What follows is a sneak peak at my new book: “Mastering Secrets of Personal Success” by Dr. Edward E. Hubbard. It is a How-to” guide designed to help you create the life you want using actions you can take immediately to make major shifts in your journey towards personal success.
The United Negro College Fund has a slogan that states in part: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”. This statement is true no matter what race, culture, gender, background, etc., you happen to be. Our minds are extremely powerful instruments. When we are born, we do not come out with a preloaded software manual that automatically tells us as owners and operators how to use it in the most effective way. This book is designed to take you on a “how-to”, skills-based journey in the study of your mind. It is designed to help you create “Excellence”, meaning, and fulfillment in your life. It will help you discover the “secrets of personal success” to develop concrete tools to master the power of your mind. These Secrets are the mechanisms that drive your beliefs and the decisions you make. It is the effective use of this instruction set which ultimately produces the results you achieve that generates the road to your destiny and the life you want.
This book will change your life. It offers a model for learning how to recognize and create sustainable change in your life. It provides a method to “de-construct” the elements of personal success and “chunk them down” into practical, manageable components in a step-by-step fashion. It is structured to help you create actions that will drive measurable changes in your life. It is the combination of these actions that support you in producing the outcomes and results you want.
Along this journey, you will access your executive powers and awaken and utilize the higher levels of your mind. We will explore some of the rules that govern our minds and emotions, how we build excellence and expertise, how to overcome complacency and limiting beliefs, and how to use the mind-muscle connection that enables us to translate “concepts” into everyday actions, and much more. It is designed to help you cultivate personal mastery over your mind and emotions to produce the level of personal success you desire in mastering your business and career goals, your health and fitness objectives, your relationships or wherever you’d like to apply that mastery.
Certainly this appears to be a tall order and verbose claim. Many books, programs and training that promise the pathway to wealth, success, happiness and mastery lead you to believe that this will be simple, quick, and easy. This is not that kind of book, nor does it make any such promises. Dr. L. Michael Hall, Neuro Semantics thought-leader said it best: “Personal mastery does not come easily, quickly, or even naturally.” If mastering personal success was quick and easy, we would see more people at this capability level. The truth is that “mastery takes effort, devotion, and unyielding passion to change your life’s status quo. If you don’t have this level of drive to change your life, who will? At bare minimum, you must possess the power of focus to apply yourself for the long-haul. Olympic athletes only reach the Olympics through the application of training, concentrated effort, and relentless focus. In this book, we will show you how to create this level of drive. We call it “learning to get leverage on yourself”.
That being said, gaining self-mastery competencies, skills and abilities by working towards personal success mastery will provide you with one of the most exciting, exhilarating, and empowering experiences you can ever have! You will often find yourself receiving rich feedback, evidence of outcome attainment and results, change, and success along the way. So much so that it will become easy to be absorbed in the passionate pursuit of your goals. To an outsider it may appear to be work, however, you will often find it to be fun and a natural part of the mastery challenge. Launching this journey helps to foster growth, shape character, builds integrity, and reveals values that are essential for a lifetime of personal success.
Harnessing the Power of Your Mind and Decision-Making
The mental mastery involved in “running your own brain” involves a discipline of understanding and skill, as well as physical and mental mastery. As with anything else we learn to a level of mastery, access to this level of expertise involves learning the principles (i.e., secrets) and applying or practicing them to build ownership. Like any other discipline, the more you apply, reflect, identify lessons learned, and master them, the easier it is to become fascinated and caught up in the experience of learning and the challenge of growing. It transforms your thirst for life to increasingly higher levels of understanding, insight, skill and abilities.
During your journey, you will explore multi-dimensional aspects of your mind, consciousness, and subjective experiences of “self-mastery”. This exploration will teach you methods to identify, access, and utilize the executive level powers of your mind. These elements of the mind control, organize, and govern the frameworks that operate how we think, feel, speak, and behave. Possessing these competencies gives you an insider’s knowledge about how to run your own brain and body, and the means to create your own experiences that align with the results you want.
Mastering Secrets of Personal Success is designed to provide you with some vital secrets of self-mastery using a personal, self-discovery approach. It will be based heavily on personal “experiential” learning exercises which build competency and skill. These exercises have worked for literally millions of people. They can work for you, too, provided you actually use them. We live in an age of information overload. Some people may be tempted to just read through the exercises to see if they are interesting. This is a good start, but you’ll need to actually do them if you want the results. The processes taught here are designed as a specific kind of experience. So when you do the exercises, be deliberate, attentive and thorough. Select a time of day when you will be able to devote the time you need and focus your concentration on every exercise step.
Actually imagine specific situations discussed in the exercise and follow the directions carefully. Most of the time, these “mental exercises” will only take ten to twenty minutes. You may even find it helpful, in some exercises to have a friend read the exercise to guide you through the process to achieve its maximum results. Remember, these are not “one-time only” workouts. The more you want to benefit from this book, the more important it is to apply these techniques consistently in your daily life.
Each exercise will immerse you into the “how-to” of running your mind. This technique takes you beyond merely explaining “theories” regarding how things work to practicing and experiencing proven, step-by-step strategies that place you at the helm of your mind’s executive powers. It is intended to give you a whole new level of personal empowerment. It will put in your hands the mechanisms by which you can effectively leverage control over your mind, emotions, body, experiences, and your destiny.
Recently, there has been an explosion of research into how our brains operate and the opportunities for advanced levels of use and impact. This study of “Neuroscience” has brought forth all kinds of new discoveries and advanced levels of learning regarding how we think, learn, decide, and do. Many of the scientists who study the brain have examined the notion that our brain functions can be modeled in operation much like a computer. If our brains are a kind of computer, then our thoughts, decisions, and actions are our software programs. If we could change our mental programs, just as we do when we change or upgrade our computer’s software, we’d immediately get positive changes in our performance. We would get immediate improvements in how we think, feel, act, and live.
The comparison with computers also explains why change is sometimes so difficult. No matter how much we want, wish, or hope, it won’t upgrade our software. Neither will getting angry, or entering the same old instructions over and over again. Someone once remarked that “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten”. What we need to do is add new instruction sets to our current programs in appropriate places where they belong. With a computer, the way to do this is laid out in the manual that came with the software. In our case as human beings, it’s been more challenging to do this since we did not come out with a manual in tow. This book is designed to help change that situation.
This book offers you a software manual for your brain. You probably have a computer at home or in your office at work. If you do, you may have a number of different software packages on it such as a word processing program, a spreadsheet, a financial program, etc. If someone suggested that you will need a separate computer for each program, you would challenge their assumption immediately.
However, this is what many people do to themselves without knowing it. For instance, they learn something well i.e., selling, managing, motivating, problem-solving, etc., and after a while think “This is what I’m good at”. They develop an area of expertise, and then they simply don’t know how to change their mental programs to develop another one. On the contrary, if your personal computer didn’t run a word processing program and a spreadsheet program, you would get it checked out or get a new system. When people can’t switch mental programs, they often begin to make excuses. They may even explain to you that they have a lack of talent, or the wrong body type or personality profile or even that they were born under the wrong astrological sign for that type of thing. The limitations, in this case however, are primarily in the software, not the hardware!
To get what we want, we need to change the way we behave to create a lasting change. Think about it…consider what you would accomplish if you could get a hold of the instruction manual for your brain. It could help you learn to master things such as:
- How to run your supercomputer – your brain – the way it was designed. And to expand it as new situations arise (using previous lessons learned).
- Change your thoughts, actions, and feelings “when” and “how” you want to.
- Change your habits, in less than an hour, even after you’ve struggled for years.
- Be the way you’ve always wanted to be: confident in times of crisis, tenacious and motivated when it really counts, as well as sensitive and receptive to loved ones and to life’s many gifts.
Remember those times when you were “in the zone”, things just clicked and worked perfectly. You experienced a sense of connectedness and control to your actions such that everything flowed like a well-oiled machine. And then there were those “other times”, when the pieces just didn’t fit together, when nothing you did seemed to go right. With the processes and techniques you will learn in this book, your knowledge and skill to realign your actions for success will be greatly enhanced. I’m certain you’ve noticed people in the world who accomplish things with ease. This book will help you gain the benefits of the processes they use to operate with excellence. This book will make their successful mental program available to you and others. These processes will help you move from hopeful dreams and good intentions to a specific set of precise skills and action steps you can use to powerfully transform your life and results. It will allow you to change what you want to change and keep those things that are in alignment with what you want and worth preserving.
The bottom-line is that these secrets of personal success mastery will build skills and empower you to have the kinds of fulfilling life choices you want. Practicing these processes will:
- Put you in charge of your own motivation.
- Help you create a compelling future and a personal roadmap to get there.
- Build closer relationships and enhance your influence skills.
- Clear up past negative experiences that may have held you back, especially from achieving your life goals.
- Enhance your self-appreciation and self-esteem.
- Create a solid positive mental attitude.
- Gain more access to your mind’s executive level powers and programs for peak performance.
At the same time you will learn many of the characteristics of top achievers and the mental maps that make them so successful. You will be guided through specific programs for learning and using these characteristics. You will discover how you can utilize these techniques, skills and processes to accelerate your ability to learn. This broader range of personal success mastery is often a difficult concept for people to understand. They ask, “How can I apply the same methods to my issues of stage freight, negotiations, improving my self-esteem, strategic planning, motivation, and human excellence? Well, it works the same way that electricity powers a variety of things like computers, telephones, and cell phones. Electricity is basic to all of them. Similarly, as with any human accomplishment, your brain is the constant… it is basic to all of them. This book offers you cutting edge approaches of neuroscience that will teach you the fundamentals of how your brain works. Regardless of the situation, these approaches will show you how you can do more, have more, and be more.
Your Habits will Determine Your Future
What is a habit? Simply stated, a habit is something you do so often it becomes easy. In other words, it’s a behavior that you keep repeating. If you persist at developing a new behavior, eventually it becomes automatic. For example, if you learn to drive a car with a standard gearshift, the first few lessons are usually a significant emotional event for you and the person teaching you. One of the big challenges is figuring out how to synchronize the clutch and accelerator pedals so you have a nice, smooth gear change. If you release the clutch too quickly, the car stalls. If you press down too hard on the accelerator without releasing the clutch, the engine roars but you don’t go anywhere. Sometimes the car jumps down the street like a kangaroo, surging and stopping as the new driver struggles with the pedals. However, with practice, the gear change eventually becomes smooth and you don’t think about it anymore.
The great news is that you can reprogram yourself any time you choose to do so. If you’re struggling financially, this is important to know. Let’s say you want to be financially independent. Doesn’t it make sense to check your money-making habits? Are you in the habit of paying yourself first every month? Do you consistently save and invest at least 10 percent of your income? The answer is either “yes” or “no.” Immediately you can see if you are moving in the right direction. The key word here is consistent. That means every month. And every month is a good habit.
Most people dabble when it comes to growing their money. They are very inconsistent. Suppose you start a savings and investment program. For the first six months you diligently put your 10 percent away according to plan. Then something happens. You borrow the money to take a vacation, and you tell yourself you’ll make it up in the next few months. Of course you don’t-and your financial independence program is stalled before it even gets off the ground! By the way, do you know how easy it is to become financially secure? One example given by Jack Canfield (and others) in the book, “The Power of Focus” determined, if you start at age eighteen and invest one hundred dollars per month compounding annually at ten percent, you will have more than $1.1 million tucked away at age sixty-five. Even if you don’t start until you are forty years old, there’s hope, although it will take more than a daily dollar to do it.
This book will provide you with personal, skill-building exercises, strategies, worksheets templates and much, much, more to create the life you want.
Watch for the pre-Publication Announcement and the special discounts available at:
http://www.diversitysuperstore.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Store_Code=DS&Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=PSCS
Dr. Ed Hubbard is author of more than 40 books including the the book “Mastering Secrets of Personal Success – Tools to Create the Life You Want” For more information regarding Hubbard Personal Success Coaching, go to http://www.personalsuccesscoachingcenter.com/index.html