The Power of Consistency

Prosperity Mindset Training for Sales and Business Professionals

Weldon Long

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118486801
• eBook ISBN: 9781118526538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business General

How to achieve wealth, happiness, and peace of mind through personal responsibility

The Power of Consistency is based on the fundamental premise that private declarations dictate future actions. In other words, we tend to take actions with the thoughts and beliefs we consistently have, and the cumulative results of those actions eventually create the quality and circumstances of our lives and businesses. Therefore, transformative change in life and business is possible when we reconstruct our minds and take responsibility for its content.

• Lays out a simple process—the Personal Prosperity Plan—to create powerful results in your life and business
• Explains the power of focus and your subconscious mind
• Outlines a four step process: focus, emotional connection, action, responsibility

The Power of Consistency teaches you how to create a Personal Prosperity Plan, get deeply emotionally committed to the plan, and take consistent action toward implementing the plan for improved sales and business performance.

Chapter One

Think Inside Your Box and Get Your Mind Right

We become what we think about all day long.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

To fully leverage The Power of Consistency and generate massive sales and business results, you must begin by understanding the concept of getting your mind right. This basically requires that you become clear on a very important point: Whatever fills the space between your ears will eventually escape the boundaries of your mind and show up in your life and business—for better or for worse.

This isn’t magic, voodoo, or some kind of mysterious “secret”; it’s just a reflection of human nature, as you’ll see in later chapters. The weakness with many books on the subject of the power of positive thinking or the law of attraction is that they seek to discuss this thought-becomes-reality concept in mystical or existential terms. But it’s just a reality of our neurological system that translates a thought into a result.

When I first came across Emerson’s statement that “we become what we think about all day long,” I was sitting in a prison cell—and quite honestly, I found it preposterous. How in the world could my thoughts define my results in life? It all seemed a bit too much like smoke and mirrors; I needed something a little more pragmatic. Like my papaw Wainwright used to say, “I’m from Missouri . . . show me!” (I don’t think my papaw Wainwright was actually from Missouri, which made his use of the axiom rather odd.)

Then one day, destitute and imprisoned, it dawned on me that, somehow, all the chaos in my head had escaped my brain and manifested itself in my life. What I was living perfectly reflected what I was thinking.

Once I processed the implications of this “living what I was thinking” thing, I realized I alone was therefore responsible for my life’s quality and results. Of course, it was a little overwhelming at first, realizing that I had created a miserable life for myself. But soon I became excited about it; after all, if I “thought” myself into this awful reality, I could certainly think myself into a more positive one. It was liberating. It wasn’t likely that my life would improve because I somehow became smarter or my luck changed. But if my life could improve by changing my thoughts . . . hell, even a bonehead like me could change those!

Here is what I figured out sitting in a 9 × 7 cell with way too much time on my hands:

Imagine you have a box sitting in front of you holding everything you need to build a beautiful motorcycle. There are no missing or extra parts in the box. There are only the parts you need, nothing else.

Now imagine that you also have the tools and mechanical skills necessary to assemble this beautiful creation. You begin the process of removing the parts from the box one by one.

As you do so, you put them together according to the mental image you have of how this machine is supposed to look once it’s finished. Part by part, piece by piece, you assemble your masterpiece.

You aren’t putting the pieces together randomly; you are doing so systematically according to the picture of a motorcycle you have in your mind. In other words, you don’t bolt the wheels on the handlebars. You put the wheels—and everything else—where they are supposed to go.

Now imagine that you stay focused on completing the assembly. Nothing distracts you from your mission. You maintain laser focus on assembling everything according to your master plan.

Each piece that you empty from the box serves as the foundation for the next. You bolt the engine to the frame and the carburetor and gearshift to the engine. You attach the throttle, brake, and clutch cables to the engine components they control.

And eventually, all your hard work comes to fruition. You step back and admire your creation as it glistens in the sun. You’ve used every part; the box is now empty of its contents. The final product stands assembled before you.

Now ask yourself a simple question: Once you have emptied the box’s contents and assembled them in perfect accordance with your thoughts about what a motorcycle should look like, what are the chances that you would look up to see that you have accidentally baked a cake?

“That’s impossible!” you might say. “There is no way I could accidentally bake a cake when I had only motorcycle parts in the box. I pulled out only what was in the box, and I put the parts together piece by piece according to my vision of a motorcycle!”

Your common sense tells you that it’s impossible to create anything except what was in the box. And your common sense would be absolutely correct—because you cannot focus on creating what’s in the box and accidentally create something else. If you have only motorcycle parts in the box and assemble them according to your mental picture of a motorcycle, you can create only a motorcycle. You cannot accidentally bake a cake.

You might be wondering at this point what any of this has to do with the underlying concepts of this book. In essence, the box is a metaphor for your mind. And whatever is in your mind is coming out—just like the motorcycle parts—but in the form of a million thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, choices, and decisions. Eventually, whatever comes out of your mind will form to create a perfect reflection of whatever was once in your mind.

The results you experience—in sales, business, and life—are not accidents. They are reflections of whatever is in your box. And whatever is in your box is an accumulation of a lifetime of thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, choices, and decisions. In much the same way, whatever is in your mind—your thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, choices, decisions, and expectations—is all you can create. You can’t visualize and create one set of results in your mind and accidentally create a different set of results in your physical reality.

This is why you cannot focus on creating abundance, prosperity, and excellence in your business and accidentally create scarcity, struggle, and mediocrity. In fact, you can generate negative results such as these only if they have somehow found their way into your box. Over the course of your sales and business career, you accumulate expectations, thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, choices, and decisions. Although your box’s contents are technically invisible, they are as real as anything in your physical (and visible) world.

You remove these expectations, thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs through the countless choices you make throughout your life and career. Those decisions accumulate to create your results. That’s why your success and prosperity in sales and business are a perfect reflection of whatever is in your box.

Sometimes other people such as our family members (especially parents), put things in the box for us. Sometimes our community and neighbors, coworkers, and competitors put things in there too. We can even accumulate stuff from talking heads on television and through the information we read in a book or see in a movie. Sometimes we put things in the box ourselves.

It doesn’t matter how all these things got in there; it only matters that they are there—and will eventually come out in one way or another. Regardless of who put them there, everything in your box forms your belief system. They help to form your basic view of the world and what you expect from yourself and others.

Then, over the following years and decades, you remove the parts from the box—piece by piece and part by part, just like the motorcycle parts. And just as you did with the motorcycle, you assemble those parts according to your mental image and expectations of how your business should look. Each piece serves as the foundation for the next—and then eventually all of your hard work comes to fruition. You create a final product as a result of your master plan, all of which comes together according to your thoughts and beliefs about your business. You step back and admire your creation. Only this time, it’s not a motorcycle; it’s your sales and business results.

You’ve used every thought and belief and have emptied the box of its contents. You stand back, take a deep breath, and behold the business you have created—a perfect reflection of whatever was in your box.

Now ask yourself the same question you did when you were finished with your motorcycle: Once you have emptied the box and assembled its contents perfectly in accordance with your mental creation, what are the chances that you would look up to admire what you have built only to see that you have accidentally created something that was never in the box?

Not very likely, right? Because as we’ve already found out, everyone’s business is a perfect reflection of what they have in their minds. For each person, there was only one type of business that could have been created—and it was not an accident.

This, of course, means that you are entirely responsible for your business’s quality and condition, because you alone have 100 percent control over what goes in your box. Even though some of its contents were put there when you were a child, one of your jobs as an adult is to choose what stays and what goes. You can be a hoarder, or you can clear out the clutter and get focused and organized. It’s absolutely your choice.

Your business is not a reflection of your past struggles and difficulties, so don’t even try to blame your parents, your ex, a mean boss you once had, or anyone or anything else. Your thoughts and beliefs are completely under your control, and they are completely your responsibility. If your business doesn’t look the way you want it to, take a long hard look within yourself. What thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs are poised to come out of your box and create your results?

Although this realization may be a little hard to swallow at first, the implications should actually excite you. After all, if your results in business are a reflection of luck, what are the odds your luck will suddenly change? If they’re a reflection of your past, how on earth will your past ever change?

But if your business results are simply a reflection of your thoughts, what are the odds you can change your thoughts? It’s not even a matter of odds; it’s a certainty. You can start to turn things around immediately—as in right this minute. That’s the beautiful part of accepting responsibility for the quality and circumstances of your business: coming to the realization that you can change it. If someone or something outside of you is responsible, you are at its mercy. But nothing external can determine your results—unless you choose to allow that. If victimhood is in your box, then victimhood is all you can take out.

Therefore, the first step in creating a prosperous career is evaluating what’s in your box. Then remove any “junk” and replace it with whatever results you really want by exercising dominion and control over what you tell yourself on a consistent basis. This is the essence of getting your mind right.

Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I suspect the historians and philosophers will cringe when I say this, but I think Socrates was suggesting that we all need to take a long, hard look at the “junk in our trunk.” It’s not an easy process, but it’s a necessary one.

After my father died in 1996, I knew I had to make a change. I knew what I needed to do to stay out of prison and build a productive life: stop breaking the law, get a job, and take care of my son. Apparently, I was getting arrested and going to jail because I was breaking the law. I wasn’t going to jail because I had bad luck or because someone was out to get me. These consequences were clearly the result of my actions.

It wasn’t about something I didn’t know; it was about something I wouldn’t do. I knew what I needed to do to create a better life. I just wasn’t doing it regularly.

I realized that the only way to change my destiny was to change what was in my box. So I started reading the great writers and philosophers in an attempt to discover exactly what the contents of my box were—and to figure out how to change it.

Soon, I stumbled across a passage written by Friedrich Nietzsche, who quoted the universal law that, “We attract that which we fear.” When I first considered those words, I thought they were preposterous. Why would I attract things in my life I did not want? It seemed ridiculous.

But later, I was perusing passages in the Bible when I came across a scripture where Job proclaimed, “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.”

I thought it was odd that two men separated by philosophy and thousands of years were essentially saying the same thing. Was it possible that I could create things I did not want in my life simply by thinking about them? Could I actually attract things that I was afraid of just by holding onto them in my mind?

Eventually, I came across a book called Man’s Search for Meaning written by Viktor Frankl, where I read these simple, yet powerful, words: “Fear may come true.”

After stumbling across this concept for the third time, I had to stop and consider how it might be influencing my life. I thought about it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Think Inside Your Box and Get Your Mind Right
• Chapter Two: Congratulations! You’re Right! . . . Even When You Are Wrong
• Chapter Three: Understanding the Power of Focus and Your Subconscious Mind
• Chapter Four: Step 1: Focus
• Chapter Five: Step 2: Emotional Commitment
• Chapter Six: Step 3: Action
• Chapter Seven: Step 4: Responsibility
• Chapter Eight: It’s Not a Knowledge Problem; It’s a Consistency Problem!
• Index