Студопедия

Главная страница Случайная страница

КАТЕГОРИИ:

АвтомобилиАстрономияБиологияГеографияДом и садДругие языкиДругоеИнформатикаИсторияКультураЛитератураЛогикаМатематикаМедицинаМеталлургияМеханикаОбразованиеОхрана трудаПедагогикаПолитикаПравоПсихологияРелигияРиторикаСоциологияСпортСтроительствоТехнологияТуризмФизикаФилософияФинансыХимияЧерчениеЭкологияЭкономикаЭлектроника






The Ten-Day Mental Challenge






 

You may ask, " How long can I focus on the negative before it's considered 'dwelling'? " To me, one minute of continual focus on, and emotional attachment to, what's wrong is dwelling. One minute is more than enough time for us to be able to catch ourselves and create a change. Our whole goal is to catch the monster while it's little. Certainly, within twenty to forty seconds you know if you're being negative about something.

If I were you, though, I'd give myself up to a maximum of two minutes to notice the challenge and begin to change your state. Two minutes is certainly enough time to identify that you're in a negative state. Break the pattern. If you allow yourself to go as long as five minutes or more, you'll find the Mental Challenge won't accomplish its task; instead, you'll just learn to vent your emotions more quickly. The goal is to knock things out before you ever get in a negative emotional state in

the first place.

When I first tried this exercise, after doing it for three days I got caught up and angry about something and indulged for about five minutes in negative emotions before I realized what I was doing. I had to start all over. On my second trip through, on the sixth day, I ran into some major challenges, but at this point I was committed. I wasn't about to start over again! So I immediately found myself focusing on the solution.

The benefit, as you can guess, was not just staying with my mental diet, but I began conditioning myself for a tremendous, lifelong pattern of staying in a positive emotional state, even when there were challenges around me, and focusing the majority of my energy on solutions.

To this day, even when I hear about problems, as you've probably noticed, I tend to call them challenges. I don't dwell on them, and Iimmediately focus on how I can convert the challenge into an opportunity.

 

" We first make our habits, and then our habits make us."

JOHN DRYDEN

 

You may decide that while you're taking this Mental Challenge you may want to cleanse your body as well. In Unlimited Power I issued a ten-day physical challenge. Combining both the ten-day Living Health Vitality Challenge with the ten-day Mental Challenge can produce powerful results that can take your life to another level in the next ten days. By committing and following through on this Mental Challenge, you'll be giving yourself a break from limiting habits and flexing the muscles of empowerment. You'll be sending your brain a new message and commanding new results. You will be demanding empowering emotions, enriching thoughts, inspiring questions.

With a clear-cut moving-away idea (the pain of starting over) you are giving your brain strong signals to search for empowering patterns. By setting a higher standard for what thoughts you'll allow your mind to dwell on, you'll begin to notice the garbage and destructive patterns you used to blindly or lazily accept from yourself. And as a result, you'll find it difficult to ever go back to the old ways again. The starkness of this approach will cause you to remember these patterns in the future and make it difficult to go back to the old patterns again.

A word of caution: Don't begin this ten-day commitment unless and until you are certain that you are going to live by it for the full length of time. If you don't start out with a sense of commitment, you certainly won't make it through the ten days. This is not a challenge for the weak at heart. This is only for those who are really committed to conditioning their nervous systems for new, empowering emotional patterns that can take their lives to the next level.

Have you decided yet whether you're going to do this? Think about it carefully before committing yourself, because once you do, you need to hold yourself to your word and experience the joy that comes with a disciplined effort. If your answer is yes, for the next ten days you'll be taking the things you've learned intellectually up until now and making them part of your daily experience of life. These ten days will help you use the NAC technology to condition yourself for success. You'll be asking new questions, using Transformational Vocabulary and more empowering global metaphors, and instantly changing your focus and physiology.

Let's face it, we all have our indulgences in life. If you're overweight, your indulgences may be chocolate fudge sundaes or double-cheese pizza. When you diet, you say to yourself, " Enough is enough. This is where I draw the line." You hold yourself to a higher standard and enjoy the self-esteem that comes with that single, small, disciplined act. But we all have our mental indulgences, too. Some people feel sorry for themselves.

Some get angry in a way that subverts their own best interests. Some of us fail to focus on the things that need attention. My challenge to you is to decide that for ten days, you will not allow yourself a single one of these destructive mental indulgences.

What stands in the way of just deciding to banish them? Three things, really. One is laziness. A lot of people know what they should do, but never quite get up the energy to do it. Many know their lives could be something more, yet they're sitting in front of the tube, eating junk food, depriving their minds and bodies of the fuel they need to spark new growth.

The second obstacle is fear. All too often, the security of a mediocre present is more comfortable than the adventure of trying to be more in the future. So many people get to the end of their lives wondering what could have been—don't let this happen to you.

The third challenge is force of habit. We have our old emotional patterns: the deadening force of routine. Like a plane on automatic pilot, our brain dredges up the same old responses it always has. We face an obstacle and see the problem instead of the solution. We suffer a reversal and feel sorry for ourselves instead of deciding how to learn from it. We make a mistake and see it as some sort of baleful judgment on what we can't do, instead of deciding to learn from it and move forward. This

exercise is a way to get beyond all three and produce lasting changes with benefits that can multiply over time. This is your opportunity to make a true commitment to CANI!

This Ten-Day Challenge is not easy. If you habitually feel sorry for yourself, it's not easy to stop. If you're focusing on financial pressure, operating out of fear won't make it any better. If you blame your spouse for everything that goes wrong in your life, the easy thing is to keep doing it. If you mask your insecurities by being angry all the time, if you wallow in guilt, if you blame your looks or your financial situation or your upbringing for all your problems, it's not easy to change. But you already have so many tools to improve your life. This is my challenge to you to start using them.

Believe me, the power inherent in this little exercise is amazing. If you stick with it, it will do four things for you. First, it will make you acutely aware of all the habitual mental patterns that hold you back. Second, it will make your brain search for empowering alternatives to them.

Third, it will give you an incredible jolt of confidence as you see that you can turn your life around. Fourth, and most importantly, it will create new habits, new standards, and new expectations that will help you expand more than you could ever believe.

Success is processional. It's the result of a series of small disciplines that lead us into habitual patterns of success that no longer require consistent will or effort. Like a freight train picking up speed, this exercise in doing things right consciously, in erasing the patterns that hold you back and installing new ones that can propel you forward, will give you a sense of momentum like very few things you've done in your life.

The great news about this is that, unlike a diet where you starve yourself and eventually have to go back to eating, your old pattern of finding the negative is not one you ever have to return to again. This may not be a ten-day exercise in the end. It's really an opportunity for you to become " addicted" to a positive focus for the rest of your life. But if, after banishing your toxic mental patterns for ten days, you want to return, be my guest. The truth is that once you experience life in this mentally vital

and alive way, going back would disgust you. But if you ever find yourself getting off track, you have the tools to immediately put yourself back on the high road again.

Remember, though, only you can make this ten-day Mental Challenge work. Only you can make the commitment to really follow through.

You might consider getting extra leverage on yourself to make certain you follow through. One way of providing yourself extra incentive is to announce to the people around you what you're committing to, or find a partner who wants to take on this ten-day Mental Challenge with you.

In addition, it would be ideal for you to keep a written journal while you're meeting the ten-day Mental Challenge, writing your experiences each day and recording how you successfully dealt with those various challenges. I think you'll find it invaluable to review later on.

Finally, one of the most valuable took in creating a change is not just interrupting your old pattern, but replacing it with something new. What you may decide to commit to doing is something I do on an ongoing basis throughout my life: become a reader.

 

 


Поделиться с друзьями:

mylektsii.su - Мои Лекции - 2015-2024 год. (0.009 сек.)Все материалы представленные на сайте исключительно с целью ознакомления читателями и не преследуют коммерческих целей или нарушение авторских прав Пожаловаться на материал