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Are You Letting This Common Mindset Ruin Your Life?
May 8, 2008
You can have any mindset you want about anyTHING you want.
None are inherantly “good” or “bad” (those concepts are based on other people’s agreement or disagreement), but for every kind of mindset, there are very exact consequences that will come to you as a result.
I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with one of my best friends since 1st grade, Matt, who (at the time of this writing) feels like he has been utterly and decisively defeated by life.
Smashed childhood dreams, horrible college experiences that have left him around $80,000 in debt to a bank that will hold his parents personally responsible if he defaults, and absolutely no degree to show for any of it, possibly not even any transferable credits he can use anywhere else.
These are among the many things currently on one of my best friend’s minds.
Like any good friend, I have personally and repeatedly tried my best to help Matt whenever possible and offer advice at all crucial turning-points over the last 4 years. At some points, I believe it has helped and at others I know it has been ineffective. And now I have reached a point where both Matt and I know there is nothing I can do or say that will have any further effect whatsoever.
“Your advice has always been sound,” Matt declares, “but it just simply will never work for me.”
He then continues for the next 7 minutes, describing in great detail one of two things:
1. All the reasons why my suggestion “won’t work”… “for him.” (this comes as a result of a mind awash in negative mindsets that have accumulated over the years, which cause him to automatically reject much of anything new)
and…
2. In cases where my suggestions “would work”… “for him”, he describes all the reasons why he “doesn’t want to do it that way.” (I call these “yeah, but” statements… as in “yeah, that all sounds good, but it’s not how I want to do things.” This comes from a strongly held belief in ideals. It’s not that Matt doesn’t want to do them, but more the fact that in doing so, it would severely clash with his views of how things “should” work as opposed to how things “really” work.)
Trying to dissuade these core beliefs was an uphill battle I did not want to even mess with, so instead over time I learned how to help and make suggestions in other ways that didn’t create the degree of internal conflict for him. But there was a huge flaw with what I was doing, that became very clear to me today:
He told me, “I have no tenacity and the last time I truly felt any passion was when I was 18, back just after high school.”
And I’ve finally gotten it. I finally understand, after all this time. So I said to him: “You’re right. You’re exactly right. None of this will work for you and in fact, none of the advice I could ever give you will ever work, and for one simple reason: All of my suggestions pre-suppose the existence of two things: passion and tenacity.”
Sadly, it is my personal thought it may take one of my best friends many years to get these 2 critically important things back in his life… if in fact he ever does at all. I really don’t want to see that happen, but after all this time I believe I am powerless to stop it.
Lack of these 2 ingredients creates a fatal mindset: that of passivity.
People who are mostly passive go through life without ever getting much out of it and are usually the same ones who (if you talk to them) are consumed with excuses and blame for just about everything except themselves. They get nothing from life because they have asked nothing from life. If you demand nothing from the universe, the universe will respond with “your wish is my command” and give you exactly what you asked for. Instead, the will of others will eventually be imposed on you more and more, and your reality will be intruded upon by whatever it is the other people around you want.
Thus, the “downward spiral” of ever-increasing shittiness in your life.
I used to do a lot of thinking about “downward spirals” and “upward spirals”, calling them “loops” by my own personal branded term. As I just mentioned, downward spirals (or bad “loops”) are when shitty things happen to you that ’cause’ other negative situations to happen that further increase the shittiness, ad infinitum, and upward spirals (good loops, or what some people might call a “winning streak” or a “lucky streak”) are, of course, when good things happen to you which ’cause’ new situations to arise that produce more good things, etc etc.
In the past, the main problem I had when thinking about this subject of loops always led me to the core question:
“How does a person break the cycle? It can’t go on forever. And it doesn’t go on forever, as evidenced by the many people who get out of bad loops all the time (success stories) and the many more who unfortunately fall from good to bad. What is the so-called ‘first cause’ that creates the initial break out of your current loop?”
The answer? Good loops are entered into by force of your own free WILL (and successful imposition of that will into forming clear, precise thoughts about who you are and what you want) and bad loops are fell into by means of a ‘slippage’ of sorts… a relaxing of the imposition of your will to the point where your demands from the universe become vague and cloudy.
Bottom line: It is your own choice (through force of will) whether you want to live in a personal reality filled with “good loops” or one riddled with bad ones.
The difference is you. The difference is me. Everybody (unless living under a socially repressed society where other people’s wills are imposed upon the populace by force of law) is responsible for their lot. One of my many favorite quotes from one of my several person heroes, Dan Kennedy (in his book, The Ultimate Success Secret), goes:
“Right now, you are exactly where you want to be in life. And if the thought of that scares you or makes you angry, there are many changes you need to make.”
It took me about a year and a half to fully understand this quote, because at first I had no idea what he was really talking about. But as I slowly discovered, he is simply referring to a more simplified version of what I’ve talked about here; where you are right now is a direct result of the culmination of demands you’ve been previously making of life up until this point. That’s why the saying goes, “you are exactly where you want to be right now” (as in “not for good, but only the present moment”)… some people read that quote and say “no I’m not… I don’t WANT to be here. That’s a ridiculous thing to say.”… but they are confusing the word “want” with their own definition (a mistake I originally made.)
See, the word “want” when most people use it, means “I want that. Boy I’d really like to have that.” But this is not so, when making demands of the universe to determine what your reality will be. No. To the universe, what you “want” is defined as exactly how much you demand and how clearly it is demanded.
An example: Someone might say “I want to have a lot of money.”
No. This is wrong. If you tell the universe this, it will ignore you and give you nothing in return. Why? Well, actually a lot of reasons, but mainly because you were infinitely vague, you did not clearly express what you really wanted (the end result that is actually percievable), and the nature of that kind of demand is subject to mental dedication the “requester” is probably not ready for.
A slightly more correct demand might be “I want to make over $250,000 by the end of this year.” It is more exact, but this still has a lot of problems. Firstly, money in and of itself has no intrinsic value. If I gave you a bunch of paper monopoly money and said, there you go… $250,000 – just what you wanted. What would you have? A good lifestyle? A great house? Fun and adventure? The only reason our Federal Reserve Notes (paper fiat currency) are worth anything at all is because you can take them down to the store and get a loaf of bread. They are only accepted because other people assign value to it.
But… what if you couldn’t do that one day? What if, when you handed your $20 bill to the clerk to get a box of ice cream, he was like “What the hell is that?”
“But I want some ice cream.” you reply, embarassed.
“Sorry. Here at Wal-Mart, we only take money for payment. That’s just a pretty piece of paper.”
Well, as silly as that example may sound, it’s concept is exactly what the universe thinks of your demands when they are that vague. You didn’t want the cash, you wanted the ice cream!! You didn’t want the $250,000, you wanted your dream house!
So… to be successful at getting what you want, you’ve got to do some thinking about what you really want, in exact, measurable, percievable terms.
So you don’t want money. You want a house? Really? What color? Where is it located? What do the insides look like? Neighbors? If so, what are they like? What do the kitchen cabinets look like? How do the floors sound when you walk across them early in the morning when no one is stirring?
Are you getting the idea now? When you give the universe a demand like that, you are giving it something that can really be worked with and eventually given to your own reality, and not just some joke of a request that will go on ignored, like the kinds of requests most people make.
The whole process really goes in three very important steps:
1. Define what your reality is. (what you would like it to be, in exact terms, like we’ve been talking about above)
2. Believe that your reality will actually become how you defined you wanted it to be. (this involves keeping your desires at the forefront of your mind every day… it sounds simple, but can be incredibly difficult if this is your first time following these methods, because it will be hard to truly believe that things can work like this)
3. Receive the benefits. (this can have several applications, but generally refers to taking advantage of the opportunities that will present themselves after you have successfully followed steps 1 and 2, and/or the ability to recognize and sieze your desires once they make themselves available to you. Again, this is another one that seems simple on the surface but can really muck up the efforts of the first-time user 
)
If any of what I’ve been advocating lately seems familiar to you, that is simply because it is a bit of a more detailed application of the concept referred to in a new DVD (and book) called “The Secret” that has been released in the part year or so, jointly created by many of today’s successful people and endorsed throughout history as being “THE method” to being able to get whatever it is you want out of life. People like Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and tons of others have either strongly hinted at or flat out endorsed this way of thinking.
It is easy for many to dismiss some of this as “mystical” or merely “hopeful thinking”, but just like you might not know exactly how your computer works, as long as you know you can flip a switch and it comes on so you can check your e-mail, you can be successful at accomplishing what you want out of it. People like me who are into philosophy and “reasons why” like to talk about the finer points in length, but the fact is, understanding is not necessary for these methods to work.
Anyway, I have a feeling this is getting quite long, so this is where I’ll have to end it for today. There were a lot of things I didn’t go into and didn’t have time to fully explain, but what is presented here is a basic primer for how anyone can begin to transform their reality into something that will give them greater happiness than they currently possess.
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Tags: bad loop, desire, downward spiral, good loop, happiness, law of attraction, life experience, mindset, perception, Philosophy, success, the secretTopics: Personal, Philosophy | No Comments »
