In order to be successful within your entrepreneurial journey you need to cultivate what some call a “mindset for success.” Volumes of books have been written on the subject of mindset and some of the overlapping elements from popular books include things like, having vision, having grit, or knowing when to quit and millions of other combinations. The truth is that you need all of these things to various degrees.
The problem is that maintaining a “Mindset of Success” can be difficult when you find yourself smack-dab in the middle of a global pandemic with your sales withering and your bills piling up. In these instances, many people tend to give into the fear and sometimes abandon their projects altogether. It’s a core reason why the vast majority of businesses fail – both online and off.
The question then becomes: how do you maintain your eye on the prize when all hell is breaking loose around you?
Taking the Personal Pep Talk to the Next Level
Many successful people will tell you that you need to be rooting for yourself and many of them use affirmations and positive self-speak to help maintain their edge. This is because on a neurological level, when you repeat certain actions or even phrases, you condition the mind and strengthen neural networks associated with the new ‘idea.’
This falls under the principle of Hebbian learning which roughly states that, “Neurons that fire together, wire together” – Donald Hebb [1949].
In other words, when a set of neurons are used repeatedly, they become stronger and denser within the brain. This is why practices like gratitude and positive self-speak can be so effective for personal development and motivation.
It takes about 21 days to establish a neural network strong enough to consider it a “habit.” Of course, the more complex a habit, the longer it takes to stick. Now imagine what happens when you feed your brain a particular instruction over the course of months or even years? Perhaps something along the lines of, “I attract money easily and joyfully” or “My body is healthy, my mind is brilliant, my soul is tranquil.”
The Mantra Hack! Okay
The mind is an amazingly powerful thing. Consciously, we can place our thoughts in linear time and manifest it into being through grit and determination. Our unconscious mind, on the other hand, is responsible for 95% of all our actions. In other words, 95% of what we do is unconscious action and only about 5% is conscious.
However, unlike the conscious mind, the unconscious does not communicate in words or logic. There is no “linearity” for the unconscious mind. Unless you address these unconscious algorithms you may be working against yourself without you even knowing about it.
A Mantra is a Sanskrit word that means “sacred utterance, a numinous sound or vibration believed to have mystic, religious, or magical superpowers.”
However, a mantra can be a simple phrase such as “I think I can” which one repeats over and over again when faced with challenges. Like a runner in a marathon saying, “Just one more mile.”
Mantras are also typically considered a “form of meditation.” What a mantra does is associate more complex concepts with unique sounds or syllables and bypasses conscious thought patterns allowing the far more capable – unconscious mind – to process the information instead.
This in turn begins to fire all those neurons clustered together and over time, you create a habit. Imagine if instead of uttering a phrase or word that doesn’t really fit your life, you design a Mantra instead by stacking a bunch of positive affirmations together!
Mantra a Making 101
A Mantra can be anything you want it to be as long as it has some importance to you. It needs to have ‘some’ meaning. It needs to sound “divine” in a way. In other words, you have to entice the unconscious mind.
Remember, the unconscious mind does not communicate in words but rather in emotions and reactions. It’s far more subtle and in order for it to get “hooked” on something, you need to embellish it. You need to embrace the activity.
When that happens – the unconscious mind locks in and begins to work on multiple levels at the same time.
I’m going to show you a trick on how to make a Mantra from a single phrase. When I work with my clients, I stack up to 10 positive affirmations to the mantra. In theory, you can stack hundreds of affirmations into a Mantra, the unconscious mind will process and replay them all.
However, for the sake of brevity, I will only show you how to do it with one phrase.
1.) Choose a short and sweet statement in the present. This can be anything but try not to make it too complex. The unconscious mind isn’t about reason as much as it is about “feeling.” Whatever concept you decide on, boil it down to its core.
For example, “I am able to find a solution when faced with adversity” can be boiled down to “I am resilient.” Or, “I have abundant resources available” can simply be, “I am abundance.”
2.) Warp it phonetically. Let’s say you chose something like, “I am a money magnet.” We’re going to be using a very primitive means of warping it phonetically. You’ll simply rewrite it the way it sounds.
For example, “I’m a money magnet” becomes “iamamonimaagnit.”
3.) Scramble the phrase. You’ll then want to play around with it. You can remove repeating vowels or consonants, you can shift parts of the word to the front or the back – to your unconscious mind this matters not. All that matters is that you invest as much as you can emotionally into the creation of the process, truly letting the original concept impregnate the word.
For example, “iamamonimaagnit” becomes “imont” or “no-mi” or anything that truly resonates with you. You’ll know when it sounds right to you.
4.) Activate the mantra. The final step revolves around ramping up the emotional charge and associating it with the Mantra. Typically, you can do a meditation session where you simply repeat the manta repeatedly for at least an hour. Another way would be to simply start repeating at any opportunity until you completely forget the original meaning associated with it.
Then you have plunged it deep into your unconscious mind and every time you repeat it, you’ll be unconsciously invoking the positive concepts at will, actively wiring your neurons together.
Does it work?
People live by Mantras or “sayings” irrespective of their belief systems. “Work hard, play hard” is a mantra. The thing about these techniques is that it’s always only as effective as you allow it to be. If you can make a killer phrase that motivates you when you are tired, or picks up your mood when you are being criticized or facing adversity, then you are winning.
If this all sounds too complicated but you’re still interested in getting your own personal or business mantra feel free to visit my website where I can assist you with the entire process.
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