Hero (17 page)

LIZ MURRAY

Because my goal was straight A’s, I went to the office in my school and I asked them to print out my transcripts. They said, “You just started. You don’t have any.” I said, “No, I want the blank ones.” They printed it out with my name on it, and I sat in the staircase and wrote my grades in. I felt like they already existed in the future, I just had to catch up with it. When I did homework I would take out the straight A’s I decided I would have and put them on the side so I could look at them while I was working. I really worked from a feeling that it was already real somewhere.

In your life, you can use visualization for any situation you want to go well. You can visualize the outcome of exams, auditions, interviews, meetings, pitches, proposals, making a speech, meeting your in-laws, taking a trip, or your boss giving you the biggest raise in the history of your company!

Make sure you visualize where you want to be at the end of this year, and maintain a yearly vision with every New Year. In addition, create a bigger vision of where you want to be five years from now. Just watch what happens with your life!

“You’ve got to visualize where you’re headed and be very clear about it. Take a Polaroid picture of where you’re going to be in a few years.”

Sara Blakely

Founder of Spanx

JOHN PAUL DEJORIA

I wake up in the morning and I just am. In other words, I don’t turn on the TV, I don’t get my cup of coffee. I don’t do anything. I just sit there in bed, and I just am. There are no decisions to make, no phone calls to make. Just for five minutes, I try and clear my mind and I am in the here and now. This way your mind goes forth during the day uncluttered. And if you have a dream you’re trying to achieve, in the last couple of minutes you think a little bit about that and how much you want it, why you want it, and things you can do to help get closer to it.

When you stop the franticness of the day before it starts, and you get your mind into a state of complete relaxation, the vision of your dream will slide straight into your subconscious mind. It’s much like shutting down your computer to install a new update or program. Updates can’t be installed while your computer is running lots of other programs – and likewise your subconscious mind can’t receive your vision if your mind is on the run with other things. But when you shut down your mind through relaxation, your vision will be successfully installed.

When you use visualization successfully, the people around you will wonder how it can be that all of a sudden everything is going your way, and everything works out for you as though you’re some kind of superhuman. And you will know that you’re just using one of the simplest, but most powerful abilities you were born with, and which is available to every human being on the planet.

PETER BURWASH

You wake up in the morning and you’ve really only got one major decision; it’s not about the clothes you’re going to wear, it’s not about how you’re going to do your hair. It’s, are you going to have a good attitude or are you going to have a bad attitude? Because a positive attitude is so critical.

MICHAEL ACTON SMITH

I am very lucky to naturally be an optimistic person, and I think that helped enormously.

One of the most difficult things every human being wrestles with is their attitude. When you really get it that you’ll thwart your own success, be miserable, and potentially make yourself sick unless you adopt a positive attitude, you will choose to start looking at life through optimistic eyes. Your attitude is of your own creation. And it can be your biggest undoing or your most powerful tool.

LAYNE BEACHLEY

If you want things to improve in your life, if you want a change from the patterns that you’re currently experiencing, then learn to take responsibility for your thoughts.

Your thoughts form your attitude, and so the first step in changing your attitude is to take responsibility for your own thoughts. When you can recognize and accept that it’s the thoughts you are thinking that are making you feel miserable, then you will begin to change the kinds of thoughts you think.

If someone offered you the life of your dreams in exchange for you finding as many good things every day as you could, you would do it in a flash. Well, that is the way you receive the life of your dreams!

PETE CARROLL

In my life I have found that thinking positively and living in optimism is the best way to be successful and create the things you want.

If you look to outside circumstances in the world to form your attitude, you’ll be in trouble. That would require every circumstance around you to be perfect all the time so you could have a positive attitude, and you cannot control every circumstance. It would also require a lot of people to behave perfectly all the time, and you cannot control anyone but yourself. If you think about it, you would actually need all 7 billion of us to shape up into what you want so you can have an optimistic and positive attitude. You simply can’t look to outside circumstances to dictate what kind of attitude you will have. If you do, you will always find a circumstance or a person that will give you a reason to have a negative attitude. In order to become your most powerful tool, your attitude must be dictated from
within.

MASTIN KIPP

I’ve been optimistic in the worst of circumstances.

PETER BURWASH

Everything has a positive or a negative to it. You can find both in every single situation in the world. The person who’s going to succeed is the person who’s going to be able to look at things in a positive manner first.

You have the freedom to choose to be optimistic or pessimistic. You can peel off your old attitude like a suit of clothes, and put on a brand spanking new attitude every single day. It’s as simple as that.

Something Good is Just About To Happen