Nov 28, 2009
Positive Focus Vs Negative Focus
A glance at any Best Seller list in bookshops today, will reveal a multitude of autobiographies of the rich and famous. From footballers to glamour models to empire builders, they all have their own story to tell, but each has a common theme – they overcame adversity by focusing on the positives.
This is the way the world works; to be achievers in life we must encourage positive reasons why ‘we can’ to flood our consciousness, and drown out negative excuses why we 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 consciously to do something, our RAS (Reticular Activation System) will search for any relevant information in the sub-conscious mind, and bring it to our attention. If we’re taking a walk down a street, only the things that have meaning to us will be noticed – the rest 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’.
Napoleon Hill once wrote that we can attain any realistic goal if we keep that goal clearly in our mind, and stop allowing any negative thoughts about it. If we keep thinking that we can’t achieve a goal, of course, our subconscious will help us not to achieve it.
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