THE SEVEN LIES OF SUCCESS

The world we live in is the world we choose to live, whether consciously or unconsciously.If we choose bliss, that's what we get. If we choose misery, we get that, too. Belief is the foundation of excellence. Our beliefs are specific, consistent organizational approaches to perception.They're how we turn on or turn off our brain. So the first step toward excellence is to find the beliefs that guide us toward the outcames we want.
The path to success consists of knowing your outcome, taking action, knowing what result you're getting,and having the flexibility to change until you're succeccful. The same is ture of beliefs. You have to find the beliefs that support your outcome- the beliefs that get you where you want to go. If your beliefs don't do that,you have to throw them out and try something new.
The word "lie" does not mean "to be deceitful or dishonest" but, rather, is a useful way to remaind us that no matter how we believe in a concept,we should be open to other possibilities and continuous learning.
We have to start with the belief systems of excellence.I've found that these sevent beliefs have empowered people to use more,do more. take greater action,and produce greater result.I'm not saying they're the only useful beliefs of success.They can work for you.

Belief # 1: Everything happens for a reason and a purpose,and it serves us. Remember the story of W.Mitchell?What was the central belief that helped him overcome adversity?He decided to take what happened to him and make it work for him in whatever way he could.
In the same way.all successful people have the uncanny ability to focus on what is possible in a situation,what positive result could come from it.No matter how much nagative feedback they get from their enviroment,they think in terms of possibilities.They belief that every adversity contains the seed of an equivalant or greather benefit.

I can guarantee you that people who produce outstanding result think this way.Think about it in your own life.There are an infinite number of ways to react to any situation.Let's say your business fail to get a contract you had counted on,One that you were certain you deserved.
Some of us would be hurt and frustrated.We might sit home and mope or go out and get drunk.Some of us would be mad .We might blame the company that awarded the contract,figuring they were a bunch of ignorant individuals. Or we might blame our own people for ruining a sure thing.

All of that might allow us to let off some stream,but it doesn't help us. It doesn't bring us any closer to our desired outcome.It takes a lot of discipline to be able to retrace your steps,learn painful lessons,mend fences,and take good look at new possibilities.But that's the only way to get a positive outcome from what seems like a nagative result.

Let me give you a good example of possibility.
Marilyn Hamilton, a former teacher and beauty queen, is a successful businesswoman in Fresno, Califonia. She's also the survivor of a terrible accident. When she was twenty-nine, she fell down a rocky cliff in a hang-gliding accident that left her in a wheelchair, paralyzed below the waist. Marilyn Hamilton certainly could have focused on a lot of things she could no longer do. Instead, she focused on the possibilities that were oper to her. She managed to see the opportunity in tragedy. From the start she was frustrated with her wheelchairs. She found them too confining,too restrictive.Now you or i probably wouldn't have any idea how to judge the effectiveness of a wheelchair.But Marilyn Hamilton could. She figured she was uniquely equipped to design a better one. So she got together with two friends who built hang gliders and started working on prototype for a better wheelchair.

The three went on to form a company called Motion Designs.It is now a multimillion-dollar success story that revolutionized the wheelchair industry and went on to become California's Small Business of the year for 1984. They hired their first employee in 1981 and now have eighty employees and more than eight hundred dealers.
I don't know if Marilyn halmiton ever consciously sat down and tried to figure out her beliefs,but she operated from a dynamic sence of possibility, a sense of what she could do.Vitually all great successes work from the same frame.

Take a moment to think again about your beliefs. Do you generally exoect thing to work out well or to work out poorly? Do you expect your best efforts to be successful, or do you expect them to be thwarted? Do you see the potential in a situation, or do you see the roadblocks? Many people tent to focus on the negative more than the positive.The first step toword changing that is to recongnize it. Belief in limits creates limited people.If you have a strong belief in possibility, it's likely you'll achieve it.

BELIEF # 2: There Is No Such Thing As Failure.There Are Only Result. This is almost a corollary belief to number one,and it's equally important on its own. Most people in our culture have been programmed to fear this thing called failure.Yet,all of us can think of time when we wanted one thing and got another.We've all flunked a test,suffered through a frustrating romance that didn't work out,put together a business plan only to see everything go awry. I've used the words "outcome" and "Results" throughout this book because that's what successful people see.They don't see failure.They don't belive in it.It doesn't compute.

People always succeed in getting some sort of results.The super successes of our culture aren't people who do not fail,but simply people,who know that if they try something and it doesn't give them what they want,they've had a learning experience.They use what they've learned and simply try something else.They take some new actions and produce some new results.

Think about it .What is the one asset,the benefit you have today over yesterday?The answer,of course,is experience.People who fear failure make internal representations of what might not work in advance.This is what keeps them from taking the very action that could ensure the accomplishment of their desires.Are you afraid of failure?well,how do you feel about learning?You can learn from every human experience and can thereby always succeed in anything you do. Mark Twain once said, "There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist "He's right.People who belive in failure are almost graranteed a mediocre existence.Failure is something that is just not perceived by people who achieve greatness.They don't dwell on it.They don't attach negative emotions to something that doesn't work.
Let me share someone's life history with you.This was who

• Failed in business at age 31.
• Was defeated in a legislative rece at age 32.
• Fail again in business at age 34.
• Overcame the death of his sweetheart at age 35.
• Had a nervous breakdown at age 36.
• lost an election at age 38.
• Lost a congressional race at age 43.
• Lost a congressional race at age 46.
• Lost a congressional race at age 48.
• Lost a senatorial race at age 55.
• Fail in an effort to became vice-president at age 56.
• Lost a senatorial race at age 58.
• Was elected president of The United State at age 60.

The man's name was ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Could he have become president if he hed seen his election losses as failures?It's not likely.There's a famous story about Thomas Edison.After he'd tried 9,999 times to perfect the light bulb and hedn't succeeded,someone asked him."Are you going to have ten thousand failures?" He was answered,"I didn't fail. I just discovered how another set of actions had produced a different result.

Winners, leaders.masters- people with personal power-all understant that if you try something and do not get the outcome you want,it's simply feedback.You use that information to make finer distinctions about what you need to do produce the result you desire.Buckminster Fuller once wrote,"Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience.Human have learned only through mistake." Sometimes we learn from our mistakes, sometimes from the mistakes of others. Take a minute to reflect on the five greatest so-called " failures" in your life.What did you learn from those experiences?Chanses are they were some of the most valuable lessons you've learned in your life.

Belief in failure is way of poisoning the mind.When we store nagative emotions,we affect our physiology,our thinking process,and of failure.
Dr. Robert Schuller,Who teaches the concept of possibility thinking,asks a great question: what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" Think about it.How would you answers that? If you really believed you could not fail,you might take a whole new set of better off trying them? Isn't that the only way to grow? So i suggest you start realizing right now that there's no such thing as failure.There are only result.You always produce a result.If it's not the one you desire,you can just change your actions and you'll produce new result.Cross out the word "failure," circle the word " Outcome " and commit yourself to learning from every experience.

BELIEF # 3: Whatever happends, take responsibility. Another attribute great leaders and achieves have in common is that they operate from the belief that they create their world.The phrase you'll hear time and again is "I am responsible.I'll responsible.I'll take care of it".

It's not coincidental you hear the same viewpoint over and over.Achievers tend to believe that no matter what happens,whether it's good or bad,they created it.If they didn't cause it by their physical actions,maybe they did by the level and tenor of their thoughts.Now,I don't know if this is true.No scientist can prove that our thoughts create our reality.But it's a useful lie.It's an empowering belief. That's why i choose to believe in it.I believe that we generate our experiences in life-either by behavior or by thought-and that we can learn all of them.

If you don't believe that you're creating your world,whether it be your successes or your failures,then you're at the mercy of circumstances.Things just happen to you.You're an object,not a subject.Let me tell you,if i had that belief,I'd check out now and look for another culture,another world,another planet.Why be here if you're just the product of random outside forces?
Taking responsibility is in my opinion one of the best measures of a person's power and maturity.It's also an example of belief supporting other beliefs,of the synergistic capabilities of a coherent system of beliefs.If you don't believe in failure,if you know you'll achieve your outcome,you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking responsibility.If you're in control,you'll succeed.
John F.Kennedy had this belief system.Dan Rather once said Kennedy became a true leader during the Bay of pigs incident,when he stood before the American people and said that the bay of pigs was an atrocity that should never have happened-and then he took full responsibility for it.When he did that,he was transformed from an able young politician to a real leader.Kennedy did what every great leader must.Those who take responsibility are in power.Those who avoid it are disempowered.

The same principle of resposibility hold true on a personal level as well.Most of us have had the experience of trying to express a positive emotion to someone else.We try to tell someone we love them,or we understant a problem they're having.And instead of getting that positive message,they pick up a negative one instead.They get upset or hostile.Often our tendency is to get upset right back,to blame them,to hold them responsible for whatever ill will is generated.That's the easy way out,but not always the wisest.The fact is your communication may have been the trigger.You can still produce the communication result you desire if you remember your outcome-that is,the behavior you want to create.It's up tu you to change your behavior,your tone of voice, your facial expressions,and so on.We say that the meaning of communication is the response you get. By changing your actions,you can change your communication.By retraining resposibility,you retain the power to change the result you produce.

BELIEF # 4: It's not necessary to understand everything to be able to use everything. Many successful people live by another useful belief.They don't believe they have to know everything about something in order to use it.They know how to use what's essential without feeling a need to get bogged down in every detail of it.If you study people who are in power,you'll find they have a working knowledge about a lot of thing but often have little mastery of each and every detail of their enterprise.
By observing successful people to discover what specific actions they create to produce results,we are able to duplicate their actions-and thus their result-in much less time.
Time is one of things no one can create for you.But achievers invariably manage to be time misers.They exact the essence from a situation,take out what they need,and don't dwell on the rest.Of course,if they're intrigued by something,if they want to understand how a motor works or how a product is manufactured,they take the extra time to learn.But they're always aware of how much they need.They always know what's essential and what's not.

I'll bet that if i asked you to explain how electricity works,you would come up with something between a blank and a sketchy answer.But you're still happy to flick the switch and turn on the lichts.
Successful people are especially good at making distinctions between what is necessary for them to understand and what is not.You can spend all your time studying the root,or you can learn to pick the fruit.Successful people aren't necessarily the ones with the most information,the most knowledge.

BELIEF # 5: People are your greatest resource. Individuals of excellence-that is,people who produce outstanding results-almost universally have a tremendous sense of respect and appreciation for people.
They have a sence of team,a sense of common purpose and unity.If there's any insight at heart of the new generation of business book like Innovation and Entrepreneurship, In serch of excellence or The One Minute Manager,it's that there's no long-lasting success without rapport among people,that the way to succeed is to form a successful team that's working together.We've all seen report on Japanese factories,where workers and management eat in the same cafeteria and where both have input into evaluating performance.Their success reflects the wonders that can be achieved when we respect people rather than trying to manipulate them.
When Thomas J. Peters and Robert H.Waterman, Jr,authors of In search of Excellence, distilled the factors that made companies great.one of the key things they found was a passionate attention to people. "There was hardly a more pervasive theme in excellent companies than respect for the individual".The companies that succeeded were the ones that treated poeple with respect and with dignity ,the companies that viewed their employees as partner,not as tools.They note that in one study,eighteen out of twenty Hewlett-packard executives interviewed said the company's success depended on HP-people -oriented philosophy.HP isn't a retailer dealing with the public or a service company dependent on goodwill.It's dealing at the most complex frontiers of morden technology.But even there,it's clear that dealing effectively with people is seen as the preeminent challenge.

Like many of the beliefs listed here ,this one is easier to glibly mouth than to actually adopt.It's easy to pay lip service to the idea of treatingpeople-Whether in your family or your business-with respect,It's not always so easy to do it.

BELIEF # 6: Work is play.
Maybe we don't paint as well as Picasso,but we can bring to whatever we do at work manny of the aspect of what we do at play.Mark Twain said,"The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation."That's what successful people seem to do.
We hear a lot about workaholics these days.And there are some people whose work has become something of an unhealthy obsession.They don't seem to get any pleasure out of their work,but they reach the point where they can't do anything else.

Researchers are finding surprising thing about some workatholics.There are some people who seem maniacally focused on work because they love it.It challenges them,it excites them,it makes their life richer.These people tend to look at work the way most of us look at play.They see it as a way to stretch themselves,to learn new things,to explore new avenues.
Are some jobs more conductive to this than others?Of course they are.The key is to work your way toward those jobs.One of those upward spirals is at work here.If you can find creative ways to do your job,it will help you to move toward work that's even better.If you decide work is mere drudgery,just a away to bring home a paycheck,chances are it will never be anything more. The way positive beliefs support others positive beliefs.This is another example.I don't think there are dead-end jobs.There are only people who have lost the sense of possibility,people who have decided not to take responsibility,poeple who have decided to believe in failure.I'm not suggesting you to become a workaholic.I'm not suggesting you should choose to orient your world around your work.But i am suggesting that you will enrich your world and enrich your work if you bring to it the same curiosity and vitality you bring to your play.

BELIEF # 7: There's no abiding success without commitment. Individual who succeed have a belief in the power of commitment.If there's a single belief that seems almost inseparable from success,it's that there's no great success without great commitment.If you look at successful people in any field,you'll find they're not necessarily the best and the brightest,the fastes and the strongest.You'll find they're the ones with the most commitment.The great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova once said,"To follow,without halt,one aim:there's the secret of success."It's just another way of stating our Ultimate Success Formula know your outcome,model what works,take action,develop the sensory acuity to know what you're getting,and keep refering it until you get what you want.

We see this in any field,even those where natural ability would seem to have the strongest hold.Take sports.What makes larry Bird one of the best player's in basketball?A lot of people are still wondering.He's slow.He can't jump.In a world of graceful gazelles,he sometimes looks like he's playing in slow motion.But when you come right down to it,larry Bird succeeds because he has a massive commitment to success.He practices harder,he has more mental toughness,he plays harder,he wants it more.he gets more out of his skills than almost anyone else.
Commitment is an important component of success in any field.Before he hit the big time, Dan Rather was a legend as the hardest-working television newsman in Houston. They still talk about the time he did a spot hanging on to a tree as a hurricane roared toward the Texas Coast.I heard someone talking about Micheal Jackson the other day, saying that Jackson was an overnight wonder.Overnight wonder ? Does Michael Jackson have great talent ? Sure he does. And he's been working at it since he was five years old. He's been entertaining since then,practicing his singing,perfecting his dancing,writing his song. Sure he had some nature talent.He was also brought up in an environment that supported him; he developed belief systems that nurtured him; he had many successful models available ti him; he had a family that guided him. Yet the bottom line was that he was willing to pay the price. I like to use theterm W.I.T- Whatever It Takes. Successful people are willing todo whatever it take to succeed.* That,as much as anything else, is what separates them from the pack. Are there other beliefs that foster excellence?Sure there are.When you think of them,so much the better.Remember,success leaves clues.Study those who succeed.Find out about the key beliefs they hold that enhance their ability to take effective action consistently and produce outstanding results.These seven beliefs have done wonders for others before you ,and i believe they can do wonders for you if you can commit yourself to them consistently. I can almost hear some of you thinking,well that's a big if. What if you have beliefs that don't support you ? What if your beliefs are negative, not positive ?How do we change beliefs ? You've already taken the first step,awareness. You know what you want. The second step is action, learning to control your internal representations and beliefs,learning how to run your brain.

References:

Unlimmited Power
By Anthony Robbins
The World's No.1 Success Coach.
Visit:  Anthony Robbins