It is a psychological law that whatever we wish to accomplish we must impress on the subjective or subconscious mind.
Sometimes I ask my audiences, “How many people here would like to double their incomes?” Not surprisingly, everyone raises his or her hand. I then go on to say, “Well, I have good news for you. Everybody here is going to double their income—guaranteed—if you live long enough!”
If your income increases at the rate of 3 percent to 4 percent per year, the average annual cost of living increase, you will double your income in about twenty-five to thirty years. But that is a long time to wait!
So the real question is not about doubling your income. The real question is, How fast can you do it?
Many techniques can help you to achieve your personal and financial goals faster. In this chapter, I want to share with you a special method that has taken more people from rags to riches than any other single method ever discovered. It is simple, fast, effective, and guaranteed to work—if you will practice it.
Earlier, I said, “You become what you think about most of the time.” This is the great truth that underlies all religion, philosophy, psychology, and success. As a teacher of mine, John Boyle, once said, “Whatever you can hold in your mind on a continuing basis, you can have.” This is the key.
Many people today talk about the importance of “positive thinking.” Positive thinking is important, but it is not enough. Left undirected and uncontrolled, positive thinking can quickly degenerate into positive wishing and positive hoping. Instead of serving as an energy force for inspiration and higher achievement, positive thinking can become little more than a generally cheerful attitude toward life and whatever happens to you, positive or negative.
To be focused and effective in goal attainment, positive thinking must translate into “positive knowing.” You must absolutely know and believe in the depths of your being that you are going to be successful at achieving a particular goal. You must proceed completely without doubt. You must be so resolute and determined, so convinced of your ultimate success, that nothing can stop you.
Everything that you do to program your subconscious mind with this unshakable conviction of success will help you achieve your goals faster. This method I am going to share with you can actually multiply your talents and abilities and greatly increase the speed at which you move from wherever you are to wherever you want to go.
One of the important mental laws is, Whatever is impressed, is expressed. Whatever you impress deeply into your subconscious mind will eventually be expressed in your external world. Your aim in mental programming is to impress your goals deeply into your subconscious mind so that they “lock in” and take on a power of their own. This method helps you to do that.
For many years, I worked at my goals, writing them down once or twice a year and then reviewing them whenever I got a chance. Even this was enough to make an incredible difference in my life. Often, I would write down a list of goals for myself in January for the coming year. In December of that year, I would review my list and find that most of the goals had been accomplished, including some of the biggest and most unbelievable goals on the list.
I then learned the technique that changed my life. I discovered that if it is powerful for you to write down your goals once a year, it is even more powerful for you to write down your goals more often.
Some authors suggest that you write down and review your goals once a month, others once a week. What I learned was the power of writing and rewriting your goals every single day.
Here is the technique. Get a spiral notebook that you keep with you at all times. Each day, open up your notebook and write down a list of your ten to fifteen most important goals, without referring to your previous list. Do this every day, day after day. As you do this, several remarkable things will happen.
The first day you write down your list of goals, you will have to give it some thought and reflection. Most people have never made a list of their ten top goals in their entire lives.
The second day you write out your list, without reference to your previous list, it will be easier. However, your ten to fifteen goals will change, both in description and order of priority. Sometimes, a goal that you wrote one day will not appear the next day. It may even be forgotten and never reappear again. Or it may reappear later at a more appropriate time.
Each day that you write down your list of ten to fifteen goals, your definitions will become clearer and sharper. You will eventually find yourself writing down the same words every day. Your order of priority will also change as your life changes around you. But after about thirty days, you will find yourself writing and rewriting the same goals every day.
At about this time, something remarkable will happen in your life. It will take off! You will feel like a passenger in a jet hurtling down the runway. Your work and personal life will begin to improve dramatically. Your mind will sparkle with ideas and insights. You will start to attract people and resources into your life to help you to achieve your goals. You will start to make progress at a rapid rate, sometimes so fast that it will be a little scary. Everything will begin to change in a very positive way.
Over the years, I have spoken in twenty-three countries and addressed more than two million people. I have shared my Ten-Goal Exercise with hundreds of thousands of seminar participants. The exercise that I give them is a little simpler than the exercise that I am giving you here. Here it is.
I ask my audience members to make a list of ten goals that they want to accomplish in the coming year. I tell them to put the list away for twelve months and then open it up. When they open up the list after a year, it will be as though a magic trick has been performed. In almost every case, eight out of their ten goals will have been accomplished, sometimes in the most remarkable ways.
I have given this exercise all over the world, to people in every language and culture. In virtually every case, when I return to their cities and countries, people line up to talk to me, like in a wedding reception receiving line, and tell me story after story about how their lives have changed after writing down their ten goals a year or more ago.
In the exercise that we are discussing in this chapter, you will learn to get far greater and far faster results than those enjoyed by people who write their goals down only one time. Your results will double and triple and increase five and ten times as you use the same power of goal setting we have discussed earlier, but you will write your goals down every day.
You must follow some special rules to get the most out of this exercise. First, you must use the Three P Formula. Your goals must be written and described in the positive, present, and personal tenses.
Your subconscious mind is activated only by affirmative statements phrased in the present tense. You therefore write down your goals as though you have already accomplished them. Instead of writing, “I will earn $50,000 in the next twelve months,” you would write, “I earn $50,000 per year.”
Your goals must be stated positively as well. Instead of saying, “I will quit smoking” or “I will lose a certain number of pounds,” you would say, “I am a nonsmoker” or, “I weigh X number of pounds.”
Your command must be positive because your subconscious mind is more receptive to positive commands.
The third P stands for “personal.” From now on, and for the rest of your life, write out every goal beginning with the word “I” followed by a verb of some kind. You are the only person in the universe who can use the word “I” in relation to yourself. When your subconscious mind receives a command that begins with the word “I,” it is as though the factory floor receives a production order from the head office. It goes to work immediately to bring that goal into your reality.
For example, you would not say, “My goal is to earn $50,000 per year.” Instead, you would say, “I earn $50,000 per year.” Begin each of your goals with phrases such as “I earn,” “I weigh,” “I achieve,” “I win,” “I drive such and such a car,” “I live in such and such a home,” “I climb such and such a mountain,” and so on.
To add power to your daily written goals, put a deadline at the end of each goal. For example, you might write, “I earn an average of $5,000 per month by December 31 (followed by a particular year).”
As we discussed in an earlier chapter, your mind loves deadlines and thrives on a “forcing system.” Even if you do not know how the goal is going to be achieved, always give yourself a firm deadline. Remember, you can always change the deadline with new information. But be sure you have a deadline, like an exclamation point, after every goal.
This exercise of writing out your ten goals every single day is a test. The test is to determine how badly you really want to achieve these goals. Often you will write out a goal and then forget to write it down again. This simply means that you either don’t really want to achieve that goal as much as something else or you don’t really believe that that goal is achievable for you.
However, the more you can discipline yourself to write and rewrite your goals each day, the clearer you will become about what you really want and the more convinced you will become that it is possible for you.
When you begin writing your goals, you may have no idea how they will be accomplished. This is not important. All that matters is that you write and rewrite them every day, in complete faith, knowing that every single time you write them down, you are impressing them deeper and deeper into your subconscious mind. At a certain point, you will begin to believe, with absolute conviction, that your goals are achievable.
Once your subconscious mind accepts your goals as commands from your conscious mind, it will start to make all your words and actions fit a pattern consistent with those goals. Your subconscious mind will start attracting people and circumstances into your life that can help you to achieve your goals.
Your subconscious mind works like a massive computer that is never turned off to help bring your goals into reality. Almost without your doing anything, your goals will begin to materialize in your life, sometimes in the most remarkable and unexpected ways.
Some years ago, I met with a businessman in Los Angeles who had an absolutely ridiculous idea. He wanted to raise many millions of dollars in investment capital to create an amusement park in Hawaii that would be composed of restaurants, displays, and exhibits from a variety of different countries from around the world. He was absolutely convinced that it would be a big attraction and that he could get the support and backing of all these different countries as long as he could raise the start-up money to launch the project.
In my youth and inexperience, I gently told him that I thought his idea was a complete fantasy. The complexity and expense of such a massive undertaking was so vast for a person of his limited resources that it would be a complete waste of time. I thanked him for his offer of a job in putting this whole plan together and politely departed.
This was in the 1960s. The next thing I heard about this project was that the Walt Disney Corporation had embraced it in its entirety, called it the “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT Center),” and had begun construction on it next to its Disney World in Orlando, Florida. The amusement park and development has gone on to make hundreds of millions of dollars, year after year, and become one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
Here is the point. At that time, as a young man, I did not know that when you write down a goal, no matter how big or impossible it seems, you activate a series of forces in the universe that often make the impossible possible. I will explain this in great detail in the chapter on the superconscious mind.
Whenever you write down a new goal of any kind, you may be skeptical and doubtful about the likelihood of accomplishing it. You may have the idea in your conscious mind, but you will have not yet developed the total belief and conviction that it is possible for you. This is normal and natural. Don’t let it stop you from using this method every day.
All that is required to make this method work is for you to get a spiral notebook and then to discipline yourself each day to write down your ten goals in the positive, present, personal tense. That’s all you need. In a week, a month, or a year, you will look around you and see that your whole life will have transformed in the most remarkable ways.
Even if you are skeptical about this method, it only requires about five minutes per day to try it. The good news is that I have never met a person, in more than twenty years, who has ever told me that this method does not work. It is quite the opposite. I get letters, phone calls, e-mails, and personal testimonials almost every day from people all over the country and all over the world whose lives have transformed so dramatically with this method as to be beyond belief!
You can multiply the effectiveness of this method with a couple of additional techniques. First, after you have written down a goal in the positive, personal, present tense, write down at least three actions that you could take immediately to achieve that goal, also in the present, positive, personal tense.
For example, your goal could be to earn a certain amount of money. You could write, “I earn $50,000 over the next twelve months.” You could then write, immediately underneath, “(1) I plan every day in advance, (2) I start in immediately on my most important tasks, (3) I concentrate single-mindedly on my most important task until it is complete.”
Whatever your goal, you can easily think of three action steps that you can take immediately to achieve that goal. When you write down the action steps, you program them into your subconscious mind along with the goal. At a certain point, you will find yourself actually taking the steps that you wrote down, sometimes without even thinking about it. And each step you take will move you more rapidly toward your ultimate objective.
Another way that you can increase the effectiveness of daily goal setting is by transferring your goals to three-by-five-inch index cards. Write one goal on each card in large letters. Carry these cards with you at all times. Whenever you have a few spare moments, take out your index cards and review your goals, one by one.
Each of these goals should be written as a personal, positive, present-tense affirmation. Someone once said, “I would rather have a morning without breakfast than a morning without affirmations.” Each time you use these cards, take a few moments, breathe deeply and relax, and then review each of your goals, one at a time.
As you read the goal to yourself, imagine the goal as though it were already a reality. Actually see yourself at the goal, enjoying the goal, feeling the pleasure of having achieved the goal.
Alternately, as you read your index cards, imagine specific steps that you can take immediately to achieve that goal. You should actually imagine yourself taking those steps. Then relax, and go on to the next goal.
Ideally, you should review your goals on index cards at least twice per day. Remember to carry them around with you and review them during the day.
Two times of the day are ideal for writing and rewriting your goals and for reading and reviewing your index cards. These are the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed, and the first thing in the morning, before you leave for work.
When you rewrite and review your goals in the evening, you program them into your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind then has an opportunity to work on your goals all night long while you are sleeping. You will often arise with wonderful ideas for things to do or people to call to help you achieve your goals.
When you rewrite and review your goals in the morning before you start off your day, you set yourself up for positive thinking and positive acting all day long. Just as physical exercise in the morning warms up your body, reviewing your goals in the morning warms up your mind and prepares you to be at your very best throughout the day.
The result of rewriting and reviewing your goals each day, in the morning and evening, is that you will impress them ever more deeply into your subconscious mind. You will gradually move from positive thinking to positive knowing. You will develop a deep and unshakable conviction that your goals are attainable and that it is only a matter of time before you achieve them, and you will be right.
1. Get a spiral notebook this very day and write down ten to fifteen goals that you would like to achieve in the foreseeable future.
2. Create a set of three-by-five-inch index cards with your goals written out in the positive, personal, present tense to carry with you wherever you go.
3. Each night before you go to sleep, visualize and imagine your life as it will be when you have achieved your goals.
4. Think of three things you could do to achieve each of your goals. Always think in terms of specific actions you could take.
5. Discipline yourself to rewrite your goals every day, without reviewing your previous list, until you become absolutely convinced that achieving your goals is inevitable.