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How To Program Your Mind For Success?

Our time and energy in this life is limited. A person can spend a great deal of time worrying and doubting, especially when feeling stuck. This way, one would end up wasting a lot of time, often not realizing that the solution is to channel the willpower, to start with one thing, then slowly build it up. How to make sure that the time we spend here is not wasted? A lot depends on how we program our mind and what we feed our mind with. Here are some techniques to help you.

1) Check your habits

What we feed our mind is what creates the patterns according to which we operate; it determines the life and passion that we experience at each given moment. This leads us to the rate of success and happiness that we enjoy through our life.

In order to take control of this, we need to start by checking our habits. Are they taking us to the path of success and happiness? Let’s remember, that though we are endowed with the awareness to feel the weight of negative patterns, we also have the ability to rise and make our dreams come true by putting a conscious effort into patterns that we are creating. Ask yourself: how can I nourish myself in the next hour, in the next day so that I build the life I want and deserve?

2) Visualize success

Visualisation is a powerful technique that allows to picture and project ourselves where we wish to be to the greatest detail. We can grasp that feeling, use the energy we get from it to make it happen.

Make a conscious choice to give yourself time out. Walk in nature, cherish the moments that give an opportunity to disconnect from everything that is distracting and preventing you to be completely honest with yourself. Create your own rituals to start and end the day. Make time for meditation as often as you can. As you work with your willpower and attention, especially in meditation, you will notice the length of time, attention and concentration varying. As time expands, you will come to a point where you can feel comfortable and enjoy  longer practice sessions which give you the chance to sink in and touch the depths of what visualisation has to offer.

3) Be bold and imagine your own funeral

A bold exercise is to imagine your own funeral. Imagine walking into a room. Inside the room are your friends and family. And as you walk into the room, you see a box. You realise that you are in the box and it’s the day of your funeral. What kind of things do you want people to remember about the life you lived, about the kind of person you were, about the things you did and the way you made them feel when they were around you?

4) Empower your thoughts

You have the power to take control over your thoughts. Use the energy you save here for doing good. Replace the negative thoughts with those that support you. No one can do it for you, you are alone in this. Start to move towards your goal: visualise it, imagine it happening, feel it happening right now. Get clear on what you want to see happening and your life will change. You are worth it! A happy life is not an accident, and you can make it happen.

Whenever you catch yourself saying something negative about yourself or your plans and abilities, replace it with something wholesome.

5) Dig into yourself

Everyone has the opportunity, the right and the obligation to be happy.  What do you love doing? What can you do about it? Where are the people with similar ideas?

We are versions of many possibilities. And definitely more than the sum of our thoughts. Be aware of what the mind is telling you and ask yourself if it helps you become the person you want to be.

Conclusion

Every day is a new chance. You can get your mind to figure out where you want to be, what you need to do to achieve it, why it means something for you and then program your mind to do it. It is often that what you’ve been postponing  to do is the place where to start, the game changer. The one that can break the rut. The one that helps you start the day with fresh energy. You can program your mind for success.

“Owning your story and loving yourself through that process is the bravest thing that you’ll ever do.” (Brené Brown)

  • To learn more about visualising your own funeral see Michael Gerber The E-Myth Revisited
  • Photo credits: Vasilios Muselimis@unsplash
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Do I See Myself From The Right Angle?

How to stand your ground when you feel you have lost yourself?

Or when you are sitting and wandering why this is happening to me, why I can’t be free from the pestering thoughts. Let’s all take a deep breath and a step backward!

When we are sitting too close, we often can’t see the whole picture. Some aspects can be seen and understood only from the right angle. Same as in Hans Holbein’s anamorphosis* The Ambassadors (1533).

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors. Photo source: http://bit.ly/2rCsc3a

Meditation often inspires positive traits such as focus, clarity, willpower, empowerment and deep trust in individual capabilities and success towards what we commit to. How understanding ourselves goes hand in hand with the right type of meditation?

Through our lives, even in the course of a single day things can change and a person can go through a wide range of emotions. Meditation helps see more clearly and identify the dominant traits we are aware of. The ability to put a label on how we feel is empowering. The complicated mind can find comfort when it’s able to recognise itself.

Finding the right word and recommended meditation technique is validating and helps feel cool and collected. Here are some traits and the corresponding meditation technique that is recommended when we experience a certain kind of mind:

  • An indulgent mind – is helped by the recollection of the body, starting the meditation in the body
  • An irritable mind – by practicing loving kindness meditation
  • An oblivious mind – relying on the breath helps
  • A doubtful mind – relying on the breath
  • A susceptible mind – can go back to being at peace with the exercise of making a reflection of values
  • A questioning mind – the recollection of peace is more than reassuring

The above is just a quick mapping, try not to get too caught up in the technique and enjoy the process.

“Worrying does not take away tomorrow’s troubles. It takes away today’s peace.” Randy Armstrong

*anammorphosis – a distorted projection or drawing which appears normal when viewed from a particular point or with a suitable mirror or lens.

Featured Image photo source: http://bit.ly/2E5fhtc

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How Nature Can Inspire Some Habits

I have been observing the curious life of meditators for a certain number of years. From the journals of people who are writing their daily thoughts and experiences, I have come to notice that we often feel motivated to pay attention to the patterns arising in the mind, the quality of our inner talk and learning how to access the feeling of a mind that is settling down and, at the same time, be less patient with our bodies, the connection between the way we feel physically and how far we can get, mentally.

A meditator can patiently wait for hours for the mind and thoughts to settle down and have the feeling of inner calm restored in the process, yet be less tolerant with a back pain, cold, sleepiness creeping in at the end of a long day.

In the words of Alan Harrington “We must never forget that we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody.”

Health is wealth and for that to be attained or maintained we must honour the nature in ourselves.

One of the best things we can do for our health is to fill ourselves with fresh air and leave aside the city hassle as often as we can.

I am not talking about the-once-a-year big get-away in the heart of nature or a retreat in an isolated place, but rather about making time to be in nature as often as we can.

In the past year, I feel nature has taught me a lot and there is much more to explore. 

From overcoming laziness to getting an early start for the day and spending time in the quietness of the forest at least 4 – 5 times a week.

Changing the weekend routine from sorting out things I did not have time to deal with during the week, shopping, eating out and catching up with friends to hiking from sunrise to sunset and sharing a lunch box with friends out of wifi reach and preferably somewhere at high altitude. From relying on my phone to tell me how to get to places to paying attention to the landscape, mentally recording landmarks so that I would be able to make my way back, learning about the clouds and the direction and intensity of the wind so that I would be able to tell which way I’d need to move to be out of storm’s reach.

The rules of nature are clear and nature respects everyone. Nature is welcoming and it makes space for all the plants and the trees, allowing all projects to grow and to flourish so that when one does not work out, not all is lost and the soil is not barren. I often feel that the rate of personal success and growth depends on clarifying our goals and the habits that support us. Nothing is lost and everything can be re-purposed. 

Two years ago, I have written about health and how peace starts on our plate.

photo source @seanafnan

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Eat Well. Live Well

food body mind

I have to confess I have been on a journey of self search and self realization for some time now. It started and is still unfolding as a gradual awakening- mostly to reality, of becoming a little more conscious of aspects of myself, of how all is interconnected and one does not live as an isolated self sufficient cell. It started as a quest journey of inner peace and in recent years it began to manifest more on the outside. Continue reading “Eat Well. Live Well”

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Mindfulness and meditation workshops in Budapest, Hungary

In February Peace Revolution, represented by Peace Architect Manuela Puscas, went to beautiful Budapest for the first time. Over 120 people of amazing diversity joined the events, from fifth graders and students to university professors, hypnosis and Gestalt therapists, yoga teachers, economists and other professionals, trainers, social workers and local NGO members. Continue reading “Mindfulness and meditation workshops in Budapest, Hungary”

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Peace Revolution in Sicily

Meditation session during Lets ACT training in Sicily

Between 3rd and 11th of November Peace Revolution was in Sicily, Caltanissetta to take part in “Lets ACT” training course organized by the Italian agency under the new Erasmus Plus program.

Peace Architect Manuela Puscas and Peace Agents Cristina Matei and Matt Witt took part in the activities designed to explore the idea of social entrepreneurship and the culture of peace. Continue reading “Peace Revolution in Sicily”