Imagine that you’re lying on a sun drenched beach in your favourite spot, sipping pina coladas. While watching the surf and local talent in a lazy daze, every little bit of disproportionate body fat you have starts dissolving away as if by magic.

If you’re a guy, your six-pack and calves magically become super clearly defined (move over Atlas!); if you’re a woman, you rise (sand still clinging to your butt) as the breathtaking goddess pictured in the well-worn story book you had as a child. You now suddenly have a build and looks that will cause dislocated necks, lead to car accidents, inspire Hollywood contracts and birth countless biographies.

Apart from this, you just know your IQ suddenly got catapulted right into the god class, you now also have a singing voice that might make Madonna quit and artistic flair enough to decommission the Picasso’s of this world (and although you haven’t tried out that one yet, you just know it to be so).

You simply can’t believe it. Maybe the one who said that if something’s too good to be true then it probably is, got it all wrong. Maybe this is all due to some fairy godmother or weird enchantment or whatever. Who knows. You just don’t care. Floating off the sand, a Cadillac with a fully stocked bar awaits you as you exit the beach and ride off into fame and fortune.

Yeah right.

Except only, it never happens this way.

Funny how desperately we wish something like this to be true but somehow know it will never be. (Damn…)

Because nothing ever happens in a vacuum.

Just as no fairy is going to miraculously spirit our present away and leave us suspended on a golden cloud of only fluff and happiness, just so the ability to create won’t magically appear over night or descend out of thin blue air, especially if your creative muscle has not been used for some time. You have to work at it.

Relax! Please don’t back button! The word “work” here, does not mean sweat!

Okay, say now that you have been trying your hand at free writing and some of the other ideas mentioned in the previous post to try and get your muse back if it has gone AWOL. If you’re lucky, it’s back already. Say for argument’s sake, it is. How do you keep it right there with you, more so, how do you remain creative for the rest of your life?

This last question is especially important if something like the ability to be creative has a direct bearing on your income and business (if you have one). Not even talking about your happiness here!

Whereas the previous post touched on creativity gone AWOL and how to get it back once it’s gone, this post will highlight the need for exercise in always keeping your creative gift healthy, happy and thriving.

This post will highlight exercise? But, doesn’t the very word “exercise” imply effort, exertion, work… practise (ugghh?).

Wait!

To prevent you from immediately hitting the back button in disgust and trotting off to do some real reading and missing out on what could end up as the greatest, most liberating and exhilarating trip of your life, let me hasten to add: exercise like this is fun! And you don’t need a gym! Or fancy shmancy equipment. Or complex machinery or gadgets.

So stay around…

Creativity is big these days. On the web and off. And it is increasingly understood by everybody who is somebody as the single most have to have item on the shopping list of success. Especially in business.

According to the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, which says that creativity is the most crucial factor for future success, CEO’s believe that ”more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision – successfully navigating an increasingly complex world will require creativity.”*

Now, there are literally zillions of creativity exercises on the web. Gazillions of links, and even more exercises. To even suggest that I could distil a few of them here and dare to call that a “Guide” would be sheer lunacy, at best arrogance.

No, what I hope at the most to accomplish through this post, is to drive home the absolute non-negotiable nature and importance of exercising your creativity if you have any hope of wanting to keep it functioning and thriving. Take the scene on the beach. Ain’t never gonna happen in a vacuum.

Likewise, you’ll never grow your gift when you don’t nurture it with the right environment and feed it the proper food. That’s where these exercises come in. They’re mostly fun to do and relax both body and mind. Maybe that’s where the whole secret to creativity capture lies.

So consider this post as an intro to Writing your Own Creativity Nurturing Exercise Guide by visiting some of the links to exercises at the bottom and then take it from there. Write your own guide. Follow the unmarked trail. Let your nose guide you. Click. Exercise. Enjoy. Click. Exercise. Enjoy.

Start off by listening to Johann Sebastian Bach. Jeffrey Baumgartner says if Bach doesn’t make you more creative, then “you should probably see your doctor”.^#

Your creativity can only benefit. Do it for you and your business or craft. And everybody else’s as well.

Nobody but nobody, can replace you or your gift. Ever. So get on with the business of being the best you there can be. You’ll do everybody a favour. You, most of all.

And as the well-known quote goes: Just do it!

Until next time,

© Elmarie Bouwer

Some links to creativity exercises:

# The Wonderful world of Jeffrey Baumgartner. 10 Steps for boosting creativity. http://www.jpb.com/creative/creative.php

Kaarina Dillabough Decide2do. 10 Steps to Boost your Creativity to Benefit your Business and Your Life.     http://www.kaarinadillabough.com/steps-boost-your-creativity-benefit-your-business/

Psychology Today. Try Fun, Quick Exercises to Boost Your Creativity. Gretchen Rubin.  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-happiness-project/200911/try-fun-quick-exercises-boost-your-creativity

Entrepreneur. Lisa Girard.  Five creativity exercises to find your passion. http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219709

Source:

* Creativity Australia. Creativity is the Most Crucial Factor for Future Success. November 3, 2010. Accessed 1 March 2012.http://creativityaustralia.blogspot.com/

There are a few successful tips that can help one make a success of business according to Brad Sugars, the author of 14 business books, and posted on the entrepreneur.com website.

First and foremost, he says, offer what people want to buy, not just what you want to sell. Too often, people jump into a business built around a product or service they think will be successful rather than one that is already proven to have a market.

The next important step is to get cash flowing as soon as possible. Cash flow is the lifeblood of business, and is absolutely essential to feed bottom-line profits. So you need to find ways to jump start cash flow immediately.

Importantly, he advises, always find new ways to keep costs low. All the cash flow in the world is worthless if it’s not positive cash flow, which means you have to bring in more cash than you pay out.

To do this, you need to keep your costs and expenses low.

Another good tip is that, when planning, always overestimate expenses and underestimate revenues.

Being conservative in your numbers doesn’t mean you are willing to accept those numbers, it just means you are arming yourself with information you can work with and work over: It means you can gauge the kinds of efforts and activities you will need to put into sales and marketing.

Then he advises that one should focus on sales and marketing as such as is humanly possible. In business, nothing happens until a sale is made. From the start, you’ll need to find a good way to get leads, convert leads into sales, and make sure you keep getting repeat sales from your customers.

Another good tip is to find ways to exponentially increase profits. In business, there are five drivers that impact profits. If you can master them while keeping your costs in check, you will run a successful business.

It’s as simple as getting more leads, converting more leads into customers, increasing the number of times those customers buy from you, increasing the average price point of your sales and increasing your profit margins.

Do any of those, while also keeping costs down, you will see more profits. Do all of them and you will see your business really take off?

Then, test and measure everything. You can’t change what you don’t measure, and you can’t tell if a program or strategy is working if you are not faithfully testing, measuring and tracking your results.

Accept that learning more equals earning more. If you’ve never run a major business, you don’t know how to run one simple as that.

However, you need to accept that learning always comes before “earning”. You’ll need to be committed to learning as much as you can about sales and marketing and operations if you want to have a truly success business.

Once you do that, however, the sky is the limit. Knowing and applying those simple fundamentals in a highly leveraged way is one of the reasons many top executives and entrepreneurs earn so much.

Identify those areas and you then decide to learn it yourself or hire an expert and learn as much as you can from that person – because you never know when you can run across a distinction in thinking or a strategy that can really take you and your business to a new level of success.

Finally, don’t discount, add value. Whenever you discount, you are taking money directly out of your pocket and directly from your bottom-line profit. So don’t do it. Instead, create added value propositions all the way up and down you product or service line.

- Compiled and written by Entrepreneurial Business School -

Success in the new economy is not only a function of relevant skills; it also demands people who have entrepreneurial mindsets.  We all know that the business environment has changed dramatically and that the knowledge, skills and attributes, needed for economic success, have changed as well.  The world economy has progressed beyond the industrial phase and new economic success factors have come into play.  Most futurists agree that in order to excel in the current economic climate, people need the following entrepreneurial attributes, knowledge and skills:

v      The ability to create new and revolutionary products, concepts and services.  (A higher degree of creativity and innovation have therefore become key success attributes).

v      Success will also be a function of abilities to develop local and international networks.

v      Successful people will be those who understand the mechanisms of the national and international economies.

v      People need to re-learn how to motivate themselves, take risks and live with uncertainty.

v      People need to learn how to identify and how to utilise new business opportunities.  Successful participants in the new economy need to know how to un-learn and how to shift old paradigms.

v      The over-emphasis on memory needs to be replaced by a much stronger focus on intuition and creative insights.

v      Old paradigms regarding scarcity need to be replaced by new abundance mindsets.

v      Advanced and applicable knowledge regarding the mechanics of the human mind has now become critical.

v      Business acumen and business management skills are not only for businessmen, but have become life skills for all people wishing to excel in the new economy.

The new economy is providing us with numerous brand new problems, which means many new potential solutions.  We now have the opportunity to utilise more of our natural and God-given talents and brain capacity.  Many more people will be able to break out of their current boring work lives and will be able to achieve higher forms of self-actualisation.

It is therefore also a reality that the attributes and skills, needed to succeed in the industrial and related economic phases, are not relevant any more.  What is really needed now, are entrepreneurial mindsets, knowledge, skills and attributes.

As a first step, we need to master basic economic principles in order to understand the new rules of the game and the new dimensions of the playing field.  We also need to realise that prosperity is a function of the human mind (the ability the human brain has to solve problems for one another).  We need to realise that we all have different talents and every single normal person is brilliant in his or her own specific field.  We need to look beyond the current and actually limited fields of occupation.  These fields were relevant during the industrial phase, but we now need much more in order to face the challenges of the new economy.  We must stop to brand people, who do not excel in the traditional study fields, as not so clever. They could have other talents, which are outside the current occupational boxes, we know about.  Besides, we are only using between 5 – 10% of our brain capacity – how on earth could any person be labelled as not brilliant?

We urgently need to develop entrepreneurial mindsets, which include our natural creative and innovative abilities, and which are currently severely depressed by traditional education.  People’s mindsets need to change from that of job seeking, towards that of opportunity seeking.  People, who are caught in job seeking paradigms, will not be able to see new business opportunities. Business opportunities, needless to say, simply boil down to solving problems.  It could be new solutions to old problems, or solutions to new problems.  We need to understand that solutions are relative – there is always room for improvement.  Prosperity is not a scarce article; it can never be, because it is a function of entrepreneurship on the one hand, and solving problems on the other hand.  Problems and their solutions are not only relative; problems do have the tendency to multiply as our standard of living increases.  Therefore, as we move up the ladder of economic prosperity, problems, which were not perceived as problems before, are now becoming problems.  Things you did yourself in the past, suddenly become hassles; like getting your car washed and cleaned, for example.

The economy has emerged out of the industrial and into the new and exciting entrepreneurial phase.

This is now the time to create a culture from where “new” Isaac Newton’s can emerge.  Newton, the founder of many scientific principles we are boasting with today, formulated his theories in sixteen hundred already.  The other super brain, Albert Einstein, was also born 150 years ago.

The realities of the entrepreneurial phase will also cause a new mindset, where we will rediscover that wealth is not a scarce resource – it is in fact available in abundance.  We will also discover that the wonderful principle of “the more you give, the more you’ll receive” is also a key factor for personal and general economic success.

People will start to realise that problems we are facing, are in fact potential opportunities when solved.  This phase therefore demands a total attitudinal makeover.  We need to realise that success is not going to be a function of demanding or taking, but success is the result of providing solutions to problems. The human mind always had, and still has, the ability to solve any problem it can conceptualise and formulise. If we can manage to vest these principles as part of our culture, the world will take the quantum leap towards the love and peace we are surely all striving for.

The critical importance of advanced entrepreneurship training as a pre-condition for effective tertiary education is also strongly enhanced by The Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education, Columbus, Ohio.  The following statement, made by them, underwrite the statement above:

“When we think about the challenges of downsizing by big businesses as well as in government, the wise person asks where the jobs of the future are going to be.  Fear of failure is a mentality that leads to loss of opportunity.  For those advising youth about their future it is essential that we see entrepreneurial thinking as an opportunity rather than a risk”. The Ohio Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education also found that school leavers, who had entrepreneurship education, all had one advantage in common.  They are motivated to prepare for their careers via a specialised route – all their training are built on the foundation of entrepreneurship.  This Education Consortium feels strongly that a critical component of entrepreneurship development is a mindset, not only wanted to learn about “what is”, but to think of “what can be”.  Education worldwide does very little about “what can be”, even though our future depends entirely on this aspect”.  What a vital statement this is: “Our future depends entirely on what can be”.  The present standard of living, relative safety, security and peace we are enjoying today, were made possible by our abilities to innovate, create and implement.  If we do not develop these attributes, we will never be able to face the challenges of tomorrow.

Entrepreneurship education in the new economy should be the foundation of knowledge provision.  Entrepreneurship education in SA is, sadly to say, not viewed to be the foundation, but only as a little outside building, not even part of the house of education.  The result of this mindset is clearly reflected by the latest GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) report. SA is slipping further behind and is now rated 22^nd out of 31 countries, has 5.4% entrepreneurs versus the average of 9.4% of the countries who participated.  The average for developing countries is 21%.  This figure is even a better benchmark because SA is also a developing country.  The effects of the above non-entrepreneurial culture are also reflected in the high unemployment and high crime rates in our country.  Most South Africans are looking for jobs, which are becoming scarcer and scarcer each year.  We are generally blind for the numerous business opportunities, begging to be utilised.  We need to create a culture where entrepreneurship education becomes the house of education, with other study fields, the rooms in this house.  We need to realise that we are far behind the rest of the world and have to catch up fast.  School leavers, as well as graduates from other tertiary institutions need to catch up on entrepreneurial skills.  An entrepreneurship-training course has become of critical importance for young people before embarking on a career path, which will probably lead to nowhere.  The reality is that only 1 out of every 10 university graduates are finding employment in SA today.  Big organisations are still downsizing and employees are loosing jobs on a continuous basis.  Thousands of school leavers go abroad for a year or two; come back and can’t find employment.  Very few South Africans are entrepreneurs who create jobs – most of us are skilled in something, but are job seekers.  We drastically need to turn the situation around.  We need a situation where a critical mass of South Africans emerges to the status of job creators (entrepreneurs).  The solution to this critical problem is, without a doubt, in effective entrepreneurship education.  Entrepreneurship education needs to be viewed as the highest possible priority in our country.  South Africans also need to realise that entrepreneurship education is not a once-off affair, but a continuous process.  We also need to understand that there are no limits in developing our entrepreneurial skills.  The more we apply and practice, the better we will get.  The future is there for us to shape.  What we do today, at this point in time, will determine what the future will be like.

We also need to realise that prosperity and peace are created by the human mind.  The more we stretch our minds and develop entrepreneurial attributes, the more the solutions to problems will follow.  Effective entrepreneurial education, as a pre-condition to tertiary education, is urgently needed to shift the old paradigm away from only learning about “what is” towards learning and thinking of “what can be”.

It is also very interesting that 74% of the GDP of the United States is contributed by small companies with less than 50 employees.  The importance of entrepreneurship education, “the new area of education” as it is known in the USA, can never be over-emphasised in the new economic climate we found ourselves today.  We are not only behind the rest of the world regarding the percentage of entrepreneurs in SA; we are also behind in realising the critical importance of such education.  School leavers should all attend a year program in entrepreneurial development before they choose a technical course or university degree in a specific field.  American research suggests that students with a solid entrepreneurship foundation are not only likely to become entrepreneurs – they are also better students.  This is probably because they now study with the major aim of acquiring knowledge, and not only to get a piece of paper (a qualification).

In an article in Die Burger a few years ago, it was clearly spelled out that so-called highly talented young people in South Africa couldn’t find employment. This situation is in fact currently not any better!  These so-called talented people include those who had many “A” symbols in matric and achieved university degrees, Technikon, as well as college diplomas and certificates.

The importance of entrepreneurship training for the new economy in South Africa also goes beyond empowering people wishing to start their own businesses.  Entrepreneurship education has become a critical element in the armament of people wanting to succeed financially.  It has also become critical important to people who want to follow the so-called professional routes, like becoming doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers.  The financially successful professionals in the new economy will have to be entrepreneurs as well.

The corporate world, as well as smaller business employers, is also looking for people with entrepreneurial skills and attributes.  The specific name of “Intrapreneur” has been created for entrepreneurial-minded corporate employees.  It is now of growing importance for big businesses, as well as semi-government and government organisations, to become entrepreneurial-minded.

- Compiled and written by Entrepreneurial Business School -

You want to become the best you can be, but somewhere along the way, you got something wrong.  Things just don’t work out as you planned!  You frequently ask yourself where you have gone wrong, but the answer evades you.

Fear not Brave Knight, for this is the quest for you.

Success Attitude – How your mind is programmed

We always earn our living in a manner consistent with our self-concept. We know that all of our performance is linked to our self-concept up to this moment.  Wonderfully enough is the fact that every human being is in a continual state of becoming, in fact, there is a sub branch of psychology called the psychology of becoming.

This simply says that nobody stays the same for any period. We are always changing in the direction of our dominant thoughts. If you believe you can be an entrepreneur and creative, you will become what you believe. Our job in this process is to keep very clearly in our minds who we would like to be and what we would like to accomplish.

“Our thoughts are a magic part of us and they can carry us to places that have no boundaries and no limitations”

-          Dr. W. W. Dyer -

With this quote in mind, let’s have a look at the Characteristics, directly linked to Attitude, common to entrepreneur and all Successful People all around the globe:

They are POSITIVE

They are CONFIDENT

They are NOT scared to TAKE CALCULATED RISKS

They are CREATIVE

Their Intuitive Powers, “Gut Feel”, are strongly developed.

They are persevering – “they never give up”.

The best news yet, is that you can acquire your Success Attitude, by developing the SIX above-mentioned Characteristics.  The information we provide in the text to follow, will surely help you in your quest to acquire that very much sought-after success attitude. What you are, and the way in which you react at this point in time, are a direct result of the instructions that are programmed into your sub-conscious mind.  Now you may ask, how did my sub-conscious mind become programmed the way it is?

The answer is simple.  There are three ways to engrave instructions into the sub-conscious mind. The first is by genetic instructions.  These instructions include the form of your physical body and the characteristics you are born with.  The second is by the environment and the third is via the dominant thought process of your conscious mind.

Re-Programming your Mind for your Success Attitude

To change your ATTITUDE and attain the Characteristics most common to Successful Business people, you’ll have to Re-Program your mind!!!

To Re-Program your mind, you have to know and understand the Mental Laws by which your Mind operates.  You will be able to effectively re-program your mind, by using two basic techniques, if you know how your mind works.

Now, let’s have an in depth look at THE SIX most important MENTAL LAWS to abide by when Re-Programming your mind for your Personal Success Attitude:

RELAXATION

The first Mental Law is the Law of Relaxation.  According to this Law, it is easier to program the sub-conscious mind when the conscious mind is less active.  If you are in a relaxed state, your conscious mind is also less active and less interfering.

To explain the working of this Law, you can simply observe what is happening when a person is under hypnosis.  In a hypnotic condition, the conscious mind is asleep and the hypnotist is in the process of directly communicating with the sub-conscious mind.  The conscious mind is completely blocked out (asleep) and the person simply reacts on the instructions of the hypnotist, communicating with subjects of the sub-conscious mind.

It is also important to notice that the sub-conscious mind does not ask questions, it instructs the physical body directly to perform on the instruction received from the hypnotist.

This first Mental Law, therefore, tells us that it is easier to re-program your sub-conscious mind for a success attitude if the conscious mind is less active and less critical.  This condition is then easier reached when you are in a state of deep relaxation!

CONCENTRATION

The second Mental Law is the Law of Concentration.  Concentration is extremely important.  It says that whatever you dwell upon in the conscious mind grows in your experience.

You know from experience that if you focus your conscious mind and really, concentrate on a problem, the chances of getting a solution are great.  Example:  you know that when you go to sleep, focussing and thinking about a specific problem, you often wake up the next morning and all of a sudden, you have the solution!  By concentrating on that problem, your dominant thoughts have effectively activated the brilliant sub-conscious mind to give you the answer.

These practical experiences that you have, supports the psychological principle; stating that concentration or focus is yet another effective tool in programming the sub-conscious mind.

PRACTICE AND REPETITION

The next Law is the Law of Practice or the Law of Repetition.  If you wish to see yourself and think about yourself as a positive constructive achievement-oriented, forward-looking individual, you have to think about yourself and dwell on yourself as being that type of person all the time.  By doing that repeatedly, that’s how you program your sub-conscious mind, until it becomes a habit.

Let me give you an example.  You know that if you wish to start biking, you have to first learn the skill and then practice it repeatedly, until it becomes automatic.  It becomes automatic when you do not consciously think about it any more.  At this point, the sub-conscious mind has taken over. The sub-conscious mind has now been programmed by repetition and controls your body and allows you to ride the bicycle without a worry or a conscious thought. Your body is now totally controlled by your sub-conscious mind.

SUBSTITUTION

The next Law is the Law of Substitution, which says that the conscious mind can only hold one thought at a time, either positive or negative. You know by now that the sub-conscious mind is programmed by your genetic make-up, environment (the people that you associate with, the things that you read and the things that you hear) and dominant thought patterns in the conscious mind.

The greatness of this Law lies in the fact that you have some direct control over what you think.  If you have negative thoughts, you can change your thinking and replace that negative thought with a positive one.

If you therefore wish to re-program your mind to have a success attitude, you will have to force yourself to replace all negative thoughts with positive ones.  In addition, luckily, the conscious mind can only hold one thought at a time…

EXPECTATION

This is the fifth Mental Law for programming your mind and shaping your success attitude.  According to this law: – whatever you expect with CONFIDENCE, becomes your own self-fulfilling prophecy.

This would mean that it is essential that you continually expect the BEST of yourself and every situation in which may you find yourself.  Successful Business people make a habit of positive Self-Expectation!

You must have ”Great Expectations” (My deepest apologies to Mr. Charles Dickens) Perhaps an apt example would do the trick of conveying the full meaning of the Law of Expectation.

Example:  I wanted to be my own boss!  Needless to say that I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what I was getting myself into!  I had lots of hurdles to overcome: Financing, Writing my own Business Plan, Setting up Business Accounts, Decide on an Apt name for my Company…

What kept me going was my “Great Expectations”.  I continually manufactured my fears into positive expectations.  When I signed off a job, I didn’t expect Praise from the People I was contracting for.  My expectations were most of all, to gain knowledge and expertise.  I can’t remember one contract or job situation from which I didn’t gain knowledge and expertise!

By having “Great Expectations” for gaining knowledge, I was in the process to engrave a new instruction into my sub-conscious mind.  My positive expectations were the gateway to my belief – (the last Mental Law).  Therefore, positive expectations are a powerful tool in creating the ultimate condition, namely Belief!  The Law of expectations therefore states that if you can have great expectations of creating the attitudes of successful business people, within yourself, you will activate all the other laws.  The law of positive expectations therefore acts as a catalyst for the other laws to be more effective.

Be positive in your Expectations!!

BELIEF

The Law of Belief, the final law, states: Whatever you believe in, if your belief is strong enough, this belief will become REALITY.  Wow!  That’s a mouthful!

Let me try that in another way: When you have Self-Limiting Beliefs, these beliefs will come true in your everyday living.  The law of belief is also a result of the effective implementation of the other 5 laws.

Okay, Okay!  I will rather use an example to reduce Confusion!

A specific observation done by psychologists on a patient with multiple personalities will help to explain the power of belief.  The one personality believed that he was a short sighted and needed spectacles.  The second personality of the same person believed that his eyes were normal.  Now the interesting part – when this person believed he was the personality with bad eyes, his eyes were physically tested and the results were that he is short sighted.  When the same person adopted the personality of the person with normal eyes, the test results on the same eyes were all of a sudden normal.  The power of his belief had a psychical effect on his ability to see – WHOW!  Therefore, when the law of belief kicked in, you will start to react accordingly.  In the next section we will focus on two techniques, which you can use to implement and activate the mental laws.  If you are disciplined enough to use these techniques on a regular basis, you will surely achieve your goals.  It is important to make sure what you want to achieve before using these techniques.  You must also make sure that the goals you set are aligned with your mission in life – in other words, the life purpose, statement or description, you are most comfortable with.

THE RE-PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES

Affirmation

Visualization

Now that you know and understand the Six Mental Laws, you can progress to the techniques of re-programming your sub-conscious mind.  These techniques are easy to understand and easy to use.  I know you cannot wait any longer, so here we go…

AFFIRMATION

By using affirmation, your potential is literally unlimited.  Affirmations are positive assertive statements that you make verbally or non-verbally.  You can create affirmations for everything you want to accomplish.

Say you want to be more confident, positive or creative. You must simply talk to yourself as though you have that characteristic already.  The more you repeat these positive assertive statements repeatedly, the better you will be able to program your sub-conscious mind. (Remember the Law of Repetition). Affirmations are easy to use and are indeed a very powerful tool. When using affirmations it is not necessary to believe the statements in the beginning.  Belief will come with repetition, as the sub-conscious mind re-programs itself over time – remembers the Law of Substitution.  By using affirmation, you can effectively replace negative thoughts by positive ones.  The “power of words” is a phrase we often use, but do we realise how powerful this really is?

If we hear the same thing over and over again (the sub-conscious mind), you will start believing it is true and will then act accordingly.  By the power of words, Hitler managed to program the entire German nation and eventually made them believe that his intended war crimes were noble and to the good of mankind.

For the sub-conscious, to accept affirmation, it has to be coached in the three P’s.  First of all, affirmations have to be personal.  It has to be “me”.  We cannot say “you”, or “somebody” else; we always have to talk in the first person singular.  “I like myself”.  Secondly, affirmations have to be positive.  If we wish to quit smoking, we will not say, “I will not smoke any more, I will not smoke any more”, because the sub-conscious cannot take in an instruction that includes a negative.  Therefore, what we would say instead is “I am a non-smoker, I am a non-smoker, I am a non-smoker”.  Lastly, affirmation has to be in the present tense.  You’ll have to instruct the sub-conscious mind in the present tense as if you are achieving already.  You have to say, “I am a non-smoker”.

VISUALIZATION

The second way, in which we program our mind, is by using what we call visualization. Visualization is the most powerful single capability a human being has.  It is the ability to form a clear precise vivid mental picture of what we want to achieve.  We must keep the picture crystal clear in our mind’s eye.  Whatever you can hold in your mind’s eye on a continuous basis, you will be able to achieve.

The goals, which you can picture in your imagination, you can accomplish.  Napoleon Hill remarked, “Whatever the mind of men can conceive and believe, it can achieve”.  Einstein was of the same opinion: “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”  The key to using visualization is to get a clear mental picture of yourself as though you already had the characteristics that you want and/or achieved the goals of your choice.

Prior to every situation of importance, take a couple of minutes to play a clear mental picture of the ideal you desire in an upcoming situation.  Say you are going into a sales interview.  Form a clear mental picture of yourself performing at your very best in that situation.  See a clear precise picture of the situation and the outcome exactly the way you want it to take place.

The best time to use visualization is when the conscious mind is in a deep state of relaxation. Remember the Mental Law of Relaxation and how it works? The best time for visualization is normally at night, before you go to sleep; the conscious mind is then in an alpha stage.  Get yourself a relaxation tape or CD.  This will help to relax the conscious mind and you will be able to re-program your sub-conscious rapidly!

The visualization techniques work better when you activate all your senses at the same time and focus on the goal you wish to achieve.  You must therefore try to feel, smell, hear and taste the ideal condition; you are trying to accomplish.  Remember, you need not believing what you are visualizing at the beginning.  The Law of Repetition, Concentration, Relaxation and eventually, Expectation will result in Belief, the final stage in the re-programming exercise.

Via the power of “words” (affirmations) and the power of “vision” (visualisation), it is possible for you to achieve your goals and to be a highly successful person.  Practice these techniques and activate the mental laws and become all you are capable of.  You will be surprised what you can achieve!!

God created us all, like brilliant computers.  What is, however, needed for these computers, are new software to make them function like they are suppose to.  The mental laws, as well as the programming techniques discussed in this article, are the tools we are provided with to create the new mental software needed.  The software we are using are clearly outdated and we need to reprogram ourselves in order to be able to solve the problems we are facing, but also, and more important, to be able to excel to the new heights we are capable of.