Love is in Your Favour

In order to succeed, whether this be in love or work, we often need to try new things. Venture outside your comfort zone to find the answers you need. Seek opportunity, not security. We can only find love if we have the courage to put ourselves out there to go out and love someone.

Naturally, this is sometimes easier said than done! In many ways we want to change, but our mind doesn't want to get out of its comfort zone. It will tell you put things off until an undefined tomorrow. The mind will come up with all kinds of excuses to convince you not to change or improve your life.

Your mind does this because it is simply used to things the way they are. It doesn't want to change because it's comfortable where it is and in many ways - in a sense your mind is happy in its misery. But you're not - and the only way things are going to get better is for you to start taking control of your mind and directing your subconscious to create the situations you want in life.

This will only happen when you train your mind - and my 90 day mind healing programme helps you to achieve thus - it's the complete course that shows you how to direct your mind to work with your subconscious mind.

A lot of people will feel that they just don't have time to take on a new programme, even if it's only 5 or 20 minutes a day. But how important is your life to you? How important is it to be happy, successful and enjoying life? Are you willing to spend 5 or 20 minutes a day so that you achieve your goals?

If you said no - then you're saying you're not worth 5 or 20 minutes. And if you think you're not worth it, why should anybody else try to help you or give you their time? What you think of yourself is what others will inevitably think of you. Get people working for you, start achieving your goals, make time for yourself. Get yourself motivated. What are your driving forces?

Click here to rewire your mindset for success!

Regular reader Sarah Jones emailed me the other day to ask, "Mickie, when you feel your levels of motivation drop, how do you get yourself back on track?"

It's a great question, and in my answer I told her that it was my daily gratitude and achievement habit that kept me on track and motivated to take action every day.

That's one way to change your life. But for those struggling with motivation, I want to share the inspirational life of psychologist William James with you today, as an example of how to overcome lifestyle stagnation.

Fully engage with life

James (1842-1910) was an author, philosopher, scientist, Harvard professor and giant in American intellectual history. His works were the acknowledged inspiration for the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the world's most effective treatment programs.

Although his name is not widely recognized outside academia today, James made major contributions to psychology, philosophy, literature, teaching and religious studies. He coined numerous words and phrases including pluralism, time-line, stream of consciousness, live option and moral equivalent of war. Historian Jacques Barzun writes that James' book Principles of Psychology is:

...an American masterpiece which, quite like Moby Dick, ought to be read from beginning to end at least once by every person professing to be educated. It a masterpiece in the classic and total sense.

What do so many find inspiring about James? In part, it was his life itself, his legendary zest for living. James loved to travel, hike and mountain-climb. He served as a naturalist and accompanied Louis Agassiz on his expedition to explore the upper reaches of the Amazon. He churned out articles, books and hundreds of public lectures while carrying a full teaching load at Harvard. When he died from heart failure in his late 60s, his contemporaries said he had literally worn himself out.

Despite James' many accomplishments, his life was not without its setbacks. He suffered from ailments of the eyes, skin, stomach and back. He was diagnosed with neurasthenia and depression. He contracted smallpox in Brazil. Three siblings, including novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James, were afflicted with invalidism. His beloved sister Alice died of breast cancer at 44.

However, James believed that we are meant to spend our lives being curious, active, and fully engaged.

He was also one of the first to try to reconcile science and religion. In particular, he was interested in human spiritual experience, a realm that is difficult to capture by logic or observation, and nearly impossible to nail down scientifically.

Yet he found a way. James is the father of the distinctly American philosophy known as Pragmatism, the doctrine that truth reveals itself in practice, regardless of its origins. Something is true if it doesn't contradict known facts and it works.

James thought a belief should be judged by its results. He was more interested in the fruits of an idea than its roots and advised people to look for a truth's "cash value", arguing that a belief is true if it allows you to live a fuller, richer life.

He was particularly interested in showing men and women how to convert misery and unhappiness into growth. As you can see from some of his remarks, the approach is nothing if not pragmatic:

• Lives based on having are less free than lives based on being.
• Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
• If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
• Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
• Compared with what we ought to be, we are half awake.
• Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.
• Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
• Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
• Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

James taught that we can change our lives by altering our attitudes of mind. He called pessimism "a disease" and said it could be cured by substitution. You can change, for example, "I have to exercise today" to "I get to exercise today." "I get to visit my grandmother" can be substituted for "I have to visit my grandmother." The shift is a subtle one, but powerful.

The essence of a belief is the establishment of a habit, a willingness to act. That begins with a change of mind. The best motivation is always an inspiriting attitude.

As a pioneering psychologist, James' primary interest was how the mind can bring about life-changing effects. Yes, we can always grouse about circumstances. But it is not what fate does to us that matters. What matters is what we do with what fate hands us.

"All that the human heart wants," declared James, "is its chance."

Turning losses into gains

Everywhere you look there are lessons. Every day you can turn these lessons into continuous improvement in your life. Problems can be overcome by taking bold, courageous, individual action. That is the choice we have.

The only race you have to win is the race against yourself. There will always be someone faster and stronger but there never be another you, so look within and push your own personal boundaries.

Sometimes it's difficult to muster up the positive mental attitude to see opportunity in a bad situation. Things get so out of hand that it's easy to become discouraged to the point of feeling despair. Those are the times when your mettle and sinew are really put to the test - sometimes very long tests.

The longest tests usually come in the form of mass oppression. To the shame of the human race, history's list of brutal oppressions is a very long one. From the American slave trade to apartheid in South Africa, oppression has been an integral part of human history.

But there's also an interesting twist to oppression. In virtually all cases, the oppressed eventually escape or overthrow their oppressors and, quite often, begin life anew on a higher plane than before their oppression began.

How this phenomenon occurs is summed up in the words of English poet Francis Quarles. In his description of the concept of compensation, he opined that "there is no worldly loss without some gain."

Which is to say that every adversity brings with it an equivalent or greater opportunity for success. We see this in a macro fashion in the rise of previously oppressed peoples, such as American and South African blacks - with them rising all the way to the top seats of political power.

And, of late, we watch in awe as India continues its incredible rise to the top of the economic ladder. For nearly two centuries (1757-1947), the British had that vast Land of Enchantment by its political and economic throat. And, for the most part, Indians were loyal, well-behaved subjects.

There is no question that the British devoured India's vast wealth and kept its citizenry in check for nearly two hundred years. But, to its credit, when Britain finally threw in its colonial towel in 1947, Indians took over a country with a ready-made, highly educated workforce.

The British also left India with a language that made it easy for them to communicate with the rest of the industrialized world, a democratic form of government that protected both individual liberties and private property, and a reasonably modern infrastructure.

Given its pro-Western lifestyle and the fact that English is now the official language of the country, it would not surprise me if India became the world's number-one economic power in the next fifty years, surpassing both China and the U.S. in the process.

However, this does not mean that oppression is a good thing, even though good has come out of it. In the above examples, the one big problem is that the opportunities available to later generations do not do their oppressed ancestors any good at all. Since you have only one life to live, it would not have been a good thing if, for example, you had been born in the Soviet Union in 1918, lived there all your life, and died before the communist dictatorship collapsed in the late eighties. It's nice for your descendents to get a start on your shoulders, but it's even nicer if you can get a start on your own shoulders.

In the case of mass enslavements - such as that of the citizens of the old Soviet Union, and American blacks in the pre-Civil War South - an individual could not take much action against his bondage without being tortured or killed. But that's not the case on a micro level, because today any individual in a Western country can still take action on his or her own, at any time, without anyone's permission. His or her only constraints are those that he or she places on him/herself.

Some people, for example, feel oppressed by their jobs. An acquaintance of my mother, well into her fifties, recently told me that even though she became financially secure by working for big corporations all her life, she regretted not having left the corporate world and going out on her own. She lamented that no matter how much money she made, she always felt like a highly paid slave.

It wasn't the first time I had heard such a complaint. But, guess what? Every person who has made that complaint had a choice. Golden handcuffs in the corporate world are not locked. You can always slip them off. All that is required is belief, determination, and action.

And that's true of any other area of life where you feel oppressed – even enslaved. Whatever the source of your bondage - job, peer pressure, unpleasant domestic circumstances, etc. - recognize that it is not a macro problem over which you have no control.

On the contrary, you have the power to escape at any time. The only question is, do you have the courage to utilize that power and transform it into action? You can make all the excuses in the world as to why the time isn't quite right to make your move, but that's all they will be - excuses.

Throughout history, oppressed peoples would have loved to have been in a position to escape their bondage overnight simply by taking individual action. But, sadly, they could not. In most cases, it took small actions by many generations - over a long period of time - to bring about an escape.

Isn't it nice to know that you don't have that problem? In a vacuum, your problems may seem big to you, but, in the overall scheme of things, they are micro in nature. And micro problems can be overcome by taking bold, courageous, individual action. Remember, the only constraints are those that you place on yourself.

The problem with problems is they get bigger and worse as time goes on, leading to bigger headaches than if you'd tackled it now. Attack that problem head on. Solve that problem today.

We all know life isn't fair, but we should look on the bright side of things. Keep your head up! It's easy to get down on yourself, but don't let a bad day or mean person get you down. Learn from your mistakes and stay motivated by focusing on your long-term vision.

What do you mean, life isn't fair?

Today, kids are often brought up to avoid any exposure to "bad" things like "failure" or "disappointment". At school, if you bring a Valentine, you must bring one for the entire class. If you pass out invitations at school, you need to invite everyone.

While I admire the fact that no one wants to disappoint a child (I don't either), unfortunately this doesn't prepare them very well for real life as an adult. Because (as we all heard our parents tell us when we were little), life isn't fair. And that's the truth.

Believe me, I really wish it were! I wish that everyone in the world had enough to eat, all of the time, and that no one was ever disappointed or scared or sick or sad. I truly wish that with all of my heart.

But unfortunately, that's not the way the world works at this moment in time. I am of the belief that the world we live in rewards hard work and perseverance, followed by more hard work and more perseverance, and if you really want to stack the deck in your favour, you need to throw in a little planning and strategy along the way. That is the path to success, and of course it's what we all want for our children. Because that is how the real world works.

So what sorts of strategy can we utilise for success in life, love and everything? Read on:

1. Cultivate an abundance mentality. It is a big, wide, wonderful world out there filled with more than enough partners, money and resources for everyone! Knowing in your heart that this is true and that the world is filled with abundance and value gives you the confidence you need to embark on a quest where you don't necessarily know what the outcome will be, but it gives you the courage to put yourself out there.
2. You need strategy to stack the deck in your favour. Of course we all know about some of the best laid plans - especially in love! But this is more about employing a strategy to follow your own path and not just run around behind all of your friends and acquaintances. Don't simply "do what everyone else is doing". The more you learn about yourself, the more you stack the deck in your favour and the more likely you are to succeed. Those who succeed in life simply have better strategies than those who struggle.
3. Improve yourself. Even in love (and especially in the workplace) it is true that the better you are, the more likely you are to be successful. Inquisitiveness is a basic human instinct and it's a good one. You should work on improving yourself, because believe me, information is power. Life isn't fair as much as we might wish it to be, and right behind having a great strategy comes having the best information. The better your information, the better your chances are of success.

   For work that means constantly strive to improve your work skills, if you're single, get a hobby, focus on a positive lifestyle to attract like minded individuals.

In closing, life isn't "fair", although we of course would like it to be, and we try to make it as fair as possible for ourselves and for our children. But you need to do all that you can legally and honestly do to stack the odds in your favour.

In general, you want to play where you have the advantage, not when the deck is stacked against you, but a final word about the playing field of love: It also means to play fairly, play by the rules, and stay within bounds at all times. Cheaters don't make good lovers, and don't forget truth is the real currency of love. It's with such trust that in love a victory comes when we surrender to it.

So, here's to you living a successful, loving, winner-take-all lifestyle. Go on out there and stack the deck in your favour with love, and you'll discover that love is in your favour.

Yours in love,