Admittedly, this concept is not original with me. It is found throughout the annals of mankind. As an example, let me paraphrase something Paul of Tarsus wrote to a group of Christians in Rome two millennia ago: Let us rejoice in hope of the glory of God; and not only that, let us rejoice in adversity and challenges also; knowing that adversity and challenges develop patience and perseverance. And, patience and perseverance develop character and strength; and character and strength produce hope and confidence that, in turn, yield the joy that God intends for us.

Modern Example:  Running a Marathon

A friend shared this experience:  “When I first thought about running a marathon, the goal seemed  formidable and frightening.  How in the world could I run, or even walk, 26.2 miles?  The first month, I started run-walking one or two miles. By the end of the second month, I was able to run a 10K (6 miles). It wasn’t easy, but it gave me a great feeling of accomplishment when I first did it. 

“By the third month, 6 miles was not a big deal.  I could do it fairly easily. So, I started stretching my distances—meaning, I started stretching myself.  Each time I set my mind to go beyond my current “limit,” my body seemed to whine and balk at it.  But every time I made my body do what I wanted to do, I received a feeling of great joy and confidence when I did it. I also noticed that after I had pushed my body to a new limit, it seemed to accept it.  After running that distance a few more times, it became fairly easy, whether it was 6 miles, 12 miles or 20.  

“Every time I achieved a new goal, I could tell my body became stronger.  Even better, I became stronger and more confident as a person. 

“Five months after I first set my goal of running a marathon, I did it.  Not only did I finish, but it wasn’t nearly as grueling as I had first imagined. Amazingly, in many ways running the marathon was easier than my first 10K (6-miler).

“That’s when I learned for myself a lesson that I’d heard many times before but had never applied: Our fears hold us back and keep us from realizing high goals and reaching our potential. Fear makes a lot of things appear to be much harder and more painful than they really are.   

More Thoughts from Abraham Maslow

“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth.  Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”

 “What one can be, one must be…. Even if all needs are satisfied, we soon develop a new discontent and restlessness, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for.”

 “People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease in their clamor only when they are used sufficiently.”

 “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write poetry, to ultimately be at peace with himself.”

 You Can Do Hard Things

           One night my wife, Susan, was helping our son Christian with his English homework.  He was in about sixth grade at the time.  To understand the dynamics of this experience, you need to know that Christian was born with profound, bilateral hearing loss.  The way Christian has dealt with his deafness has been a remarkable example of The Ownership Spirit in itself.  He is a true inspiration to me and many, many others.  One of his courageous choices was to be mainstreamed in the public school system.  This he undertook with enthusiasm and a positive attitude.  Although this route was more challenging in many ways, Christian excelled. He did well socially as well as academically, earning mostly A’s and B’s.  But, his toughest class, by far, was English.

            If you have mastered a second language, I extend my sincere respect.  That is no small feat.  If you have mastered English as your second language, my respect for you climbs even higher.  The English language is fraught with so many quirky rules it’s a formidable challenge to master it.  If you couple that with the fact that Christian can’t even hear it, then you get some idea of what a challenge English has been for him. 

            So, now picture that one night Susan is helping Christian with his English.  He had learned one of the quirky rules and applied it, and it worked.  Then he encountered one of the exceptions to the rule and it threw him for a moment.  He put his pen down firmly on his notepad and said in the unmistakable tones consistent with his deafness, “This is sooo haaarrdd.”  There was a pause and then Susan, gently but firmly responded, “Yes, Christian, it is very hard. “But you can do hard things.”

            That statement has become a mantra—a scripture—around our home. I can’t tell you how many times that thought has given me inspiration to keep battling as I have encountered obstacles in my path since that time.

Thoughts are not only powerful, they are, in fact, power.  Literally.

An infinitely comprehensive law of conservation prevails in the universe: Matter cannot be created out of nothing; neither can it be “destroyed.” The same holds true of energy. Energy cannot be annihilated. One reality (matter or energy) can be converted to the other, but neither can be destroyed.  The sum of mass-energy in the universe never changes.

We are only beginning to scratch the surface of our ability to measure thoughts and activity in the mind. Someday we will discover more accurate ways of measuring the mind and will prove that it is the highest manifestation of energy-matter on the spectrum. Through the power of thought, mankind has already harnessed many prodigious forms of energy to an impressive degree. It remains only a matter of time and development until we harness them all. This is nothing more nor less than a case of the lesser becoming subject to the greater.

Thoughts are just as tangible and just as real as the chair you are sitting on as you read this blog.  Yet, thoughts have amazing properties, excelling most energy-matter.

Thoughts are literal forms of energy. And this energy can be focused and directed, and has supremacy over all other forms of energy and matter. Furthermore, your ability to control and wield this power can grow and increase. Your ability to do so is a measurement of and proportionate to your current level of faith and internal strength—or, in other words, your level of mind management.

Your internal environment has power over your external environment the moment you choose to exercise control.  You can alter circumstances and events at will by first creating a vision of what you want to have happen and then giving yourself permission to enact it.

Moment by moment, thought by thought, you author your own script.  You do it actively or passively.  Either way, you are ultimately the cause determining which effects occur. People are only victims of circumstance if they believe that they are and take a passive approach, letting their lives become subject to outside forces. Each one of us stands as a creative force of immense potency and potential.  Believing that truth is half the battle.

Noted cognitive psychologist, Dr. Albert Ellis, stated, “We humans have real self-awareness. We can, though we do not have to, observe and judge our own goals, desires, and purposes. We can examine, review, and change them. We can also see and reflect upon our changed ideas, emotions, and doings. And we can change them. And change them again—and again!”

An even more definitive medical study was published by Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley in The Mind and The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.

Contrary to the notion that the brain has fully matured by the age of eight or twelve, with the truly crucial wiring complete as early as three, it turns out that the brain is an ongoing construction site. The hardware of the brain is far from fixed at birth. Instead, it is dynamic and malleable.

Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of neurons to forge new connections, to blaze new paths through the cortex, even to assume new roles. In shorthand, neuroplasticity means rewiring of the brain.

Conscious thoughts and volitions can, and do, play a powerful casual role in the world, including influencing the activity of the brain. Willed mental activity can clearly and systematically alter brain function. The exertion of willful effort generates physical force that has the power to change how the brain works and even its physical structure. The result is directed neuroplasticity.

People rise or fall, limp or leap, cower or conquer, dependent on the degree of their mind management.  The moment you start thinking differently, the world changes.  A new mental process precipitates a new physical and behavioral outcome.  The effects are often amazingly rapid.  People can make dramatic, stunning changes in short order by simply altering their thoughts.

The truly exciting part of their transformations lies in the astounding discoveries they make regarding their abilities and capacities.  They realize that the potential has been there all along, and so have the opportunities, but their own thoughts have been holding them back.  When they see that it has been only their thoughts which have been holding them back, panoramas of potential open up to them.  Suddenly they see—and seize—the opportunities which have been staring them in the face all along.

We think, and with those thoughts, we create. We create the world we live in. It goes beyond influencing, shaping or guiding. You and I, in very literal terms, determine what we experience and what we enact into the world. We establish our own happiness or misery, abundance or scarcity, bondage or freedom. We harvest in life, only and exactly, what we sow in our minds.

At this very instant, you are abiding the consequences of your own mental choices. You have been where your thoughts have led you, you now stand where your thoughts have brought you, and you will go as high and as far as your thoughts will take you.

All that you do and all that you will ever accomplish is a product of your mind. Once you see—really see—that thought is the sole cause of all your effects, and discover that you have total control over that exclusive causative force, you gain access to the grand key—the source and the solution to the full gamut of human potential.

“The consummate truth of life is that

we alter our destiny by altering our thoughts.

The mind is our most crucial resource, our crowning asset,

our ultimate arena of battle.

If we will master the power of our minds,

we may do or be whatsoever we will.”

When we fully comprehend how precisely everything from our character to our circumstances, corresponds to the thoughts and images we create in our minds, it stands among the most significant and empowering revelations a person can receive.

By mastering the principles of Mind Management, you attain a level of control over yourself and the world outside that at times will astound you.  As you grow in your appreciation for the power you gain by controlling your thoughts, you will wield that power more skillfully and judiciously than ever before. Greater success and deeper satisfaction will be yours as a result.

Happy New Year!  What I want to share with you today is another KEY POINT in our teachings at Quma Learning—a point that I cover in more depth in my new Ownership Spirit – The One Grand Key That Changes Everything Else.

One of the big benefits the comes from higher awareness of our own thought processes is that we can learn to coach our own thinking.  And, one of of those coaching Key Points I call Resetting Our Presets.

What are our PRESETS?  Well, they’re our preconceived notions or pre-existing interpretations that we carry around with us all the time.  We all have a tendency to pre-hear what someone is saying based on our preset judgment about that person.  Without realizing, we make assumptions about their motives and intentions.  We make assessments about their experience and intelligence. And so on.  In other words, before they’ve said one word, we have a preset expectation as to whether or not we are going like or value what we are about to hear. 

Unless we Reset our Presets we close down our listening and create disconnection.  

The good news is that none of us need be victims of our presets. We can coach our-selves to set aside our preconceptions. For example, take your self-centered next door neighbor, the one that monopolizes every conversation. You could reset a preset by assuming the best in his motives–maybe he’s not the manipulator you think he is.  Even if he is, you could coach yourself to be more ‘open-minded’ and actually look for the “gold” in what he’s saying.  The results that can come from that Reset of your Presets may surprise you!  

Unless we Reset Our Presets, we might not really be listening at all. Our presets may be so dominant that our receptors are entirely blocked, and we wind up hearing only what we think we were going to hear all along.  

One more quick example.  A while ago my wife and I attended a conference at which a very successful couple spoke candidly about the secret to their successful marriage.  The woman said, “The biggest key was our decision to set aside our tendency to try to change one another and we decided to work at just getting along with one another.”  

I’ve used that idea in a number of ways since that conference.  I’ve used it in my marriage and I’ve used it in my business. Resetting My Preset from “finding ways to fix” to “finding ways to just get along,” has paid huge dividends for me over the years.

I trust this Key Point will do the same for you.  Once again, Happy New Year!

Due to the recent death of a neighbor—a cordial, outgoing man with an abiding family commitment, with so much of life still ahead of him, I began my remarks by asking the audience, including myself, to consider the question, “To what degree am I living my life?” I am confident this was not the first time any of us in the room had done some introspection and self-evaluation triggered by some personal event that underscored the brevity and fragility of life. We have all done this before. Truthfully, we do not do this often enough, on our own, without some outside event evoking such a thoughtful pause.

An additional question I posed to them I now pose to you: “When we step back from our life to examine our trends and progress, do we do that with the cognizant awareness that what we are seeing is the print-out of our current mindset and thought trends?” And, if we see something that we would like to improve or change, what thoughts do we think at that moment—what is our governing point of view about how the change needs to come about?

My opinion is that most of us look at what things have to change and what people have to change, and what circumstances have to change, rather than what thoughts and perceptions—what mental habits—do I have to change.

People change from within or they change not at all.

Nothing will fundamentally change in our career, our business or our life unless and until we get to the root cause of our successes and our shortfalls.

Change your name and your image… upgrade your computer and your software… move to a new town or buy a new home… throw out all your old clothes and get a whole new wardrobe… do a make-over to whatever extreme you desire…

But if you fail to upgrade the very software of your mind—how you see yourself, your world, and the opportunities around you—how you connect with your loved ones, friends, and co-workers—how you respond to adversity, set-backs, and disappointments—at best, your improvements will be modest and temporary.

Your thoughts about my thoughts….