Developing a mindset to help you make the most of challenging times

With all of the current uncertainty in this unprecedented situation that we find ourselves in, I thought it would be the right time to share some tools and ideas with you that are used and understood by the world’s most effective people.

What I will share with you now is not about positive thinking or looking at your world through rose coloured glasses, its about using the power of your mind in the most effective way so that you can deal with the issues and challenges that life invariably throws at us on an ever increasing basis.

Have you ever noticed that what you tend to fear tends to manifest in your life, As it says in the bible “What I have feared has come to pass” This is simply telling us that we attract what we focus on!, allow me to illustrate with an example that most people would have experienced and noticed, but have not been able to realise or comprehend the powerful force of the mind that was at work.

Have you ever decided to buy a certain car and as you have driven it away you suddenly see that make and model of car everywhere!, yesterday you didn’t notice these cars at all, yet all of a sudden everywhere you turn you see this car everywhere, next to you at the traffic lights, overtaking you ,pictures of the car seem to appear in magazines and newspapers and yet just yesterday there didn’t seem to be any around, actually this was part of the reason that you chose to purchase this vehicle, so what happened?.

We have as part of our brain something called the Recticular activating system, this part of your brains responds to your input by way of your thoughts primarily, what you are focussing on at any given time, hence you tell yourself that a shiny new BMW is important to you and lo and behold all of a sudden they are everywhere.

As a human being you are bombarded with approx two million bits of information per second through all of your senses, now you cant possibly process two million bits of information as you would suffer sensory overload, infact you are only able to effectively process seven plus or minus two pieces of information per second, which equates to approximately one hundred and thirty four bits of information per second.

Now there is a massive difference between two million bits of information and one hundred and thirty four bits of information, so how does your brain differentiate on what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant to you?

Imagine that you mind is the World Wide Web, if that is the case what happens if you type in poverty? Well if you type in poverty you will get 55,700,000 pieces of information regarding poverty, not one reference for prosperity!, like wise if you type in wealth you get 85,000,000 pieces of information regarding wealth and this is exactly how your mind works, what you focus on grows with intensity or to put it another way energy flows where attention goes.

With this in mind it is extremely important that you monitor your thoughts and regulate what you focus on, but even more importantly you must train yourself to focus with intensity because the emotion that you attach to your thoughts creates an immense amount of power within you.

We have all heard the well worn and tired cliché “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” and like all good clichés they tend to be true but we have all heard them so many times that we do not take the time to understand them or examine them for a deeper sense of understanding, so lets try that now, simply ask yourself the question, if it is true that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, why is that?

Most of us will instantly come up with an instant response and within that response you can tell a persons entire philosophy about money, for example, if your automatic response was along the lines of “because wealthy people are mean” then you have developed a negative belief about money which means that for you to have money you need to be a mean person, likewise if your automatic response was because wealthy people tend to leverage their money to make better investments, then you would have a belief that money is a positive force which you can use to multiply your wealth.

The whole point is that whatever we focus on, we are sure to bring more of that into our lives, and it is extremely important that during these challenging times that we don’t allow our point of focus to become negative and most of this can be achieved by asking ourselves a better quality of question.

So we should ask ourselves things like” What are the opportunities here” or what could I do in order to achieve x , because you will always get an answer, we always answer ourselves when we ask ourselves a question so we need to be very careful about the questions we ask ourselves.

If you ask yourself “how can I best increase and protect my income during this period” you will get a totally different answer than if you asked the question “Why am I always broke!”.

I think that the guiding principle here is simply to realise that you don’t always get what you want out of life but you always get what you expect! Think about it.

I would like to leave you with a wonderful quote by the philosopher Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: as I feel it encapsulates what we have shared today.

"Until one is committed there is hesitancy, a chance to draw back. Always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elementary proof - the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans. This is, that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one, that would never have otherwise occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has power and magic in it, begin it now."

Mark Baker is one of the leading Business coaches and business speakers today.

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