.:. WitNit .:.: 1. Creating Your Life

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May 27, 2005

1. Creating Your Life

his series of posts will make a lot more sense if you have already read the series How the Mind Works.

Is your life more a comedy or a tragedy? Do you feel you have the ability to create your life, or does it seem like your life creates you?

There's lots of Power of Positive Thinking approaches out there: Norman Vincent Peale, Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar.

These can work for some people. Mostly they are based on mind-driven methods, and as good as they are, I think they don't tell the whole story. I don't think I'M capable of telling the whole story, but I intend to get into some things that go a bit further than you normally hear about. I hope you have the patience to hang in there with me.

Because I think there are at least two points to create from: Creating from Mind, and Creating from Soul. Be patient. I will define that distinction as we go along.

The Mind is a Good Slave but a Poor Master

If there is any hope in discovering a way to create from a vantage point OTHER than the mind, then the mind has to be disciplined and streamlined.

If you've read the How the Mind Works series, then you probably recognize that the mind tends to operate on a kind of habitual autopilot, generating thoughts and pictures of reality, most of which we now recognize as being LIMITED or LIMITING. Those posts have many clues to help you take charge of your mind and whip it into shape, rather than let it drive you every day.

Here is a list of propositions arising from that series of posts:

We do not act according to the whole truth; we act according to the �truth� as we believe it to be.
To grow personally is not always a matter of working harder; it is often a matter of thinking differently, of thinking more effectively.
Effective thinkers do not blame things outside of themselves; high-performance thinkers feel their locus of control inside.
They believe in their own ability to make things happen.
The quality and quantity of our beliefs influence our self-efficacy (our belief that we can make things happen).
The way we talk to ourselves (psycholinguistics) can keep us fixed, or enable us to grow.
High-performance thinkers recognize they have blindspots, and consequently strive to overcome them.
When you Lock-On to a �Truth,� it gets stored subconsciously and your mind begins working automatically to build blindspots to anything that contradicts that stored �Truth.�
Just because you cannot see it doesn�t mean it�s not there.
You have all kinds of blindspots to the truth, to reality, right now, and there is a way to overcome those blindspots.
You must become End-Result Oriented to overcome blindspots. Once you set a Goal, THEN your Reticular Activating System (RAS) lets through the information you need to achieve your goal.

Let me give you an example of that last principle. The RAS only lets through what is of value or a threat. When you set a goal, you tell your RAS that now anything associated with achieving that goal is of value. This is why you DO NOT WAIT FOR THE RESOURCES BEFORE SETTING OUT TO ACHIEVE A GOAL.

If you think in terms of having to have the money or resources FIRST, you are doing it backwards. You set the GOAL first, then look for the resources to achieve it.

I play piano. In my college days, I didn't have one, couldn't afford to buy or rent one. For the longest time that stopped me from getting a piano. Why? Because I THOUGHT (held the picture) that I could only have a piano if I bought or rented one.

WRONG!

Once I was presented with the principle of being END-RESULT ORIENTED, not first thinking I needed the resources first, I gave it a shot.

I began picturing having a piano and looking for a way of getting one that I didn't have to buy or rent. Once I set the goal, I soon had the thought, Hey, you know there are a lot of people out there that probably have a piano and find it a burden. I could offer to store it for them. Actually, I thought, there are probably people with TWO pianos and they would LOVE to have me take one off their hands. That way, they would probably let me keep it for years, since they already have one piano.

So at my job as a 7-11 manager (putting myself through college), I began asking all my regular customers who had known me for some time whether they had an extra piano that they need to have someone store for them.

It only took TWO WEEKS. An older gentleman who lived nearby said his wife had two pianos and they had been thinking for a while what to do with them since they only need one. He invited me to get a friend with a truck and move one of them into my condo.

I arrived that weekend with a friend and a truck. We walked into a very nice home. One piano was an older black upright Baldwin piano. The other was an even older, beautifully crafted Chickering spinet piano with a top that folded down turning it into a table. It was lovely.

We started heading toward the upright piano, and the man said, no, his wife likes the touch of that piano, we could take the Chickering.

It was INCREDIBLE! Beautiful appearance. Wonderful touch. Bell-like tone. I had that piano in my home for almost 5 years.

Even today, the piano in our house belongs to someone who has no room for it right now.

So you see, it wasn't a matter of Positive Thinking. It was more a matter of End-Result Thinking. Thinking differently, not harder. It required no extra effort, just a willingness to suspend disbelief and recognize that the possibilities of achieving a particular goal are much wider than we often believe. We just have to think from the End, AS IF.

I KNEW there was a way to get a piano with paying or renting one. I set the GOAL. I got the piano within a couple of weeks.

Try it. You will be properly amazed.

Go on to 2. Creating Your Life

*** The man who has no imagination has no wings. Muhammad Ali

*** To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. Cynthia Ozick, novelist

*** You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. Mark Twain

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Posted by witnit at May 27, 2005 11:18 AM