Is there a “secret” formula to success?

Perhaps.

Why are some people successful while others are mediocre?

For centuries, men and women have been looking for a “secret” formula to success, fame and fortune.

People have been known to consult fortune-tellers, psychics, and astrologers, just to know their fate. In the western world, numerology, graphology, palmistry and astrology are popular. In recent times, the use of vision boards has grown popular.

What’s the secret to success?

The quick answer is that there is no secret.

The long answer is that success comes to people who are able to alter (or reprogram) their subconscious minds.

Why?

Simply because our destinies are shaped by our subconscious neural pathways.

What’s the subconscious mind?

The “subconscious” mind (or unconscious mind), is the part of your mind that operates below your normal level of waking consciousness.

In other words, it is the part of the mind that consists of thoughts, processes, memories, interests and motivations which occur automatically and are not subject to introspection.

The conscious mind consist of the active part of your mind and includes random thought, processes, feelings, emotions, memories, interests and motivations which can be analysed, controlled or altered.

Despite it’s obscure nature, the subconscious mind occupies 90% of your brain. Think of the conscious and subconscious minds like an iceberg. 10% is what you see and represents the conscious mind. The remaining 90% which is submerged under water represents the subconscious mind.

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Dr. Sigmund Freud’s 3-layer brain consciousness model

[Dr. Sigmund Freud talked of three layers namely, Conscious, Subconscious and Unconscious minds, but modern psychologists find this unnecessary — only two layers play a key role — the Conscious and Subconscious, thus combining subconscious and unconscious minds into one]

Another analogy is to think of the conscious and subconscious minds like a computer system. The conscious mind is like the random access memory (RAM) of a computer, whereas the subconscious mind is like the hard disk of the computer.

The subconscious mind cannot be altered directly because it includes the default settings or programming of your brain from the time you were born until now. It has largely been influenced by circumstances, surroundings, school, religion, status, society, parents, relatives, friends, and cultural norms.

The best way to explain “default” programming is to use the analogy of a computer. A default programming is a setting that has been preset by the manufacturer. Unless we deliberately “change” the settings to customize them to our own preferences, they will stay on default until we die.

Having explained default settings in terms of computers, how does this relate our own lives?

Whereas, everyday, we consciously change the settings on our computer systems or mobile phones to suit our preferences, in real life, we ‘unconsciously’ choose a default setting that is based on old cultural beliefs, thoughts, emotions, motivations, memories and feelings.

As a result, these default settings create psychological “blocks” or hindrances to our most innermost goals and desires for a fulfilled life.

Even if we exert deliberate effort to change them, as soon as life pushes a certain button, we automatically return to our ‘well-worn’ neural default pathways, believing them to be the truth. However, default settings are far from the truth.

Ironically, our subconscious mind dictates the direction of our lives, and then we keep wondering why things don’t change in our favour.

The reason things don’t change according to our desires is because we are still tightly embracing the default blocks. Together, these default settings conspire to create a wall collectively known as the Default Loop.

The Default Loop comprises six default settings which create a hindrance to prevent us from reaching our goals, desires and purpose.

The Default Loop

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” — Albert Einstein

There are at least six default settings that affect our lives:

#1 — Approval

The approval default setting is a subtle setting that overrules against what we truly believe in. The overwhelming need for approval by other people leads us to make decisions with a view to please the people whose approval we seek at the cost of what’s right for us.

The approval default setting believes that others are responsible for our worth. If they like us, we’re comfortable — if they don’t like us, we’re doomed.

#2 — Blame

The blame default setting creates victims out of us in life. Instead of taking responsibility for our lives, we go looking for someone or something to blame in the outside world.

To feel comfortable, we proceed with the blame game, and blame everything including our circumstances, the weather and government except ourselves.

Phrases like, “it’s not my fault” or “I am not to blame”, are the common mantra that are used to exclude us from self-responsibility, which further strengthens the shackles of this subtle, default setting.

#3 — Conformity

The conformity default setting forces us to unconsciously chase other people’s or society’s definition of success.

This default setting compels us to spend our waking hours working hard to fit into society’s set patterns of success as defined by the media. They do a great job of explaining what success is, and what it’s not.

So, we constantly spend our time and money rearranging our external world in an attempt to “fit into society”, at the expense of our true happiness.

#4 — Doubts and FEARS

The doubt and fear default settings causes us to “play-it-safe” and never take risks.

Here’s a reality — any action that’s worthwhile but involves risk will scare you to death.

There is probably not a day that passes without you wishing a better life for yourself and your family, but then the default loop of doubt and fear sets in and blocks you from taking the risk alongside the opportunities that go with it.

#5 — Excuses

The default settings of excuses shows up in the form of excuses and justifications. Excuses are just avoidance tactics to explain our failures and our inability to overcome fear.

There’s always a reason why you didn’t get a promotion, or why you couldn’t lose weight, or or you don’t have enough money. The list goes on as far as you want it to go.

The problem is that excuses make us delusional and put our brains to sleep.

The real problem with excuses is they stop us from taking action.

Excuses drive us into PROCRASTINATION.

#6 — Focus Scatter

The focus scatter default setting unconsciously pulls us to juggle many things at once and never really accomplish anything.

The main cause of this default setting is distraction — also known as “the shiny object syndrome”.

Focus scatter is like the magpie — always jumping from place to place and from one shiny object to another, not willing to be left behind, or miss out on any opportunity.

Not willing to focus on one thing and complete it is a subtle default setting. It will prevent you from getting any meaningful results and reaching your goal. It can be likened to the analogy of the greedy hyena — when the hyena reached a Y-intersection, it could not decide which road to follow, so it stretched both its front legs on each road until it split apart.

How to Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind

Here are 8 mindset hacks you can implement to permanently reprogram your mind:

1. Believe in yourself and your abilities.

To say this is key is an understatement. If you don’t believe in yourself, you will ultimately find excuses and ways to fail, whether you realize you’re doing it or not.

We all deal with vulnerability, uncertainty and fear of failure.

But you’ve got to trust that by moving forward despite these feelings, you’ll figure it out. It’s a matter of stacking small victories one on top of the other. Each victory should give you some small boost in confidence that you can use to earn the next victory, and so forth.

This is why having a big hairy goal often doesn’t work — you don’t believe you can accomplish it because you’ve never done anything like it before. But if you break that big hairy goal down into tiny simple goals, and then accomplish them one by one, soon you will believe that yes, you truly can do anything you set your mind to.

2. Remove your money blocks

If you’re perpetually short of money, you’ve likely been programmed to have a negative relationship with it. During your childhood you heard things like, “Rich people are crooks,” and “Money is the root of all evil.” In fact, the correct statement reads: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Two things you can do to lose your money blocks are…

a) Reprogram yourself.

The subconscious believes whatever it hears over and over again. To reprogram your subconscious takes work, but it’s worth it. When you think, “I have to work hard to make money,” correct yourself with a statement such as, “It is so easy and fun to earn money.”

b) Choose 2 or 3 positive affirmations and turn them into mantras that you say to yourself throughout your day and as you fall asleep.

Find friends who are good at making money. Connect with others who are on the same entrepreneurial path you’re on. Talking to, relating to and being around people who easily make money will help you to see it’s alright for you to make money as well.

3. Unclutter your life

The reason you’re attracting new things in your life is because you have a lot of junk in your life.

More importantly, your mind is full of junk — useless information that’s not helping you move ahead.

I used to think that keeping old books is something to be proud of, until I lost all my books. I filled the space with new books. Then I realized I was not only filling my space with old information, but also my mind was full of old ideas.

You have so much useless junk lying around your home, your office and your car, that you don’t have room for the abundance you’re seeking.

Get rid of junk. Give it away or sell it on eBay. That way, you can even make some money while creating room for new stuff, new clothes, new carpets, new furniture and new ideas.

Money doesn’t like clutter. Get rid of everything in your life that serves no purpose and organize the rest. If you’re not growing it’s probably because you don’t have room to grow.

Money loves speed, clarity and clear space.

4. Show gratitude

If you’re not making any progress in life and getting new things it’s probably because you’re not grateful and don’t appreciate what you already have.

I’m telling you I suffered for a long time until I discovered this one simple hack.

I started thanking God for everything I have and forgiving people who had wrongly me. If you don’t believe in God you can at least thank nature for giving you oxygen and fresh air. As long you’re alive and breathing you have something to be grateful about.

Let go of resentments. Positively forgive everybody of everything, with no exceptions.

Holding resentments only hurts you — it doesn’t hurt the person you refuse to forgive. And be grateful for everything you have in your life, as well as those things about to come into your life.

5. Forgive yourself

The person you most need to forgive is yourself.

And you might have to do it over and over again. Forgiveness is a painful thing — today you forgive yourself, tomorrow you’re admonish yourself for the less-than-wise decisions you made.

Any time you find yourself beating yourself up, forgive yourself. You did the best you could at the time. Remind yourself that the past can never be undone, and you can’t live there, either. But you do have today, so make it count.

We’re all vulnerable to mistakes, disappointment and failure. Even the most so-called successful people like Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela struggled in life and failed more times in their lives, and made more mistakes than they could count.

Self-forgiveness one of the most effective methods to reprogram your mind, and the quicker you succeed to do it, the quicker you will move ahead.

6. The Power of Focus

Our default brain is programmed to multitask. This is because of the fear that we might not have enough time to accomplish tasks. However, this belief is self-defeating. In fact, multitasking doesn’t accomplish anything effectively, but leaves many loose ends.

However, the main reason why we fail is because we lack focus and commitment.

Whereas, the power of focus gets more things done effectively and eliminates scatter. This has been scientifically proven.

The majority of us tend to be multitasking in our daily activities. The power of focus draws commitment to one task at a time, and ensures that task is accomplished effectively before moving to the next task.

To overcome this, prioritize your activities and focus on one task at the time. Once you learnt to do this, you will automatically start to eliminate activities which are wasting your time and money.

You will also realize that you become more productive, efficient and less stressful. This is what the power of focus can do for you when you reprogram your mind to start thinking like this.

7. The Power of Autosuggestion

One of the techniques which you can use to help you tap into the power of your mind is the process of autosuggestion.

Autosuggestion is technique whereby you barrage yourself constantly with positive affirmations of what you wish to achieve or become until those affirmations become real in your life.

Autosuggestion is an effective tool to reprogram your mind from negative to positive mental attitude.

This is a deliberate effort on your part to try to transmute your thoughts to manifest physically.

Once your thoughts have become internalized into your subconscious mind, the subconscious will start to set into action the process where all your activities will be focused towards achieving your goal.

8. The Power of Affirmations

With our beliefs, we shape our perception of reality, and hence, we shape our destinies. Our fears of illness, poverty, embarrassment, and negative emotions are the results of the beliefs which we hold in our mind. It is these beliefs which distract us from the success which is rightfully ours to claim.

Affirmations help us to eliminate our old beliefs and replace them with a new set of beliefs. If we repeat our thoughts loudly, often enough, our thoughts will begin to take shape into beliefs. This is an effective method to reprogram our minds.

For example, the common belief that “Money is the root of all evil”, can be replaced with “Money is a good thing”, and “Money is scarce”, can be replaced with “There’s an abundance of money in the world”, and “I don’t have money”, can be replaced with “I make much money?”, and so on…

The subconscious mind takes whatever you feed it as truth. It has no capability to differentiate between good or bad, positive or negative.

Using simple affirmations, we can effectively change our beliefs from negative to positive. With the power of affirmations, we can reshaped our reality and create a new and better life for ourselves.

9. The Power of Visualization

“What you can see, you can have.”

Visualization is about what you can see and how far you can see.

Visualization is a technique for creating the reality we want through imagery, diagrams, or animations for the thing we want to achieve in future. There are many tools to do this including software. This is has an effect of transforming our mindsets to start thinking and planning in terms of what we want achieve in future.

Visualization is not a new concept. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity.

Examples from history have been evidenced in cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry.

Leonardo da Vinci’s revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes is an example of visualization.

Visualization, today has many applications. We can apply visualization in our personal lives to achieve anything or in business. If we keep visualizing what we want to achieve, it becomes easier to achieve it because it becomes our new reality. This has an effect of reprogramming our minds to start working on the thing we want to achieve, now so that we can manifest it physically in future.

More importantly, visualization draws us to the thing we want to get. Vision boards are effective tools to help us see more clearly, what we want to achieve and as result, we feel more strongly, drawn towards it.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, it is easier to theorize than to apply all the suggestions mentioned here. Humans do not have the affinity for taking action. This explains why only a few people are successful while the rest are mediocre.

Even if I give you all the tools in the world to reprogram your mind for free, I’m sure only a few people will take action. This is the default setting of all human beings. It takes a great deal of deliberate effort to alter the default settings of our minds, sometimes, it can take forever to change our minds.

The process of achieving success, good health, becoming famous, or getting rich is made easier if your mind changes. Even with all the scientific methods available, many people will still not take any action, although by doing so, they’re creating better lives for themselves, their community and their loved ones. This explains why some people are more successful than others, not just in terms of wealth, but also in terms of achievements.

Fortunately, today, there are modern tools to assist you to make the process easier for you. These tools are not an end in themselves, just like computers are not an end in themselves in terms of automation.

However, these tools are scientifically proven to help hack your mind, and are said to have helped many people accomplish their goals.

If a scientific tool can help me to stop smoking, stop abusing drugs, create a better future for myself, or help me lose weight, then I think such a tool should be given consideration.

I also struggled with many issues until a friend recommended a mind-hack program, which the rich and famous SECRETLY use to hack and reprogram their minds, get better results, become more successful, achieve their goals, and basically, manifest what they want in life.

Article Source: Medium