Are Your Thoughts Really Yours?

Your mental strength and attitude determines the type of friends you attract.

If you desire to be a positive, successful person, make sure you choose your friends carefully.

Positive friends and role models will have a positive effect upon you, while negative friends will soon kill your motivation. Don’t allow yourself to be lulled into complacency by the masses who believe mediocrity is an acceptable alternative. Think for yourself and focus on the possibilities for success and all that it will bring.

When you doubt yourself, talk the situation over with a coach or a positive, supportive friend. Everyone needs a boost now and again…kind of like a tune-up or oil change; ensure your friends are positive, success-oriented people who always build you up, not negative thinkers who always seem to find a way to tear you down.

When you chose your friend wisely you’ll always be the victor!

Victim or Victor? You Decide.

by Dr. Napoleon Hill

“God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform wrote William Cowper in 1772. And if we could only get a long range perspective of the eternal scheme, we could see that these upheavals in our social, political and economic institutions are sent to break up the undesirable mass habits of men. They may be the means of clearing the way for growth and progress in the overall evolution of the race.

Men of great achievement may be playing parts in an overall pattern, or plan, and they may be serving some purpose far beyond their own conception. Take a man like Thomas A. Edison. He probably thought he was inventing to make money, but for all we know, nature may have had another idea. She may have been using him as an instrument for the betterment of all mankind. At least, he did improve the lot of every one of us.

Two great forces are working in the minds of all men to make them what they are. One is social heredity, and the other is physical heredity.

Physical heredity is the law of nature through which the sum and substance of all characteristics, traits and physical aspects of your ancestors, through the ages, have been handed on to you. You are unavoidably a product of all your ancestors.

Social heredity consists of every influence with which you will come in contact, from the time you reach a state of consciousness until you die. Your mother’s and father’s influence, your education, the conversations you listen to, religious influences, political ideas, the newspapers you read, the shows you see – they all have and will help to make you what you are. They are your social inheritance. Very few persons have what it takes to pull away from these and do some independent, accurate thinking for themselves. A few cast off their social inheritance and dare to be different and individualistic. When this happens, the world has an Edison, a Ford, a Thomas Paine, an Ingersoll or a Jonas Salk. But the vast majority of people allow themselves to become victims of social heredity. This is why straight thinking is such a rarity.

It’s a great moment in your life when you break away from your social heredity and start doing your own thinking. Both social and physical heredity are under the direction of cosmic habitforce. Subconscious application is emphasized because they never consciously knew of this principle or what it was that literally swept them up the stairway to eminent success.” – Source: PMA Science of Success Course. Pgs. 504-505.

WOW…did you get this line! “It’s a great moment in your life when you break away from your social heredity and start doing your own thinking.”

How many of us think we’re doing our own thinking, only to find after further investigation that we are simply running programs that have ben installed by parents, teachers, friends and media?

When we truly develop our mental strength and start to question our thoughts and think in a new way, select our friends with a different perspective…this is when we will experience personal empowerment!

Byron Katie has a series of powerful questions called “The Work” to help investigate our thoughts.  They are:

• Is it true?
• Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
• How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
• Who would you be without the thought?

After you have taken any thought, especially a disempowering one and run it through The Work you’ll be faced with a decision.  Do I continue to think this way or do I want to think for myself?

The answer to that question will either give you personal empowerment and you’ll be the victor.  Or you’ll fade back into the shadows of being a victim….the choice is yours.

How will you choose?  Please let me know in the comments below.