,000

57,000 thoughts that were the same as, or the same type as yesterday.  We can guestimate that we can take about 10,000 of those thoughts to think about getting up in the morning, planning our day ahead, driving to school/work, practical thinking about issues at work/home etc etc – these are practical thoughts that we have to think about day in and day out.

So we are left with around 47,000 thoughts.  That’s 47,000 spare thoughts, thoughts that are up for grabs and to be turned into something useful. What do you think these thoughts are about?

Here’s are some classifications of the 47,000 thoughts we have:

Worry, boredom, daydreaming, future planning, catastrophising, fighting in our minds, negative self talk, positive self talk, what others think of us, and so on.

How many of the 47,000 spare thoughts that we have each day do we think positively about the future, or plan positively for the future, or ask the right questions to get a better future.  I am willing to guess not very many at all.

Our minds are in constant battle with useless worry (not all worry is bad if you do something with it), other people inside our heads, self pity, self deprication, negative thinking, despair, doom and gloom.  Very few of us have risen above this constant barrage.  It is fueled by you, but it is also fueled by the media, television, newspapers, and radio telling us day in and day out that the world is a shit place to live.  Do you know what, the world is not a shit place to live.  Yes there are others who get murdered, yes there is war, yes there are terrible people out there, but the amount of media stories about the bad events in the world is totally disproportionate to the population as a whole.  We do not live in an evil world, we live in a world inhabited by SOME evil people.

One of the best things you can do to cleanse your mind is to stop reading the newspapers, stop listening to the news, turn news 24 off, turn radio news off.  There is nothing we can do about most of the news we hear so why let it infect our minds.

Okay, back to the topic at hand here.  What can we do with these spare 47,000 thoughts and how do we make sure the 47,000 thoughts are useful?

Management of many is the same as management of few. It is a matter of organization

Sun Tzu

Replace, Stop and Redirection

At the moment a lot of our thoughts are based on a stimulus from our physical world.  We are going to look at changing the 47,000 spare thoughts we have and turning them around in order to help us.

Replace

We are going to inject more of the outcome focused thoughts you learned in the previous 6 days of the course.  This way you will be having more outcome focused thoughts, which lead to more outcome solution oriented thoughts, which leads to taking more action.

Stop

We can’t stop thinking altogether, but what we can do is stop some of the thoughts that we do not want from entering our minds.  The way to do this is through relaxation, meditation, guided mediation, and focused thinking, which we will be looking at later on in the course.

Redirection

Whenever we catch ourselves thinking things we don’t want to think we turn it around in the opposite direction.  For example:

“I can’t afford to put my daughter through college” we turn it around and think

“How can I find a way to put my daughter through college”

You see the difference here.  The first thought leads to more doom and gloom thoughts and feelings of despair, whereas the second thought leads to more solution oriented thoughts, more positive and more likely to find a solution to the issue at hand.

Exercise for the day – Unedited writing of thoughts

Todays exercise is all about unedited recording of our worries and thoughts.

You can download the Mind Alchemy worksheet or take a blank piece of paper and start writing.

I read a post last month from a great guy called Amit Sodha about unedited writing of your thoughts which is something Amit came across on his own without realising there was a name for it called Freewriting.  Anyways I discovered it through Amit and want to pass it on to you as an exercise today.

Get a pen, a piece of paper, what we are going to do is for 30 minutes start writing down every single thought we have and focus on what we are worried about, but also let any thought you have come out on paper, so if a worry thought leads to another thought let it flow.  Alternatively if you are a relatively fast at typing you could open up a word document and start typing away every thought that comes into your head.  The trick here is to not think too much about what you are writing just let it flow.

I think you will find this exercise pretty amazing as it throws up some interesting observations about the way our minds work

Tomorrow

Tomorrow we will be having a little fun with a great exercise to help keep your motivation high.  Until tomorrow my fellow Mind Alchemists……..

Action follows a thought…

This course is about taking action, and to become pro active in changing your life.  Take time to do this exercise and really think about it throughout the day.  You don’t need to wait until tomorrow to take steps to improve your ‘Wheel of Life’, but with the support and encouragement from all the members we can help each other and support each other, but ultimately ‘you have to bring something to the table!’

Your thoughts

As always it’s good to talk about your experiences and share it with the rest of the members of the course, so let us know how this exercise went for you and if you gained any insights or had any revelations about yourself or your life.

You can share your thoughts at Mind Alchemy Facebook Group

You can Tweet using the hashtag #MindAlchemy

Or of course you can leave a comment below.

What is a thought?

We first have to define what a thought is.

A thought, in its basic form, is an electrical impulse which sparks neurons firing in your brain to produce some kind of feeling within you.  These impulses can be triggered by what you see, hear, taste, touch and smell; the five senses.  They are also triggered by memories of what you have seen, heard, smelt, touched and tasted.

Over thinking

You’ll notice, if you pay close attention, that most of our thoughts are repetitive in nature, we think the same thoughts day in and day out: got to go to work, got to do this at work, what will I have for dinner, how can I make the boss happy, how can I make myself happy, why are they not like me, how can I get out of the rate race, what will they think of me, how can I make my wife happier, I can’t do that, I wished I was more like them, how can I spend more time with my family…………….

Since our thoughts are mostly repetitive, we go round in an ever-lasting circle, unless the circle gets broken.

So, if one of your repetitive thoughts are: “I am no good,” what do you think will happen? Your brain is wired to provide evidence to support the hypothesis you are repeating.  If you think you are no good at math, you will find evidence to support this thought.  You will remember all the times you have been in situations in which you were no good at math, you will remember all the times your father shouted at you because you were no good at maths, you will think back to the time you were laughed at because you were no good at maths.  The little ‘Numskulls’ in your brain will be running around shouting ‘Quick, we have to find evidence to support his thoughts that he is no good at math’, and like an obedient dog, your brain will find lots of evidence to support your thoughts.

The wonder of you

Here’s the wonder that is you: If you reverse that original thought, and you started thinking, I am good at math.  The little ‘Numskulls’ will scratch their head for a bit and say ‘Right lads, we need to find evidence that he is good at maths,’ and you’ll start to remember the time you got a question right in the math class and your teacher said ‘well done’, you remember the time your father patted you on the back and said, ‘well done son’, you remember the time your mother smiled and called you a ‘clever cookie,’ you’ll remember the time your friend was crying in frustration and you helped her with her math homework.

Here’s the other wondrous thing that will happen.  Those good thoughts that you had about being good at math will enhance your motivation to be good at math, which in turn will increase your good feeling and provide you more evidence to show how good at math you are.  Not only that, but that one repeating thought will go on to spark other neurons in your brain to trigger more good memories about your self worth in other areas of your life.

Can you find evidence about anything?

You might be saying to yourself at this point ‘this is ridiculous, that would mean all I need to do is pretend I am good at anything, and I’ll be good at it.’  Not true.  Remember I said you have to find evidence to show you are good at something.  If, for example, you said to yourself, I am good at driving, and you’d never driven a car in your life, you couldn’t possibly find any evidence to prove you were good at driving.  In that instance you could take driving lessons and build up your skill, therefore acquire some skills, therefore acquire some good experiences and memories of being good at driving.

Thoughts and your reality

You’ll notice that in the above examples your thoughts of self worth come from past experiences and memories.  However, your ego comes into play when attaching itself to those thoughts.  If you feel sorry for yourself when you say ‘I am no good at ……..’ it is your ego that has attached itself to feeling sorry for yourself.  If you can detach your ego from the statement ‘I am no good at ……………’ and you have no evidence to the contrary, then your ego has nowhere to go, in essence with that particular thought, you are merely stating a fact but you are not attaching a feeling to it.  when this happens you have a choice to either do something about it or accept the fact that your priorities lie elsewhere and you are okay with not being good at………

When your ego is attached to every thought you have, and most of the time it is, your reality becomes skewed, because your reality becomes what you think about day in and day out.  When you detach yourself from your thoughts, then your reality changes because you are seeing the bigger picture.

Of course it’s not easy to detach yourself from all of your thoughts without practice, but you can make a start and look at the thoughts that bring you down.  If you have thoughts that make you feel miserable because you feel awkward when you are in social situations, start to look for evidence to prove to yourself that you are good in social situations.  If you can’t find any evidence at all, which is unlikely, then make the statement ‘At the moment I feel awkward in social situations,’ and then decide to either do something about it or accept that this feeling is low on your list of priorities and you will come back to it later.  The thing not to do is bombard yourself with thoughts of being a social misfit:

either look for evidence to the contrary or

Accept that this feeling you have is low on your list of priorities and detach yourself from any other thoughts about the subject.

When you accept and detach, there is almost a sense of relief, a feeling of a weight being lifted off your shoulders.  You can now choose to think about other good things about yourself and find evidence to support those thoughts.  Do this every single day of your life and your thoughts and your whole life will start to change in a dramatic way.  If you are thinking ‘that sounds like hard work’, remember, you have been doing this every single day of your life up to this point, only this time you are choosing what to think about.

What are your thoughts about this? (pun intended )

‘Waiting for perfect partner before I can be truly happy’

‘Waiting to make more money before I start my business’

‘Waiting until the day I retire before I truly enjoy life’

Every single ‘waiting for’ excuse can be overcome today.

The myth that we have to wait for something to happen before we can move a step closer to our perfect life seems to be invading everyone’s lives.  We all seem to be waiting for tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes we wait for another tomorrow.  The thing is, tomorrow has been heavily influenced by our yesterdays; our beliefs, our emotions, our attachments, and our thoughts on life.  So you can’t change your tomorrow unless you change your yesterday, and the only way to change your yesterday is to change today.

This is not a post on living in the moment and living for today.  This is a post on recognising what your thoughts were yesterday, analysing them and changing them today.

What stops us moving forward is fear and doubt.

In my life, I am not really waiting for enough money to give up my day job; I am fearful that if I give up my job I won’t make enough money in my business to support my family.  In actual fact my wife is reluctant to let me give up the day  job as it would be a bit irresponsible However, what I have done is stopped waiting for knowledge and information to move forward in my business.  I used to think I will need to master video techniques before I can post videos, I need to have enough knowledge to speak about a certain topic, I will need to become a literary genius before I can write a book.  I accept the fact that I will make lots of mistakes in my life, so why not make the mistakes today, learn from them, and produce something better tomorrow.  I can look back on my very first post on CYT and laugh at it now, but I learned, got a little better, and 450 articles later you are reading this.

Here are 4 common ‘Waiting for’ excuses and how to overcome them:

4 Common ‘waiting for’ excuses

Waiting for more knowledge

Haven’t we all used this excuse at some point in our lives.  We all seem to be waiting to become experts in something before we move on with our lives;  waiting to gain more knowledge in the writing process before writing a book, waiting to gain more knowledge about a particular topic before applying for that job, waiting to gain more knowledge about a sport before taking it up.

I was on a training course last year about a new computer software management tool I had to use at work.  The training lasted 1 day, and by the time I came to use it, 1 week later, I had totally forgot what I had learned on the 1 day training course.  However, I didn’t ask to go back on the course, I started using it, making lots of mistakes, asking lots of questions, and eventually mastered it within 1 week.  We learn by doing.

By doing something, we quickly learn to ask more questions.  Each piece of knowledge we gain from each question we ask, brings us closer to having a more thorough knowledge about something.  However, if we wait until we think we have a thorough understanding of something before we start, we will never gain any real insight and learn to ask the pertinent questions we need to ask.

Obviously, we might need a PhD in order to practice medicine, but for most things in life we don’t need to become experts before we start practicing something.

Waiting for more money

This is a classic ‘waiting for’ excuse.  ‘I’m waiting for a big lottery win before I can get all the things I want in life.’

I have asked friends who have said this what it is they really want if they win the lottery.  A lot of the answers are something like:

‘I’d travel the world’

‘I’d buy a Ferrari’

‘I would give up my job and do volunteer work’

What we are looking for a lot of the time is not to own something, such as the Ferrari, but to experience it.  You can experience driving a Ferrari for $200 a day.

You can travel the world using your holiday time from work and travelling is relatively cheap these days, you don’t actually need a huge wad of cash to do this.

You can do volunteer work any time, you don’t have to give up your job to experience the thrill of helping others less fortunate than yourself.

Most of the things we want in life can be experienced quite cheaply so why wait, why own it when what we are really after is the experience.

Waiting for more time

This is an excuse I have learned to overcome in the last few years, and I think you’ll find it relatively easy to overcome it as well.

A few weeks ago when I asked my son why he hadn’t completed his homework for his English classes, he advised he didn’t have time.  the conversation went something like this:

‘You didn’t have time!, what have you been doing’, I said, as he is sitting watching another episode of ‘Two and a Half Men’

‘Well, I had rugby on Wednesday and Sunday, I had homework for other classes, I had a party to go to.  Where do I find the time?’

‘How long would this homework take you?’

‘About an hour, ninety minutes max’

‘What are you doing just now?’

‘What?’ he says, looking perplexed.

‘You’re watching TV just now.  You could have done it instead of playing your xBox or watching TV.’

‘Oh come on, I need my relaxation time, I’ve got a busy life.’ He says with a cheeky grin.

I couldn’t help but laugh.  the reason he didn’t do his homework air because he didn’t give it enough importance.  (Needless to say he completed his homework immediately after our conversation).

If you are using this excuse a lot, ask yourself this question:

If someone was holding a gun to my head and saying ‘find more time to get this done, or I’ll pull the trigger’, how would I find more time?

Not having time is never a valid excuse.  Not assigning enough importance to something is closer to the truth.  Be honest with yourself and find a way to assign importance to something you’re putting off.  A great way to do this is to tell someone you’re going to do something by a certain date.  That way it creates a little more urgency and more accountability.  If you are accountable only to yourself your excuses don’t seem lame.  If you’re accountable to someone else, excuses always sound lame.

Waiting for belief in myself

Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the thinker and the prover.  He states that; ‘whatever the thinker thinks, the prover will prove’.  This is true in our day to day lives.  We believe what we believe because we have found evidence to believe it, or we trust someone else has found evidence, and piggy back off their beliefs.

Think of a belief you hold about yourself that is holding you back.  It can be anything you want e.g. you might believe you are no good in social situations, but you desperately want to be social.  Over the years you have collected evidence to prove this belief, therefore reinforcing it over time.  Flip this on it’s head and start looking for evidence to prove that you are good in social situations and you will find that your old belief starts to melt ever so slowly.  Look for more and more evidence and pretty soon you will start to believe you’re bloody amazing in social situations.

Having belief in yourself is not an external issue, it’s an internal one, as is all the other ‘waiting for’ excuses.  Belief in yourself is simply a matter of gathering enough evidence to prove to the prover that what you believe is really true.

Try and think some of the beliefs you hold about yourself and by doing the flipping exercise you will be able to find evidence to dispute your old beliefs and install a new belief.  It takes work, but believe me it’s worth it.

Can you think of any other ‘Waiting for’ excuses that you are using?

In this video we will look at getting dissatisfied to make the change and why it is important.  Many people are stuck between satisfied and dissatisfied, but won’t make the change because the hassle is not deemed worth it.  If you want to be happy in all areas of your life – get dissatisfied with the status quo.

Is money the root of all evil?

We have been programmed to believe that the pursuit of money is bad and it’s not good for the soul.  This is without doubt one of the biggest lies we have been told as children, that and Santa Claus (I was gutted when I was told that Santa was a lie and I was 23 imagine how children feel!)

You’ve more than likely heard these sayings in your life:

• ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees you know’
• ‘We can’t afford it’
• ‘Money can’t buy you happiness’
• ‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer’
• ‘To make more money you have to work harder’
• ‘Money is the root of all evil’

Until you rid yourself of the guilt of trying to better yourself financially you can’t begin to create more money into your life.  We’ll speak about four steps to creating more money in your life a bit later but for now I’d like to speak about the difference between greed and making more money.

Greed and money

Thinking of some of my heroes I used to think why would they try and make more money when they obviously don’t need it.  I am thinking of people like Richard Branson, James Dyson, Warren Buffet and Tony Robbins to name but a few.  However when reading their biographies, watching and listening to them on interviews it is clear their goal is not to make more money but to feel alive by building on their brand and their customer loyalty, with the possible exception of Warren Buffet who is an investment genius.  So their goal is not to make more money it is a by-product of their goal of achieving more in their life.  They are also philanthropists and they give back a hell of a lot to the world in the form of donations, settings up schools, giving knowledge and time to the younger generation.  This is not greed it’s a desire to reach their potential, which is what Abraham Maslow speaks about in his ‘hierarchy of needs’ theory.

Greed is a different animal altogether.  Greed is defined in the ‘New Oxford English Dictionary’ as: ‘Intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power or food.’ If your goal is to create more money into your life simply for your own selfish needs then life will be empty after a while.  Giving back something to the world in the form of money, knowledge, education, and time is something everyone should strive for, I believe.

Four steps to creating more money in your life

I have learned these lessons the hard way and it has taken me over twenty years to finally be able to understand them, from the beginnings of selling sweets in the playground to where I am now.  I still want to make more money and be financially able to do whatever I want but I am closer to my goal than when I first started out.

Step one – Blasting through your limiting beliefs

As I said in the beginning of this post we have been programmed to believe the pursuit of money and wealth is not good.  Get rid of this thought as quickly as you can for it will hinder you from making progress in your life’s goal to create more money in your life.  Money is the pathway to freedom for yourself and for others in your life.  You will have the ability to help more people by being wealthy than you will be by being poor.  Think of this for a moment:

More money in your life will mean you will buy more, when you buy more it means small and large businesses can stay in business, when they stay in business it means the banks can lend more money to them to expand therefore keeping the banks in business, when the banks are healthy financially it means they can lend more to people for loans and mortgages, when mortgages are purchased it means house builders are thriving, when house builders thrive it means more choice for house buyers and more social housing stock, when there is more social housing stock it means people getting out of poverty and bad housing conditions…………………….this could go on and on.

Look at the situation just now and what has happened to the whole economy because the banks have made poor decisions.  However we as a nation are perpetuating the situation by not spending the way we used to and if we are really honest our situation has not really changed we still earn the same monthly income, the price of food is the same, the price of clothes has gone down, the price of cars has gone down so we should be spending the same to keep the economy afloat.  However because a global financial crisis is great news for newspapers they print their horror stories and suddenly people have stopped spending, small businesses are going bust, house builders have stopped building and banks have stopped lending.  Do you think if the ‘Global Crisis’ was never reported on TV, on the internet or in newspapers we would be in this situation right now, I definitely believe we wouldn’t.  Yes this is an overly simplistic view of how the economy works but believe me when I say there are people out there making millions because the herd have listened to the media.

You were born to reach your full potential and that certainly does not mean living in poverty and scrimping and saving to get by in life.  There is enough money in the world for everyone to thrive and that includes you.  It’s time to open up your mind to the possibilities of making more money.

Step 2 – Creating your future

You can’t row your own boat until you know your destination.    You can certainly row someone else’s boat and that is what most of us do in life.  We go to school, leave and then go to university, leave and then row someone else’s boat by working for them, then we jump off the boat after 45 years service and retire when it’s almost too late to really enjoy life.  That’s not a life it’s an existence.

Rowing your own boat means controlling your own life.  yes it also means taking more risks and failing more but you will learn a hell of a lot about the world works and how you work and how to better yourself.  To do this you have to know what you want to do with your life, you need dreams to follow, you need a vision to hold and passion to drive you.

Start small, think big and build yourself up from there.  What do you want in life?

Now you know what you want you need to know how you get it.

Step 3 – Help someone create their dream

Yours dreams are undoubtedly different from mine however the key to making more money in your life is to help people realise their dreams.  What I mean by this is create something or pass on knowledge which will help someone else realise their dream.  Now, the dream the other person has might not be huge but if you help them and they are willing to pay for it then you have helped yourself and someone else at the same time.  When one person has a dream there are some others who have the same dream.

A fantastic example of this is someone who is selling an ebook right now, you can check it out on Google, called ‘How to build your own chicken coop‘.  You might think this is a crazy idea, but the owner of the ebook thought ‘If I wanted to know how to build a chicken coup, there must be others too’.  And now there are hundreds of happy people who had a tiny dream to build their own chicken coop and found someone willing to impart their knowledge for a small fee.  This book is doing great and making the owner a lot of money.

So you see, people have all different kinds of dreams big and small and if you can help people realise their dreams, big or small you can help yourself create more money in your life and help people around the world.

Step 4 – Once you’ve made it it’s time to share it

I am nowhere near this stage yet but it is my ultimate goal that when I have become wealthy enough to have anything I want in life I will share my successes and teach people how they can emulate my success.  And I will do this freely to people who have not made it yet and charge for it to businesses who are in the latter stages of step 3.  This way the knowledge is always going round and being shared and I cannot think of a better way to enrich the world than by sharing knowledge on how to better create more money in people’s lives.

1. ‘Life is shit’ Thinking pattern –Everything in life is bad, everybody is not to be trusted and nothing good will ever happen to them e.g. “I won’t get that job, the interviewer didn’t like me, I didn’t particularly like them anyway.”
2. ‘Unsubstantiated conclusive’ Thinking pattern– You tend to make a lot of conclusions without any evidence to back up your conclusions. This can be a really destructive pattern as it can limit you in seeing reality for what it is e.g. “He walks a bit funny, he must be gay.” (I actually heard someone saying this about a colleague last week).
3. ‘Never to me’ Thinking pattern – This is when you think nothing good will ever happen to you. This can be a deep seated way of thinking and it is a deep down inability to believe you are worthy of anything good happening to you e.g. “I’ll never have money, I’ve never had it before so I’ll never have it in the future, might as well carry on with this shitty job, at least it pays the mortgage.”
4. ‘The negative psychic’ Thinking pattern – Presuming you know what people are thinking about you and it’s all bad. e.g. “She thinks I’m an idiot, I’ll try to avoid talking to her.”
5. ‘Should, would, could’ Thinking pattern – This type of person knows what they have to do to change their life, they are capable and they know it and they would do it if only……… e.g. “I know I could go to university and I would, but I’m just to busy with other things right now, I’ll apply next year.”
6. ‘Emotion based’ Thinking pattern – Your emotions control what you are thinking and therefore your vision of what reality is e.g. “I feel incapable of doing that so I must be incapable”.
7. ‘It’s all my fault’ Thinking pattern – You see yourself as being the cause of everything bad that has happened e.g. “It’s my fault he left me for another woman.” You’ll notice this type of person does not take responsibility for the good things that happen.
8. ‘They’re all wrong’ Thinking pattern – You see everyone as incapable of doing anything right and your way is the best way to do it e.g. “He can’t do it right, I’ll stay late tonight and fix it when he’s gone.”

These are just some of the common thinking patterns I have come across in my life and I have used some of them myself, I used to use mix the ‘Never to me’ and ‘The negative psychic’ thinking patterns about everything, “She’ll never go out with me she thinks I’m an idiot.” I made a conscious effort to change what I believed about myself and what I believed about the world and it has literally changed my life.

How to change the destructive thinking patterns

The first stage of changing is to recognise the problem – You will find a lot of people in life who just don’t think there is a problem so there is no need to change. If this is you then do nothing. If you want to change you must think there is a need and you will start to recognise what things need to change and it usually starts with your perception of life. Everybody’s perception of life is different, therefore everyone’s reality is different. I don’t live in the same world as you and you don’t live in the same world as me. That might sound a strange concept to some people, but think about it for a few minutes, it could change the way you see the world. I’ll give you an example:

In 2004 I took a redundancy package from my place of employment and received about £10,000 for my troubles, not a lot at all when I was earning £25,000 a year when I left. I was speaking to my friend about it and he thought I was absolutely nuts to do it, especially since I was married with two children. I explained to him how free I felt and what plans I had to start an online book dealing business and my wife was right behind me. He still thought I was crazy. My perception of the world was one of opportunity, life was great and I was free from the rat race for a while and I would get to see my wife and children a lot more than I had, I was ecstatic and if it didn’t work out I had a lot of skills to offer another employer. My friends perception was one of doom and gloom, he needed the security of a full time job even though he hated it and was working 12 hours per day. It turns out I worked at it for 1 year made a good profit but gave it up due to a huge downturn in business. At the end of it I was still optimistic as I knew I was good enough to get another job until I could do something else.

Everybody’s view of the world is different and it all comes down to the thinking patterns you use in your daily life. If you think life is wonderful you will notice the wonderful things in your life, if you think life is shit you will find shit things about life. Change your thoughts and you literally change the world you are living in. First you have to recognise your destructive thinking pattern.

The second stage is to be aware of when you are using the destructive thinking patterns – We can employ different thinking patterns depending on what we are doing in life. For example you could use a positive thinking pattern at work as you are very confident in your ability and yet use a destructive one when it comes to looking for love. Recognising when you use destructive thinking patterns can help you to change that pattern. Now that you have recognised when you use the destructive thinking patterns it is now time to change it.

The third stage is to replace the bad with the good – This is something that you don’t do immediately. You don’t say to yourself ‘I’ll never be able to do that”, which is you old thinking pattern, to “Oh yes I can”. That won’t work. You have to let the old pattern die slowly whilst slowly introducing your new improved thinking pattern. Here an example:

You are out in a club and you want to talk to someone you are attracted to. Your thoughts are “ She’ll never talk to me, she’s gorgeous.” You will immediately recognise this pattern of thinking and tell yourself something good about yourself e.g. “I’m good at _______(FILL IN THE BLANK), it can be anything. This will not immediately help your situation but it will slowly begin to change your old destructive thinking pattern with a new one.

This stage takes place over time and is not done immediately. The best time to change a destructive thinking pattern is to let it run it’s course and slowly replace it with a thinking pattern that is better for you. I know people want a microwave life, stick it in the micro and it’s ready in 3 minutes, your life is not like that and you cannot change in 1 day, unless something drastic happens.
You can work on more than 1 destructive thinking pattern at a time.

To recap

To change your thinking pattern you have to

Recognise
Be aware
Slowly change and introduce a new thinking pattern
Keep working on all your destructive thinking patterns

Change your life with your new way of thinking

Recognising and changing your way of thinking can be a long process depending on what patterns of thinking you employ and how badly you want to change. People can change, do change and change for the rest of their lives, I know I have, so don’t be thinking you’ll never be able to change, you can and you will if you really want to.

After a few months you will see a huge difference in your life and you will want to use your new way of thinking to good effect. You will start to notice new types of people enter into your life who can help you reach the goals you have in life and in turn you will help them reach their goals, don’t worry about how just now.
Take time to think about your goals and take the time often to do this. I take time every day to think about where I want to be in life and slowly but surely it happens. Personally I find it better in the morning to really think about my goals and then again at night just before I am falling asleep. It works for me but you will have to experiment a little to find your way of thinking about your goals.

I hope this article has helped you a little. If you feel you would like to say something about it why not leave a comment.

Dr Richard Wiseman has studied Luck for over 10 years and has shown that lucky people have certain traits and characteristics that make them more prone to being lucky.

Defining ‘being lucky‘

Being lucky could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. What I am talking about here is being lucky in life, not lucky in the lottery or any other form of gambling, as this is down to chance alone. Being lucky in life is when you have the life you want and it seemingly happens by accident, by pure luck.

I work with someone who seems incredibly unlucky in everything she does. If something unlucky is going to happen it will happen to her. She is a manic person whose mind is constantly racing and she tries to do 100 things at once. When she talks it’s at 100 miles per hour, she asks questions about 5 times before taking it in, she is distrustful of people, she sees the bad in everyone and to top it off she’s a very nice person. However, she must be the unluckiest person I have ever met.

In contrast I know someone else who seems to be incredibly lucky. He is optimistic, sees the good in people, believes that good things will happen to him and his family and regularly has conversations about the good things he wishes for himself and his family. He knows what he wants and he goes after it with all guns blazing. Yet he is laid back, he is a very kind and generous person and is happy in life.

People who are lucky show certain characteristics and beliefs about themselves and the world so I would like to share with you the eight ways to be more lucky.

7 ways to be more lucky

1. Belief: Believing that you will get the things you want in life and deserve the things you want in life will make you more prone to receiving them. Why is this? When you think about something you see a picture in your head, when you have a picture in your head your mind is locked onto receiving it. When you mind is locked onto receiving something it will start, unconsciously, to notice ways of getting what you want. It will start to notice opportunities that you might have missed had you not had that picture in your head and the belief it could happen.
2. Taking risks: People who are lucky take more risks. This doesn’t mean they gamble their house and take risks on new businesses and forgetting their family. Taking a risk can be calculated, you weigh up your options know what you can afford to lose and go for it. If it doesn’t work out you go for it again when you can afford to lose more.
3. Working hard: A lot of sports stars, singers, dancers, actors etc seem to have become famous overnight and are rich beyond belief. However what most people don’t see is that those same people have spent years of hard work and sacrifice to get to where they are today. Take Sylvester Stallone, he auditioned with every casting agency he could and didn’t get anywhere until he wrote a script for Rambo, and the rest is history. Working hard is a pre-requisite to being lucky.
4. Generosity: Being generous to others seems to be a trait in all lucky people. They give generously of their time and their money. They share their luck and wealth among others. A lot of people share their knowledge which can be more valuable than money or time. I have met so many people through this blog and I believe it’s because I share what I know and what I have learned throughout my life and throughout the research I have done over the years.
5. Instinct: Listening to your instinct can be invaluable when it comes to choosing what you want in life. How many times have you had the instinct to go for something but your brain held you back and told you all the reasons not to do it, then later on you find out it would have worked out well after all. We all have instincts for a reason and some people take more heed when it comes to listening to their instincts, you can hone this ability simply by listening with your body, be aware of your bodily sensations when you are thinking about trying something new. The more you trust your instinct the more it will serve you better.
6. Positive outlook: Having a positive outlook on life is a must if you are to become a luckier person. If you outlook on life is doom and gloom then I am afraid to say this is how you will see life itself. Your brain thinks ‘I am a gloomy little git, so I will look for things to be gloomy about’ whereas if you have a positive outlook your brain will say ‘I am a cheery liitle git, I will look for more things to be cheery about’. You control what is input int your brain by your thoughts, change your thoughts and you will change your life.
7. Coping with bad luck: The way you cope with bad luck can change your life. If something bad happens to me I always look at what could have made that situation worse. Two weeks ago my washing machine, power shower and gas all packed up at the same time. It was going to cost over £700 to get them all fixed. Luckily, my wife had taken out a gas plan 1 week previous and we were covered for the repairs which would have cost us hundreds. We managed fine with a bath, and are still doing so, and we bough a new washing machine which was on special offer at the time, how lucky was that. Now, instead of thinking ‘oh why oh why does this happen to me, I am the unluckiest person in the world, what is going to happen next’ I thought ‘jesus, that could have been a lot worse.

Being lucky does not happen by luck it happens by having a positive attitude in life, working hard and sharing yourself with others. This has been proven in numerous studies and time and time again it has been shown that changing your thoughts really does change your luck.

I thought I would share the highlights and show what can be achieved in a year.

Statistics:

Traffic: unique Visitors

RSS Subscribers

Traffic

I am very pleased with the amount of traffic I am getting just now and I have to say that if it wasn’t for stumbleupon I would have had half the traffic. I have started to optimize the blog for SEO to get more search traffic as I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. Organic search is accounting for about 20% of all traffic which is quite good.

Top 10 articles for 2007

Top 10 articles are as follows:

22 of the Best Motivational Videos for free

10 beliefs that could hold you back in life

10 Questions that will change your life

The three pillars of creativity

6 Ways to dramatically increase eye contact skills

Top 5 gym-free exercises

10 ways to boost your concentration

5 Ways to make money without selling your body

Change your life part 2 – gaining back your energy

Micronap your way to success

Earnings

I am also pleased with the earnings. I only started affiliate marketing at the end of October this year and have started to see results from it. I have taken Google adsense off the blog so the figures have dipped since October, where previously I was earning around $100 per month. I may put adsense back on the blog, I am not sure yet as adsense seems the least obtrusive and readers are used to it on blogs.

Earnings from blog related activities	Amount
Earnings from writing for another blog:	£3,600 ($6,840)
Earnings from Google Adsense:	£423 ($803)
Earnings from affiliate marketing:	£1,200 ($2,280)
Total	£5,223 ($9,923)
Expenditure (advertising etc)	£1,730 ($3,287)
Net profit from blog related activities	£3,493 ($6636)

Thank you

I would like to thank all the readers of this blog and everyone who has commented and made contributions to the discussions. I would also like to thank everyone who has stumbled and dugg my articles and I hope this continues throughout 2008 as I know I will be using stumbleupon a lot more in 2008.

I would particularly like to thank:

Jim Bouchard – Jim has contributed 5 articles to this site and they have all been excellent and he has provided a fantastic free download for the readers of Change your thoughts,

Grigor Ćorić – Grigor wrote another fantastic article ‘Three pillars of creativity‘ which brought my second front page on Digg and it received over 10,000 visits in a 24 hour period.

Alex Blackwell – Alex contributed a great article for change your thoughts and I hope to see more from him in the future.

Alexander Kjerulf (the chief happiness officer) – Alexander submitted another one of his great articles to Change your thoughts and it was received very well. Alexander is one of my favorite bloggers.

Aaron Potts – Another one of my favorite bloggers helped me out by guest authoring whilst I was on holiday last year.

Jospeph Bernard - Joseph was the first guest author for Change your thoughts which ultimately led me to seek out more quality authors for the site.

Laura Young – Laura kindly stood in for me whilst i was away on holiday and wrote a great article on Becoming more disciplined

Lodewijk van den Broek – Lodewijk was another one of the early guest authors and wrote another cracker of an article ‘Your vision of the future’

Ponn Sabra – Is an inspirational woman and an inspirational blogger who wrote a great article in September.

Michael Pollok – Michael is the guy who designed the current version of change your thoughts theme and it was a god send when i was in a panic about my site supposedly being hacked.

The PBN Network – The Positive Blog network has been fantastic this year and i have made some great contacts through it. It will hopefully get stronger this year.

Gleb Reys – I would like to thank Gleb for helping me out this year in a lot of ways notleast of all taking a look at my hosting when there were problems, thanks mate.

Finally I would like to thank all of the regular readers of this blog and i hope 2008 is your best year yet.