You’ll see a mass of autobiographies of the rich & famous if you look at any best seller list today. There’s a common thread in every story, even though their lives might be very different - they dealt with the negatives by zoning-in on the positives. Only when we encourage a ‘can do’ mental attitude will we rise above the crowd.
So if you’re dieting, develop a positive approach to losing the pounds. Tell yourself how good you are at healthy eating. Thinking positively opens up a wealth of solutions to any problem. A pessimistic approach though does the opposite.
This is because we have a mechanism, called the Reticular Activation System. It tells the brain what to think about. We become familiar with many things over time that don’t continue to stay in the forefront of our minds - as we store all our previous experiences in the sub conscious bit, or the back so to speak.
When we consciously attempt to do anything, our Reticular Activation System (RAS) will search the sub-conscious mind for any relevant information it holds, and bring it to our attention. If we’re walking down a street, we’re only made aware of things that have meaning to us - the rest is just background noise.
This means that if we’ve been regularly sending messages that are positive to our sub-conscious mind, then that’s what it will transfer back. However, we can only expect unhelpful, depressing thoughts to be returned if that’s what was originally sown.
Successful people seem to have developed the technique of ‘programming’ their subconscious with positive thoughts, thereby controlling their RAS. For achieving goals this makes the RAS an essential tool, because the sub-conscious mind doesn’t know what’s real or imaginary.
In other words, as it believes what it’s told, we need to create a very specific picture of our goal in our conscious mind. The RAS will then pass this on to our sub-conscious - which will then help us achieve the goal. It does this by bringing to our attention all the relevant information which otherwise might have remained as ‘background noise’.
Napoleon Hill once wrote that we can attain any reasonable goal if we keep it clearly in our mind. That’s as long as we don’t allow any negative thoughts about it. Of course, if we keep thinking that we can’t achieve a goal, our subconscious will help us not to achieve it.