Want To Live A Rich Life? Change The Way You Think…
by Brian Tracy
The starting point of all riches is the development of what Napoleon Hill called prosperity consciousness. You must become a financial success in your thinking long before you achieve it in your reality. Both poverty and riches are the results of a state of mind. The most important single step you take on the road to wealth and financial independence is the decision to change your thinking and to impress into your mind an unshakable belief that you can and will achieve your financial goals. This must happen before anything else happens.
When I was growing up, I was fascinated by stories of successful men and women and how they made and lost their fortunes, and then made them over again. I read about the importance of prosperity consciousness several times. But I never fully understood what it meant until a few years ago. Then suddenly it hit me and I’ve never been quite the same since. Every aspect of my life improved dramatically, especially in the area of accumulating wealth, when I finally understood what was meant by the words prosperity consciousness.
Change Your Thinking…Change Your Life
How you use your mind determines everything that you are or ever will be. To put it another way, you are merely a mind with a body that you use to carry it around. Everything in the man-made world began with an idea. Everything you see around you is simply an expression of thought. Your entire life is an expression of your own thinking. And since the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life, if you improve the quality of your thinking, you must inevitably improve the quality of your life.
When you begin to think about yourself as capable of achieving all your financial and personal goals, and constantly seek ways to make them into realities, your whole attitude toward yourself and your possibilities will change for the better.
Expect The Best
The law of expectations says that whatever you expect with confidence, positive or negative, becomes your reality. If you confidently expect to succeed and hold to that belief, and if you act as if your success was inevitable, you will eventually achieve that success.
If you confidently expect to learn something from every experience, you will become wiser and smarter from every setback or difficulty. If you confidently expect to become wealthy as a result of applying your talents and abilities to your opportunities, and you maintain that attitude of confident expectations long enough, it will become your reality. An attitude of positive expectations will give you a positive, optimistic, cheerful attitude that will attract helpful people into your life, and will cause things to happen exactly the way you expected them to happen.
Successful people expect to succeed, in advance. They expect to be popular and liked by others, in advance. They expect to learn and grow from every experience, in advance. And the wonderful truth about your expectations is that they are completely under your control. You decide for yourself what they are going to be. You manufacture them by the way you think things are going to turn out. Always expect the best and you will seldom be disappointed.
Become A Living Magnet
One of the most powerful principles in the universe is the law of attraction. The law of attraction says that you are a living magnet. This law says that your thoughts create a force field of energy that radiates out from you and attracts back into your life people and circumstances in harmony with those thoughts. Every thought you have is emotionalized in one way or another, positive or negative. Like iron filings to a magnet, whether you have thoughts of desire or thoughts of fear, you attract people, circumstances, and events into your life that are in harmony with those thoughts.
This is perhaps the most important of all mental laws in explaining success and failure, good luck and bad luck. It says if you have a very clear picture in your mind of your desired goal, and you can hold that idea in your mind on a continuing basis, you will inevitably draw into your life the resources that you need in order to achieve it.
People who have become wealthy or successful have become wealthy and successful as a result of holding the idea of wealth and success in their minds long enough and hard enough until they drew into their lives the resources they needed to accomplish it. Your main job is to keep your mind fixed on what you really want and keep your mind off of the things you don’t want until your true desires begin to materialize in the world around you.
There are three places where you see this law of correspondence demonstrated continually: in the faces of others, in your relationships and in your wealth.
Your Relationships
Your relationships will mirror back to you exactly the kind of a person you are inside. When you feel happy, kind, and loving, your relationship will be happy, harmonious, and loving as well. But if you become angry, impatient, or fearful for any reason, consciously or unconsciously, you will quickly if not immediately see this reflected in your relationships, especially at home and at work.
Excerpted from the book, Getting Rich Your Own Way.