Change your thinking Change your Life

After I helped the owner of the company I worked for shut it down, I took the first job that came my way because I needed a paycheck.  I quickly realized that I should not base my job decision just on needing a paycheck but on whether it is a good fit.  I like challenges, opportunities to solve problems, to be able to think and to grow.  I need to be a part of a group that has a goal that drives them daily.  I enjoy working with CEOs of companies, making sure the details and things that would add stress to their life are not on their plate but on mine.  I knew I needed to make changes to my life.

One Sunday morning I woke up with a book title on my mind.  Going straight to my laptop, I entered the title "Change Your Thinking Change Your Life" into Google.  The book by Brian Tracy was at the top and I clicked onto the link.  After reading about the book I knew I had to buy it.  It started me on a journey to other encouraging books and assessing myself.  I'm still on that journey.  I would like to go through the book, "Change Your Thinking Change Your Life" with you and hope you will find it as inspiring as I did.

"Change Your Thinking Change Your Life" begins with a story about a woman whose life was changed because she had amnesia.  She no longer remembered how her parents treated her as a child.  She didn't remember her fears and low self-esteem.  It is thought that a our mind is a blank slate when we are born and we become everything we learn, feel and experience.  Our self-concept is a bundle of beliefs regarding our self.  We are also born without fears and develop the fear of failure or loss and the fear of criticism or rejection which can hold us back.  I home-schooled a couple of my children.  When they would say "I can't" (one of my son's would say it often) I would have him stand in front of a mirror and look at himself and say 10 times "I can".  He says he doesn't remember it.  But he is a very confident person.  He believes he can do just about anything. So much confidence that as a teenager he skate boarded off the roof our house!  Surprisingly he didn't get hurt but he did it because he believed he could.  I like to believe I helped build that confidence in him by making him stand before that mirror.

Thomas J Watson Sr., the founder of IBM, stated, "If you want to be successful faster, double your rate of failure.  Success lives on the far said of failure."

Our beliefs are subjective.  They are not always based on facts but on information we have taken in and accepted as true.  The worst beliefs are self-limiting.  These beliefs make us feel limited or deficient in a particular area.  To break this, we have to start challenging these self-limiting beliefs.  Brian Tracy tells us that our self-concept is made up of three parts.

1. Self-Ideal - all your hopes, dreams, visions and ideals.
2. Self-image - the way you see and think about yourself.
3. Self-esteem - how much you like yourself.

Self-esteem determines your level of confidence and enthusiasm.  The more we like ourselves, the bigger the goals we will set for ourselves and the longer we will persist in achieving them.

Ten years ago I worked with a girl.  She was enthusiastic about life, had goals she wanted to accomplish, a real spark.  We went our separate ways and I did not keep in touch with her as well as I should have over the years but now I am currently working with her again.  I was surprised and dishearten to see she lost her spark, her dreams.  She has been through a lot and she works for a company that micro-manages, they focus on the negatives, majoring in the minors, breaking people's spirits and crushing self-esteems.  They believe by doing this, it will improve the individual's performance but in actuality it depletes a person's self-image and destroys their self-esteem.

How has your life experiences damaged your self-image?  What are your self-ideals - what qualities do you want to possess?