The Art Of Thinking For Success: Personal Growth Guide | The Art of Motivation

whenever you see an adult who is having problems you can trace it back for to the first three to five years you're about to hear a life-changing speech from Brian Tracy relax take notes and watch this entire video so you don't miss anything that can have a huge impact on your life the starting point of the development of negative habit patterns are first of all destructive criticism in early childhood destructive criticism is more painful than a lash because destructive criticism we used to talk about this like a neuron bomb you know a neuron bomb has a special characteristic that you set it off over a city and it kills all the inhabitants and it leaves all the buildings so if you're in the serious business of warfare looting plunder and things like that you don't want to destroy all the property so what you destroy is just destroy all the owners and then your army goes in buries all the bodies and you keep all the buildings I mean that's what the neuron bomb was for Neutron Bond I'm sorry they used to call Jack Welch Neutron Jack because he would shut down entire divisions and lay off Thirty forty thousand people leave all the buildings standing call them Neutron Jack so destructive criticism is like a neutron bomb in that what happens is the neutron bomb destroys the person that leaves the building in track destructive criticism destroys the emotions of the person and leaves the person intact so there's the person walking around with their emotions completely destroyed from destructive criticism destructive criticism early in life as you know leads to incredible feelings of failure and feelings of inadequacy now anything said by a PP which is a prestigious person parent sibling older relative teacher is taken to be a true representation of Reality by the child as an adult if I were to say something to you like Randy I say boy that that church you're wearing sure sucks I mean would you get that at a Goodwill or something like that Randy can just laugh you know when men say that by the way it's usually a sign of affection anyway so it's pretty hard to get anybody mad but but Randy can just laugh and he can take my opinion for what it's worth if he can take it he can he can respond to it because she's in it also he's got enough discriminating power to consider the source all right children don't have any ability to discriminate so anything you say to the child the child accepts as true if you say you know you're no good you're late you never clean up your room you're messy you're not very smart you'll never amount to anything child has no way of blocking that it goes straight into the subconscious mind and is locked in as a place of semi-permanent data the child accepts it as true and operates on the basis of that for example you know if I said to you lunch is out here down the hallway and over there you would just say okay you go out down here down the hallway to lunch you don't question you don't argue you don't fight and raise your hand and so on child's like that the child just accepts so anything that is said by an older person sometimes an older relative will come over an uncle an aunt a mother-in-law something I you see Reed Ann Landers on a regular basis the Mother-in-law comes over and criticizes the children and the mother says to so he says you know it's my husband's mother what can I do she's always criticizing my kids and I don't think that's good and and Landers is really clear she says you know don't let her in your house if you do you supervise it and you just tell her straight don't talk to my children like that because it's so destructive so number two is lack of love as we've talked about lack of Love is another form of neutron bomb is there's a one-to-one relationship between the amount of Love A Child receives quantity and quality and a healthy personality one-to-one relationship now here is a mistake that many parents make many parents say they love my kids oh I love my kids they do anything for my kids of course I'm at the office all week until 12 o'clock at night and I play golf on the weekends and go off on business trips and so what happens is they treat their children like domestic pets when they come home they may if they're there they may give them a little scratch behind the ears verbally hi how you doing have a good day and then watch TV and you'll find that the amount of one-on-one time that parents spend with their children they get so busy that they don't do it especially during the formative years mothers are much better at this than fathers are but then there's a lot of people that say well mother should get right back into the workforce as fast as they can and get something to take care of the kids or put them in in daycare whoever came up with that great idea is probably a parent a dying adult of a really broken relationship broken Parenthood because the more time you spend with a child the more you tell them how valuable they are if you don't spend any time with a child the child internalizes my mummy my daddy never spends any time with me it must be because I'm no good it must be because I'm fundamentally flawed I'm just no good and they grow up and they become a behavior problem and they get into trouble at school and they act out and they drink and they blow up in anger and they get do damage to themselves they are fighting against this awful feeling they have inside of being of no value to their parents because their parents especially their father spent no time with them this is a major problem in America where you have children growing up illegitimately is the well George Will had this wonderful column many years ago and I thought what a wonderful thought they said no child asks to be born no child asked to be born so when a child is born then you are responsible for taking care of that child and then the second quote that I read was a child should be in the company of someone who is crazy about them for the first three to five years of their life and I thought isn't that a wonderful idea is No Child asked to be born but by gum if they're born they should be in the company of someone who's crazy about them for the first three to five years of their life and many parents didn't know this we didn't know that my parents didn't know it when I was growing up we sure knew it when we had our first children because we had for children to feel fully loved three conditions must exist number one the parents must love themselves a low self-esteem parents raise low self-esteem children because they don't love themselves so they're critical toward themselves they're negative they're angry they're depressed they have a whole lot of problems sometimes they drink it so on and many of us were raised by parents who didn't love themselves very much and second of all parents must love each other the greatest kindness that a man can do for his children is to love their mother and vice versa greatest kindest a woman can do for their children is to love their father because children learn about Love by seeing it in their environment by watching it experience they learn many people get married they call it a trial marriage most trial marriages are people have never seen true love expressed genuinely between their mother and father while they were growing up so they have to get married to learn about it and it's a trial marriages last a few years breaks up in Flames usually in the 20s mid-20s and then they go on and now they have an idea what it's like to be in a marriage with another adult and often the second marriage takes the statistic was out to the day before yesterday it was 50 percent of first marriages now end in divorce I don't know if that's entirely true but it may be because enormous number of marriages are trial marriages because they've never seen love in their environment and they have to go through trial and error to figure it out the third factor is that parents must love the child and there's only one way you can love the child it's by spending an enormous amount of time with the child there's only one way you've got to really really spend enough time so you really get to know the child and ask questions and listen and talk and go to movies and all kinds of things like that so that you really develop and and deep down feeling of love for this child and if you don't put in the time nothing happens the rule is this a relationship only grows in value to the degree to which you invest more time in it if you want your any relationship at all even a business relationship a customer relationship a relationship with a co-worker or your boss but especially with a member of the opposite sex your spouse your mate or your child you have to invest more time in that has to become a priority to spend more time in it I had this discussion with somebody the other day it was really interesting I said that you know with love they talk about quality of time but quality of time is a function of quantity of time is you only get the quality moments those unbidden unexpected moments in a relationship with another person as a result of providing large quantity and the moments come unbidden the moments come without anticipation the moments come as a complete surprise the moments just happened there was that moment and you remember it forever because I remember it for years but you've got to provide large quantities of time for that to take place so they must love the child and many parents meant to love their child and they even say I love my child I just never spend any time with them I have no idea what they're doing or thinking a friend of mine who was you know was talking about these things about how important it is to be a good father he his daughter was going on a ski trip and it was about five hours away and she missed the bus and so he had to drive her to the ski trip and so the bus left at seven o'clock and she overslept so he had to drive her to the ski trip so he drove to the ski strip and they're going through mountains this is in Utah so remember this they couldn't pick up any radio so there was no radio on so they talked for five hours and she was 16 years old she said he learned more about his daughter in five hours than he learned in 16 years he had no idea who she was what she thought about what her concerns were what her fears her Ambitions her desires her goals and he thought he was just a great parent he was just shocked I mean he never got over the shock and from then on he always drove his daughter to ski he always graved that five hour block to drive her to the mountains for skiing and never had the radio on one of my rules is never travel with someone in your life with any music on leave it off leave it off so that you can just talk because if you create a vacuum of Silence by not having it on it'll fill with conversation if you as soon as you turn it on all conversation stops shuts down completely so just a very small thing Barbara and I travel all the time and we never have anything on we will never listen to anything we just talk actually I just listen [Applause] um the only reason nobody believes all right the only way you can really love a child is by standing a high quantity of time with with the child and this has to take precedence over all things they did a study of 50 parents on I believe it was Mother's Day I think it was Mother's Day and or Father's Day maybe it's probably Father's day but they asked them what's the biggest regret that you have with regard to your grown children and 49 out of 50 had the same regret can you guess what it was I wish I had spent more time with them when they were young I wish I had spent more time with them when they were young because if you missed that time you can never get it back you can never go back you can't make it up you can't go back and catch up on those years say all with 49 out of 50 said their biggest regret as parents is I did not spend enough time with my children when they were young so when Barbara and I heard that before we had Christina our first child and we made a vow that that would never be the case with our children that we would spend enough time with them so releasing your brakes one of the if one of the three above conditions existed in combination with destructive criticism you'll have grown up with guilt and guilt is the feeling of not being worth very much guilt is the most powerful and biggest negative phenomena in our society today we have a plague like an epidemic of guilt that is pulling our society down and destroying the hopes of so many people and guilt is an Insidious it's like a low-grade emotional infection that sits in there and that follows up everything that we try to do say be in life so when we don't feel that we are worth very much we feel worth less and the greatest problem a feeling of guilt leads to a feeling of worthlessness interesting I've spoken with the doctors who work with AIDS patients when age was much more of an epidemic they say the one characteristic of an AIDS victim was an overwhelming feeling of worthlessness they felt absolutely worthless and as a result they engaged in promiscuous behavior that led to them getting AIDS and it's because they just felt so worthless they just punish their bodies because they felt so worthless for a whole variety of reasons the feelings of guilt and worthlessness are expressed in the thought or attitude of I'm not good enough I'm not good enough and this is one of the greatest single problems we have as adults we look at others who are doing better and we think they're better than us I'm not good enough we think we want to start our own business and we say I'm not good enough we want to start we want to start our own practice we want to do something new and different we want to run a marathon and the first thing that axes us it cancels the thought is wait a minute you're not good enough hey when I started off I didn't graduate from high school it took me a decade to get over this feeling of I wasn't good enough and even if you work hard and succeed and do well you feel like an imposter it's called The Imposter syndrome you feel guilty you feel they're gonna they're going to find you out because you're successful really it's they don't know way down inside you're really not that good they are going to find out people who've been raised with feelings of guilt have this feeling that somehow they're going to lose it all and be put back to the beginning again they're always in danger of losing everything no matter what they've achieved they have this on easy feeling that it's all going to be taken away I don't know if anybody here can identify with that now those who have been raised with destructive criticism and lack of Love experience self-hatred and self-doubt whenever you see an adult who is having problems you can trace it back for to the first three to five years whenever you see an adult who engages in destructive behaviors either for themselves or others who can trace it back for the to the first three to five years and and that's why it's so important that we get rid of the feelings of guilt so we find that guilt is used for two reasons number one is punishment parents are his guilt because guilt was used on them and it was used on their parents and throughout the ages there has been what what I call negative religion negative religion is based on guilt you must inculcate in the child a feeling of being guilty before the age of six or seven or you'll never get them they've got to feel awful they've got to feel like Sinners they've got to feel like they are bad like they came into the world as a sinner and are bad I have a friend who was an Evangelical missionary in Mexico and I asked him I said how do you go about evangelizing in Mexico he said well we pull in we get a donor a supporter a sponsor who translates and we pull into the center of a small town and we say we're going to have a meeting and we call people around this truck that's got speakers on it he said and then my job is to convince them that they are evil and Sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God and are going to hell for Eternal punishment we've got to get them to accept that or they won't be open to the Evangelical message that's the opening line I think oh and so you find negative religion is based on beating the emotional crap out of the child so they raise are raised feeling guilty and unworthy and undeserving and if you can't do that you can't get them later in life because later in life they say This is BS you try to you I try to say you're an evil person you're going to hell you'd say yeah go stuff it where the sun can't don't shine you know so what we did with we raised we raised our children with no we're no religion we told them God loves you and we love you and they say well I don't love God I don't believe in God they said oh God believes in you so it's okay do what you want so our children have grown up with no religion and you know what they've grown up through wonderful young people with high values and great characters and everything else but we've never imposed a religion on them because we know how dangerous it can be so it's guilt is used as punishment and parents use it as punishment as well they say how could you dare do that and I was expecting you to do this and you said you would do that and I was hoping you would do this and why I went and they just work you and work you and they started at a very early age because you've got to get the guild Hooks and the young or adults would just laugh at it so second of all is the control and they use guilt to control you many people are controlled by guilt by long distance the mother can call you up and say oh I was expecting you to call why didn't you call you're going to call I haven't seen you why don't you visit and they can they can use guilt at long distance they can put those hooks in over 500 miles so mostly mothers are brilliant at this but Fathers as well um so and because they learned it and and the reason they use it for punishment and control is because it's easy you can do it sitting down you can do it from a couch you don't have to get up you don't have to hit the kid with a stick you can just use guilt and just and grab them from the inside and pull them I've met so many adults who are still feeling guilty because of what their parents do or did to them and their parents are still working them still working so the adult manifestations of guilt see if these any of these apply to you number one feelings of inferiority feelings of inadequacy feelings of undeservingness there's a school of thought that says that the feeling of undeservingness lies at the root of all negative emotions well there's many things but the feeling of undeserving being undeserving of good things being undeserving of of being really happy that's why if you're really happy for a time and you've been raised with feelings of guilt you'll feel oh my God it's going to be taken away something's going to happen because I don't deserve to be happy all the time well the fact of the matter is you deserve all the happiness that you can legitimately enjoy by doing something worthwhile in the world by treating other people well and by making a contribution people say well I feel I don't deserve they say they call this fear of success it's not fear of success it's a desire it's it's a feeling of undeservingness when you tell people you're entitled to all the money you can earn if you do it by legitimately helping other people and making a profit and they say really I said you deserve it all you deserve the house on the hill and the big car and everything else if you earn your money because the word deserve comes from the Romans which is from service if you earn your money from service you deserve everything you can possibly make I've had many people walk out and transform their financial lives with that one concept and now their whole focus is not on the feelings of guilt but their focus is on serving other people higher better inexpensively more convenient and so on number two destructive self-criticism people have been raised with a feeling of guilt are always running themselves down oh I'm always late I never do this I always forget I'm terrible with money I can't remember anything is they're always saying negative things to themselves and what that does is it keeps the parental destructive criticism keeps it going keeps the plate spinning as adults number three they're easily manipulated by guilt you can be manipulated by by strangers here's an example of the way they're taught in Flight School their flight attendants they come by and instead of saying would you like another glass of water or Coke they say will that be all will that be all or is there anything else and they say it in with just a little bit of an edge like it would be a real inconvenience for me to bring you something and so and what they'll do is they say oh no no I'm fine I don't mind sitting here for the next three hours with nothing to drink while my whole head implodes from uh uh lack of moisture so what you do is you realize people are trying to use guilt on you and they use it in restaurants they use it in aircraft they use it everywhere and just don't allow them to do it that person is a drive victim of a drive-by-gilt shooting they were taught to use guilt by their mother and now they just pass it on and because why because it works they get really good bank they don't have to serve you anymore because you said no I'm fine I don't need any more yeah number four is they use guilt and blame generously remember the evil that's under the children is done onto their children so they use guilt and blame all the time they're always blaming their other people you did this and you did that and why did you do this and how did you do that and so on I'll give you an example my kids come home they get a lousy grade I never get angry for them for lousy grades they go off to college and they get lousy grades and they don't even send them home imagine that they're even getting the grades um and so what what happens is that they use the blame on other people and it works and we we start to we just keep it going generation after generation and you can tell if a person has been raised with guilt it was the mother that was raised with guilt and the grandmother was raised with guilt and the great grandmother was raised with guilt and why because it works and the fifth is they use victim language now the victim language is I can't I can't I'm too weak I'm too little I'm too small I don't have the ability other victim language one of the worst of all is I'll try I'll try I'll try I'm trying I'm trying a friend of mine uses this example he takes a person and he puts a pen on the down on the uh stage and he said here he said and he takes and grabs a hold of his back of his shirt and belt he said pick up that pen for me and so the person goes to pick it over and he pulls it's just pick up the pen and he goes it pulls again he says pick up the pen this is in front of the whole audience and he said I'm trying I'm trying to figure out if you're holding him he said great he said come on thank you very much sends it back to a seat he said see the fact is you're either picking up the pen or you're not there is no trying it's like Yoda no try do or no do but no try so eliminate the words I can't eliminate the words I have to eliminate the words I'm trying or I'll try or I'll do my best have you ever invited somebody to a party and they said I'll try to get there what does that mean it means I am not coming I'm trying to Signal you in a nice way I'll do my best to get there I'll try I'll do my best Winston Churchill had this great line when he's given a command during World War II and the general said um Mr Prime Minister I'll do my best and he said stop stop here just a second he said it is not sufficient that you do your best but that you do what the situation requires and that you do it with dispatch I don't want to hear about doing your best I want to hear that the job will be done because when a person says I'll do my best they're kicking the back door open for failure I'll try it's kicking the back door open for failure so don't use victim language and don't allow people to use victim language say I will or I won't I would like to but I'm not going to I decided not to thank you very much I'm not going to could you do this could you do that no I would like to but I don't have the time and just tell them straight oh okay so to rid yourself of guilt here are the keys number one eliminate destructive self-criticism from now on never say anything about yourself that you do not sincerely desire to be true if you don't want to be it to be true because the reason that you're late is because you've decided not to be on time that's all I can guarantee that you would be on time for every appointment what if they got you've got ten thousand dollars for every appointment that you're showing up five minutes early for ten minutes early for you'd be on time for every appointment for the rest of your life in other words if you decided to be there you'd be on time the reason you're late is because you have not decided to be on time that's all shared was once accused she arrived her meeting and the person said you're almost late she said where I come from in Hollywood that's called being on time I thought that was funny all right all right number two refuse to be manipulated by guilt when a person tries to manipulate you using guilt you say excuse me are you trying to make me feel guilty and you smile at them and nobody will admit it they're all lie through their teeth and they'll say oh no no not at all you say that's good because I thought you were trying to make me feel guilty and when they try it again mother say it again are you trying to make me feel guilty and just say it with a cheerful voice and the third time you say are you trying to make me feel guilty the finally burst out they say yes I am you say well it's not going to work anymore because I don't feel guilty and I'm not going to do anything if you try to make me feel guilty and if you keep trying to make me feel guilty I just won't talk to you anymore and what that does is it forces them to start to engage in adult behaviors in adult conversation you have to break people of the habit of manipulating you with the use of guilt so you just say excuse me I'm just curious are you trying to make me feel guilty you're not attacking them you're just saying this and if when they finally admit yes you say well it's not going to work anymore that'd go to work I'm not going to do anything because I feel guilty so what else you got so that's all I got I've been working for years number three refuse to use guilt and blame on others refuse to use guilt and blame on others guilt is often a punishment my mother was raised Catholic so I say I come by my feelings of guilt and unworthiness honestly but my mother would take something a mistake I made when I was five and she'd still be reminding me of it when I was 15. one of the rules we have in our house is if somebody breaks a dish or makes a mistake it's never mentioned again it is never mentioned again we never bring up a past mistake we say that when you're growing up you make mistakes and life goes on and we never mention it again we never get angry we never blame we never remind it's just past event it's like something that happened in a previous town and it's never brought up again because why only by by reminding you of a mistake you made are you made you feel guilty over and over again now the fourth is to use the law of forgiveness and this is perhaps the most important thing that I can share with you because this is what changes people's lives the law of forgiveness says that you are mentally healthy to the degree to which you can forgive and forget the grievances against you in the Bible in the New Testament it said the principle of forgiveness if a person hurts you go with him 70 times seven if you remember that you've heard somebody go and apologize to them the principle of forgiveness right up to the end of the life of Jesus is the fundamental principle of Christianity the ability to freely forgive is the mark of the truly developed the superior human being and that's why when you think of what they call the great Mystics or the great lovers throughout history they have been people totally without Rancor or anger toward anyone even people who put them to death the ability to forgive is really the mark of how far you've come as a human being so we say the people that you must forgive are first of all you must forgive your parents children grow up with ideas of what the things that their parents should or should not do and those ideas may be based on reality or falsehood it may be based on something someone said when our daughter Christina was growing up she was thinking of becoming a psychologist so she visited a psychologist and the first thing the psychologist told her was that she had terrible parents because we asked Christina twice in her lifetime to babysit for Catherine just take care of her while mom went shopping and the psychologist told her and when she was a very impressionable age that that was an awful thing for her parents to impose on her to ask her to babysit for her baby sister which was at home while mom went shopping and she thought wow she didn't realize how badly she'd been treated it it took her it took her years to recover from that she took her years to get over this first impression remember a prestigious person do giving a piece of input to a vulnerable person and this and it turned out this psychologist turned out to be a bit of a wacko and eventually nobody would nobody would send anybody to her she was a teenager psychologist but she would plant these sort of things in other kids minds and turn their kids against their parents and raise their kids feeling that their parents had abused them because they'd asked them to wash their dishes or clean up their bedroom and children should be free and not have to clean up their bedrooms and I mean it was just anyway my point was the first people you have to forgive are your parents and you have to forgive them for everything that they ever did that you still feel angry or unhappy about and the way that you do it is one of three ways you can just say to yourself I forgive them completely for everything and I let it go I forgive them completely for everything and I let it go and whenever you think of them you say I forgive them completely for everything and I let them go what I did to clear my metal decks is I forgive them completely for everything I wish them well and God bless them forgive them for everything I wish them well and God bless them and I did this before my parents died which is a good thing because often people are still angry with parents who've passed away and there's no ability to settle but you can just say it to yourself just say I forgive them completely for everything I had one gentleman in my seminar who was still he's 35 years old still angry about something his father had done uh or said when he was 15. and he decided because he was still making him mad because he realized it in the seminar so he decided he'd go over that night and tell his father he was a working guy rough Gruff you know never showed any affection at all so I went over and he went over to his father's house it's a Saturday after the seminar and he said Dad I just want you to know that I forgive you for that thing you did when I was 15 years old and he said I don't know what the f you're talking about I never did anything that requires forgiveness I have no idea what you're talking about and he suddenly realized he'd been mad for 20 years and his father never even knew he did it what a stupid waste of time life and emotion he said okay Dad no problem and he left and he was free at last he was just completely free most pet cases your parents never even knew what they did your parents only did to you what they knew how some people complained my father my mother didn't love me enough but why do you think that was it's because they didn't have they weren't loved when they were children and they didn't have enough love for themselves to give any away and so the rule is your parents gave you all the love they had they had no more it wasn't as if you did something that caused them to withhold it they had no more to give you than they gave you is they gave you all they have and so therefore you can't be mad at them many more than you could be mad at a person who's in a wheelchair because they don't get up and run sometimes people are emotionally crippled and all you can see is from the results so what you do is you say God bless them I wish them well and you forgive them sometimes you can go and see them personally we have found in many cases that parents feel extremely guilty about all the mistakes they made with their kids and so they're hoping against hope that their children will come and sit down and say I forgive you and I love you I spoke to a gentleman a couple of days ago very interesting guy very interesting guy very successful he said he never had any truck with his father his father was Gruff difficult abusive angry his father was on his deathbed when he was 32 years old and he went to visit him on his deathbed and say Dad I forgive you and I love you he says I love you too son and he died the next day that's the only conversation he had with him in 20 years never seen him never spoken to him never had a conversation but he says thank God he did it before his father died so he could make peace one of the most important things you can do is tell your parents that you forgive them for everything and you love them and you wish them well and it's absolutely amazing from that point on you become an emotional adult from that point on you move from being a child with this big evil parent looming over you you move up to emotional maturity you jump over the canyon and from then on you'll have the best years of your life with your parents when I went through this with my parents in my late 20s from then on we were like friends and we had just a great relationship for the rest of our lives which is another 10 15 years because you'll let it all go as long as the baggage is there you still remain a child to your parent the child is still the parent is still the rigid disciplinarian lording it over you with the emotional stick as soon as you forgive them you're free and you become an emotional adult yourself our country is filled with people her emotional children emotional cripples because they cannot forgive their parents they're still angry with their parents I was in doing a seminar in Orlando and this gentleman came lunch with him he said he had to get divorced from his wife after about 10 15 years and his wife was about 35 years old and he has to still meet with her because they had two children they had children things to straighten out and he said he had had lunch with her the night the week before and he she started off complaining about her mother and complaining about her mother complaining about her mother and he'd heard this so many times he had to they got divorced about three years ago because he just couldn't take the negativity anymore and he said to her he said Harriet he said you realize that you haven't lived with your mother for 18 years yes but my mother did this and my mother you haven't lived with her for 18 years how many years more are you going to be mad about something that your mother did or didn't do when you were a teenager oh yes but my mother this and my mother she was just like just caught up with it almost like a rain man you know she could not let go of the fact that her mother did something that hurt her feelings when she was young I read the story of a woman who's uh when she was a teenage she put on 20 or 30 pounds and she came home one day and her father said boy you're sure looking Porky she was 35 years old and still an emotional Basket Case still in counseling because she had not recovered from her father saying geez you sure look Porky one comment one time when she was a teenager and she was working and she still couldn't get over it and she was still she said she is still emotionally conflicted because she can't get over that comment from her father which is one of the way of saying be careful of what you say to your children because it can have a real negative effect on them but look at the child why don't get the child Let It Go okay so we forgive your parents second of all forgive everyone else everyone else in your world who has ever hurt you for any reason and people say well I can't do that because of what they've done because of what they hurt and they hurt me and because of the cruelty and the years and the upset I had and so on but remember this forgiveness is perfectly selfish as Emmett fox says every prisoner needs a jailer every prisoner needs a Jailer if there's no Jailer there's no no prisoner and so what happens is when you keep the person in prison you remain the jailer if you don't forgive them you remain caught almost like there's a like those chains and and leg links that prisoners used to be on the CH on the Chain gangs they used to be linked together you're linked to the person by the chain if you don't forgive them so the reason you forgive another person is to be free is to liberate yourself you don't care if the other person drops off a cliff now that now in time you will be completely neutral with what happens to the other person but you let it go completely you just let it go and you forgive them so you can be free people say well I can't forgive that person it's a perfectly selfish act it has nothing to do with the person as a matter of fact if the other person knew that you were still upset about something that happened they'd probably be happy about it now would you like to go around ruining your own life and making that other person happy you probably want to kill that other person and you're thinking well I'm going to hurt them by destroying my emotional life on a day by day basis does it sound a little absurd by the way you know I'm going to hurt them by punching myself in the face over and on just keep punching myself in the face until I bleed and that'll get that person back in Cincinnati that already punish them you'd say well that's absurd imagine you took a hammer and say that person in Cincinnati that I was married to and whacked your hand with a hammer until the bled and the bones were broken I mean are you with me so far this is absurd and you know something physical pain you can take away with pills but the emotional pain that you carry around with you is there all the time so your job is to get free and the way you get free is to just forgive everybody you forgive people in your past you could give past relationships past business deals you just clean the deck clean the deck because it's the mark of the superior person is they have no anger they have no hatred there's nobody that they're mad at no matter what anybody else has done that's their problem so that's your problem third whoops the third person you is yourself and you forgive yourself for every Wicked senseless brainless stupid unkind cruel and ignorant things you've ever done now all of us have done countless things in our lives that we feel badly about and it's time to Let It Go in fact Emmett fox says that clinging to negative experience in your past is actually a form of weakness it's a form of emotional insincerity it's a refusal to grow up and get on with your life it's not a mark of being a superior person and feeling guilty because you made mistakes it's just a form of weakness that keeps you away from reality because when you let everything go you say okay I'm not perfect and remember this the person who made those mistakes in the past is not the person that you are today in the past that person made those mistakes that was the person you were at that level of knowledge and maturity you are not now that person today the person you are today would never do the silly things you did in the past isn't that true so therefore don't beat yourself up today for the person for a person that existed years ago because that was then and this is now what you do is you say that's not the kind of thing I would ever do now and the wonderful thing is they say that wisdom comes from making mistakes and miss and and you and you make mistakes in order to gain wisdom and so what you do is you make mistakes in life and the only thing you do with the past experience is what now you learn from it you say what can I learn from that past experience and then you take the wheat and you let the Chafe go so whenever you think of a negative experience you say all right what did I learn from that that's made me a better person today and I always think on paper I write down all the things I can think of and you think well I learned to do more of this and less of that or not to do this and not to say that I think before I speak and to do more due diligence due diligence has been my favorite word during the economic bust due diligence I wish I'd done more due diligence into the background of people that I was doing business with but I didn't and life goes on you know the money's gone life goes on so what you have to do is you say okay I learned to do due diligence and do lots of research and Let It Go Let It Go remember we never become upset about a past event because you can't change a past event imagine a guy comes up to me in a seminar and I said how you doing he said oh I'm doing fine I said you see a little bit perturbed yeah I said I'm pretty pissed off you're really pissed off he said yeah I'm just curious he said what happened he said about five years ago my wife my family and I decided to go on a picnic on Sunday and we packed up everything on Saturday night we're going to leave first thing Monday morning about two hour drive I'm going to picnic and we got up on Sunday morning it was raining it rained all day and we couldn't go on the picnic and I'm still pissed you'd say whoo bring in the guys with the white coats I mean you're still mad about the fact that it rained five years ago and you couldn't go in your picnic you're still upset yeah I'm still pissed you think this person needs a checkup from the neck up they're obviously a serious problem what's the point that I'm making there are people still mad about things that happened five years ago that you can't change they've gone forever they've disappeared into the past and they're still men today for the mistakes they made or mistakes somebody else made so what you do is you say God bless them I wish them well is I forgive them completely for everything God bless them I wish them well and if you've done something to hurt someone else go and apologize have the courage and the character to go to that person write them a letter make a phone call send them an email and just say you know what I did was really unkind and cruel and I'm sorry and I apologize and then let it go they said what about the other person you're not concerned about what the other person does or says or anything else just let them go many of us will feel guilty for years because we did something that we feel bad about we did something that was unkind or cruel or something uh and we feel badly about it but it takes tremendous courage to go and say you know I thought about that and in retrospect I'm sorry I said or did that I'm sorry what happened and if necessary make make recompense if necessary you make compensation that's really really important in in the Bible what is the what is the word that they use is to um to repent and to repent means to turn back to repent means to turn back and go back to a past event and and have done with it and deal with it honestly and the whole purpose of those teachings is to free your soul so you feel happy about yourself and just let it go and once you've done it by the way you just let it go now number eight the last thing which is not in this and I'll leave you with is we'll take a break now the last thing has to do with what we call the letter and the letter may be written in your workbook please excuse me because I've only been over this about 25 times and 30 years so if we go through here releasing your brakes okay yep there's three people the last exercise 42 lists three people you're still angry with who you are now going to forgive completely and one one action are you going to take immediate as a result of what you have learned in this session and let me just tell you about the letter and the letter is where you have been through a bad relationship or even worse a bad marriage and I've met people 10 15 years after a bad marriage who are still bitter and as a result they never meet anybody else and they end up alone for the rest of their lives because anybody who comes near them is like trying to stroke a porcupine the first thing that they do is they start to spew all their venom about their bad marriage and remember what you dwell upon grows so the more you think about your bad marriage the angrier you get and it just keeps you angry all the time it's sort of very much like putting hot water onto black tea and letting it steep for a long time what happens to the water it gets blacker and Blacker and Blacker and the more you dwell on a negative experience the blacker and Blacker you're thinking and feeling becomes so here's how you liberate yourself from a bad relationship what you do is you write the letter and the letter has three parts the letter is I uh I have thought over are marriage relationship and I forgive you completely for everything that you ever did or said that hurt me in any way that's the first line the second line is to be specific I forgive you for the following colon and you can write down every single thing that you think the person ever did to hurt you some people will come up with several pages the last thing is I let you go and I wish you well and then you take the letter and you sign it and you go down to the mailbox and you mail it you don't email this by the way you have to write it psychoneural motor activity and you mail it now here's the most astonishing thing from the time the letter becomes irretrievable you drop it in the mailbox and it's gone suddenly all the negativity of the relationship is vanished it goes it's almost like a it's almost like a zapper is as soon as the letter of forgiveness and wishing them well has been mailed you're free you're free at last free at last and you walk home and you walk home singing It's the most astonishing thing I've had people come back from all over the world say they couldn't believe it and this man in my seminar and he was sitting there and he was and you can see he was having some problems and he came back it was a two-day seminar at that time he came back the next day and he was smiling and he was beaming he said he changed my life yesterday and said let me tell you what happened here's what happened he and his college buddy formed a business and they built the business for 10 years and they built it into a multi-million dollar business and they both got married and they both had children and they're both the best of friends and they worked together and they built this business and whole whole arm and arm and they were just really successful and one day he went to the office and his partner was gone and his partner handled all the money accounting bookkeeping and so he just went to work went home that night his wife was gone and what he found was that his partner and his wife had been having an affair they had carefully closed up everything he had stripped the company bankrupt and they had both moved away to the other side of the country and they had carefully written he'd signed whatever they put in front of him you know we just needed this for the bank and he signed it so he ended up on the hook for everything and they ended up with all the money and it was unlegally Untouchable and then they moved away and left basically two families with children and took all the money left in bankrupt with I think two two or three children and was this guy entitled to be a little bit angry I mean we're talking smoking here I mean he was angry and he was angry this happened about four years before and he had to work his buns off for 16 hours a day to save his business he had to take complete responsibility for his children and he was just human I mean his best friend and his wife had stabbed him in the back so deeply he was entitled to be angry would you say he had not done a thing he had been an innocent player this whole time but he came to this seminar and after he went home he wrote the letter he wrote the letter to them he knew their address he wrote the letter to their address and he wrote it to his to to both of them and said I forgive you completely for everything I forgive you for bankrupting the business and leaving me and blah blah and I wish you well have a good life they dropped the letter he said as the letter dropped it was like the burden had been lifted off of him completely so sometimes there are things that you can do to unlock that break on the front wheel of your Mercedes-Benz mind and emotion and just release it completely and a letter is very simple but forgiveness is the most powerful technique ever discovered to Free Yourself completely from negative emotions from all the ones in the past and all the ones to the present and do it on a go forward basis so there's never anybody that you're angry with no matter what they do you are not going to give them the the honor or the right of being angry with them is when the movie Patton Patton says in his opening talk he said and I don't want to hear any any calls from the front saying we are holding our position we are not holding our position he said we are not retreating he said I don't like to pay for the same ground twice he said we are moving ahead we are going to kill the enemy we're going to go through him like crap through Goose remember that movie pattern but he said we're not going to tape hey we're not going to pay for the same ground twice my point there is that we're not going to have the injury plus pay for it by being negative and unhappy and angry and frustrated and have it affect our lives and the lives of our family pay for it with money pay for it with lost time but don't pay for it twice just pay for it by saying okay it happened I forgive the person completely and get on with the rest of your life so I want you to think in your mind and every time you think of that person say I forgive them completely for everything and I wish them well and then I then I say is God bless them I wish them well I've already forgiven them God bless them I wish him well God bless them I wish her well God bless them I wish him well whatever the the the the the thought of the person comes up I just throw a bucket of water on that negative emotion and it goes out and in less than a week it stops coming up the fire is out and you think geez I was upset about that for weeks months years and it's gone because you cannot wish a person will say God bless them and wish them well without feeling great about yourself and if you do that you become completely liberated and after lunch we are going to there's a God here after lunch we're going to start talking about programming your mind for Success now we have cleared your metal decks completely now let's build an incredible psychological and emotional edifice or building on it that will now allow you to accomplish anything you want in life does anybody have any questions from what we talked about this morning covered a lot a lot a lot of ground my daughter is a psychologist and uh I said I'll I'll teach you what you learned in five years of a master's program in about five hours and this is what you learn I'm working on a book now the working title is get over it and get on with it and it basically talks about all the things that we talk about in this seminar and all the different ways that you can just drop off the things that are acting as drags on you which is the old negative experiences and negative memories and so on and wonderfully enough there are some really great Technologies metal technologies for that which you're going to start learning after lunch and so just ways of your thinking differently because if you change your thinking you do change your life and sometimes instantly you know a friend of mine was once asked how long does it take to develop a new habit and the question is they say maybe three weeks four weeks maybe a month maybe a year but some habits you can develop instantly for example if you sit on a hot stove or put your hand on a hot stove uh you'll develop the habit of not putting your hands on a hot stove instantly and you'll never have to relearn it so for the rest of your life with one quick experience you'll have developed a habit of never putting hands on hot soaps from now on you'll check the stove before you put your hand on it there's a little thing in biology where they talk about if a cat sits on a hot stove and burns itself that cat will never again sit on a hot stove you'll learn immediately but the problem is the cat will never sit on a cold stove either the cap will never sit on any stove never take another chance at all around stoves human beings are often like that often we have one negative experience and we say that's it and we won't ever try in that area again and it should find that most people who are successful have failed so many times they've lost track of it they just try and fail and try and fail and try and fail they don't like to fail nobody likes to fail but they recognize it well this is part of the experience you have to make mistakes in order to learn how to be successful and so the critical things don't make a mistake and then never try something else you just learn from it pass on what we had especially in relationships especially in business I sometimes will ask an audience is anybody here who's been lied to or let down or cheated or betrayed or swindled or badly done by or treated pretty when they were growing up and had a bad childhood bad marriage bad relationship went broke lost all your money everybody like that and by this time everybody's got their hand up I say well good get over it let's get on with the rest of your life it was just shocked you know wait a minute wait a minute I've paid a lot for those that suffering you can't ask me to just give it up but they think that they have to hold on to it like I I paid for that I own that suffering and you're not going to talk me out of it and you started thinking isn't that amazing amazing on your hot stove and saying take your hand off the hot stove no damn well no damn way I'm gonna stay here and burn until the skin starts to smaller well why well because I put my hand on this hot stove and you know the old days they say well if you made a bad marriage or you made your bed you have to lie in it the idea was that if you made a bad marriage well you just stayed in that bad marriage for the rest of your life I had a woman in my seminar a very nice one attractive woman but 28 and she came to me at the break and she'd come by herself she said her husband she she was gone up with him for about two or three years and they've been married for two or three years and she said you know you're saying that if if the marriage is not working out or if I'm unhappy I should think of leaving well I never put those words in people's mouth I say well she said I've been but I've gone six years of my life in this relationship and but he's abusive and he's negative and he criticizes me all the time and he runs me down and he drinks and I mean it just never what I expected and she's as I said she's a very nice one very smart attractive so I said well let me ask you a question I said how long are you intending to live how do you mean I said well you're 28 now and so let's say you live the lifespan average lifespan of females in our society 80 years how many years is that 52. yeah it's 52 years so now you have a choice you can take the last five years of that have gone by which is the past in your relationship or you can look at the next 52 years do you want to be still in this situation for the rest of your life she said oh my God like OMG OMG she said oh my God her eyes opened up and I ran into her about a month later and she was just shining I said how are you doing she said great I said you dumped the bastard didn't you she said I sure did she said I'm not going to spend the rest of my life in a negative situation like that and so the the mark of superior people the top 10 percent is they think about the future most of the time is they don't think about the past because you can't change the past but you can't change the future by changing the present moment you can change the future by making new decisions today and taking new actions today it's almost like you've been driving and no matter how far you've driven it doesn't matter but you can change the future by changing the wheel of your mental or emotional mind right now and go in a different direction but you can't change the past so sometimes people think that they've invested so much in the past one of the great obstacles to change is Investments of three kinds one is Investments of time you've invested a lot of time in something and it hasn't worked out and people are reluctant to Let It Go uh but I say if you invested time in something and it hasn't worked out and it's obviously it's not going to work out then the question you ask is if I were not now doing this knowing what I now know would I get into it and this is something we teach in the total business Mastery seminar called zero-based thinking if you were not now doing this knowing what you now know would you get into it and I call it a quick analysis k-w-i-n-k knowing what I now know what would I do and so I say to managers if this person applied for their job again today knowing what you now know would you hire them if the answer is no then how do you get rid of them and how fast if you would not get into a relationship that you're in today knowing what you're now know then how do you get out and how fast because once I found a situation fails the Quint test is finished it's unsavable can never be saved people keep thinking well maybe something will happen a miracle will happen I like Peter drucker's comment he said that it's not that Miracles don't happen it's just that you can't count on them and a lot of people think a miracle will happen and save them from all the mistakes that they've made or the time or money they've wasted so just ask at every part of your life is there anything that I'm doing today that knowing what I now know I wouldn't get into and if the answer is no then how do you get out and how fast going back to Investments the second investment is of money we invest a lot of money in something and we lose our money and what many people do is they throw good money after bad they say well I've invested in this stock and it went down so I'll buy more instead of saying knowing what I now know what I invest in that stock at all but I invest in that business at all if the answer is no how do you get out and how fast I have a friend who's a professional poker player goes to Las Vegas and plays in the no hold them poker rooms I don't know if we've ever seen those but they're quite interesting they've got tables full of professional poker players and um they come from all over the place and they play poker all day long 10 12 14 hours anyway his observation was this he said that once you've made a bet as far as you're concerned the money's gone you don't get it back you can't say well I really made a Bad Bet there so can I take my money back and give you your cards back no that's not how it works if you get your cards and you make a bet and you get another card you make a bet and then a card comes up and you make a bet and so on if each time you make a bet that money's gone forever so what you do is you make every decision based on the cards that you have now based on the cards on the table now this becomes your criteria and you ask you ask yourself knowing what I now know with the cards the way they are now what I've bet and if the answer is no it's time to fold know when to hold them and know when to fold them if you would not bet again but always remember the money that you put in is gone money so in accounting they have an expression called a sunk cost does anybody know what a sunk cost is well the sunk cost is a cost that's gone forever if you buy a piece of equipment and it's worn out and it's thrown away in the trash it's a sunk cost if you run an ad six months ago for your business it's a sunk cost it's not a capitalized cost it's not part of your business it's gone forever it's like dropping a big Anvil off a ship in the middle of the ocean you can't just go get it back it's gone it's called a sunk that's what they call it a sunk cost it's sunk and it's amazing how many of us try to invest time or money or emotion to preserve a sunk cost or to try to get the sunk cost back when in reality the time money emotion is gone so the third type of investment is emotion we put a lot of emotion into something and it can be a career or relationship or something else and at the end of the day we realize that knowing what I now know is not a good investment the emotion is gone the investment is gone so how do you get out and how fast and here is the Great Discovery is that when you finally make the decision to end a situation that knowing what you now know you wouldn't have gotten into in the first place you'll only have one reaction afterwards and it will be why did I wait so long why did I wait so long to make this decision why did I hang in there for so long when I've known it was the wrong situation for such a long time and so once you've decided you wouldn't get into it now the only question is how much more you're going to suffer how much longer this is purely a personal choice you could choose well I'm going to suffer for another three months or six months or year just go ahead suffer suffer suffer and at the end you will then fold your cards because it's over it's over now you already know it's over in most cases where you use a zero-based thinking model knowing what I now know there's situations in our life that knowing what we now know wouldn't get into

Channel: The Art of Motivation

Views: 86,657

Keywords: The Art Of Thinking For Success, Personal Growth Guide, The Art of Motivation, Master, Art Of Thinking, Success Mindset Tips, Brian Tracy Motivation, Improve Thinking Skills, Achieve Success Brian Tracy, Critical Thinking Tips, Personal Growth Mindset, Brian Tracy Success Guide, How To Think For Success, Success Strategies Brian Tracy, Motivational Thinking Tips, Art Of Thinking Guide, Best Thinking Practices, Personal Development Tips, Improve Critical Thinking, AMt&x%

Id: YrCXPM3B1Ho

Length: 59min 47sec (3587 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023