Why Am I Not More Successful Online?   Upgrading Your Mindset Autopilot.

Upgrade Your Mindset AutopilotHave you ever asked yourself “why am I not more successful?”   I know I have.  In spite of having success in many ways, my online financial success hasn’t been what I expected or wanted and I decided to make a change.  The things I found out about mindset may help you too.

I’ll Start With My Conclusion About Why I Am Not More Successful Online

First I’ll share my conclusion and then I’ll trace a little of how I reached that conclusion.

There are two pieces to my conclusion:

  1. I needed a clear vision of where I wanted to go AND I need to visualize that destination with strong emotion  (and I do mean STRONG emotion).
  2.  Most of our lives are lived on autopilot (a set of ingrained habits.) My autopilot has been broken.  In spite of the destination I thought I was setting, it only recognized one destination – where I am right now.  I need to upgrade  that defective autopilot.  

 

Said another way:  We must retake control of the 95 percent of our minds that controls most of our lives.  We have a massive set of habits that run our body most of the time.   How you drive a car along a familiar route is a great example because we can see it.  We have similar autopilot habits that control how we handle food, exercise, carry out our daily morning routine at home, put on our clothes and many others.   There are also set routines for how we carry out our work.   According to Dr. Hugh Byrne research shows that about 45% of the actions we take every day are done totally by unconcious habit.

The Short Version of My Journey to This Conclusion

After years and 10’s of thousands of dollars of technical marketing training and effort, I decided that:

  • I knew enough – had enough training. I was even teaching others weekly.  I knew more than a lot of successful marketers.
  • I worked hard enough – I had launched hundreds of products and ad campaigns on Facebook, Amazon and Google.
  • I tried enough options – I had tried eBooks, Blogging, Monetizing Websites, Amazon, Print-On-Demand and lots more.

So What Was Missing?

About a year ago I decided that I needed to decrease the technical training and do a deep dive into something that many people said was important; My Mindset.  I had always been self-confident and had been successful in many different fields.   Recently though, that success had been eluding me.  Maybe Mindset was the missing piece.

The questions I wanted answered were

  • Exactly what is mindset?
  • Is my current mindset good enough?
  • How do I change my mindset?

It didn’t take me long to decide that what I thought about the traditional “You Need a Good Mindset in Order to Succeed” was not enough.  I wasn’t even asking the right questions.

Over my life I’ve been to dozens of talks (often as part of MLM training) where I was encouraged to do the following:

  • Have a good Mindset
  • Discover my Why
  • Build a Dream Board
  • Repeat Affirmations every day
  • Visualize what you want
  • Test drive your dream car
  • Believe in yourself
  • And so on.

On many different occasions, I tried all of these with no noticeable changes in me or my life.  Obviously something was missing.

One Question That Did Resonate with Me –

I’ve also heard “You are where you are because that is exactly where you want to be!”  Like most people, I resisted that wisdom, even as part of me felt the correctness of the statement.  I didn’t recognize until much later that this statement could also be said this way:  “Your autopilot is defective.”

During my Deep Dive into mindset I read books, lots of books, attended workshops, had sessions with an excellent hypnotherapist, attended webinars and purchased several mindset courses.  Along the way I met (figuratively). Bob Proctor, Jack Canfield, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Ester and Jerry Hicks, Jesse Elder, Cat Howell and many others

Two Major Threads from Some Mindset Experts

They all have a different takes, but there are common threads.

  1. You can influence your future directly with your thoughts – I’ll start with that big one.  The one that many feel  is off in woo-woo land.  (Although more and more people have come to believe that there is SOMETHING real there.)
    • Spiritual Version – The Law of Attraction has influenced many people with a spiritual rationale for this phenomenon.
    • Science Based Version – Today people like Dr. Dispenza and Jesse Elder explain it using the scientific breakthrough called the Quantum Field.
    • More traditional version – There are others who just feel that when you tell your mind to be on the lookout for certain opportunities, you see things that were already there, but ignored.  (Have you ever bought a car and suddenly you notice many, many cars just like yours? ).It doesn’t matter how you explain it, there is a growing body of evidence that shows the phenomenon is real.
  2. We operate our lives mostly on autopilot.  We have developed habits that take care of most of the activities in our lives.  An example you often here used (because it works so well) is driving a car.  When we are learning to drive, we think about every move.  After a while driving becomes a set of habits and we often arrive at our destination and don’t remember anything about the trip.   The same autopilot runs the rest of our lives too.  How we talk to people, brush our teeth, put on our clothes, live in our homes, do our work is all done on autopilot.  (I can hear the creative people saying “I don’t work that way at work!  I concentrate intensely on the thing I’m creating.”  My response is that I’ll bet that where you create, when you create, the tools you use to create, how the tools are arranged, etc. are almost always the same.  Much of the process is done on autopilot.

While I believe that can and do influence our future, I’m going to concentrate on the autopilot.   One way to definitely influence our future is to upgrade our autopilot.

When we realize that we are where we are because our habits took us there,  we understand that the analogy of defective autopilot works perfectly.  It always takes us to the one destination it is set for.  Until we upgrade the autopilot (change our daily routine habits), it will ALWAYS take us to this one destination.

I Believe That My Thoughts Can Change My Future, But Will Only Talk Here About Changing Habits

Before diving in to changing my business habits, I decided to work on my eating habits.  The results REALLY surprised me.   I used a meditation strategy and guided meditation developed by Dr. Joe Dispenza.  I describe that technique below.   It involved my listing the thoughts and excuses I used to justify eating things and amounts I knew I shouldn’t be eating.    I ended up with over 30 common thoughts on eating, 10 thoughts on exercise and some very interesting observations about automatic triggers.

  • Eating Habits – you can see the entire list at http://TheJourneyToThin.com  They included thoughts like:
    • No-one will know if I take two cookies
    • No-one will know if I stop and have an ice-cream
    • No-one will know I finished the potato chips if I stuff the empty bag down in the trash can
    • No-one will know ….
    • I’m a big person and I need more food.
    • This is a family get-together and I don’t see these foods often so …
    • I don’t like lettuce so I’ll skip the salad bar.  (Ignoring the fact that I like lots of raw vegetables and fruits.)
  • Eating Triggers – events that triggered unconscious eating behavior
    • My most interesting discovery was that after I swallowed most of a bite, that triggered my hand to deliver another fork or hand full of food.  It was scary to watch my hand stuff pop-corn into my mouth with absolutely no conscious thought on my part.
    • I would eat finger food like cookies and not even notice.  I’d take a cookie to my computer and then look around to eat it and discover that I had already eaten it, without savoring it or even noticing it.
  • Exercise Thoughts
    • I have more important things to do.  (Really?)
    • I will hurt tomorrow if I exercise today.
    • I can’t exercise much so it would help so why bother.
    • And the real winner – exercise is boring.

In the meditation I would go over these thought in order to recognize them with they appeared in my daily life.  Then I would imagine a situation where these thoughts occurred and say “CHANGE!”.  Later when these thoughts appeared in my day to day life, I would say CHANGE and not give in.

RESULTS – Over 20 pounds lost in 30 days and I’m not dieting.

We Need To Change and It Needs to Be Permanent Change

This obviously needs to change if we want to change our life situation.

I will note that we can accomplish some things by over-riding our autopilot.  Many intense diets and 45 day dash plans have us thinking about our destination all the time.  The problem is that as soon as we stop flying manually, the autopilot re-engages and we end up going back to our standard destination.  (Dieting authors have a name for it:  Yo-Yo Dieting.  People lose weight and then gain it back.)

We want permanent change, not a series of temporary changes that consumes our lives.

Why Do I Call This Updating My Mindset Autopilot.

My ingrained habits are like an Autopilot that is stuck on One Destination.  It doesn’t matter how I set the dial, it always goes to one place – Where I Am Now!  My Autopilot definitely needs to be replaced!

Background for Creating Permanent Change – Upgrading our Autopilot

Even if you think it is woo-woo stuff, check out the Law of Attraction and Quantum Field theories with an open mind.  Pick the theory that works for you.

Here are some points that IMHO appear in all the theories.

Some theories talk about the sub-conscious and others talk about wiring the brain and some talk about habits that are in the body.  I’m going to use the autopilot analogy and ignore the theoretical side for now.

  1. Take this seriously.  Jesse Elder made this point in his training on a meditation technique called PrimeLight: “Between 80 to 95% of success depends on Mindset, so why do we spend all of our time and money buying training on strategies, tactics and tools?”
  2. Our minds think in pictures – it saves information based on emotion.  The piece that is often left out is that without strong emotions attached to those pictures, feeding our mind images has little impact.  For example, .you need to FEEL what it would be like to own that special car or house!  Think about what it would be like to reach the top of Mt. Everest after weeks of climbing and setting up intermediate camps.  You would have a VERY STRONG feeling of accomplishment, pride, awe and more.   The point is that the feelings you add to your mental pictures need to be VERY STRONG!
  3. Do Not Use Negatives – When we send messages to the autopilot, it does NOT understand negatives.  Thinking “I do NOT want to be broke” is heard as “Fly this plane to where we can be broke!.” Note that things we DO NOT WANT are often thought about with very strong emotions and that really drives home the command to be broke.
  4. Re-wire the Brain – Habits are electrical pathways in the mind that have been used so often that you have to work hard  NOT to do the habitual behavior.
  5. Issue Explicit, Detailed Instructions – The autopilot does not receive general instructions like “Go North”.  It needs concrete destinations.
    • One common mistake is to issue the command “I am rich!” There is no setting on the autopilot dial for a very vague destination like “rich”.
    • Another error is to issue commands like: “I want to make $50K a month.”  “I want” is not a command and so it is ignored.  “I want” is a statement about a command.
    • Use something like “I am making $50K per month!” – AND FEEL like you are doing just that.
  6. Take Action – There has to be an action component to your thought.  (If you don’t set the autopilot and engage it and then fly the airplane, it will never take you where you want to go.)  Expecting to say over and over “I am an excellent piano player” without practicing piano is just crazy.

Here two themes that are not common in all the theories, but they are common enough and I believe they are critical.

  1. Meditation with a purpose is super important.  I did months of work using an app on my phone called Headspace.  It taught me how to calm my body, but didn’t take me anywhere.   Quite a few of the Success books promote meditation, but don’t tell you how. Then I read Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself”, took training with a hypnotherapist and an online training by Jesse Elder.  These taught me techniques on how to  use meditation to make changes. (As a side note, I used the meditation from Dr. Dispenza’s book to work on my eating habits.  It was fascinating to watch my hand shovel finger food into my mouth with no conscious direction at all!  It really drove home how much of our lives are run on autopilot)
  2. New Science Explains a Lot – The Quantum Field has an explanation for how we influence our future. A growing body of evidence indicates that the basic way we have viewed the Universe and time and space has been very simplistic.  This theory is way beyond what I can describe  here, but basically says that there are an infinite number of parallel universes and they all exist during the present moment.  When you connect with the field properly you can choose which of these universes  you want to be in. This is another way to say that you can influence your own future time line.

So How Do I Upgrade My Mindset Autopilot?

  1. Joe Dispenza’s book called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself uses meditation.  His technique breaks down into three steps
    1. List all the bad habits you can think of in the area you want to change. List the thoughts and rationalizations you often use for behavior that you “know” isn’t good for you.    (When I used this for weight loss – so far I have lost 20 pounds in 30 days without dieting – I came up with over 30 thoughts that I knew were wrong and 10 thoughts related to exercising that I know were wrong for me. I list these at a website called http://TheJourneyToThin.com)
    2. In his meditation, he has you think about each of these habits so that you will recognize them when you start to think them.
    3. The next step is to visualize the situations where you have these thoughts and say “CHANGE!” to banish the thought.
    4. Follow-through by seeing these thoughts in your day-to-day life and think CHANGE! and do what you know is right.
    5. I will note that his meditation is over an hour long and I wouldn’t recommend that you jump right into that if you have never meditated. The Headspace Ap did help me there, but it took several months.   During that time I often wondered “Why am I doing this?”.  When I started Dr. Dispenza’s meditation, I could see what I can gained.
  2. Stephen Guise in his book Mini-Habits for Weight Loss uses a technique where you basically trick your mind into doing things. He shows you how to commit to super small habits – like “I will do one push-up per day” and turn that into serious change.  It works because once you have set yourself up and done the one push up, it is easy to say: “As long as I’m here I might as well do more.”    He has written several books with the mini-commitment of “I will write 50 words per day”
  3. James Clear (https://jamesclear.com/three-steps-habit-change) uses a similar technique. He likens his technique to setting an alarm on your phone, except instead of using the alarm app, you use things that happen to you every day as triggers.   “When I brush my teeth, I will meditate on what a great day it is going to be for one minute” or “When I am stopped because a traffic light turned red, I will think about …..”

Summary:  I am busy re-wiring my mind to accept a brand new and improved autopilot.  If you want to improve your mindset, I suggest you do the same.

Until Next Time. Remember, You Are One Decision Away…! Oh Hale Yes
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Recommended Books on Mindset

  • Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill (This books is not directly on Mindset, but it is close enough.  I never knew that it was a Research Report until I read it.)
  • The Success Principles – Jack Canfield
  • You Were Born Rich – Bob Proctor
  • The Law of Attraction – Jerry and Ester Hicks (our physical body is a manifestation of an infinite portion of ourselves that wanted to have experiences and grow)
  • Mini Habits for Weight Loss – Stephen Guise
  • Younger Next Year – Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge (the part of your body that controls the immune system and muscle-building/fat reduction only responds to activity.  Daily exercise will tell your body that it is Spring Time and you need muscle and improved immunity to the scratches and sprains that come when you leave cave to chase game and collect food.)
  • Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself – Dr. Joe Dispenza (We are part of an infinite set of dimension and we can create our own future by meditation,    He also spends a lot of time on re-wiring your brain and changing your daily habits.)
  • Jesse Elder – who believes in the Quantum Field and focuses on the “How To” rather than the Science behind it.  His primary works are not books, but online training programs  http://JesseElder.com
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Comments

  1. Cathie Kroll says

    Insightful!! Love your journey. Thanks for sharing

  2. Thank you so much for this article. “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe the mind can achieve” is incredibly powerful and I’m glad your study is yielding positive. The body is much stronger than the mind will let it be.
    Contrary to our perception, the average Navy SEAL is 175 lbs.,and about 5ft – 10in. Seems rather small for some of the toughest people on the planet. Exceptional mental control.
    Stay with constant mind training.

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