Positive vs Negative Focus

Look at any Best Seller list in bookshops today, and it’ll be populated with autobiographies of the rich and famous. From glamour models to footballers to empire builders, they all have a different story to tell, but each has a common thread - they overcame adversity by focusing on the positives.

This is the way the world works; to be achievers in life we must encourage positive reasons why ‘we can’ to flood our consciousness, and drown out negative excuses why we can’t.

This attitude to studying is paramount for the student. To successfully complete a training program, an optimistic mindset is the biggest tool in a trainee’s workbox. A positive approach brings about all sorts of possibilities, circumstances, answers and opportunities to achieve. By contrast, a pessimistic outlook blocks our learning receptors and thwarts creativity .

This is down to our Reticular Activation System - an automatic mechanism in our brain that tells us what to focus on. Throughout our lives, we’ve experienced many things that no longer stay in the forefront of our minds - the bulk of what we’ve learned moves from our conscious mind to our sub-conscious mind, a kind of store cupboard stocked up with all our past knowledge and beliefs.

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.

It appears that achievers can manipulate the messages going through to their sub-conscious minds by deliberately programming their RAS, and selecting the exact messages the conscious mind transfers. For achieving goals this makes it an essential tool, because the sub-conscious mind can’t distinguish between real or imaginary events.

In other words, 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, as it believes everything it’s told, will then help us achieve the goal. It does this by making us aware of all the relevant information which otherwise might have stayed as ‘background noise’.

Napoleon Hill said that we can achieve any realistic goal if we keep on thinking of that goal, and stop thinking any negative thoughts about it. Of course, if we keep thinking that we can’t achieve a goal, our subconscious will help us not to achieve it.

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