Forging Your Self-Confidence: Part 2
Posted by Brian Tracy on Oct 19, 2009
Some years ago, a young man named Tim came to one of my personal-development seminars. He was shy and introverted. His handshake was weak and he had tremendous difficulty making eye contact. He sat in the back of the seminar room with his head down, taking notes. He seemed to have few friends, and he didn’t socialize very much during the breaks. At the end of the seminar, he told me that he was in sales and hadn’t been doing very well up to that time. But he had resolved to change, to go to work on himself, to overcome his shyness and to become very good at selling for his company. He then said good-bye, and I wished him the best of luck as he went on his way. Read the rest of this entry »
7 Factors of Luck, Part 3 of 3
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jul 9, 2009
Luck Factor #5: Personality
Personality is a key luck factor. The more positive, optimistic and cheerful you are, the more people will want to be around you and help you in any way possible. Lucky people also tend to be happy, positive people. They get along with others and they have wide networks of friends and contacts in a variety of different areas.
The Butterfly Effect
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jun 4, 2009
It has been said that, “A Butterfly flapping its wings in Peru can start a change in the weather that leads to a typhoon in China.â€
The application of this idea is that a casual meeting with a new acquaintance at can have major long-term effects on your sales and your life.
At every turn in the road of your life, there will be a person standing there helping you or hurting you, guiding you or blocking you, giving you good or bad direction.
Read the rest of this entry »
How to Get What You Want by Helping Others Get What They Want, Part 2 of 4
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 19, 2009
A critical part of power and influence in your life and work revolves around the subject of “ownership.”?
When you have something that you want to get done, you “own” the job or task. If you simply tell someone else to do all or part of the job, they may comply because they are required to, but they will not accept ownership. As far as they are concerned, if the job is done well or poorly, it is still your job.
Highly effective people however, are those who have developed the ability to transfer the concept of ownership into the mind and heart of the other person. This is done by bringing the subject up in a casual way, discussing thoroughly with the other person, asking for his or her ideas and input, as well as suggestions on how best to do the job, and then giving the other person both the authority and encouragement to do the job within a certain time and to a certain standard.
“Leverage” is the key to great success. You need to be able to take your talents and abilities and multiple them times the talents and abilities of many other people if you are determined to accomplish great things and realize your full potential in life.
There are five keys to wealth and great success in our highly competitive society today. The first, which you have heard of for years is called “OPM,” or “Other People’s Money.” You will only be successful to the degree to which you can tap into, borrow and deploy the funds of other people. This is why it is so important that you accumulate your own funds and that you keep a meticulous credit rating throughout your life.
All success in life, in relationships and in business is based on the foundation of trust. As Benjamin Franklin has said, “Cash is money and credit is money, and the person who can call upon the credit of others has no limit to the funds at his disposal.”
All great fortunes and great success in life is built on the ability to attract and leverage the funds of other people. Every loan that you ever take out, from a simple credit card all the way up to the financing of a home or business, is based on the use of other people’s money. This is a key leverage factor that many people have used to go from rags to riches.
Another form of leverage is called “OPE,” which refers to “Other People’s Effort.” Your ability to attract people who will willingly work hard to help you to be more successful while they are helping themselves is a key to your success. If you want to accomplish great things in life, you must have the help and support of lots of other people. If you are going to work by yourself running a shoeshine stand or working a farm, you can get by with the limited efforts and support of others. But if you are going to achieve all that you are capable of achieving, you must structure your life so that you can tap into the energy and efforts of lots and lots of people, at all levels.
You will find that, at every turning point in your life, there is a person standing with advice, support, direction and resources. In fact, the more people you know, and who know you in a positive way, the more successful you will be.
You have heard it said that “success leaves tracks.” This means that you should find out what other successful people do and then do more of it yourself and you will eventually get the same results.
Well, when you look around you, you will find that the most successful people in your society are the ones who know, and who are known by, the greatest number of other successful people.
Of course, it is absolutely essential that you become the kind of person who both attracts and deserves the respect of others. The very best way for you to become a major player, an influence in your business and your society, is for you to become very, very good at what you do. This, more than anything else, will attract into your life the kind of people who can be extraordinarily helpful in advancing your life and your career.
Learn to attract what you deserve in your life with The Law of Attraction - In Action
The third form of leverage that you can develop is called “OPI” which stands for “Other People’s Ideas.” One good idea is all you need to start a fortune. Every change in your life comes about when your mind collides with a new idea of some kind. A very small change in your thinking, or in your mental paradigms, as the result of your bumping into a new idea that enables you to see things in a different way can change the whole future direction of your life.
Successful people are those who are always organizing their life so that they are in the mainstream of ideas, rather than sitting on the shore watching the ideas flow past. They continually bombard themselves with books, magazines, articles, newsletters, audio programs as well as regular attendance at seminars and conventions.
The most successful people have learned that a single idea can save them weeks, months, even years of hard work and that the Law of Probabilities applies to the entire world of ideas. The more ideas you expose yourself to in a given period of time, the more likely it is that you will expose yourself to the right idea at the right time for you. If you bombard your mind with hundreds of ideas during the course of a year, you are much more likely to be successful than the person who reads little, listens to the radio and goes home and watches television at night. The odds are very much in your favor.
Next time, I will explain more secrets of getting what you want by helping others get what they want.
The Law of Attraction - In Action
The Key to Charisma
Posted by Brian Tracy on Sep 19, 2008
There is a close association between personal charisma and success in life.
Probably 85 percent of your success and happiness will come from your relationships and interactions with others. The more positively others respond to you, the easier it will be for you to get the things you want.
The Law of Attraction
In essence, when we discuss charisma, we are talking about the law of attraction. This law has been stated in many different ways down through the centuries, but it basically says that you inevitably attract into your life the people and circumstances that harmonize with your dominant thoughts.
You Are A Living Magnet
In a sense, you are a living magnet, and you are constantly radiating thought waves, like a radio station radiates sound waves, that are picked up by other people. Your thoughts, intensified by your emotions, as radio waves are intensified by electric impulses, go out from you and are picked up by anyone who is tuned in to a similar wavelength. You then attract into your life people, ideas, opportunities, resources, circumstances and anything else that is consistent with your dominant frame of mind.
The law of attraction also explains how you can build up your levels of charisma so that you can have a greater and more positive impact on the people whose cooperation, support and affection you desire.
Perception is Everything
The critical thing to remember about charisma is that it is largely based on perception. It is based on what people think about you. It is not so much reality as it is what people perceive you to be. For example, one person can create charisma in another person by speaking in glowing terms about that person to a third party. If you believe that you are about to meet an outstanding and important person, that person will tend to have charisma for you.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta
One of the most charismatic people in the world was Mother Teresa of Calcutta. In a physical sense, she was a quiet, elderly, frail woman in poor health, and she wore a modest nun’s habit. She might have been ignored by a person passing her on the street, were it not for the tremendous charisma she developed and for the fact that her appearance was so well-known to so many people as a result.
How Would You Feel?
If someone told you that he was going to introduce you to a brilliant, self-made millionaire who was very quiet and unassuming about his success, you would almost naturally imbue that person with charisma, and in his presence, you would not act the same as you would if you had been told nothing at all. Charisma begins largely in the mind of the beholder.
Lasting charisma depends more upon the person you really are than upon just the things you do.
Continually look for ways to improve other’s perceptions of you so that you can be more influential with them. Be a living magnet.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, be clear about the messages you are sending and the perceptions you are creating in others. Are these perceptions consistent with the impressions you want to make?
Second, see yourself and imagine yourself every day as an important powerful and charming person. Treat others as you would if you were already strong, famous and influential.
Fake it until you make it!
The Law of Attraction — In Action LIVE Teleseminar
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals faster than you ever imagined!
Two Principles for Financial Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Sep 19, 2008
There are two great principles for achieving financial success.
The first Principle is what we call the law of attraction. The law of attraction says that you are a living magnet. It says that your thoughts create a force field of energy that radiates out from you and attracts back into your life people and circumstances in harmony with them. Any thought you have, combined with an emotion, positive or negative, radiates out from you and attracts back into your life the people, circumstances, ideas and opportunities consistent with it.
How to Attract the Success You Desire
Many people feel that this is perhaps the most important of all mental laws. It says that if you have a very clear idea in your mind of your desired goal, to become wealthy, and you can hold that idea in your mind on a continuing basis, you will inevitably draw into your life the resources that you need in order to achieve it. Every person who has become wealthy or successful has become wealthy and successful as a result of holding the idea of wealth and success in their mind long enough and hard enough, until they drew into their lives the resources they needed to accomplish it.
Your World Reflects Your Thoughts
The second principle is called the law of correspondence. This mental law is very powerful. It says, "as within, so without." It says that your outer world is like a mirror that reflects back to you what is going on in your inner world. And this law of correspondence says that everything that happens outside of you corresponds to something that’s going on inside of you. When we say that your outer world is a reflection of your inner world, we mean both at a conscious and at a subconscious level.
The Law of Attraction — In Action LIVE Teleseminar will teavh you to attract what you desire!
Visualize Your Goals Clearly
If you consciously believe that you have the ability to achieve your goals and you can hold a picture of those goals clearly in your mind long enough and hard enough, eventually your outer world will correspond with it.
Three Reflections of Success
There are three places where we see this law of correspondence. First of all, your outer world of people will correspond exactly with your own attitude. You will always see your attitude reflected back to you in the faces and the behaviors of the people around you. If you have a positive, optimistic attitude, people will respond to you almost immediately, even before you open your mouth, in a positive and cheerful way.
Relationships Show You Who You Are
The second area where we see the law of correspondence is in your relationships. Your relationships will always mirror back to you exactly the kind of a person you are. When you are happy and optimistic and at peace, your relationships will be happy and harmonious and loving. But when your thinking is disrupted or negative for any reason, consciously or unconsciously, this will be immediately reflected in your relationships.
Inner and Outer Wealth
The third place you see the law of correspondence is with regard to your wealth. Your external world of wealth and financial accomplishment will be a mirror image of your inner world of preparation. The only part of the equation that you can control is your conscious thoughts, and if you can keep your conscious thoughts on what you want, on your images of wealth and affluence, eventually your external world of reality and experiences will reflect it back to you.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to apply these principles in your financial life:
First, guard your thoughts carefully. Whatever you think about, combined with the emotions of desire or fear, you will attract into your life. Be sure that you are attracting what you want by continuing to think only about what you want.
Second, keep feeding your mind with new information, ideas and pictures of the person you want to be and the life you want to live. By creating this inner attitude of mind, you change the outer aspects of your reality.
The Law of Attraction — In Action LIVE Teleseminar
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals faster than you ever imagined!
The Toughest Job
Posted by Brian Tracy on Sep 17, 2008
There Are No Buffers
Selling is one of the toughest jobs in the world. There are no buffers between you and the reality of daily difficulties, delays and disappointments. You often ride an emotional roller-coaster, up and down, that never seems to stop. You are all alone.
You Must Motivate Yourself
Like a front line soldier, you must get yourself up every day and go out to where the bullets of rejection fly. You must continually deal with the possibility that all your sales efforts could turn out to be in vain through no fault of your own. And you must keep on going in spite of this because your profession of selling requires it.
Face the Facts of Selling
Selling is hard. It always has and it always will be. Even for the best and most experienced salespeople, it is a continual effort. You can make it easier by developing your skills in the critical areas of prospecting, presenting and closing sales, but you can never make selling an easy profession. However, once you accept that selling is a hard way to make a living, it somehow becomes a little easier. When you stop expecting it to be something other than it is, much of the stress of selling goes out of it. As William James said, "The first step in dealing with any difficulty is to be willing to have it so."
Open Unlimited Opportunities
Selling is also a wonderful profession. It offers opportunities for the average person that are unimaginable in most countries. Your potential earnings are beyond what 95 percent of the world’s population could ever hope for or expect. Because selling is difficult, your activities are valuable and important and they have to pay you very well for carrying them out. As you move to the top of your field, you can earn more than a person with ten or twelve years of university education. You can eventually become financially independent. Fully five percent of self-made millionaires in America are salespeople who do their jobs extremely well.
Make a Wonderful Living
As a salesperson, the reason that you can make a wonderful living for yourself and your family, achieve your goals and fulfill all of your aspirations, is because making the sale is difficult, and often, extremely difficult. And the longer the sales cycle, or the larger the dollar amount involved, the more that companies have to pay salespeople to do the work. When you are selling complicated or expensive products in a highly competitive market, and you do it well, you can become one of the highest paid people in your field, if not the world.
Using The Law of Attraction can help you achieve all your goals!
Be the Best at What You Do
You should get up every morning and give a silent prayer of thanks that selling is so difficult. If it was easy, the field would be flooded by amateurs and the amount you could earn would be greatly reduced. But because it is hellishly hard, by becoming very good at it, your future can be unlimited!
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, dedicate yourself to getting better and better at selling. The better you get at selling and closing, the easier and more enjoyable it is.
Second, be grateful that selling is a tough job. It keeps the weaklings and the mediocre out of the field and enables you to be even more successful.
The Law of Attraction — In Action LIVE Teleseminar
See Also
- Brian Tracy International
Helping you achieve your personal and business goals faster than you ever imagined!
Don’t Lose Money!
Posted by Brian Tracy on Jul 25, 2008
W. Clement Stone once said, “If you cannot save money, then the seeds of greatness are not in you.”
Throughout the history of American enterprise, you’ve heard the words, "work hard and save your money." Work hard and save your money. It is the oldest rule for success in America. It’s so important, as a matter of fact, that W. Clement Stone once said, "If you cannot save money, then the seeds of greatness are not in you."
Saving is a Discipline
Why is it that saving money is so important? Because saving money is a discipline and any discipline affects all other disciplines in your life. If you do not have the discipline to refrain from spending all the money that you earn, then you are not qualified to become wealthy and if you do become wealthy, you’ll not be capable of holding on to it.
The Law of Attraction
A principle with regard to saving your money is the law of attraction. The law of attraction is activated by saved money. Even one dollar saved will start to attract more money. Here’s what I suggest that you do. If you’re really serious about your future, go down and open a savings account. Put as much money as you can into it, even if it’s only ten dollars. And then begin to collect little bits of money, and every week go down and put something into that account.
Learn more about financial success with
The 21 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Money.
Attract More Money Into Your Life
You will find that the more you put in that account, the more you will attract from sources that you cannot now predict. But if you do not begin the savings process, if you don’t begin putting something away towards your financial independence, then nothing will happen to you. The law of attraction just simply won’t work.
Invest Your Money Conservatively
Once you begin to accumulate money, here’s another rule. Invest the money conservatively. Marvin Davis, self-made billionaire, was asked by Forbes Magazine, "How do you account for your financial success?" And he said, "Well, I have two rules for financial investing." He said, "Rule number one is, don’t lose money." He said, whenever I’m tempted, whenever I see an opportunity to invest where there’s a possibility I could lose it all, I just simply refrain from putting the money in. Rule number two is, whenever I get tempted, I refer back to rule number one. Don’t lose money.
Get Rich Slowly
George Classon says, in The Richest Man In Babylon, that the key is to accumulate your funds and then invest them very conservatively. One of the characteristics of self-made millionaires, one of the characteristics of old money in America is that it’s very cautiously, conservatively and prudently invested.
Don’t try to get rich quickly. Concentrate rather on getting rich slowly. If all you do is save ten percent of your earnings, put it away, and let it accumulate at compound interest, that alone will make you wealthy.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to apply these lessons to your financial life:
First, open a separate savings and investing account today. From this day forward, put every single dollar you can spare into this account and resolve to never touch it or spend it for any reason.
Second, whenever you consider any investment of your savings, remember the rule, "Don’t lose money!" It is better to keep the money working at a low rate of interest than to take the chance of losing it. Be careful. A fool and his money are soon parted.
Learn more about financial success with
The 21 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Money.
The Real Secret of Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on May 14, 2008
“Esoteric Arts�?
More than 5,000 years ago, in the ancient mystery schools of Egypt, the mental and spiritual laws and principles of success were taught to students who dedicated their entire lives to learning in what was called the “Esoteric Arts.”
One of these “secrets” was the Law of Attraction, which said that your mind is a magnet and that you invariably attract into your life people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts, especially your dominant thoughts emotionalized.
Today we say, “Like attracts like” and “Birds of a feather flock together.” From ancient times, it was known that your mind sends out vibrations, like radio waves, that are picked up by the minds of other people who are tuned into the same rate of vibration.
The force that determines the sending power of your mental vibrations is the amount of emotion, positive or negative, that you put behind a thought. If there is something that you intensely desire, something that excites you and enthuses you, you will send out powerful, high-frequency vibrations that can travel large distances in split seconds and cause your phone to ring from someone you have not heard from for months or even years.
Because your mind is so powerful, especially when backed by emotionalized thoughts, you must handle it carefully, like a child handling a gun. The Law of Attraction is neutral. It works on both positive and negative thoughts. It brings into your life whatever you are thinking about on a regular basis with either fear or desire.
When the book, “The Secret” came out, along with the movie, I was happily surprised to see that the first half of the movie comes from my audio program and seminar, “The Psychology of Achievement” which was produced initially in 1981. We videotaped the live seminar which explains the Law of Attraction along with thirty-one other laws, plus how this law is applied in every area of life, and then distributed the video seminar world wide, including New Zealand, where the Author of The Secret comes from.
The weakness in The Secret is that it is “necessary but not sufficient.” Of course, it is important that you think positive thoughts and that, by so doing, you will attract positive people and circumstances into your life. But it is not enough.
In response to The Secret, I decided to write a book which is called “Flight Plan – The Real Secret of Success.” In this book, I explain that life is very much like a long distance flight. When the plane takes off, it will be off course 99% of the time. But nonetheless, the plane will eventually arrive at its destination, even thought it was off course most of the time.
In my experience, the real secret of success consists of three major factors: First, you must be absolutely clear about your destination. By this I mean that must have clear, written, specific, measurable goals, committed to paper and organized into specific, step-by-step plans of action.
Before you can set your goals, you must know exactly who you are and what you want. You must do a thorough analysis of yourself, your life, your hopes, your dreams, your ambitions, and where you want to be sometime in the future. Then, you create a “Flight Plan” to get you from wherever you are today to wherever you want to be in the months and years ahead.
The second part of Flight Plan is that you must “take off!” You must have the courage to step out in faith with no guarantee of success. You must be prepared to launch in the face of your fears, doubts and natural reluctance to break out of your comfort zone. “To achieve something that you have never achieved before, you must be prepared to do something that you have never done before.” (Les Brown).
Once you have launched toward your goal, like an airplane, you will meet with unexpected turbulence, headwinds, updrafts and downdrafts, lightning, storms and every sort of mechanical problem. You must be prepared to make continual “course corrections” as you move toward your goal.
Perhaps the most important quality for success is, and always has been, the quality of persistence. You must resolve in advance to persist in the face of any difficulty or problem that you experience. You must resolve in advance that you will never give up. You must resolve in advance that you will view every temporary setback or difficulty as merely a signal that you need to make a “course correction” as you move inevitably toward your goal.
This is a great time to be alive. The very best days of your life lie ahead of you. The highest income of your life is still to come. The greatest experiences of your life are still to be experienced.
There is very little that you can not accomplish if you will file your flight plan. Determine exactly what it is that you want to achieve, take off toward your goal with no guarantees of success, and then make continual course corrections until you finally succeed. If you resolve to do these things, nothing can stop you from creating an extraordinary life.
An Accumulation of Riches
Posted by Brian Tracy on Apr 8, 2008
Little Things Mean A Lot
One of the greatest success principles of all is called the Law of Accumulation. This law says that everything great and worthwhile in human life is an accumulation of hundreds and sometimes thousands of tiny efforts and sacrifices that nobody ever sees or appreciates. It says that everything accumulates over time. That you have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile. It’s like a snowball. A snowball starts very small, but it grows as it adds millions and millions of tiny snowflakes and continues to grow as it gathers momentum.
Learn What You Need To Learn
There are three areas where the law of accumulation is important. The first is in the area of knowledge. Your body of knowledge is a result of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small pieces of information.
Any person with a large knowledge base has spent thousands of hours building that knowledge base one piece at a time. And what you see when you meet the individual is an expert in his or her field, with that high level of knowledge that makes him very valuable in the marketplace.
Save Your Money
The second area where the Law of accumulation works is with regard to money. Every large fortune is an accumulation of hundreds and thousands of small amounts of money, and the place to start is to take any amount of money that you can right now and begin to save it. When you begin to save money, it sets up a force field of energy and it triggers the law of attraction. As a result you begin to attract to you even more bits of money to add to your savings.
Do you want to know the laws of success?
There are laws that explain how people act in any given situation. Laws that explain why some people triumph while others fail. These laws can predict the outcome in the game of life. If you learn these laws, and apply them — YOU will become a winner.
Attract Riches Into Your Life
And I’ve spoken to many, many successful people and they’ve told me the same story. That as soon as you start to put savings aside, it starts to attract into your life and into your work all the money that you need to achieve your goals. The reason why most people retire poor is they never put the initial savings aside to start with.
Get The Experience You Need
The third area where the law of accumulation applies is in the area of experience. You’ll find that successful people in any field are those who have far more experience in that field than the average. And there is nothing that replaces experience. Whether it’s in business or entrepreneurship or management or parenting or selling or anything else. Many people do not take the risks that are necessary to move out of their comfort zone because they’re afraid it won’t work out.
Everything Counts
But the fact is that until you move out of the comfort zone and get the experience from making the mistakes, it’s not possible for you to grow and become capable of earning the kind of money that you desire. Now here’s the key to the law of accumulation. It says that everything counts. Everything that you do counts. The biggest mistake that people make is they think that only what they want to count, counts. That when you read a book, when you listen to an audio program, when you go to a course, when you go to bed early and you get up early and you work, it all counts. And it’s all going on the plus side of your ledger.
Use Your Time Well
But when you watch television, waste time, hang out, fool around and so on, all of that counts, as well, and it’s going on the negative side. A person who has a great life, by the law of accumulation, is a person who’s accumulated far more credits on the credit side than debits on the debit side. And here’s an important point. If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals. Nothing is neutral. Everything that you’re doing is either moving you toward the things that you want to accomplish in life, the person you want to be, the wealth you want to accumulate, or it’s moving you away. Everything counts. The law of accumulation says that everything counts.
Action Exercises
First, begin today to build your knowledge base in the subject that can be most helpful to you in achieving financial independence. Whether it takes a week, a month or a year to become thoroughly knowledgeable, it doesn’t matter. Just get started today.
Second, get as much experience as you can in your chosen field. Start a little earlier, work a little harder and stay a little later. Take risks and try every different way you can think of to achieve your goal. This experience is invaluable and it accumulates over time.
The Universal Laws of Success and Achievement
