“We grow stronger the more we are challenged. Our minds grow stronger the more we use them just as our muscles do. Both atrophy when not used for lengths of time. Use it or lose it is how it is. We must challenge ourselves and grow through opposition.

Welcome to Part 11 of The Secret To Success And Happiness Few Know And Won’t Tell You. The series continues and this post continues from yesterday. I hope you found the first 10 parts valuable. Ready, let’s go. Part 12 tomorrow.

We must grow mentally and physically, emotionally and spiritually. Whenever you begin to change anything, a belief, a behavior, an old habit, all of your old chronic past habitual conditioning and programming rears up. You feel resistance.

Failure Is A Part Of Life – If You Don’t Fail You Don’t Learn …

Some call it paradigms. Our old conditioning is doing what it is supposed to do. Those who don’t know any better call it self-sabotage. You never self-sabotage yourself! You do what you were trained to do! In order to change you have to change your training.

The instant you begin your new training you encounter the old patterns and programs asserting themselves. That is because that is what you previously learned to do. Until you learn the new way it will feel difficult. The old way will continue to exert its influence.

For awhile, it will be difficult. Soon enough, with routine practice and dedicated application, you will overcome the old conditioning and the new conditioning will take hold. You will make the changes you want. Once the new way takes hold it will be just as reliable.

… If You Don’t Learn You Don’t Change

Believe me you want it to be like this! You don’t want the old to give way too easily. If it did you’d be screwing things up every other week. You want the things you learn to be difficult to change for consistency. The brain is smarter than we think.

People who don’t know any better call this process self-sabotage, as if a part of you is trying to thwart your progress. It isn’t! It is remaining your loyal and faithful friend by resisting the new ways. It is preserving what you previously learned to do.

It attempts to keep you consistent. It is a blessing not a curse! Even if what you learned, way back then, was unwanted and not your choice, you learned it and have operated from it. Your brain didn’t care if it was positive or negative, that isn’t its job to decide.

Failure Is Part Of Success – Don’t Worry About Failure …

Its job is to learn and carry out whatever it is programmed to do. To be reliable so you don’t have to keep relearning it every day. It builds reliable pathways to follow. It creates habits. This is WHY habits are difficult to break at first. This is why it seems difficult to change.

BUT it only seems that way. Change can be easier or harder depending on your mental mindset about it. AND GUESS WHAT? Your mindset is habitual too. How you view change is how you learned to view it at another previous time. AHHHHH get it?

This is why changing your mindset and learning to control your thinking is SO CRITICAL because it is habitual too. If it doesn’t support you how you want it to then you must change it. It will keep doing what it always did until you change it. Understand?

… Worry About The Chances You Miss When You Don’t Try

These things are locked in BUT not permanently. Well, they are permanent if we never bother to try to change them. Once we begin the process we encounter all the old thinking, feeling and behaving and that is what we need to overcome.

Inertia is the principle of physics that maintains that a body at rest tends to remain at rest until a larger force acts on it. OR a body in motion tends to remain in motion unless a larger force acts on it. This is why it is difficult to push a car down the road from park.

It is also why it is difficult to stop a car with your hands once it is moving down a hillside. Momentum takes over and you just have to get out of the way at a certain point. We can understand these for our personal changes. When we do it makes things simpler.

Success In Life Simply Comes When You Refuse To Give Up

Beginning a change means overcoming the tendency to remain at rest, or stay the same. Our brains try to keep us consistent. It seems to take effort and it does but it gets easier the more we do it and the longer we do it for. Easier and easier. Still, we have to start it all.

We have to start it and keep it going until momentum takes over. Once we get to that tipping point it is ‘all down hill from there’. Change becomes easier and picks up speed. We can feel the shifting. Until we get there though we have to push through it.

This is true of our mental condition and controlling out thoughts and feelings as well as our skills and behaviors. Changing for success in 99.9% a mental game. Get your head on right and the rest follows. Most people never get the mind game understood and that sucks.

In Order To Succeed We Must First Believe We Can

They don’t get good results because their mind’s don’t serve them as they would like. They put their attention not on changing their thinking but on what is wrong with others, the economy, the environment. They blame others and the world for their ‘failures’.

So they never learn nor change. They can, and maybe someday they will, when ready, but for now they maintain their status quo. They can’t see it yet, and that is okay. When they are ready the teacher will appear. The real teacher is oneself. AND mentors are beneficial.

Changing your mind means overriding the old programming. You can do that. Bit by bit, over time, by repeating exercises and processes that help you do that. Affirmations, Directed Questions™, Visualization, using vision boards all help you change your thoughts.

I Can – I Will – End Of Story

Consistent application of new thought is how you change. Focusing on the positive most of the time is how you change. The first great step is in awareness. Become aware of whether you are mostly positive or mostly negative most of the time. AND be more positive.

Accept and welcome the process. Celebrate the fact that you learn things and adapt. Celebrate that your brain and mind serve you in a variety of ways. Failure leads to success when you apply feedback as an athlete does. Awareness is the starting place and it is required.

Examine your defeat and losses. Once at the bottom the only way to move is up. Those who have achieved great things and great wealth have often done it on the back of great loss and hardship, equal in difficulty as their good fortune is good.

The Key To Success Is To Begin Before You Are Ready

You only fail when you quit the pursuit. Once you stop it is over. As long as you continue you are not failing. Everyone who has ever succeeded in anything has met with challenges. Some seemed insurmountable at the time.

Those who continued on in spite of the hardship, made it through and reaped a reward. Those who did not lost out. What gives the person who continues the edge. What do you think it is? Their mindset, of course? What else could it or would it be?

They control their thinking and do it in spite of the difficulty or the odds. They do it in spite of not feeling like it. They do it anyway. In order to do that they must think it first. They do not let their thoughts or their thinking prevent them. Others will but not these.

Winners Never Quit And Quitters Never Win

Thomas Edison tried over 10,000 times before he found the right combination of materials that produced a working lightbulb. What if he had stopped after 3 tries as most people might do?  We all still might be reading by gas or oil lamps.

The Wright Brothers continued attempting to fly until they actually did. What might have happened or how long would it have taken if they threw in the towel? There are countless examples of people overcoming difficulty and pushing through to ultimate success.

R. U. Darby, who Napoleon Hill references, had a wealthy gold mine that dried up. Dig and dig he did but to know avail. He tossed in the towel, sold the mine and gave up. The gentleman who purchased the mine, hired a consultant who determined that gold was still there.

Fall Seven Times – Get Up Eight

They dug 3 feet from where Darby left of and struck the richest gold vein making the new owner instantly very wealthy. Darby lost a fortune. Fortunately, for him, by his own admission, he stated it was probably the best thing that ever happened to him.

He learned from his mistake and vowed to never let anything stop him again. He went into the insurance business and he learned he would not take no for an answer. He became a wealthy millionaire salesman as a result and he attributed this to missing gold by 3 feet.

If we learn from our mistakes; if we learn from obstacles and our challenges and what appears to be defeat we will learn things of incredible value. These can be positively life changing. Our challenges are our blessings too. We just don’t view them that way.

What Defines Us Is How Well We Rise After Falling

We can. Challenges contain opportunity. Your mindset, your attitude, your beliefs will determine what you see as a blessing or a problem. It will determine whether you think you can or you think you can’t accomplish something. You mindset determines if you try.

The saddest thing you can do is throw in the towel and give up. The saddest thing is to not take control of the one thing YOU can control, you mind.  Learn to control it. Make it work for you. Learn from your mistakes. Find the good and the positive in everything.

When you do you will begin to change more and more easily. The momentum takes on a life of its own. As you find things to enjoy and opportunities to take advantage of, as you feel grateful you discover more. Your brain actually opens up. Enjoy it! Celebrate everything!” Rex Sikes

What will you do today to make it marvelous?

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Horizons photo used with permission of Phil Koch.

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