Positive vs Negative Focus
Look at any Best Seller list in bookshops today, and it’ll be populated with autobiographies of the rich and famous. From glamour models to footballers to empire builders, they all have a different story to tell, but each has a common thread – they overcame adversity by focusing on the positives.
That’s the way of the world; life’s achievers allow positive reasons why ‘they can’ to flood their consciousness, and drown out negative reasons why they can’t.
For the trainee, this attitude to studying is vital. To complete a training program successfully, the biggest tool in a student’s workbox is a positive mindset. An optimistic outlook brings about all sorts of circumstances, possibilities, answers and opportunities to achieve. On the other hand, a negative outlook blocks creativity and numbs our learning receptors.
This is due to our Reticular Activation System, which is a mechanism in our brain that automatically tells us what to focus on. We’ve experienced many things throughout our lives that no longer stay in the forefront of our minds – most of what we’ve learned moves from our conscious mind to our sub-conscious mind, a sort of store cupboard stocked up with all our past knowledge and beliefs.
When we consciously attempt to do something, our Reticular Activation System (RAS) will search the sub-conscious mind for any relevant information it holds, and bring it to our attention. If we’re walking down a street, we’re only made aware of things that have meaning to us – the rest is just background noise.
Therefore, if our conscious mind has generally been transferring positive, upbeat messages to our sub-conscious mind, then that’s what it will send back. But if our sub-conscious has been fed a bunch of defeatist, downbeat messages, then equally that’s also what will come back.
Achievers, it appears, are able to manipulate the messages streamimg through to their sub-conscious minds. They do this by choosing the exact messages the conscious mind sends and deliberately programming their RAS. As such, it’s an essential tool for achieving goals, as the sub-conscious mind can’t tell the difference between real or imaginary events.
So, as it believes what it’s told, we must create a really specific picture of our goal in our conscious mind. This will then pass on to our subconscious via the RAS – which will then help us to achieve our goal. This is done by bringing to our attention all the meaningful information which might otherwise have remained as ‘background noise’.
Napoleon Hill said that we can achieve any realistic goal if we keep on thinking of that goal, and stop thinking any negative thoughts about it. Of course, if we keep thinking that we can’t achieve a goal, our subconscious will help us not to achieve it.
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