The Secret to Your Success

Success may depend upon a variety of factors, but most successful people will tell you the secret to success lies between your ears. It’s your mind, and, more specifically, your thoughts. That’s why they focus an enormous amount of time, attention and money on personal development.

A few years ago, I attended New Media Expo, a huge conference attended by bloggers and podcasters from all over the United States and the world. The final keynote speaker was not a blogger or podcaster but rather a hypnotist and personal growth instructor named Marshall Sylver.

A few months prior to that, I attended bestselling author and speaker Brendon Burchard’s Expert Industry Association annual event. Every one of the speakers mentioned how much money—between $25,000 and $100,000 per year—they spent on personal development. Their personal-development dollars might have been spent on a personal coach, a coaching program or some sort of training program or programs ranging from business coaching to transcendental meditation. All of them attributed this expenditure, and the time and focus on personal development, to their success.

At both events, the message was the same: Success has less to do with what you do or want to create and more to do with how you think.

Your thoughts affect almost every aspect of your life, including how you behave and feel. Change your thoughts, change your life.

It’s All in Your Mind

Almost every personal-development or human-potential book, course or program focuses on learning to manage your thoughts so you get different, meaning better, results. Why ask a hypnotist and personal development trainer to speak at a new media conference? Hypnosis reprograms the brain—the thoughts of an individual. What better way to learn the importance of controlling the mind if you want to succeed—or learn to influence—others?

For example, by educating you on the power of subconscious reprogramming, Sylver motivates you to take action in the present moment and change you life in a positive way forever. His book, Passion, Profit & Power, offers a technique you can use to do just that on your own. His courses help you reprogram your thinking so you can becoming a millionaire (he claims).

In classic personal development style, Sylver says, “Thoughts are things…treat them accordingly.”

Additionally, if you want to program yourself for success, don’t use the words “can not.” These two words, he claims, are “the most negative and destructive programming word you can ever use.”

If you catch yourself saying something negative, you can always qualify it with the word “yet.” Someone taught me this years ago, and just last week I heard Burchard repeat this lesson. For example, if you say, “I can’t do that,” add the word “yet” to the end of the sentence: I can’t do that yet. You’ve turned a negative thought into a positive one.

Know Your Why

Most of personal development asks you to look at your life and decipher why you do what you do—to discover the life experiences that have created your negative thoughts and beliefs. “An experience creates a thought; when reinforced or repeated, it becomes a belief or program. Our beliefs (programs) create our habits, and our habits become our life,” explains Sylver.

But you don’t have to continue with that old life. You can change your life, change your successes by reprogramming your thoughts and beliefs. “Personal programming is the ability to observe or be aware of what you are getting by what you are doing. Through making adjustments based on what you observe, you will then start creating outcomes in the way that you want them,” he says.

Think Like a Successful Person

This past year Burchard began a hit podcast called The Charged Life. In the third episode, “How Successful People Think,” which also is featured on his blog, he says unsuccessful people get stopped in their tracks by three thoughts that cause them to say three things to themselves: “I don’t know how to do that. So they stop. I don’t have those things… So they stop. I’m not like that. So they stop.”

On the other hand, according to Burchard, successful people say, “’I want to do that, but I don’t know how,’ and instead of stopping they say, ‘Then my job is to go learn that.’ They take their current limitation and put it on their agenda as a job to do, as a thing to figure out and make happen. Instead of saying, ‘I don’t have that.’ They say, ‘Then my job is to go build that.’ Or, instead of ‘I’m not like that,’ then they say, ‘My job is to go become more of that, become that person who could accomplish those things.’”

It’s all about attitude, and your attitude stems from the thoughts you think and the things you tell yourself. As Burchard reports, if you want to achieve success, the thing you seek—that new thing—must come from within. You must tell yourself, “I’m going to become a better person. I’m going to become a person who is more optimistic, more confident and more driven, not because I am that now, but because I can grow.”

Personal development is all about personal growth. It’s about how you change for the better to achieve your potential. And that’s how you truly succeed.

Don’t Just Learn

Every day I’m faced with the need to learn new things to succeed at my business, which straddles the expert industry and the blogging/podcasting industry. However, the one thing I know has helped me more than anything to achieve my current level of success, and that will help me achieve higher levels of success, is constant personal change and growth. This requires that I monitor and alter how I think.

It’s been said that your current habits have only helped you achieve your current level of success. To achieve a different level of success, to obtain your goals and dreams, change your habits—change your thoughts, your beliefs, your actions. That’s when your results change.

Each of these conferences offered the same message, as do most of the other high performance and personal development events I attend: Learn the essentials of how to do what you do, but become the type of person who can succeed. Focus on personal growth and development.