Raise the B.A.R!

So this week I really needed a pep talk as I felt the energy I was bringing towards my goals waning a little bit. Instead of just giving myself a pep talk, I decided to put my thoughts down in writing. Hopefully I can inspire at least one person. Here goes:

One of the things I love to do in my spare time is read.  I am fascinated by knowledge and want to acquire as much of it as I can in the subjects that interest me. This often leads to a lot of questions loosely based around the context of what I’m reading at the time. Some of these questions are interesting, and some of them are downright hilarious!

Last week I was reading this article where the writer was commenting on how even in a bad economy, there seemed to be a noticeable cycle…. Successful people got more successful and people with little or no success continued on that downward trend. This triggered a flurry of questions in my head as I wondered if there was any legitimacy to the assertions the writer was making…. And if there was, what was the reason for this? Is there a process or set of rituals as secret as the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) recipe that was known only by successful people and hidden from everyone else?  If you were a betting person at a Casino table, what makes you supremely confident in betting on the odds of a certain person pulling through tough times to achieve successes as opposed to someone else? What makes such a person bankable?  I decided to pull back on all the other stuff I had read over time about topics related to this, and I would like to give a snapshot on what I deem to be some of the most interesting thoughts on the issue:

Tony Robins identified a cycle which I call the cycle of progress: Belief, Action, Results and repeat. Think about it this way… a person who has little belief in what he/she is trying to accomplish is not going to be motivated to take a lot of action…in their internal dialogue, they’re probably saying to themselves, “this isn’t going to work anyways”… with little belief and little action taken, they get nothing in results which further reaffirms the belief they had in the first place. As a result, they take even less action which leads to even less as far as results, and thus, a cycle is born. So what about successful people? Successful people constantly find ways to raise the b.a.r.  Massive belief leads to massive action which leads to massive results, which in turn reaffirms their belief.

One of my favorite definitions for success simply says success is certainty… being able to see the finish line mentally even before the first step has been taken in that direction. Doing anything worthwhile is going to take massive amounts of belief.  There are people doing the things you want to do and they are no better than you. They just believe in themselves more.

Having increased belief will almost certainly always lead to more action as regards the goal you are trying to achieve.  It is kind of a by-product.  As a trivial example, a guy who wants to become an expert in a certain field who spends every day reading and studying books about that field will most likely in six months to a year become very vast in that field, if not one of its leading experts.

Whatever success looks like to you, you can achieve it on a more sustained level if you make the commitment to constantly raise the b.a.r. Raise your belief… raise your actions… see better results!