Personal Improvement

Brian Tracy is one of the world’s premier experts on goal setting, self-discipline, and personal success. I’ve enjoyed many of his lectures and complete programs and picked up numerous effective strategies and tactics from him over the years.

One of the more interesting tactics he promotes is called “Back from the future thinking”. This is a powerful combination of visualization and goal-setting that I highly recommend.

Essentially here’s how this method works…

Take the time to vividly imagine your life as you want it to be five years into the future. See every detail of every aspect exactly the way you want it.

What kind of work will you do?

How much money will you have?

Where will you live?

What kind of home will you have?

Who will live with you in this home?

What will you do for fun and satisfaction?

How will you impact society through charity, philanthropy, etc.?

Leave nothing out! And once you’ve captured your ideal vision write it out (or type it up); go ahead and take a couple of pages so you can account for every detail.

When you have a clear, exciting picture of everything you want your life to be, start the process of thinking backwards from this ideal vision toward where you are now. Through this process of imagination you’ll begin to identify how you arrived at your dream life from your current position.

You’ll start to develop ideas and receive inspiration. Opportunities and ideas will emerge, many of which have been hiding in plain sight for some time now.

Do this exercise on a regular basis and soon you’ll be able to see clearly a powerful plan that will take you from where you are now to where you most want to be five years into the future!

Not only is this practice highly productive in terms of organizing a serious life plan, it’s a real confidence builder and it’s loads of fun. And this is just one of many amazing goal setting tips from Brian Tracy.

For even more fantastic insights on how to visualize and achieve anything you want be sure to have a look at Brian’s Ultimate Goals Program:

I purchased this complete course over a year ago and I’m still using the proven methods within. In fact I can easily say this is the most comprehensive goals system I’ve found so far.

Using this material you’ll be amazed by how much you are able to get done and how quickly you can transform yourself into a super-achiever. You won’t be the same after following along with the amazing formula in Brian Tracy’s Ultimate Goals Program.

If you’re ready to roll over all obstacles, put aside all excuses, and take possession of the exciting and rewarding life you know you deserve this material is the perfect fit. Be sure to check it out and let me know what you think.

While there are numerous strategies for personal development and a wide range of tactics to help you succeed in specific areas of your life, there is in fact one key ingredient you’ll need before anything else will help:

You MUST have or develop some degree of self discipline before you can success in anything!

In today’s fast food culture it’s hard for people to accept this. Everyone wants a quick fix that involves no effort, and that’s precisely why most people live in mediocrity and failure.

The following article by Goal Setting and Self Discipline expert Brian Tracy puts the subject of self-discipline into perfect perspective:

Self-Discipline for Success
By: Brian Tracy

There is one special quality that you can develop that will guarantee you greater success, accomplishment and happiness in life. Of a thousand principles for success developed over the ages, this one quality or practice will do more to assure that you accomplish wonderful things with your life than anything else. This quality is so important that, if you don’t develop it to a high degree, it is impossible for you to ever achieve what you are truly capable of achieving.

The quality that I am talking about is the quality of self-discipline. It is a habit, a practice, a philosophy and a way of living. All successful men and women are highly disciplined in the important work that they do. All unsuccessful men and women are undisciplined and unable to control their behaviors and their appetites. And when you develop the same levels of high, personal discipline possessed by the most successful people in our society, you will very soon begin to achieve the same results that they do.

All great success in life is preceded by long, sustained periods of focused effort on a single goal, the most important goal, with the determination to stay with it until it is complete. Throughout history, we find that every man or woman who achieved anything lasting and worthwhile, had engaged in long, often unappreciated hours, weeks, months and even years of concentrated, disciplined work, in a particular direction.

Fortunately the quality of self-discipline is something that you can learn by continuous practice, over and over, until you master it. Once you have mastered the ability to delay gratification, the ability to discipline yourself to keep your attention focused on the most important task in front of you, there is virtually no goal that you cannot accomplish and no task that you cannot complete.

Successful people engage in activities that are goal-achieving. Unsuccessful people engage in activities that are tension-reliving. Successful people discipline themselves to have dinner before dessert. Unsuccessful people prefer to have dessert most of the time.

Successful people plan their work, and work their plan. They take the time to think through their responsibilities before they begin. They make clear decisions which they then implement immediately. They get a lot more done in a shorter period of time than the average person. And it all has to do with their disciplines.

Perhaps the most important benefit of self-discipline is the personal benefit that you receive. Every act of self-discipline increases your self-esteem. It gives you a feeling of personal power and accomplishment. Each time you discipline yourself to persist in the face of distractions, diversions, and disappointments, you feel better about yourself. As you continue to discipline yourself, you achieve more and more in life. As you achieve more things, you feel more like a winner. Your self-confidence goes up. You feel happier about yourself. You get more done and you have more energy. You earn the respect and esteem of the people around you. You get more rapid promotions and are paid more money. You live in a nicer house, drive a nicer car, and wear nicer clothes. You get a natural high from the thrill of achievement. And the more things that you achieve as the result of employing your personal habits of effectiveness and productivity, the more eager you are to achieve even higher and better tasks. Your life gets onto an upward spiral of success and happiness. You feel great about yourself most of the time.

Every act of self-discipline strengthens every other discipline in your life. Every weakness of self-discipline weakens your other disciplines as well. When you make a habit of disciplining yourself in little things, like flossing your teeth every night, you’ll soon become able to discipline yourself to accomplish even larger things, like working long, long hours to bring a major task to completion.

Your entire life is an on-going battle between the forces of doing what is right and necessary on the one hand and doing what is fun and easy on the other hand. It is a battle between the forces of discipline and the forces of ease or expediency. And when you develop the strength of character that gives you complete self-mastery, self-control and self-discipline, you feel wonderful about yourself. You develop a deep inner sense of strength and confidence. You replace positive thinking with positive knowing. You reach the point inside where you absolutely know that you can do whatever it takes to achieve any goal that you can set for yourself.

Self-discipline is its own reward. Not only does it pay off in terms of greater self-esteem and a more positive mental attitude, but it pays off throughout your life in terms of the goals that you achieve and the success that you attain in everything you do.

Self-discipline is a skill and a habit that can be learned by practice. Every time you practice a little self-discipline, you become stronger and stronger. Bit by bit, you become more capable of even greater disciplines. As you become a totally self-disciplined individual, your entire future opens up in front of you like a broad highway. Everything becomes possible for you and your future becomes unlimited.

Please click the image below to discover the tools for creating unlimited self-discipline and enjoying the rewards that follow:

This information will help bring all other aspects of personal improvement into focus. Once you have the drive and discipline to use your time wisely you’ll be able to put the many things you learn from various sources into actual practice!

In some ways you and I are always living out the past. The focused intentions and strong emotional responses of yesterday are the experienced realities of today.

Much of the life we experience is the result of manifested focused intention. And it is the result of our emotional response to previous occurrences.

The thoughts and feelings that resonate most powerfully within us at any given moment are our vibration. And we can only vibrate from one specific frequency in any given moment.

Let’s back up just a bit. What’s all this talk of vibration?

Everything in our universe is made of vibrating energy. This is not some New Age theory; it is scientific fact.

Our bodies, oxygen, the many elements of the earth, every man made object you can see right now, electricity, light, water, and all organisms everywhere have a molecular structure, i.e. everything is literally made up of molecules. These molecules in turn consist of atoms; and atoms are nothing more than vibrating tendencies.

Atoms are energy. Once thought to be dense particles, scientists now understand atoms to be more like vibrating thoughts.

So there you have it. All the universe is vibrating energy; it’s all information that vibrates on particular frequencies.

It’s the frequency of vibration that determines an object or organism’s physical form. Slower vibrations equal greater density, and higher vibrations result in “lighter” phenomenon.

You and I are vibrating energy and the specific vibration we hold in any given moment is created in large part by our thoughts and emotions. The law of vibration states that we can only hold one vibration per conscious moment.

Negative, heavy thoughts and feelings create a more dense, slower vibration. Light, happy thoughts and exhilarating emotions produce a really fast vibration.

This is why you often feel “stuck in the mud” or weighed down by a bad mood, disappointment, fear, etc. On the other hand when someone hands you a big, fat check you often feel like you cold bounce off the walls.

Getting back to the main point of this article, what we vibrated in our recent past has manifested our current experience. The law of gestation tells us that many of our vibrations require a specific amount of “time” to become tangible reality.

I use the quotes around the word time because science also suggests that time as we know it, traveling in a forward line from one moment to the next, may be an illusion. But that’s a topic for another article.

To recap, what we focused our thoughts on in the past has played a role in creating our now. Also the major emotions that pulsed and vibrated within us colored our present experience.

Not only does this mean we are hugely responsible for whatever is happening in our lives, it also means that what we are thinking and feeling (vibrating) right now will have a direct impact on our immediate future!

I don’t know why the universe appears to be programmed with this vibrate-delay-manifest algorithm but I have definitely observed the truth of the notion within my own life. And while it’s tempting to many people to resist the idea when they first encounter it, often when they are really honest with themselves they begin to see how true it is.

In essence, you can choose your vibration and thereby create your reality.

The point of this article is not to theorize and debate scientific findings, but rather to leave you with this very important encouragement:

If you don’t like your life today, you can change it by holding a better vibration and therefore manifesting a better reality in your near future. And if you do like your life today, you can continue to create the same circumstances by holding the vibrations that created your present reality.