However, if you have faith in your ability to care for the plant, and give it positive attention, the
ficus will remain resilient, and not loose many leaves. In effect faith will allow one to be success
ful even if then “experts”. say differently. If you didn’t have this faith, the ficus may not have
survived. When you approach your work, you must also have positive faith in order to succeed.

Don’t say, ” I can’t do that. ” Say instead, ” It can be done.” Have faith in yourself, and you will
be able to succeed in all aspects of your life. Faith brings enormous results every time. “If thou
can believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.” Mark 9:23.

By Phillip B. Crosby

Philip B. Crosby (1926-2001) was a local businessman, author, teacher, and generous contributor to our local community. Known as the “Father of the Quality Revolution”, his philosophies and concepts helped change the way business is conducted worldwide.
http://www.wppl.org

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STOP! Think about it for a moment…

Your conscious mind is the part you are most familiar with – it does all your conscious thinking, it processes the information that comes in through your senses, it makes decisions that affect everything you do during your day and it’s the part that is your awareness.

That’s all pretty amazing! But, the power of your conscious mind is limited. There have been a lot of studies showing that your conscious mind can manage at most between 5 and 9 things simultaneously – it just can’t cope with more.

It’s your subconscious mind that is a real powerhouse. Your subconscious operates outside of your awareness, but just because you aren’t aware of it doesn’t mean it’s not doing much. Here are a few of the things your subconscious does for you.:

* It manages all the muscles in your body, so that you can breathe, walk, talk, drive a car and much more. Sometimes hundreds of muscles have to be co-ordinated to achieve what you ask your subconscious to do – an amazing feat in itself!

* It processes, stores and retrieves vast amounts of information (there’s a lot of evidence that our whole life experience is stored somewhere in our mind – if we could just remember it!).

* It tries to protect you and do the best for you at all times. Like when you touch a hot kettle, and your reflexes snatch your finger away.

The Danger of Unconscious Thinking

Look at reflex reactions in more detail…

Snatching your finger away from hot kettle is obviously good for your survival. But the subconscious mind is so much more powerful than that. It learns from your past experiences how to respond to inputs from all your senses and your thoughts. It can help you respond without having to use the limited power of your conscious mind, almost as if you are on auto-pilot. One name for this process is “habitual thinking”.

Habits or as they are sometimes known, programmed responses, can be very useful for you: sensing people’s emotions by reading subtle tell-tale cues, driving a car, adding and multiplying numbers…All done instantly and without conscious effort.

However, not all the things that your subconscious mind has been programmed to do by your life experiences serve you as well.

In fact, all of us have negative as well as positive experiences in our formative years – and even as adults. When your subconscious mind is exposed to a negative experience it doesn’t have the reasoning power of your conscious mind to judge what’s happening to you. Instead it goes ahead as usual and forms a habit that you will have for the rest of your life.

Quite commonly people have bad experiences in their childhood – their parents go through a painful divorce, they get abused, they experience something really terrible – and this often leads to some very negative habitual thinking. Thoughts such as “I’m not worthy”, “I’m a failure”, “I can’t…”

These traumatic experiences can leave you completely trapped in negative habits as an adult.

More subtly, you may have an experience in childhood that wasn’t bad at the time but that led you to form a habit that is now bad for you. It can happen like this…

Maybe when you were growing up you learned that finishing all the food on your plate made your parents very happy. Maybe they re-enforced your behavior with a bit of guilt about “all the starving children in the world”. So you got into the habit of doing as you were told.

Now that you’re an adult, you might find it impossible to not eat everything that’s put in front of you. So now you constantly struggle to loose weight, you become frustrated, miserable, depressed because another part of your mind doesn’t like your appearance or the feelings of poor health…

Knocking Down Your Internal Obstacles

I have shown you how your subconscious mind has a tremendous amount of control over your life. Mostly it acts for your good and it achieves its purpose of helping you to live your day to day life in the best way possible.

But, sometimes the way it has been unintentionally programmed by past events leads to habits of thought that prevent you from getting where you now want to go. And these habits can imprison you as well as any real locked door in your way.

The answer to overcoming these negative habits ingrained in your subconscious mind is very simple, you need to change the programming.

Yes IT IS that simple…

But it’s very hard to do !!!

After all you’ve perfected your habits over years of use and now you are a real expert at doing all those things that you don’t want to do. Changing bad habits can be one of the hardest things you will ever have to do for yourself…

Luckily, there is help out there for you.

People throughout history have struggled with the problem of eliminating negative mental habits and solved it. Methods have been tried tested and refined over hundreds of years. The fantastic news is that you can have access to all this wisdom through books, tapes and seminars. In fact there are so many answers that there isn’t time to go through them all here.

So, get out there and start searching for a solution that works for you.

By Kevin J. John

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If you spend a lot of time focussing on negative feelings and ideas and thinking about things that you don’t want, you chances of getting what you want are diminished.

Warning! Killer ANTS on the loose!

Your mind is continuously flooded with thoughts all day long – problems you are solving at work, what you are going to have for tea tonight, what you think of the boss, how you need to loose some weight… Many of these thoughts are automatic, they just pop in to your mind without you consciously thinking about them, stay for a few seconds and the go only to be replaced by the next thought.

The problem is that a large number of your thoughts are of the undesirable negative variety – ANTS- Automatic Negative Thoughts. Like their insect cousins, these ANTS are present in huge numbers, they run relentlessly through your mind and they are very difficult to get rid of!

Personal development tip – first find your ANTS

The first job is to find your ANTS.

Carry a piece of paper around with you for at least one day. Every time one of these ANTS crosses your mind, write it down. You may find this difficult at first. Many people I have worked with find that they only see the most obvious negative thoughts when they start looking for them. For example when they have an argument, when some inconsiderate driver cuts across them and so on.

However, over time, as you get used to spotting these insidious creatures, you will find that there are a lot more of them – sometimes they are very trivial and fly by in a flash.

You’ve probably developed the habit of ignoring the vast majority of your ANTS, so they don’t appear to be having an effect on your life. But where there are small ANTS there are also big, destructive ones and there are so many of them that they have a big impact on you life through their sheer weight of numbers!

Personal development tip – kill your ANTS

There are two ways you can approach this problem – you can use tools that will kill any ant stone dead or you can find the source and eliminate it.

My personal development tip is to adopt the habit of positive thinking – every time you come across a bad ANT, expose it to the light of day and watch it shrivel into nothing.

Ask yourself “on the scale of things, just how important is this, what impact will it have on my life tomorrow, in five years”. Often the answer is that this is an insignificant problem that is not worth the emotional turmoil that it might be causing you.

If it turns out to be potentially more serious, then develop a plan to deal with it. Once you know it has been controlled, you can get it out of your mind and get back to working on the things that are really important for you.

ANTS can be a major problem – they occupy your mind, they attract negative results and they cause unhappiness. Learning to spot them and control them are two very useful personal development tips. Do you want some more personal development tips?

You can get a free e-course the success principle . Visit my website for more resources, articles, and support materials about success and personal growth .

Kevin John has spent many years helping businesses owners, aspiring business owners, and private individuals to develop the understanding and skills needed to achieve the success that they want.

By Kevin J. John

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music, wine and will…

” You go to the supermarket and stop by some shelves offering French and German wine. You buy a bottle of French wine. After going through the checkout you are asked what made you choose that bottle of wine. You say something like “It was the right price”, or “I liked the label”. Did you notice the French music playing as you took it off the shelf? You probably did. Did it affect your choice of wine? No, you say, it didn’t. That’s funny because on the days we play French music nearly 80% of people buying wine from those shelves choose French wine, and on the days we play German music the opposite happens “

This study was done by Adrian North and colleagues from the University of Leicester [1]. They played traditional French (accordion music) or traditional German (a Bierkeller brass band – oompah music) music at customers and watched the sales of wine from their experimental wine shelves, which contained French and German wine matched for price and flavour. On French music days 77% of the wine sold was French, on German music days 73% was German – in other words, if you took some wine off their shelves you were 3 or 4 times more likely to choose a wine that matched the music than wine that didn’t match the music.

Did people notice the music? Probably in a vague sort of way. But only 1 out of 44 customers who agreed to answer some questions at the checkout spontaneously mentioned it as the reason they bought the wine. When asked specifically if they thought that the music affected their choice 86% said that it didn’t. The behavioural influence of the music was massive, but the customers didn’t notice or believe that it was affecting them. Similar experiments have shown that classical music can make people buy more expensive wine or spend more in restaurants.

Is this manipulation? There’s no coercion, all the customers are certainly wine buyers who are probably more or less in the mood to buy some wine. But they have been influenced in what kind of wine they buy and they don’t know that they have.

What would be the effect, I wonder, of having someone stand by the shelves saying to the customers as they passed “Why don’t you buy a French wine today”? My hunch is that you’d make people think about their decision a lot more – just by trying to persuade them you’d turn the decision from a low involvement one into a high involvement one. People would start to discount your suggestion. But the suggestion made by the music doesn’t trigger any kind of monitoring. Instead, the authors of this study believe, it triggers memories associated with the music – preferences and frames of reference. Simply put, hearing the French music activates ideas of ‘Frenchness’ – maybe making customers remember how much they like French wine, or how much they enjoyed their last trip to France. For a decision which people aren’t very involved with, with low costs either way (both the French and German wines are pretty similar, remember, except for their nationality) this is enough to swing the choice.

This priming affect is, I believe, one of the major ways advertising works . Simply by making it more likely for us to remember certain things, we are more likely to make decisions biased in a certain way. There’s no compulsion, nobody has their free-will wrenched from their conscious grip. There’s just an environment shaped a certain way to encourage certain ideas. And how could anything be wrong with that?

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