10
Steps to Success
Through a Positive Attitude
Jake Winters
Published by Jake Winters
Copyright
2011 Jake Winters
Smashwords Eition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Chapter 1 – What a Positive Mental Attitude Will do for You
Chapter 2 – Condition Your Mind to Think Accurately
Chapter 3 – Eliminate Negative Thoughts Through Self-Reflection
Chapter 4 – Put the Golden Rule to Work for You
Chapter 5 – Realize Your Dreams Through Goal-Setting
Chapter 6 – Be Happy by Default
Chapter 7 – Control Your Thought Habits
Chapter 8 – Embrace The Law of Attraction
Chapter 9 – Enrich Your Life Through Faith and Prayer
Chapter 10 – Get Moving, Take Action
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Life can be scary sometimes! Every day you must deal with your family, your job, your finances and all the other things that seem to get in your way. You are constantly bombarded with news stories about the poor economy, wars and unrest around the world and the destruction of the planet, to name a few. All this stress can chip away at your attitude and make you see your world and yourself in a negative way. Do you feel like your life is getting away from you, that the goals and aspirations of your youth are now unobtainable or that things will never be any better? If you feel this way and if what you’re doing isn’t working, then this book is for you.
Herein is a simple method for developing and maintaining a Positive Mental Attitude, the main ingredient for becoming exceptional in your life. It comes with a promise! The promise is that this method will help you find a new and wonderful undiscovered person within you. By following this formula, you will discover and maintain a passionate and blissful attitude toward life and experience the benefits of PMA, helping you acquire anything in life that you desire! Change your life, don’t be average, and become exceptional….you can do it.
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Chapter 1 – What a Positive Mental Attitude Will Do for You
“Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”
Winston Churchill
A Positive Mental Attitude or PMA is the starting point of all success in life and is the only way to change your life for the better. To have PMA means that you have a well-balanced way of thinking, are conscious of success and have the ability to follow through with your actions in a positive and proper way. It will give you peace of mind, good physical and mental health, defend you against any form of self-limitation, help you overcome fear and worry, and help you attain anything in life that you desire.
PMA must be an all-encompassing part of your life and become a permanent state of mind. From the time you wake up in the morning to the time you retire for the evening, your attitude will determine the outcome of your day and all the days that follow. It takes just as much work to have a positive attitude as it does to have a negative one, but the rewards are much greater for the positive thinker.
If things aren’t working out the way you expected them to in your life so far, it’s because of your attitude. Think about the situations that you face from day to day, and your attitude and thoughts toward them. Are you poor and just getting by? Then you are getting exactly what you expect. Are you lonely and always on your own? Then you expect to be. Are you constantly ill and in poor health? Then you created that situation in your mind. Before you can change the circumstances of your life, you must change your attitude and change your mind.
William James (1842-1910) was a doctor of medicine, a psychologist and a philosopher at the Harvard Medical Center. During his life he helped to develop a thought system called “pragmatism.” Pragmatism means thinking in terms of the result that doing something will have. James wrote, “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.” To him life was a battle between pessimism and optimism. He felt that negative thinking filled men with failure and doubt. According to James, the universe is full of possibilities, and people can become better if they open their eyes and look for the mind power they have within them. He believed that each of us decides what our future will be and “we become what we think about most of the time.”
The PMA principle was originally described by Napoleon Hill (1883-1970). He was one of the earliest writers of personal success literature and books, and is considered one of the greatest writers on the topic. His most famous book, “Think and Grow Rich” was one of the best-selling books of all time. Hill describes PMA as one of the 17 principles of success that formed the first practical philosophy of personal achievement. He defined a Positive Mental Attitude as “a confident, honest, constructive state of mind which an individual creates and maintains by methods of his own choosing, through the operation of his own willpower, based on motives of his own adaptation.” In other words, you and you alone have the ability to create and shape the outcome of your life experiences and you do it through your attitude.
Let’s break down the three words that make up PMA.
Positive
Positive is being optimistic about yourself and expecting the best outcome from the situations you encounter. It is associated with the good aspects of life such as honesty, love, faith, hope, generosity, courage, integrity, kindness, diligence and common sense. It makes you attractive to others and makes them want to be with you. It propels you forward and gives you the strength to succeed in achieving your goals. When you are positive about life you attract only positive experiences and positive people to you.
Mental
This means the physical mind, the medium through which we think. It is influenced by your attitude, be it positive or negative. It contains the chemistry through which input from your senses is received, processed and acted upon.
Attitude
Attitude is a feeling or mood. It is a judgment based upon your feeling toward another person, circumstance or thing. Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of the school of analytical psychology. His definition of attitude is “a readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way.” It is your attitude that determines how you will react to any situation that arises in your life.
So then, these three words combined are the glue that binds together all your good characteristics and drives you toward positive results in your life. PMA allows you to build hope and overcome the negative attitudes of despair and discouragement. It gives you the mental power; the right feeling and the confidence to do anything you make up your mind to do. PMA is commonly referred to as the “I CAN…I WILL” attitude when applied to the challenging circumstances in life.
When you develop PMA, you are happy with yourself. You love that inner light and the feeling of good which lives within you. It gives you the confidence that you can succeed at any endeavor. This gives you a feeling of self-respect and projects the goodness from within you to others. In doing so, you will draw the good from others and attract only good people and things to you.
PMA is a continual process. It is not something that you use at your convenience, but it must become a part of the way you live. It is a wholesome mental habit of dealing with your emotions, moods, actions and reactions in a positive way. PMA is the right way to react to incoming stimulus from one or more of your five senses. It is the right way to think about, act upon or react to each situation, person or circumstance that enters your mind.
You can use PMA to bring your wants and desires into reality. Learn to live it. Learn to think constructively and apply wholesome principles to any situation. Absorb these convictions into your daily life and then act in compliance with them. Information, ideas and intentions without action will remain dormant.
Sometimes you stay in your habit of negative thinking because it’s comfortable and is what you’re used to. You tell yourself that being positive is not realistic, that life is not a bed of roses. Negative thinking then becomes your reality and you see life in a negative way, which produces negative results perpetuating your belief.
You may say that those who are positive thinkers expect their desires to materialize out of thin air, and it’s fantasy to believe that this is possible. But this is not positive thinking and you’re confusing positive thinking with dreaming and wishing. Positive thinking creates the “I can…I will” attitude that, when mixed with action, attracts the necessary circumstances for the achievement of your desires. Dreaming and wishing that is not mixed with the proper attitude only creates a false hope that is short lived.
Or you may say that positive thinking doesn’t change the reality of a situation. And on this you would be partially right. A situation is what it is, but a positive attitude will show you the situation in a different light. Problems are no longer problems but opportunities to learn from, with endless possibilities and resolutions. A positive mental attitude creates a mindset of solutions. Instead of thinking of what can’t be done, it moves you toward what can be done. You can easily turn a negative situation into a positive one by looking at it in a positive way.
Whatever your beliefs about PMA are, stop and ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing now getting me what I want out of life?” If the answer is no, then change your mind — it will change your life.
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Chapter 2 – Condition Your Mind to Think Accurately
“No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.”
Terry Josephson
The only way to acquire PMA is to condition your mind to think properly. You must forcefully and consciously take possession of your mind and realize that you can direct your thoughts, control your emotions and shape your destiny. No one else can control your thoughts, and you cannot be forced to think about something you do not accept. Negative thoughts will produce negative results while positive thoughts will produce positive results. So make the decision now to condition your mind through a Positive Mental Attitude.
This is easier to do than you may think. The mind given to you by your creator is a magnificent piece of equipment. The greatest people who ever lived came nowhere near to using the fullest capacity of their minds. Most of the important people in history had an IQ no higher than average. Their greatness was due to their ability to use and direct their mental powers. Greatness does not require genius. You have unlimited mental powers too, and it is up to you to direct this power positively. Through conditioning your mind with accurate thought, you take possession of your mind and direct it to guide you toward the things you desire from life.
You drive your car using a steering wheel, which connects to the front wheels and determines your direction. The steering wheel of your life is your mind and your thoughts are the front wheels. Your thoughts, like the front wheels of your car, determine your direction in life and ultimately your destination. But you and only you command the steering wheel, your mind, and control your thoughts. Without proper control of your thoughts, you will ride around aimlessly and will end up somewhere, but probably not where you want to be.
Conditioning your mind takes time, practice and effort. You will find yourself losing control from time to time, and slipping back into your old worn out negative attitudes and thought patterns. But do not despair, just gently pull yourself back to the thoughts of what you want to achieve and re-take control of your mind. No harm done. Use it as a learning experience, recognize it, ride it out and apply the power of positive thinking. It gets easier with practice.
Your mind is always busy, bringing you what you want and what you don’t want. It brings you poverty and misery or it brings you wealth and happiness, but it is never idle. Accurate thought is a major factor that determines whether your mind delivers more of what you desire or brings you what you do not. Remember, your subconscious mind will deliver to you that which you hold in it. The thoughts that you focus on most reflects in your physical world. There are a few simple steps you can take to aid you in developing the habit of accurate thought.
First, you must have a definite major purpose — a goal. There must be something that you deeply desire to have, to be, or to do. Something that you want so badly that you fix emotion to it and get excited about it. We’ll discuss goal-setting later in this book.
Then you must develop the ability to separate facts from fiction and hearsay. Most of our thoughts are inaccurate because they come from opinions based on bias, prejudice, fear, or are the result of emotional excitement and thus are irrational. You must learn to examine these so-called facts to determine which are of use to you and are important, and those arrived at through wrong thinking or biased observation. The way you interpret the information presented to your mind will largely be influenced by your attitude.
Once you have decided what is fact, you need to separate the important facts from the unimportant ones. The important facts are the ones that you can use to further your journey in the attainment of your desires. The unimportant facts have no use and should be discarded. They have no value to you except perhaps for entertainment or as a temporary diversion.
Forming the habit of holding your thoughts only on significant facts takes work and self-discipline — the next step in conditioning your mind.
Strengthen Your Self-Discipline and Will Power
“With self-discipline most anything is possible.”
Theodore Roosevelt
You will find it difficult to condition your mind if you can’t discipline yourself. Self-discipline is the ability to motivate yourself in spite of a negative emotional state. In other words, the ability to get things done despite how you feel about doing them. It’s the ability to control your feelings and overcome your weaknesses. To pursue what you think is right, despite temptations to abandon it. It is the postponement of short-term gratification in favor of your long-term goals.
Self-discipline resides in the faculty of reason and not emotion. When you are disciplined, you choose the way you react to situations, through your reasoning power, instead of reacting on impulse through your emotions. Take the check out line at the grocery store. None of the items displayed there are anything that you really need. They are placed there for you to pick up on impulse while you’re waiting to check out. Do you really need that pack of gum or the magazine about the movie star who is an alien? This may be a simple example, but the power you use to resist these temptations is self-discipline. Resist making decisions on impulse, which is based on emotion, and think things through before you act. Ask yourself, “Do I really need this, will it make a positive impact on my life?” If not, then move on.
You use self-discipline to control that other person who lives inside you who is lazy, procrastinates, acts on emotion and who has all the bad qualities that you don’t want. Has this other person ever proclaimed, “Why bother, you know you’ll fail,” or “Instead of doing this, let’s watch some TV?” This person can be very persuasive in getting you to stop what you’re doing. You must learn to shout that person down with self-discipline. And you can take that literally, learn to let that person know who the boss is and “shout them down” when their poor opinions, bad attitudes and laziness get in the way of what you want. Don’t be a slave to your emotions, moods and passions.