- Press Releases: You can now visit my updated profile in the Yearbook of Experts and check out my recent press releases. Click on the link below:
- Here's my article that appears in the February issue of Personal Excellence Magazine.
Personal Excellence
February 2009
Change You Can Believe In!
Failure-proof your life and achieve potential.
by Matthew Cossolotto
MANY SUCCESS COACHES offer good advice and valuable insights about how to become more productive, prosperous, and successful. But the standard approach to personal change simply doesn’t work for many people. They leap from one coach to another, one method to another, one book to another. Nothing seems to work for them. You can receive the best advice in the world, but it won’t work if you remain a victim of your negative patterns and self-defeating habits. Said Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do.”
You tend to be fairly comfortable with your current habits—even those that don’t serve any useful purpose or hold you back from achieving your true potential. Your existing inventory of habits—both empowering and disempowering—make you who and what you are at any given moment. The standard, success-first approach to personal change puts the cart before the horse. Before you can carry out the success strategies that will propel you forward, you have to recognize and reject the engrained, habitual failure traps that hold you back.
Consider this principle of physics: “Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.” The same principle applies to personal change. You can’t fill your toolbox with new success skills if it’s full of failure habits.
Failure-Proof Your Life
The failure habits I’m talking about take place mostly between the ears and find expression in disempowering internal dialogue. These failure traps are negative, macro-level thought-habits, mindsets, and attitudes that cause you to fall short of your potential.
I advocate a Fix Failure First approach to personal change, since you tend to fall short of your potential because you are comfortable with the person you are now—failure habits and all. Introducing a set of new success habits might stretch the rubber band for a while, but eventually it snaps back to its previous, tension-free, habit-formed configuration.
In my Failure-Proof Your Life seminar, I talk about the Six Axioms of Personal Empowerment. In this short article, I want to focus on the fourth axiom because it’s key to fixing failure first.
The fourth axiom states: You can’t change what you don’t realize. Self-awareness is key to personal change. You simply can’t implement the Three Rs (Recognize, Reject, Replace) unless you spend time in personal reflection and meditation. You must get clear
about the specific patterns that hold you back and undermine your success.
The change process can only begin when you manage to bring your negative internal dialogue—that nagging little voice in the back of your head—up to conscious awareness. Once you become aware of habitual, negative messages you send to yourself, you can change those messages from disempowering to empowering.
In Keys to Success, Napoleon Hill says we are all “ruled by habits” and these habits are “fastened upon us by repeated thoughts and experiences.” However, we all have control over our thoughts. We create patterns by repeating certain ideas or behaviors “until the Law of Cosmic Habit-Force takes over these patterns and makes them more or less permanent, unless or until you consciously rearrange them.” I agree with Hill that each habit “can be developed and neutralized or changed through the proper use of your mind. You have the power. You are ruled by your habits. It takes a habit to replace a habit.”
I refer to this empowering idea as reprogramming your HabitForce so it works for you, not against you. This ability to reprogram or replace habits forms the basis of my Failure-to-Success system. Each disempowering habit of failure gets replaced by its success counterpart. By recognizing and rejecting your failure habits first, you can clean out your toolbox and make room for new methods of dealing with daily challenges and opportunities.
Recognize, Reject, and Replace
The Fix Failure First approach offers a systematic, three-step, 3R process:
1. Recognize. You start the process by Recognizing the specific disempowering mindset or pattern you want to change. Simply becoming aware of each failure trap is an empowering experience. It shatters the notion that you are held back by forces beyond your control.
2. Reject. Once you begin to recognize the seven major failure traps (spelled out in my forthcoming book The Real F Word), you’re ready to take the next step—to actively, consciously Reject them. Instead of reacting to a situation or problem as you normally would—out of HabitForce—you reject that impulse.
3. Replace. Replace each of your failure traps with the corresponding success track. Each failure habit has an equal and opposite, mutually exclusive success habit. In other words, the first failure habit cannot coexist with the first success habit. By recognizing, rejecting, and replacing the failure habits with the corresponding success habits, you will reprogram your HabitForce for success.
Personal Change You Can Believe In
Such personal empowerment is also about fulfillment and happiness. Paraphrasing Aristotle, John F. Kennedy said, “The Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.” Reprogramming your HabitForce so it works for you is essential to making full use of your powers.
When you hold yourself back and fall short of your potential, you’re not making the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. As a result, your personal power and happiness are diminished. Following the Three Rs is key to reprogramming your HabitForce so it works for you and to making long-lasting, positive changes that create success and happiness for yourself and others.
Failure is not inevitable. You have the right to fulfill your potential and achieve success. It isn’t the birthright of a privileged few. It can be your destiny. By Fixing Failure First and Failure-Proofing your life, you take a giant step toward fulfilling your potential and living the life of your dreams. That’s personal change you can believe in.
*********
Matthew Cossolotto, author of The Real F Word (Morgan James Publishing), is president of Ovations International. Call 914-245-9721, email Matthew@ovations.com, or visit www.ovations.com.
(Note: The above article appears in the February 2009 edition of Personal Excellence Magazine. Visit www.leaderexcel.com for more information. The Real F Word is scheduled for release on March 1, 2009. Pre-orders are available on www.amazon.com.
- Press Releases: You can now visit my updated profile in the Yearbook of Experts and check out my recent press releases. Click on the link below:
- Here's my article that appears in the February issue of Personal Excellence Magazine.
- Press Releases: You can now visit my updated profile in the Yearbook of Experts and check out my recent press releases. Click on the link below:
Personal Excellence
February 2009
Change You Can Believe In!
Failure-proof your life and achieve potential.
by Matthew Cossolotto
MANY SUCCESS COACHES offer good advice and valuable insights about how to become more productive, prosperous, and successful. But the standard approach to personal change simply doesn’t work for many people. They leap from one coach to another, one method to another, one book to another. Nothing seems to work for them. You can receive the best advice in the world, but it won’t work if you remain a victim of your negative patterns and self-defeating habits. Said Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do.”
You tend to be fairly comfortable with your current habits—even those that don’t serve any useful purpose or hold you back from achieving your true potential. Your existing inventory of habits—both empowering and disempowering—make you who and what you are at any given moment. The standard, success-first approach to personal change puts the cart before the horse. Before you can carry out the success strategies that will propel you forward, you have to recognize and reject the engrained, habitual failure traps that hold you back.
Consider this principle of physics: “Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.” The same principle applies to personal change. You can’t fill your toolbox with new success skills if it’s full of failure habits.
Failure-Proof Your Life
The failure habits I’m talking about take place mostly between the ears and find expression in disempowering internal dialogue. These failure traps are negative, macro-level thought-habits, mindsets, and attitudes that cause you to fall short of your potential.
I advocate a Fix Failure First approach to personal change, since you tend to fall short of your potential because you are comfortable with the person you are now—failure habits and all. Introducing a set of new success habits might stretch the rubber band for a while, but eventually it snaps back to its previous, tension-free, habit-formed configuration.
In my Failure-Proof Your Life seminar, I talk about the Six Axioms of Personal Empowerment. In this short article, I want to focus on the fourth axiom because it’s key to fixing failure first.
The fourth axiom states: You can’t change what you don’t realize. Self-awareness is key to personal change. You simply can’t implement the Three Rs (Recognize, Reject, Replace) unless you spend time in personal reflection and meditation. You must get clear
about the specific patterns that hold you back and undermine your success.
The change process can only begin when you manage to bring your negative internal dialogue—that nagging little voice in the back of your head—up to conscious awareness. Once you become aware of habitual, negative messages you send to yourself, you can change those messages from disempowering to empowering.
In Keys to Success, Napoleon Hill says we are all “ruled by habits” and these habits are “fastened upon us by repeated thoughts and experiences.” However, we all have control over our thoughts. We create patterns by repeating certain ideas or behaviors “until the Law of Cosmic Habit-Force takes over these patterns and makes them more or less permanent, unless or until you consciously rearrange them.” I agree with Hill that each habit “can be developed and neutralized or changed through the proper use of your mind. You have the power. You are ruled by your habits. It takes a habit to replace a habit.”
I refer to this empowering idea as reprogramming your HabitForce so it works for you, not against you. This ability to reprogram or replace habits forms the basis of my Failure-to-Success system. Each disempowering habit of failure gets replaced by its success counterpart. By recognizing and rejecting your failure habits first, you can clean out your toolbox and make room for new methods of dealing with daily challenges and opportunities.
Recognize, Reject, and Replace
The Fix Failure First approach offers a systematic, three-step, 3R process:
1. Recognize. You start the process by Recognizing the specific disempowering mindset or pattern you want to change. Simply becoming aware of each failure trap is an empowering experience. It shatters the notion that you are held back by forces beyond your control.
2. Reject. Once you begin to recognize the seven major failure traps (spelled out in my forthcoming book The Real F Word), you’re ready to take the next step—to actively, consciously Reject them. Instead of reacting to a situation or problem as you normally would—out of HabitForce—you reject that impulse.
3. Replace. Replace each of your failure traps with the corresponding success track. Each failure habit has an equal and opposite, mutually exclusive success habit. In other words, the first failure habit cannot coexist with the first success habit. By recognizing, rejecting, and replacing the failure habits with the corresponding success habits, you will reprogram your HabitForce for success.
Personal Change You Can Believe In
Such personal empowerment is also about fulfillment and happiness. Paraphrasing Aristotle, John F. Kennedy said, “The Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.” Reprogramming your HabitForce so it works for you is essential to making full use of your powers.
When you hold yourself back and fall short of your potential, you’re not making the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. As a result, your personal power and happiness are diminished. Following the Three Rs is key to reprogramming your HabitForce so it works for you and to making long-lasting, positive changes that create success and happiness for yourself and others.
Failure is not inevitable. You have the right to fulfill your potential and achieve success. It isn’t the birthright of a privileged few. It can be your destiny. By Fixing Failure First and Failure-Proofing your life, you take a giant step toward fulfilling your potential and living the life of your dreams. That’s personal change you can believe in.
*********
Matthew Cossolotto, author of The Real F Word (Morgan James Publishing), is president of Ovations International. Call 914-245-9721, email Matthew@ovations.com, or visit www.ovations.com.
(Note: The above article appears in the February 2009 edition of Personal Excellence Magazine. Visit www.leaderexcel.com for more information. The Real F Word is scheduled for release on March 1, 2009. Pre-orders are available on www.amazon.com.
