Many years ago, Earl Nightingale said, “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.”
How can you keep achieving your ideals or goals, one after another, in the years ahead?
Any time you want to make a significant change, whether it’s earning a lot more money or ending world hunger, you’re not just trying to change your income or feed more people. You’re trying to change a paradigm—the ideas, beliefs, and habits you have about those ideas. You can’t change your paradigm with self-will alone.
Two Ways to Change a Paradigm
One way to change a paradigm is to experience an emotional impact that hits you so hard that your life is never the same. It’s usually a negative or troubling event, such as a death, an act of violence, or a natural disaster, but it can also be positive. Significant emotional impacts are unpredictable, a second way to change a paradigm is repetition. Repetition is exposing yourself to a new idea over and over again. The point of repetition is not to memorise information, but to impress the idea into your subconscious or emotional mind enough times that it replaces the old idea or paradigm that resides there.
Repetition is the Mother of All Learning
Repetition is one of the primary ways we learn. And changing a paradigm is ultimately learning new beliefs and habits. Learning is more than merely gathering information. Many people continually get the same results, they read books and attend seminars, but very little changes.
LEARNING IS WHEN…
we consciously entertain an idea
we emotionalise the idea
we act on the idea
and, we observe a change in results.
A Closer Look
Consciously entertaining a goal is easy.
Emotionalising the idea so that it gets planted in the subconscious mind is anything but easy because your paradigm has been running the show for a long time, and it does not want to change.
You must keep repeating your goal and impressing the image the ideal over and over until it starts to take hold in your subconscious mind. Initially, the image is weak because it’s only in your conscious mind. It’s like a little sapling planted there. Repetition works to loosen the soil of the conscious mind and allow the new image to take root in the subconscious mind. The more you impress the image into your emotional mind, the stronger it becomes. Eventually, the old image (the paradigm) weakens, and the new one replaces it, and you move into the vibration that the image creates. When that happens, you are in resonance and you will reach your goal.
Choose Well
This process works because it is aligned with natural laws. That said, it’s important to be mindful of the ideas that you are planting. Unlike the conscious mind, the subjective mind is totally subjective. It accepts whatever you give it. So, ANYTHING that you say, write, or feel over and over again will eventually become fixed in the subconscious mind.
Change Your Life
If you want to improve the quality of your life, start allocating a portion of each day to changing your paradigm. Start dedicating time to building a new image in your mind by writing your goal, in the present tense, 20 times, twice a day (every day). Doing this for the next 30 days will pay huge dividends in shifting your paradigm.
Become an actor. Write a script that details how you really want to live, and then read it and re-read it. Memorise the script and then internalise it. Become the script. Become emotionally involved with it. And then, you’ll start to live the part.