The Essential Mindset for Success

What’s stopping you from achieving your health and fitness goals? Are you struggling to stay motivated? You may have noticed some unwanted patterns of behaviour that make you go off track at times. Or maybe you’ve simply been procrastinating for a long time and haven’t got out of your comfort zone to take action and get started with it? Sounds all too familiar?

Whatever are the reasons that hold you back from getting in the best shape of your life, it may largely be down to your identity, self-image and habitual behaviour (our habits define us!). Your best endeavour may be clashing with the picture of yourself ingrained in your subconscious mind. Dr Maxwell Maltz explains this in the classic self-help book “Psycho-Cybernetics”:

Whether we realize it or not, each of us carries about with us a mental blueprint or picture of ourselves. It may be vague and ill defined to our conscious gaze. In fact, it may not be consciously recognizable at all. But it is there, complete down to the last detail. This self-image is our own conception of the "sort of person I am.” It has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves. But most of these beliefs about ourselves have unconsciously been formed from our past experiences, our successes and failures, our humiliations, our triumphs, and the way other people have reacted to us, especially in early childhood. From all these we mentally construct a "self" (or a picture of a self). Once an idea or belief about ourselves goes into this picture it becomes “true,” as far as we personally are concerned. We do not question its validity, but proceed to act upon it just as if it were true.

This self-image becomes a golden key to living a better life because of two important discoveries:

- All your actions, feelings, behaviour-even your abilities-are always consistent with this self-image. In short, you will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be. Not only this, but you literally cannot act otherwise, in spite of all your conscious efforts or will power. The man who conceives himself to be a "failure-type person" will find some way to fail, in spite of all his good intentions, or his will power, even if opportunity is literally dumped in his lap.  The self-image is a "premise,” a base, or a foundation upon which your entire personality, your behaviour, and even your circumstances are built. Because of this our experiences seem to verify, and thereby strengthen our self-images, and a vicious or a beneficent cycle, as the case may be, is set up.

- The self-image can be changed. Numerous case histories have shown that one is never too young nor too old to change this self-image and thereby start to live a new life. The self-image is changed, for better or worse, not by intellect alone, nor by intellectual knowledge alone, but by "experiencing." Wittingly or unwittingly you developed your self-image by your creative experiencing in the past. You can change it by the same method. Our present state of self-confidence and poise is the result of what we have "experienced" rather than what we have learned intellectually.

Due to popular demand I have once again teamed up with TheBrainPeople.com to teach essential training and nutritional advice during the same weekend that James Hutchinson (NLP Trainer, Coach, Clinical Hypnotherapist, CEO The Brain People) explores the mindset required to not only set a plan but STICK to it!

If you’d like to learn a wide range of useful techniques that can be applied immediately to alter your thinking patterns and achieve great success with your health & fitness goals, we have a few spaces available for the two day weekend Mind & Body seminar “With Your Weight In Mind” on 12^th and 13^th of January 2013. Please refer to www.thebrainpeople.com for details (under "programmes") - the other two weekend events shown are now sold out, we must be doing something right! You can read more info here and to book your place click here.