Five things you can do right now to begin achieving your dreams

Saturday, September 6th, 2008 : Read 1,011 Times : 913 words (Aprox 4 min read)

People see the success my clients and students achieve and ask me, “What can I do to be that successful?”

The mentality is that there’s some kind of “magic bullet” that will automatically transform their life without any kind of investment or effort.

Unfortunately, there isn’t. But there is something you can do right now from the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (also known as NLP) to jump-start your success...

Five Principle For Success

This principles come directly from Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and when you follow these steps, you’ll begin to see automatic results in your life.

1. Know Your Outcome

I often ask people, “What do you want?” and I’m always amazed at the answers I get.

They usually range from, “I don’t know,” to, “Well I don’t want X, and I hate Y.”

Most people have no idea what they really want.

One thing we know about the unconscious mind – which is the goal-getting part of your mind – is that it needs clear instructions to achieve a goal, otherwise you’re likely to get inconsistent results.

You must know what you want in detail. That doesn’t mean you have to know the exact steps to get it, yet. But you to have to have a clear internal representation of what it is.

This means you know what it will look like, sound like, and feel like, and even what you might be saying to yourself when you get that goal.

You can read more about how to set effective goals in our Free NLP Guide under the Keys To An Achievable Outcome.

2. Take Action

Tony Robbins once said, "Knowledge isn’t power. Knowledge is only potential power. Action is power." No truer words have been spoken.

For instance, I loved the movie The Secret. I thought it was very inspirational and entertaining.

But so many people tell me they tried it, but it “didn’t work.”

And when I asked what they did, it essentially came down to “wishing for it.” The movie simply doesn’t put enough emphasis on taking action.

My Grandmother used to say, “Wish in one hand and crap in the other. Put them together and tell me what you’ve got.”

Wishing simply isn’t going to get the job done. You’ve got to take action. Take the first step.

So, how do you know what the first step is? Simple. Start with your future goal and work backward.

If your outcome is to have $1,000,000 net in a year, what would have to be your nine month goal to have $1M in twelve months? And what would have to be your six month goal to get the nine month goal? What would your three month goal have to be to get that six month goal?

By working out the details backwards, you can find that very crucial first step for any goal, no matter how big or small.

3. Have Sensory Acuity (Heightened Awareness)

Sensory acuity means, being aware of what’s going on around you. Seeing, hearing and feeling your results, and paying attention to whether or not they’re advancing you toward your outcome or not.

If you’re paying attention to the results, and they’re not what you want, then you need to…

4. Have Behavioral Flexibility

There’s a rule in NLP that basically says, he who has the most flexibility in their behavior, wins.

This means that if you are willing to do whatever it takes (obviously, within your own moral scope) to achieve your goal, you are far more likely to achieve it than if you were fixed in the way it “must be done.”

So often, people are rigidly fixed in their behavior, that success just passes them by. They keep doing the same things over and over again, expecting a different result. And we all know what Einstein said about that – insanity!

So, be willing to change your behavior in ways that you maybe didn’t expect to get results. The more flexible you can be, the easier success will come.

5. Operate From a Physiology and Psychology of Excellence

Finally, have your body and your mind 100% focused on success. This is called a physiology and psychology of excellence.

Your physiological being is essentially a machine that is designed to produce the results that you’re focusing on. It doesn’t matter if you program it with – happy or sad, thin or fat, smoker or non-smoker, rich or poor – it will act out any image, concept or idea that you are holding in your conscious and unconscious minds.

Ultimately, you get what you focus on, so focus on what you want. Not on what you don’t want.

People sometimes ask me, “But, what if I’m fooling myself?” or “If I only focus on the good stuff, I won’t be prepared if something bad happens.”

I got the answer to this way back in Jr. High, when a motivational speaker came to our school and said, “It’s better to aim at the moon and land in a pile of crap, than it is to aim at the pile of crap and hit it.”

Simply put, always set your sights high and operate from the belief – both physically and phychologically – that you will achieve it.

You’ll be amazed by the results.

Posted by Michael Stevenson in Hypnosis, Motivation and Success, NLP on Five things you can do right now to begin achieving your dreams