Look in any bookshop at their Best Seller list today, and you’ll see a mass of autobiographies of the rich and famous. From empire builders to glamour models to footballers, they all tell a different story, but each has a thread in common – they focused on the positives and overcame adversity.
That is the way of the world; to achieve in life we must allow positive reasons why ‘we can’ to flood our consciousness, and drown out negative reasons why we can’t.
For the student, this attitude to studying is paramount. To successfully complete a training program, the biggest tool in a trainee’s workbox is a positive mindset. An optimistic approach brings about all sorts of possibilities, circumstances, answers and opportunities to achieve. By contrast, a negative outlook thwarts creativity and blocks our learning receptors.
This is because of our Reticular Activation System – a mechanism that automatically tells our brain what to focus on. Over our lives, we’ve experienced a huge number things that no longer remain in the forefront of our minds – the majority of what we’ve learned moves from our conscious mind to our sub-conscious mind, a kind of cupboard that stores all our past beliefs and knowledge.
When we attempt to do something consciously, our Reticular Activation System (RAS) will go through our sub-conscious mind for any associated information it holds, and bring it into focus. As we’re walking down a road, we’re made aware only of things that are relevant to us – anything else is just background noise.
This means that if our conscious mind has been regularly sending messages that are upbeat and positive to our sub-conscious mind, then that’s what it will transfer back. But if our sub-conscious has been given loads of downbeat and defeatist messages, then that’s equally what will be sent back.
Achievers, it appears, are able to manipulate the messages streamimg through to their sub-conscious minds. They do this by choosing the exact messages the conscious mind sends and deliberately programming their RAS. As such, it’s an essential tool for achieving goals, as the sub-conscious mind can’t tell the difference between real or imaginary events.
In other words, as it believes what it’s told, we need to create a very specific picture of our goal in our conscious mind. The RAS will then pass this on to our subconscious – which will then help us achieve the goal. It does this by bringing to our attention all the relevant information which otherwise might have remained as ‘background noise’.
Napoleon Hill once wrote that we can attain any realistic goal if we keep that goal clearly in our mind, and stop allowing any negative thoughts about it. If we keep thinking that we can’t achieve a goal, of course, our subconscious will help us not to achieve it.
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