If You Think You Can

If You Think You Can
Written by Niloufar Abedi,
Author of Highway to Success and Better living in USA

If you think you can,....

"I think I can. I think I can." the little train repeated as it slowly went up the hill. I am sure you have heard the story. In fact, you can probably recall at least one or two occasion in your own life that you were told, " if you think you can, you can."As tempting as it is to think that people have blind faith in your ability to succeed, there is a very logical reason behind this belief that if you set your mind to it, you will succeed. That logic relates to your mind's capability of sustaining or defeating your goals. Your mind has the ability to help you overcome the most horrendous obstacles and face up to any challenge and succeed, but it also can use its strengths to defeat your every attempt for achievement. It is entirely in your power how your mind will behave.

The human mind is still a mystery to scientists. However, there is already considerable knowledge about it which can help you to utilize this dynamic tool toward living a fulfilled and successful life. Your mind is a powerful computer and a humble servant that aims to please you. In its own estimation, your mind has only one purpose for its existence: to keep you in your comfort zone, where you are happy, feel secure, and have a sense of control over your life. Any situation that threatens this mission is a signal for your mind to start a gorilla war and get you back into your comfort zone. The two most common systems your mind uses for this fight are called: Rationalization, and defensive repression.

Rationalization occurs when your mind uses your own thoughts and beliefs to justify or explain the result of a particular action or inaction in your life.

One of the abilities of your mind is its recording power. Your mind makes a record of everything that happens to you. It takes every situation you ever encounter and stores it. Your mind uses these recorded memories in addition to your beliefs, your knowledge, and the circumstances of your environment to keep you in your comfort zone. Anything that takes you out of that comfort zone must be immediately explained and justified by your mind. This justification does not need to be logical or correct. As long as the result will help you move back into your comfort zone, your mind has done its job well.

Let's consider an example. Let's say you want to achieve a goal and, for whatever reason, you have not succeeded yet. Your lack of achievement upsets and frustrates you which will cause you to move out of your comfort zone. Your mind becomes alert and will immediately look for a way to get you free of this entanglement and move you back into your comfort zone.

In this situation, if you ask yourself "What can I do to achieve my goal?" This will signal your mind to go after every possible solution to help you succeed. Your mind will give you all the possibilities it can find regardless of their logic. Here, you can choose the solutions that apply to your situation among those possibilities and continue moving ahead with your goals.

One the other hand, if you make the mistake of asking yourself, "Why do I always fail?" or "Why does this always happen to me?" You give your mind the wrong signal. Now your mind presumes that you want to know why you are a failure. Therefore, it will search for a reason to justify your failure. The first and easiest reason that your mind finds when seeking this type of justification is in your own personal insecurities. If any characteristic in your personality, subconscious mind, belief system, or environment gives you a reason to be insecure, your mind will use that characteristic as the answer to your question. It will search the subconscious part of your memory which acts like an storage area, finds your personal insecurities, and bring them out to your conscious awareness as the solution to the problem that caused you to fail. Therefore the answer to the question "Why do I always fail?" or "Why does this always happen to me?" might be:

Because you are stupid/ ugly/ short/ tall/ old/ young/ a woman/ a man/ a foreigner/ a blond/ a brunette/ a redhead!

You can exchange the adjectives above with any others that would describe what you consider to be your personal shortcomings. The result is the same-your mind has provided you with a reason for your failure. Even though the "reason" could be completely unrelated to the actual elements that prevented you from achieving success, it doesn't matter. As long as you accept that reason, your mind has accomplished its task. It has rationalized your failure. Unfortunately, this rationalization does not make appease you. Therefore, you will not go back into your comfort zone. When rationalization fails to bring you back into your comfort zone, your mind will use defensive repression to help you cope. This is how it works. Your mind will, through time, repress the entire memory of that particular incident from your conscious awareness by burying it in your subconscious memory. Then it will create a signal that causes you to avoid similar types of circumstances in the future. That signal usually takes the form of unreasonable fear, unexplainable discomfort in new situation or anticipation of pain and unpleasantness in a new experience. When you receive the protective signal from your mind, you instinctively avoid the new situation. Defensive repression is a primary cause of a person's developing one of the major self-defeating, compensatory personality types such as the victim, the endurer, the dreamer, or the sacrificial lamb.

To prevent this circumstances, you should learn to tell your mind what you want--what your goals are and how important fulfilled desires and attained goals will be to you. This can be done. Consider this fact: your mind's ultimate goal is to give you pleasure, because everything you do in life is motivated by your simultaneous subconscious hunger for pleasure and desire to avoid pain. That is the basic reason you automatically take or avoid taking an action in any situation. If you can associate pleasure and happiness with the achievement of your goals and associate as much displeasure as you reasonably can with a lack of success, your mind will continuously search for new ways to help you reach for your goals. This approach is called the pleasure and pain technique.

It is for this reason that you are often told; "if you set your mind to it, you will succeed". When you take the time to study and recognize what motivates your mind and how to communicate with your mind, you can use that knowledge to harness your mind's power, then use that power as leverage to direct your mind to come up with every possible strategy to help you succeed.

The degree of skill you develop in communicating with your mind will be a measure of the degree to which you shall be able to keep control over almost every situation in your life.

Niloufar Abedi is the author of Highway to Success. To learn more about this book or to contact Ms. Abedi, please visit her official site...http://www.abedi.com. ======================================================

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