Positive Health Online

In everything that's really important to us, love, life, friendship, caring, success – feelings come first. We may spend our school life learning about logic, but all the really big decisions we make in life, such as who we marry, where we live, what we want from life, we make them with our emotions. The feelings come before the actions. Thus it is important that we are finely attuned to our feelings. When your feelings and whole attention is focused on your goal, then you can attain it, providing you know the order in which to do things that will lead to your success.

In my last column I described how to find simple strategies that work well for other people and model their behaviour to increase your own skills. There is a way of doing most things, and you need to have a simple strategy that gives you the order – the specific syntax – needed for the process to work. Whilst there is nothing new in this world, when we do things in a very specific order, then we can begin to create almost magical results.

Gathering your Resources

Remember when you did something really well, something that made you feel really proud? What were the beliefs you held then about your abilities to achieve your aim? What sort of things did you say to yourself about the task you were doing? Was your motivation drive high? You can train yourself to recall those powerful feelings of energy and exuberance, and harness those feelings to use in other situations where you may feel fearful or stressed because you are taking risks to succeed and extending your boundaries.

Anchoring a Good Feeling

Remember a personal moment of success that you have experienced, and vividly run through the events several times in you mind's eye until you can recall it with ease. Then take the associated feelings and memories attached to it, and save them in your best memories store, like freeze-framing a mental and sensory snapshot. Once your recall is vivid and your sensations are at their highest point, use a signal, such as pressing your middle finger and thumb together, to anchor that good emotional state. In future, by repeating the finger press action, you will be able to play your success movie at any time you want to feel powerful, successful and in control.

Creating the Circumstances for Success

Martin Goodyer, motivational trainer of Reach International Associates says: "If you truly want success, then whatever you are doing in life raise your standards."

• Raise your standards. Whatever your standard is now, whether it's good or bad, it is not relevant, it just is. Whatever you've got in life you have got everything you deserve, because the actions you have taken to date have produced it. These are the standards that you have set for yourself up until now, and it's not until you do something different that you are going to get a different result. It's not until you raise that standard yourself that you can expect to raise your expectations;
• Have an unshakeable belief. Raising your standards on its own is not enough. You've got to have an absolutely unshakeable belief that says "I know I can do it". Because if you don't have that you get a little voice in your head – the one that says "Who are you kidding", "You've never done it before". "Why are you going to do it now?" "What makes you think you're going to do it now";
• Banish your devil. It's like a little devil that you have on your shoulder. So we have to banish the little devil, or at least have him so dumbfounded that he's got nothing to say;
• Know what to do and apply it. Remember a time when you were able to do things that you didn't think you were able to do before? Where did you find references for doing these things successfully from? The chances are that you modelled someone else's way of doing things, because they were getting the sort of results that you wanted to acquire. Look around you now, and when you see people with skills you'd like to acquire, don't be afraid – ask them 'how did you do that?'

Your purpose and destiny are intertwined. And once your thoughts, plans and actions flow together, your energy will grow because you are doing what you love doing. Once you're really focused on creating the outcomes you want, you have the strategies modelling tools, you have the motivation, you feel powerful – now take the next steps and journey towards your destiny.

"Don't be afraid to take big steps. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."
– David Lloyd George