Your self-image is the key to your ideal life.
There are real limits that every person has been given. No matter how much I play golf I will never be able to play like Jack Nicholas or Tiger Woods. It’s not that I can’t be substantially better than I am today it is simply that some people were born with certain talents in specific areas. But it is also true that Jack and Tiger may be weak in areas where I am strong. For instance, I have a really unique gift of being able to look at something that is mechanical and to be able to reverse engineer the device in my mind. Jack and Tiger may not have that gift. I also have a gift of being able to take something of a complex nature and be able to explain it more clearly in layman’s terms.
So to expand one’s horizon you have to push the limits of your mind to find out if and where those actual limits begin.
It’s like exercising for you mind.
Exercising pushes the limits of your muscles, as you work them, they naturally become larger and stronger and if you stop working them they become weaker and smaller. So you want to always be working your mind, to strengthen it so that it does not become weak.
Too many people leave out this critical step.
You must work out your mind daily. Everything ever created was first created in the mind.
Your self-image is the ultimate judge of where those limits exist today and in the future. You have the ability to redefine those self-imposed limits to expand your horizons far beyond anything you have achieved previously. The reprogramming has to come from instructions from the conscious mind given to the subconscious mind. Once the instructions are given your success mechanism can go on to expand your horizons. So let’s say you want to reprogram your subconscious mind.
Pick a habit, any habit you do now. There are so many, what hand you use to brush your teeth, what shoe you put on first, what order you use to get dressed, what hand you use to answer your phone and these are just some easy ones. These habits are part of the programming of your subconscious mind. When your phone rings you do not need to think about what hand you will use to grab your phone, you just do it. If you want to change which hand you use you have to reprogram your subconscious mind to grab it with the other hand. So let’s say you answer your phone with your right hand and you want to reprogram you subconscious mind to answer it with your left hand. The only way to reprogram the subconscious mind is first to make the thing you want to change or reprogram a conscious thought. To do this you might put a note on your phone or place your phone in your left pocket perhaps out of reach of your right hand. Every time your phone rings you see the note or notice consciously the pattern change and quickly recall, “oh yeah, I want to answer with my left hand” and after about 20 to 30 times using the new pattern you will have created a new subconscious habit. The deeper and longer you have and the old pattern the longer and more times it will take to change the old pattern but rest assured you can reprogram anything in your subconscious mind because you are the programmer!
If you would like to tackle bigger areas of life then which hand to use to answer your phone, the reprogramming is similar but more in depth. Let’s say you have a habit of starting something but often not finishing. Believe it or not this is one of the most common barriers to success and if you change this one habit you can be on your way to a lifetime of success. This “habit” is buried in your subconscious mind and to reprogram it will make a world of difference in your life. You need to start small by clearly defining what it is you intend to start. This is the step to make it conscious. For instance start with something like doing the dishes every day for a week, if it is something you are not normally inclined to do. Write it out on a piece of paper, “I will do the dishes every day for a week”. You may even want to number the sheet 1 through 7. A journal book would be better than a sheet of paper but for now you can start with a sheet of paper. Your spouse will thank you for it by the way just let them know the reasoning behind performing this. You tell them that you are working to reprogram you subconscious mind to finish tasks that you start. Every night you perform the necessary task of starting and completing the dishes. Then you go to your sheet of paper where you wrote your note and cross off one of the 7 days you listed. Once you have completed the week and cross through the 7th day give yourself a small reward, perhaps a night off from dishes, a dinner out with your spouse whatever it is it is simply showing your subconscious mind that there are rewards for completing what you start.
The next week you will add 2 to 4 activities that you will write on a sheet of paper, perform however many times the task needs to be done and then once completed you will give yourself a small reward. You will do this for 30 to 45 days adding more activities every week and increasing in complexity as time goes on. Once you have performed well for 30 to 45 days your subconscious mind will see that when you write something down on paper and lay out a plan that you intend to complete the activity. Don’t take this lightly, reprogramming your subconscious mind is essential to your success and your mind will perform in the exact way that it is programmed.
This method works because you have several things going for you. You have a clearly defined end result, completing the dishes every night for 7 days. You track your progress, every night you complete your task you check off one day on your list. You see yourself moving toward your goal. By focusing on the end result and performing daily to achieve the goal you start to see yourself mentally completing the goal. As the days move on you consciously believe you will complete the task before it’s done. Best of all, when you complete the task you reward yourself in some fashion to show yourself that completing goals is satisfying and rewarding.
Once you have done this for a period of time, you will use this technique to allow yourself to sleep better at night and get more done than you ever thought possible. I mentioned a journal earlier as a means of writing out the list of items to complete. Use a journal just for these type of activities, ones you will start and finish. The reason I like a journal being used for multiple reasons:
- You can always track your progress.
- All of your activities are recorded in a single booklet so you don’t have to wonder what you forgot.
- You can look back and see all of your accomplishments which builds confidence.
- You program your subconscious mind to know that when you write something in the journal it gets completed. This is a critical step to long term achievement of your dreams and goals.
- As your confidence grows in your ability to finish what you start, you will put bigger and bigger items into your journal.
Programming is what makes computers work and it’s what makes us work like finely tuned machines. Try it, your life will never be better.
To your lifelong prosperity,
David Mulvaney