DESMOND ELIOT EPISODE THREE (3)

There is nothing on earth that you cannot have once you have mentally accepted the fact that you can have it.

You are a thoroughly good person. You deserve a wonderful life, full of success, happiness, joy, and excitement. You are entitled to have happy relationships, excellent health, meaningful work, and financial independence. These are your birthright. This is what your life is meant to include.

You are engineered for success and designed to have high levels of self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride. You are extraordinary; there has never been anyone exactly like you in all the history of mankind on earth. You have absolutely amazing untapped talents and abilities that, when properly unleashed and applied, can bring you everything you could ever want in life.

You are living at the greatest time in all of human history. You are surrounded by abundant opportunities that you can take advantage of to realize your dreams. The only real limits on what you can be, do, or have are the limits you place on yourself by your own thinking. Your future is virtually unlimited.

How did you react to the preceding three paragraphs? You probably had two responses. First, you liked what they said, and your fondest wish was for them to be true for you. But your second response was probably one of skepticism and disbelief. Even though you deeply

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 desire to live a wonderfully healthy, happy, prosperous life, when you read those words, your doubts and fears arose immediately to remind you of reasons why these dreams and goals may not be possible for you. Well, join the crowd!

This is exactly how I felt many years ago. Even though I wanted to be a big success in life, I was unskilled, uneducated, and unemployed. I had no idea what I could do to improve my situation. I felt trapped between big ideas on the one hand and limited resources and opportunities on the other. Then I discovered a series of the ages, and my life changed forever.

After proving these laws and principles in my own life, I began speaking, and training others to apply the same ideas. Since then, I have given more than two thousand talks and seminars as long as four days in length, in 24 countries, to a total of more than two mil- lion participants. Most of them were also skeptical when they first heard these ideas of optimism and possibility, until they learned what you are going to learn in the pages ahead. It changed their lives, as it will change yours.

Perhaps the most important mental and spiritual principle ever discovered is that you become what you think about most of the time. Your outer world is very much a mirror image of your inner world. What is going on outside of you is a reflection of what is going in inside of you.You can tell the inner condition of a person by looking at the outer conditions of his or her life. And it cannot be otherwise.

Your mind is extraordinarily powerful. Your thoughts control and determine almost everything that happens to you. They can raise or lower your heart rate, improve or interfere with your digestion, change the chemical composition of your blood, and help you to sleep or keep you awake at night.

Your thoughts can make you happy or sad, sometimes in an instant. They can make you alert and aware, or distracted and depressed. They can make you popular or unpopular, confident or insecure, positive or negative. Your thoughts can make you feel powerful or powerless, a victim or a victor, a hero or a coward.

In your material life, your thoughts can make you a success or a failure, prosperous or poverty-stricken, respected or ignored. Your thoughts, and the actions that they trigger, determine your whole life. And the best news of all is that they are completely under your own control.

You are a complex bundle of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, desires, images, fears, hopes, doubts, opinions, and ambitions, each of them constantly changing, sometimes from second to second. Each of these elements of your personality affects the others, sometimes in unpredictable ways. Your entire life is the result of the intertwining and interconnecting of these factors.

Your thoughts trigger images and pictures, and the emotions that go with them. These images and emotions trigger attitudes and actions. Your actions then have consequences and results that deter- mine what happens to you.

If you think about success and confidence, you will feel strong and competent, and you will perform better at whatever you at- tempt. If you think about making mistakes or being embarrassed, you will perform poorly, no matter how good you really are.

Pictures and images, from your imagination or from the external influences, produce ideas, emotions, and attitudes that correspond to them. They then trigger actions that bring about certain results and outcomes. The thought of a person or situation can cause you to instantly feel happy or sad, elated or angry, loving or lonely.

Your attitudes, positive or negative, constructive or destructive, lead to corresponding images, emotions, and actions that affect your life and relationships. Your attitudes, in turn, are based on your previous experiences and your basic premises about how things are supposed to be.

Your actions trigger the emotions and attitudes that go with them. By the Law of Reversibility, you can actually act your way into feeling in a manner consistent with the action. By acting as if you were already happy, positive, and confident, you soon begin to feel that way on the inside. And your actions are under your direct control, whereas your emotions are not.

In and of themselves, the outer aspects of your life are neutral. It is only the meaning that you give to them that determines your attitudes, opinions, emotions, and reactions to them. If you change your thinking about any part of your life, you will change how you feel and behave in that area. And since only you can decide what to think, you have the ability to take complete control over your life.

The Law of Belief says: Whatever you believe, with conviction, be- comes your reality. You always act in a manner consistent with your deepest and most intensely held beliefs, whether they are true or not. And all your beliefs are learned. At one time, you did not have them.

Your beliefs largely determine your reality. You do not believe what you see; you rather see what you already believe. You can have life-enhancing beliefs that make you happy and optimistic, or you can have negative beliefs about yourself and your potential that act as roadblocks to the realization of everything that is truly possible for you.

The most harmful beliefs you can have are your self-limiting beliefs. These are beliefs about yourself and your potential that hold you back. Most of them are not true. Most of them are the result of information you have accepted without question, often from early childhood. Even if it is completely untrue, if you believe yourself to be limited in areas such as achieving wonderful health and happiness and earning a lot of money, that will become your truth. As the author Richard Bach in his book Illusions wrote, “Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they’re yours.”

When you think positive, optimistic, loving, and successful thoughts, you create a force field of magnetism that attracts, like iron filings to a magnet, the very things you are thinking about.This law explains why it is that you don’t have to be concerned where your good is going to come from. If you can keep your mind clearly fo- cused on what you want, and refrain from thinking about what you don’t want, you will attract everything you need to achieve your goals, exactly when you are ready. Change your thinking and you change your life.

Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, once said, “The very best proof that something can be done is that others have already done it.” In the New Testament, Jesus taught the way to measure the truth of any principle: “By their fruits, ye shall know them.”

In other words, the only question you need to ask about any idea is, “Does it work?” Does it bring about the results that you de- sire? Milton Friedman, the Nobel prizewinning economist, said, “The only true measure of a theory or idea is your ability to make accurate predictions of the future based on it.”

The good news is that the ideas and principles you are about to learn have been tested and proven in the lives and experiences of millions of people. In themselves, like any principles of nature, they are neutral. Nature plays no favorites. Nature treats everyone alike. Whatever seed you plant in the ground, nature will grow. Whatever thought seeds you plant in your mind, nature will grow as well. It is entirely up to you.

Successful people are those who think more effectively than un- successful people. They approach their lives, relationships, goals, problems, and experiences differently from others. They sow better seeds, and as a result they reap better lives. If you learn to think and act like other successful, happy, healthy, and prosperous people, you will soon enjoy the kind of lives they do. When you change your thinking, you change your life.