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The Most Essential Ingredient Of Success

Peaceful Scene

There are an incredible number of books, articles, videos, and any other kind of media you can imagine selling you "the secret of success". Most of these methods are questionable… after all, if it were easy, then everyone would be successful, and that's clearly not the case. There is one thing, however, that IS critical to success… success in ANY field.

That one thing is awareness. There are many kinds of awareness, but there is one kind that has greater impact on your path to success in anything you attempt. That kind is awareness of self… awareness of how you make choices, how you change your subconscious tendencies, and how that determines how you see the world.

We all face an uncountable number of choices each day. With each choice that comes, you have two levels at which it can be made: subconscious or conscious. The default is subconscious, as you can plainly see if you think about it. You don't consciously choose when (or whether) to breathe, at least not normally. You don't, generally speaking, choose which letters to read in which order. Your subconscious handles all of these types of decisions…. EXCEPT when you become consciously aware of it.

When you read the paragraph above, you may have suddenly become aware of your breathing, and made a choice to hold your breath, or breathe more deeply. If you did decide to do one of those things, then your conscious mind made the decision to take over that choice temporarily from your subconscious. It will shortly pass the choices back to the subconscious as your awareness of your breathing fades.

When you become aware of a choice your conscious mind has the chance to pick the option that best aligns with your conscious goals, rather than your subconscious goals. That means that you have a much better chance of achieving success in the area where you are aware. Your conscious mind has the ability to prioritize goals much better than your subconscious… for instance, your subconscious will seldom, if ever, decide that something is more important than taking care of hunger. Your conscious mind, on the other hand, can see that going to an interview during your lunch break, and thus missing lunch, will satisfy higher priorities, like getting a better job.

Your subconscious mind makes choices based on the history of how your conscious mind has chosen in situations similar to current circumstances. Any time it doesn't have enough related decisions, it passes the choice on to your conscious mind by bringing it to your awareness. It also brings things to your awareness that your conscious mind has taught it are important.

You teach your subconscious about what is important to you by giving it your conscious attention. Whenever you think about something, you are giving it importance "points" in your subconscious. That is, if you think about something in passing one time, it will barely register as important, and your subconscious will only bring things to your awareness concerning it if they are huge, and if it's shortly after the thought. If you are constantly thinking about something, however, your subconscious will interpret that as you telling it that that something is very important, and it will pop even minor things relating to it into your awareness.

Your subconscious is not terribly smart… it's more like a computer. It does what you tell it to do, but can't make intelligent decisions on its own. What that ends up meaning is that it takes not only the content of your thoughts when determining what's important to you, but also the "polarity". That is, if you think about something in a negative way, it will bring things that relate to that thing in a negative way to your attention. If you think about it in a positive way, it will bring things that relate to that thing in a positive way to your attention.

One example of this is finances. When you think about how little money you have, what things you don't have, and how you don't seem to be getting anywhere, that's what you're telling your subconscious is important. That means that it will make you aware of things that relate to (and reflect) how little money you have, what things you don't have, etc. If, on the other hand, what you think about when it comes to your finances is how you can invest time or money to bring added benefit, that is what your subconscious mind will bring into your awareness.

For instance, let's take a situation and look at it from each perspective. Let's say a coworker tells you about his new fishing boat. Someone who looks at what they don't have feels bad, or jealous/envious, that the other guy can afford to buy a boat when they can't. Someone who looks for opportunities, on the other hand, might see it as a chance to make a friend and go fishing with them, or from a more financial side, might offer to buy the fish the coworker catches for a set rate, knowing that he can sell them for more than that.

That's the same situation, the coworker with the new boat, and two completely different ways of seeing it. The same thing happens in other areas, too, like relationships. If you think more about what's wrong with your relationship (or what's wrong with the other person), your subconscious is going to bring more of that to your attention. If, on the other hand, you think about the positive aspects of the relationship, or positive attributes of the other person, your subconscious will make you aware of things related to that. It's pretty obvious what a difference that can make in a relationship.

The good news is that you can intentionally choose to think (or not think) about a specific thing, or in a specific way. That is, you can consciously choose to look at your relationship from a positive perspective, and start teaching your subconscious that THAT is what you want brought to your attention. You can turn your thoughts away from what you lack any time they head that direction, and that will make that of less importance, thus bringing less of your lack to your attention.

By doing this, you are choosing what to be aware of. That means that you make choices in that area consciously, thus also setting "the history of how your conscious mind has chosen in situations similar to current circumstances", and changing how your subconscious handles similar situations in the future when your conscious mind is too busy to deal with it.

You can set the patterns of success consciously, and then your subconscious will automatically reinforce those patterns. You can also set the patterns of failure, and your subconscious will automatically reinforce THOSE patterns. The difference between the two is awareness… when you become aware, you can set the pattern of your choice. That just leaves choosing what success means to you… and focusing your thoughts and awareness on that meaning.

Author

August 27th

Awareness, Energy, Goals, Patterns, Polarity, Relationships, Subconscious

4 Steps To Truly Forgiving

Forgiveness… it is espoused by very nearly any program for personal growth or healing, whether scientific, religious, or new age. The reason behind the effectiveness of forgiveness is not mystical, however. The reason that forgiveness is so essential is simple: True forgiveness involves releasing your hold on grudges that are constantly draining your mental energy.

When you hold on to grudges, you are devoting mental energy to maintaining them and the emotions that you associate with them. Since we're talking about grudges here, this also means that emotions you are devoting your energy to holding on to are negative . Think about it… you are intentionally causing yourself to feel bad feelings. That doesn't make sense, but if you allow your subconscious mind control, things don't have to make sense.

Understand What Forgiveness Is

True forgiveness begins with acknowledging and accepting responsibility for any emotions that you attach to an act. "They" didn't make you angry. "They" did something, and you became angry. The difference between the two is critical. The first one assigns blame for the feeling, and responsibility to change that feeling, to the person who committed the act. The second one brings it back to where it belongs: you.

Forgiveness always comes from within, never from outside. That is because outsiders have no control over the emotions, the feelings, inside of you. The best they can do is inspire you to decide to change yourself.
Understand What Forgiveness Is Not

Forgiveness is not justifying or forgetting. It is not pretending like nothing happened, or letting actions go without consequence merely for the sake of "forgiveness".

Many people confuse forgiving an act with justifying the act. When you justify an act, you search for reasons to show that the act was never bad, right from the beginning. But that doesn't fool your subconscious… it knows what you really feel, what you really believe, and so it will continue to hold negative emotions, though your consciousness may disguise them as feeling guilty either for having provoked the action, or for not having truly "forgiven" it. Your consciousness is not fooled by false justification… and if you REALLY believe the act was completely, 100% justified, then you'll have no forgiveness to grant.

Forgetting and pretending nothing happened are actually the same thing… because you're highly unlikely to ever truly forget. Once you feel like an act has harmed you, your subconscious stores it away in patterns having to do with getting hurt, so that it can recognize similar situations in the future and act to avoid that hurt. Thus, both of these things are false fronts, and do not contribute in positive ways to either you or the person who you want to forgive.

Letting actions go without consequence is VERY commonly mistaken for forgiveness. In reality, it's one of the worst choices you can make. If actions have no consequences attached, then the person committing those actions doesn't learn anything from them. If someone does something that hurts you, and there are NO bad consequences, they will do so again in the future in the same situation. Now keep in mind, knowing that they hurt you may be a bad consequence for some people, but even then, that still requires that you let them know that they hurt you. That means that without consequences for the action, not only did you get hurt, but the person who did it won't even learn that they did something wrong.
Understand Why Forgiveness Is Important

Negative emotions have a natural tendency to become entangled. That means that when you attach negative emotions to an act, those emotions become entangled with any OTHER negative emotions you have tied to another act. They become one interconnected mass, the total size of which grows with each new act to which you attach negative emotions. The fact that they are entangled also means that as you add more to this mass, already existing emotions become harder to release, and new ones are more likely to stick.

This entangled mass is what causes situations where one annoying but inconsequential act snowballs into massive amounts of negative emotions. Basically, it catches onto the existing entanglement of negatives and rips the whole thing into your conscious awareness, but WITHOUT THE REASONS BEHIND THE WHOLE THING. That is, all of your negative emotions that you have piled up get focused on this one, inconsequential thing, and so you completely overreact, out of all proportion to the "cause". Often, you won't know, even later, WHY you did that… so you'll come up with some sort of reason that half fits.

All that energy that you are dumping into holding onto this entanglement of negatives is energy that could be spent to improve your current life, work for the future, deepen relationships, or any number of other things. Because of inertia, though, you continue to spend that energy on anger, frustration, pain, and other bad things from past events. If you were to consciously choose which thing to spend your energy on, what would you choose: positive things in the present and future, or negative things from the past?
Take Action

Letting the negative emotions attached to an act go is an intentional action. You choose to stop devoting the energy to continue feeling the hurt. You choose to untangle the negative emotions from the act you are forgiving from whatever other emotions onto which you are holding. You acknowledge that the act hurt you, but that it is in the past, and that you're only slowing yourself down by holding onto those emotions.

Once you have let the emotions associated with an act go, you can make practical choices about how to respond to the action. You can decide, in fact, if it's worthy of a response other than to note it in passing. Some acts may not be. Others may require you to respond drastically. With your sight cleared of all the negative filters from anger, pain, or whatever else, you can actually make these choices consciously and in an educated manner. You will no longer feel the desire to simply strike out, to make someone else pay for your hurt. That means that you can choose appropriate consequences, and actually let go of the attention you were giving to the act (this includes subconscious attention, which is actually the most dangerous kind, since it's difficult to recognize as even being present, let alone the cause of stress and bad feelings).

Forgiveness can be a cascading event. Forgiving one action removes some of the negative emotions from the entangled mass present in most of us. As anyone who has untied a nasty knot can tell you, each thread you remove makes the rest easier to detangle. You also learn the process, and become adjusted to it, making it even easier to do. You may find that with a few conscious efforts at forgiving specific acts, it starts to become natural… though you will still find instances that require your conscious attention from time to time.

True forgiveness requires conscious acknowledgement of an event that hurt you and the negative emotions that you attach to it. It requires that you acknowledge these feelings, and then let them go. It requires you to take responsibility for the feelings that you associate with the act, because as long as you blame someone else for making you feel that way, you won't be ABLE to let them go (how can you let feelings someone else controls go?).

But most importantly, true forgiveness opens up a huge amount of your life and energy that were closed off by those negative emotions. It makes it FAR easier to be happy and at peace. Those things you aren't fogiving are anchors holding you back from the happiness, the joy, the life that you could be experiencing.

Get rid of your anchors. Forgive someone today!

I have created a new contest! One lucky subscriber will win a free copy of The Secret.

Click the link below to enter:
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Author

August 20th

Awareness, Communication, Energy, Free Will, Relationships, Subconscious

You Are Who You Choose To Be

Signposts - Choices

You are who you choose to be. That can be a difficult pill to swallow. It means that you are responsible for yourself and everything that you do. All the good parts about you, and all the bad, are of your own choosing, though you may not be specifically aware of the choice (or choices) that led to specific traits.

It is also difficult because it is difficult to accept the power that gives you. If you have the power to control who you are, then anything you can no longer blame anyone else, including your parents, for whatever traits you don't like about yourself. If you can control how you react to any given situation, then any time in the past that you have responded poorly, it was 100% your fault. That's a very unpleasant concept, and makes it difficult to accept the power of conscious choice. If you don't accept it, then you can continue to deny the blame… though that doesn't mean it belongs any less to you, you can at least deny it, even to yourself.

You're making the choice of who you want to be already, whether you know it or not. Your conscious mind makes the choices, but it can lie to itself, though not to your subconscious. You can tell yourself that you want to be this way or that way, but not really mean it, down at the level where thoughts turn into concrete decisions and actions. You may say you want to be generous, for example, but below that, you may have a fear of scarcity that keeps you from acting out what you say you want.

When you accept the conscious power of choice, you take the power from these lower layers, where such fears dwell, and bring it up into your awareness. Now you can take those things that you say you want to be and consciously examine them to determine if that really is who you want to be, rather than something you think you should be because others tell you so. If it's truly who you want to be, then you can take it from just words, and turn it into a decision, and embed that decision in the bedrock of who you are.

How long it takes to do that depends on how truly you have let go of the concept of powerlessness. When you have truly let it go, and completely understand and accept that you are who you choose to be, change, even drastic change, can be nearly instant (referring to a change in who you are, not what you are… changes to your physical body will still take time, though quite possibly considerably less, since you will not be conflicted and fighting yourself). If you are just beginning, it may take several times making the decision to add or remove a trait to really embed it deeply.

Once you accept this power, it also leads you to the knowledge and acceptance that all of your emotions come from inside you, too. You choose which emotions to feel, and how strongly, though often your choice may not be "I'm going to be extraordinarily happy right now", but something more like "Those circumstances will no longer bring anger or pain". That's not to say that you can't make decisions about how to feel and make them instant, but it takes more work, more energy, and therefore is not as common.

After you've accepted the power of conscious choice, and experienced it for a while, you are almost certain to be more at peace. In fact, it's hard to NOT have that as your default state. After all, if who you are, what you do, how you feel and react, if everything about you is your choice, what is there to be conflicted about? You may lose your peace from time to time, when you slip and give up your conscious choice, letting your subconscious back into control, but as soon as you return to conscious awareness of choice, your peace will return.

Incidentally, when you have this state of conscious awareness of choice as your normal state, other people will notice. People may turn to you for leadership, since they can see that you have it together. They may come to you with questions and problems, some of which you may wonder why they thought you could help. They are likely to give you trust, often trust far beyond what they should give someone they know to the extent they know you… you may find strangers telling you things they would be better off keeping to themselves. Most of all, they will see you as someone they should emulate, which can bring positive or negative responses.

Acceptance of that awareness, the power of conscious choice, is good for you and good for others. It can bring peace and harmony to you, as well as improving your ability to make choose the path that is best for you in any number of circumstances (the best for you in the sense that it fits who you are the best, not in the sense that it brings the most gain to you in the eyes of the outside world). It shows other people that "people" can learn to respond to situations in the way they choose, rather than just letting their subconscious respond. It shows them that ongoing, lasting peace is attainable by someone they know, not just some Tibetan monk chanting in a Buddhist temple. It might even lead them to the knowledge that they, too, are who they choose to be.

Update: On a personal note, I went through this process of realization and becoming aware the first time around ten years ago. At the time, I had been suffering from severe clinical depression for years, though I had never been treated for it. My depression caused me to sleep very little, until I was down to about 45 minutes per night, which causes all sorts of interesting experiences after a few days (or weeks). It got to the point where I was hospitalized, and for the first time given medication to help (I think the medicine they gave me to let me sleep helped nearly as much as the anti-depressants). I was given a month's worth of Prozac, and that really helped… it pushed back the funk far enough that I could actually think clearly. It was at this point that I began (I still have slips) to acknowledge control of my own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Since then, I have had one major backslide into depression (which was around seven years ago), where I needed medicine to help. Again, I only needed one month's worth of aid from the pills, and I got my mind straightened back out. Since then I have had a few slips, including one just the other day, but now they only last hours. I have taken ownership enough that it has changed my subconscious mind's natural reaction to bad things, where instead of dwelling on them, I consider them and let them go. I can't even begin to accurately describe how much of a difference that makes… it's an absolutely amazing change.

I have created a new contest! One lucky subscriber will win a free copy of The Secret.

Click the link below to enter:
A Miracle A Day Contests – Win A Free Copy Of ‘The Secret’

Author

August 14th

Awareness, Energy, Free Will, Growth, Healing, Subconscious

How To Make Your Life Happier In One Simple Change

A Man's Worried Eyes

What do envy and jealousy, perfectionism and anger, fear and loathing, and all other things that make you uhappy have in common? There's one thing they all boil down to… they are all focusing your mind on something that isn't perfectly the way you want it to be.

One of the easiest signs by which you can tell that you are thinking too much about something not being perfect is when you start complaining. Whatever it is that you are complaining about, it's obviously something you don't like (or why would you be complaining?). If it's something you don't like, why are you wasting your time and energy thinking about it? As I've written before, spending energy on something gives it importance in your life, whether that energy is negative or positive. However much impact something has in your life, in who you are, is determined by how much importance you give it.

Every time you complain about something, your are giving it more importance, so it's becoming a bigger part of your life. Since you only complain about things you don't like, that doesn't seem like a very desirable outcome, does it? This includes, by the way, when you only complain about it in the safety of your own mind… you are still thinking about it and giving it more importance.

Now, let's think about the other side of the coin. How often do you specifically mention the things that you do like that are going on in your life? How often do you thank someone for something they do that makes something go well in your life, compared to how often you complain when someone does something that you don't like? For instance, do you thank your spouse if they do the dishes, or only complain when they do not? Do you thank your boss when he stands up for you, or only complain when he does something you don't like?

Happiness in life is all about your focus, whether it's negative or positive. If your "thanks" outweigh your "complaints", then you will be happy most of the time. If your complaints outweigh your thanks, you will be unhappy most of the time. If you want your life to be happier, you can make it that way, without changing your circumstances at all. Want to know how? Just make this one simple change:

Every time you catch yourself complaining, find two positive things about your life to tell the same person to whom you're complaining.

This forces you to focus more on the things you do like, and keeps the things you don't like from obscuring the overall quality of your life. If you want to make even more difference, if you're complaining about a person, find something good about that person to tell to whomever is receiving your complaints, and then go over to the person you were complaining about (if it's feasible… obviously you can't do this if the person you were complaining about was an anonymous driver on the freeway) and thank them for whatever it is that they do that you like. Do this and you'll find it hard to harbor grudges or do more than vaguely dislike someone, since you are aware of their positive traits, too.

Again, happiness is a state of mind that you choose. If you leave the choice to your subconscious, your conscious mind may not like the results, until you have trained your subconscious to STOP concentrating on the things that are going wrong and instead focus on the things that are going right. Choose to focus on the things you like, and bring those things more into focus, making them a bigger part of your life, rather than the things you complain about.

PS – Doing this won't make everything in your life positive, and can't make you happy 100% of the time. It will, however, make it easier for you to be happy the majority of the time, and make it easier for you to return to happiness after something causes you to depart from that state.