A self-help guide offering tools for readers to transform patterns of thinking, discover potential and achieve personal and professional success. Brian Tracy offers a proven plan for transforming your life by changing the way you think about yourself and your potential. What you think has a profound effect on what you do and how you do it. But your thoughts aren't set in stone. Just like you can learn to ride a bike or play chess, you can also learn to control your thinking and control your life. Based on Tracy's thirty years of experience as a successful businessman and speaker, Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life presents twelve powerful principles that will help anyone get on the road to a better, more fulfilling professional and personal life. Each chapter offers inspirational stories, along with exercises that help you train yourself to think and act like the successful person you truly are. The principles in this book have helped millions of people take control of their thinking and make positive changes in their lives. And they can help you too. If you want to achieve wealth, happiness, and professional and personal fulfillment, all you have to do is Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life. "Brian Tracy is the preeminent authority on showing you how to dramatically improve your life. Let him be your guide." —Robert G. Allen, #1 New York Times –bestselling author "This book gives you a step-by-step system to transform your thinking about yourself and your potential, enabling you to achieve greater success in every area of your life." —Lee Iacocca, Chairman, Lee Iacocca & Associates
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
—William James
Once upon a time there was a woman, about 30 years old, married with two children. Like many people, she had grown up in a home where she was constantly criticized and often treated unfairly by her parents. As a result, she developed deep feelings of inferiority and low self-esteem. She was negative and fearful, and had no confidence at all. She was shy and self-effacing, and did not consider herself to be particularly valuable or worthwhile. She felt that she was not really talented at anything.
One day, as she was driving to the store, another car went through a red light and smashed into her. When she awoke, she was in the hospital with a mild concussion and complete memory loss. She could still speak, but she had no recollection of any part of her past life. She was a total amnesiac.
At first, the doctors thought it would be temporary. But weeks passed and no trace of her memory returned. Her husband and children visited her daily, but she did not know them. This was such an unusual case that other doctors and specialists came to visit her as well, to test her and ask her questions about her condition.
STARTING OVER
Eventually, she went home, her memory a complete blank. Determined to understand what had happened to her, she began reading medical textbooks and studying in the specialized area of amnesia and memory loss. She met and spoke with specialists in this field. Eventually she wrote a paper on her condition. Not long afterward, she was invited to address a medical convention to deliver her paper, answer questions about her amnesia, and share her experiences and ideas on neurological functioning.
During this period, something amazing happened. She became a new person completely. All the attention in the hospital and afterward made her feel valuable, important, and truly loved by her family. The attention and acclaim she received from members of the medical profession built her self-esteem and self-respect even higher. She became a genuinely positive, confident, outgoing woman, highly articulate, well informed, and very much in demand as a speaker and authority in the medical profession.
All memory of her negative childhood had been wiped out. Her feelings of inferiority were wiped out as well. She became a new person. She changed her thinking and changed her life.
THE BLANK SLATE
The Scottish philosopher David Hume was the first to propose the idea of the tabula rasa or blank slate. This theory says that each person comes into the world with no thoughts or ideas at all, and everything that a person thinks and feels is learned from infancy onward. It is as though the child’s mind is a blank slate that every passing person and experience leaves a mark on. The adult becomes the sum total of everything he or she learns, feels, and experiences growing up. What the adult does and becomes later is the result of this early conditioning. As Aristotle wrote, “Whatever is impressed is expressed.”
Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in the field of human potential in the twentieth century was the discovery of the self-concept. This is the idea that each person develops a bundle of beliefs regarding oneself, starting at birth. Your self-concept then becomes the master program of your subconscious computer, determining everything you think, say, feel, and do. For this reason, all change in your outer life begins with a change in your self-concept, with a change in the way you think and feel about yourself and your world.
The child is born with no self-concept at all. Every idea, opinion, feeling, attitude, or value you have as an adult you learned from childhood. Everything you are today is the result of an idea or impression you took in and accepted as true. When you believe something to be true, it becomes true for you, whatever the fact may be. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”
FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE LASTING
If you were raised by parents who continually told you what a good person you were, who loved you, encouraged you, supported you, and believed in you, no matter what you did or didn’t do, you would grow up with the belief that you were a good and valuable person. By the age of three, this belief would lock in and become a fundamental part of the way you view yourself in relation to your world. Thereafter, no matter what happens to you, you would hold to this belief. It would become your reality.
If you were raised by parents who did not know how powerful their words and behaviors could be in shaping your personality, they could very easily have used destructive criticism, disapproval, and physical or emotional punishment to discipline or control you. When a child is continually criticized at an early age, he soon concludes that there is something wrong with him. He doesn’t understand why it is that he is being criticized or punished, but he assumes that his parents know the truth about him, and that he deserves it. He begins to feel that he is not valuable or lovable. He is not worth very much. He must therefore be worthless.
Almost all personality problems in adolescence and adulthood are rooted in what psychologists refer to as love withheld. The child needs love like roses need rain. When children feel unloved, they feel unsafe and insecure. They think, “I’m not good enough.” They begin to engage in compensatory behaviors to make up for this inner anxiety. This sense of love deprivation is manifested in misbehavior, personality problems, bursts of anger, depression, hopelessness, lack of ambition, and problems with people and relationships.
YOU ARE BORN UNAFRAID
The child is born with no fears, except those of falling and loud noises. All other fears have to be taught to the child as he or she grows up.
The two major fears we all develop are the fear of failure or loss and the fear of criticism or rejection. We begin to learn the fear of failure if we are continually criticized and punished when we try something new or different. We are shouted at and told, “No! Get away from there! Stop that! Put that down!” Physical punishment and the withholding of love, possibilities that scare us and make us feel insecure, often accompany these shouts and criticisms.
We soon begin to believe that we are too small, too weak, incompetent, inadequate, and incapable of doing anything new or different. We express this feeling with the words, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” Whenever we think about doing something new or challenging, we automatically respond with feelings of fear, trembling, and a churning stomach. We react exactly as if we are afraid of getting a spanking. We say, “I can’t” over and over.
The fear of failure is the primary reason for failure in adult life. As the result of destructive criticism in childhood, we hold ourselves back as adults. We sell ourselves short. We quit before we even try the first time. Instead of using our amazing minds to figure out how to get what we want, we use our reasoning ability to create reasons why we can’t, and why the things we want are not possible for us.
THE NEED TO BE LOVED
The second major fear that holds us back, undermines our confidence, and destroys our desire for a happy life is the fear of rejection , and its expression, criticism. This emotion is learned in early childhood as the result of our parents expressing disapproval of us whenever we do something they don’t like, or don’t do something that they expect. As a result of our displeasing them, they become angry and withdraw the love and approval we need so much as children.
The fear of being unloved and alone is so traumatic for a child that she soon conforms her behavior to do whatever she thinks her parents will approve of. She loses her spontaneity and uniqueness. She begins to think, “I have to! I have to! I have to!” She concludes, “I have to do whatever Mommy and Daddy want me to, or they won’t love me, and I’ll be all alone!”
CONDITIONAL LOVE
As an adult, a child raised with what is called “conditional love” (as opposed to unconditional love, the greatest gift one person can give to another) becomes hypersensitive to the opinions of others. In its extreme form, he cannot do anything if there is the slightest chance that someone else may not approve. He projects his childhood relationship with his parents onto the important people in his adult life—spouse, boss, relatives, friends, authority figures—and tries desperately to earn their approval, or at least not lose it.
The fears of failure and rejection, caused by destructive criticism in early childhood, are the root causes of most of our unhappiness and anxiety as adults. We feel, “I can’t!” or “I have to!” continually. The worst feeling is when we feel, “I can’t, but I have to!” or “I have to, but I can’t!”
We want to do something, but we are afraid of failure or loss, or if we are not afraid of loss, we are afraid of disapproval. We want to do something to improve our lives, at work or at home, but we are afraid that we may fail, or that someone else may criticize us, or both.
For most people, their fears govern their lives. Everything they do is organized around avoiding failure or criticism. They think continually about playing it safe, rather than striving for their goals. They seek security rather than opportunity.
DOUBLE YOUR RATE OF FAILURE
The author Arthur Gordon once approached Thomas J. Watson Sr., the founder of IBM, and asked him how he could succeed faster as a writer. Thomas J. Watson, one of the giants of American business, replied with these profound words: “If you want to be successful faster, you must double your rate of failure. Success lies on the far side of failure.”
