The one thing I can tell you with great certainty is that life will pay whatever price you demand of it. In the building of my core knowledge, I have studied all of those who have been able to have a massive impact on the lives of others, including the Dean of Success coaching, Earl Nightingale, as well as Zig Ziglar, Bob Proctor, Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, Eric Thomas, David Bayer, Les Brown and more. I have anatomized and dissected literary work like “The Alchemist,” “The Science of Getting Rich,” “Think & Grow Rich,” “Awakening the Sleeping Giant,” “As a Man Thinketh,” and so much more. What I can tell you is that life is not happening to you; it is responding to you.
Unlike any other species on this planet, you have the power to completely change your environment, your reality and the results that you are getting in life. I teach my clients that your mind is the genesis of your destiny and your thoughts are the seeds of your future fortune.
Not everyone is in the same situation, some people don’t even have a clue of what is possible for them — believing that poverty and suffering are their lots in life. Others know that there is something better, but they confused as to how to obtain it. There is so much noise being made with advice and instructions on how to get it that they simply become frustrated.
No matter who you are and where you start, your destiny is in your hands, and you either have what you need or the capacity to go out there and get it. You are the results of your thoughts and the limiting beliefs that they produce; if you want to produce something greater, you must change your thought patterns so that they positively impact your beliefs and expectations.
If you really want better, you must raise the expectations that you have for yourself in this life. You must raise the level of what you demand of yourself. Simply put, you have to raise your standards. ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.
Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D. is the Founder and CEO of The
Visionetics Institute and he is one of the leading life strategist and
business strategist in the world. His extensive background in human behavior, conjoined with his vast and in-depth experience as a business owner, allows him to work with his clients, as a life coach, life strategist, business strategist and therapist on multitudinous levels.
The Warrior concept and the Warrior’s creed is a concept and
tool that Dr. Wallace uses to help strengthen the self-image of his clients while painting a portrait of what is possible when a person is able to create a paradigm shift in their lives.
Dr. Wallace has authored and published more than 18 books that
address everything from self-awareness, finance, relationships and more.
You can get some of his more popular books at Barnes &
Noble, including:
By Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Pys.D. | Courtesy of Visionetics 2020 | Dec. 26, 2016
Creating an Optimal Future for Yourself
While many people will use the phrase, “you are what you think,” very few actually take the time to truly consider the impact of the their thoughts on a daily basis. Scientists suggest that the average human being processes between 40,000 and 50,000 thoughts per day. What this means is that even when we are not aware of it, our subconscious is at work processing what is known as cognitions — subconscious or unconscious thoughts. It is important to understand that while we may not be aware — at least on a conscious level — of all the thoughts that are being processed by our subconscious, we have the capacity to control the type of thoughts and how they are interpreted.
Actually, there is an epochal amount of truth embedded in the statement “you are what you think,” your thoughts are the seeds of ultimate manifestation. In other words, your thoughts are the staging ground and the catalyst for what you will ultimately become. Whenever clients contact me to be a part of my Visionetics 2020 program, I immediately emphasize the fact that the reason they are where they currently are is because of who they are. You don’t get what you want or wish for out of life; you get what you are. If you don’t have the things that you want out of life, it is because you have not become the person who is capable of obtaining them.
When you determine that it is time for a change in your life, you must begin with changing how you think. Why is changing your thought processes so important? Your thought processes govern your belief system, and your belief system is the conduit through which paradigms are created, and finally, paradigms are the lenses through which we interpret life. So, our thoughts will determine if we view life from the position of a victim or a victor. It will determine whether we see life as happening to us or responding to us.
Creating an Optimal Future for Yourself
Changing your thoughts will help develop and change who you are in multitudinous ways. There are two distinctive ways that this happens. Let’s take a quick look at both.
Feeding & Nurturing the Subconscious
The reason that my Elevation and Empowerment course has proven to be so successful is because it uses, as one of its primary components, cognitive enhancement techniques. The cognitive enhancement process takes into consideration that cognitive biases and cognitive distortions can directly impact the social mobility and mental health of an individual. This is one of my areas of expertise. My research and dissertation for my doctorate in psychology was conducted in this area. In fact, my research produced several theories — two of which being Cognitive Bias Syndrome and Collective Dominative Cognitive Bias Syndrome — explaining how both, individuals and groups can develop negative social paradigms that lead to poor decision making and erroneous behavior.
When I encounter a client who is in need of behavioral adjustments, unlike many of my colleagues, I do not start with habitual adjustments — changing behavioral habits at the superficial level. When habitual behavior is addressed at an adumbrated level, the changes are harder to take hold, and the person will usually revert back to the original habits under pressure. Instead, I work on using the conscious mind to influence the subconscious mind, which will subsequently and inherently influence the spirit of the person. Ignoring the spiritual element of our holistic existence is another way that many of my colleagues fall short. We are holistic in our existence — consisting of a body, mind, soul and spirit. What I have discovered is that whatever the subconscious is fed consistently, will, in turn, be fed to the spirit. This particular interaction between the subconscious and the spirit are prodigious.
As the spirit develops in a positive way, as it is being fed positive thoughts and beliefs about the person through the subconscious, it develops the capacity to provide a new and more powerful type of vision. I call this type of vision, spiritual vision. Spiritual vision has the capacity to see beyond what physical vision can see. While a person’s physical sight can only see the facts associated with any particular circumstance or situation, spiritual sight has the capacity to see those things that have not yet manifested themselves within the physical realm, but are just as real as the facts being presented by the current situation. In other words, while losing your job and being behind in mortgage payments and car note payments presents a gloomy outlook, a spirit that has been conditioned to believe that your destiny of greatness, prosperity and success has been set and guaranteed, will interpret the reality of the circumstance as a temporal challenge in which you have the capacity to overcome. In essence, the spirit will disagree with or override the circumstance. This is the power of properly training the subconscious by guarding what it is being fed consistently.
The Reticular Activating System
The truth is that you are creating your future constantly and consistently — each and every day. Your thoughts are literally writing the narrative of your future life. According to Ernest Holmes, “life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” Your thoughts are the staging ground and catalyst for the perpetuation of actions, beliefs, feelings, values, goals and dreams. It is important to understand that this is happening regardless of the level of consciousness and awareness you have of the fact that it is taking place.
Basically, the combination of your present moment awareness, conjoined with the future that is created through your thoughts is actually the totality of the aggregate sum of your subconscious programming. This is why it is so important to guard your gates — those openings to your soul — the eyes and ears. What you allow to infiltrate your subconscious on a frequent basis will create an involuntary response in which beliefs will be developed to align with the information received by the subconscious. Finally, in order to maintain sanity, you will naturally perpetuate behavior that is in alignment with the reality created by your subconscious.
To further assist in this adaptation, the human brain is equipped with a mechanism known as the reticular activating system. The reticular activating system can be viewed as a mediator of your future goals and dreams. The RAS functions as a filter between the subconscious and the conscious mind. When your conscious mind perceives an idea or belief, it is passed to the subconscious through the RAS.
Allow me to elucidate what I am attempting to convey here. The RAS is a biological function that takes whatever the conscious is focusing upon or thinking about and transmits it to the subconscious mind where the thought or focus will reproduce itself through physical manifestation at a future date and time. Have you ever had a situation in which you noticed something for the first time — a new car, watch, shirt, etc. — and you decided that you wanted one? Then, all of a sudden, every time you look up you see it. It is not that it started to appear more, it has always been there. The difference is that your thoughts and focus has indicated that you are interested in it, and so the RAS and your subconscious will work to identify it every time it or an opportunity to have it presents itself.
Understanding how the RAS works illuminates the importance of managing your thoughts, ideas and belief systems, because it will reproduce and illuminate what you give gravity to. If you place an emphasis on financial literacy and building wealth, it will continuously identify opportunities for you to do so.
There is so much more to the idea of thought management, but the two concepts presented here will give you, at least, a limited perspicacity of the power of your thoughts to shape your future. You cannot have the things you desire until you become the person who has the capacity to achieve and obtain them. You cannot become that person until you master your thoughts to align with the values, behaviors and habits of the successful person who is capable of having all that you desire. At the end of the day, you are writing the narrative of your life with every thought you process. ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.
While it is important to develop goals, a plan and a strategy to help you in the pursuit of success, there are some internal elements and components that must be in place in order for you plans and strategies to be success in reaching your goals. You can have the best plan in the world. You can work with the best coaches and business strategists that money can buy. However, if you don’t have the internal discipline and organic passion associated with the following rules, success will continue to allude you.
1. Know exactly what you want 2. Work on your gift or genius 3. Accept no excuses from yourself 4. Make sure your value system is in alignment with your goals 5. Grind on G.P. ~ not for goals, but simply because it’s who you are 6. Educate yourself 7. Know your “why” ~ why are you grinding and pushing? 8. Create Boundaries for others and yourself 9. Be authentic and (transparent) 10. Make sure that you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe
Positive Thinking: The First Step in Changing Your Life
You are What You Think!
Positive Thinking: The First Step in Changing Your Life ~ Life is both, highly complex and immensely simple. The key to successfully navigating it is to understand when things need to be simplified and when they need to be anatomized. I have invested a substantial amount of my time to understanding human behavior — how to evaluate it, as well as how to help others change it in order to achieve optimal results out of their goals and actions. While human behavior, and the catalysts behind it, is highly complex, the manner in which you change it is actually very simple, at the core.
The most common question I receive from people who approach me for impromptu advice is: How do I get better results out of my efforts? — Or something to that nature. Many of these individuals are quite surprised when my response is so simple: change the way you are thinking. They normally follow with a subsequent question that inquires as to how I can possibly know that it is their thinking without having spent any time with them. My response is also succinct and to the point: It is always your thoughts that are the seed of your reality. Simply put, your thoughts, mixed with emotion, are the foundation of your reality.
It is impossible to think negative thoughts and live a positive and productive life. The entire universe responds to the energy you emit as a result of your beliefs, and your beliefs are established, cultivated and shaped by your thoughts. So, the results you get in life, business, relationships, and more, are all a byproduct of the beliefs that are the results of your thinking.
I have a concept I call “minding your reality,” which gets people to focus on the cognitive influences that have a massive impact on their reality. Many times people have cognitive biases that are founded upon negativity, and they may be influenced by past experiences, or they could be the result of consistent exposure to negative stimuli. When a person suffers from negative cognitive bias to the point that it negatively influences their social functionality, financial progress, and more, I call it Cognitive Bias Syndrome — meaning that the combination of multiple negative biases has created a systematic thought process that leads the person to expect negative results.
Allow me to elucidate my point. You should view life as being cyclical, and in this constant cycle beliefs are inextricably linked to manifested results in life.
Your beliefs establish paradigms through which you view life. It is these paradigms that dictate how you feel about each situation you encounter — because you will interpret every situation based on the beliefs that you used to construct your current paradigm.
Your beliefs also impact your emotions, which play a direct role in how well you perform in any given situation. If you are negative, or even capricious, in your thinking, it will negatively impact your emotions — minimizing your ability to perform optimally.
While there are many factors that impact your results in life, the vast majority are exogenous in nature, meaning that you have very little influence on them. The only factor that you have 100 percent control over is your performance; however, if your thinking has tainted your beliefs, it has negatively impacted your self-confidence. Your mental attitude, which is directly correlated with your thoughts, not only impacts your ability to perform, but it impacts how others perceive and receive you. How you feel about yourself will determine how others perceive you.
Here is where the cycle comes into play. Not only does your thinking directly impact your performance, but your performance will reinforce your thinking. So, if you think negative, it will produce substandard results, and those results, will serve to reinforce your thinking.
This vicious cycle of poor thinking produces poor performances, which in turn reinforce poor thinking — creating the need to be addressed at the source — which is your thoughts. Because people lack a reasonable perspicacity of the manner in which their thinking impacts their reality, they often focus on the idea of persistence and hard work. While I am a firm believer in taking an implacable stance to achieving goals, pressing inexorably through every obstacle, the action must be accompanied by expectation of success. It does not matter how hard you work if you already believe that you are going to fail.
The hard work provides the force and momentum, but it is your thinking that provides the direction. No matter how hard you try, you cannot produce positive results from negative thinking.
Here is something to think about as well. It becomes easier to grasp the concept that thinking manifests reality when you understand that your physical reality is not the ultimate influence of your existence. Your physical reality, everything that is tangible and measurable, exists in the third dimension, but the third dimension is simply the physical manifestation of a reality that was initially created in the fourth and fifth dimensions. You create your reality by first conceptualizing it in your thoughts and then birthing it in either the fourth of fifth dimensions, and then your work and efforts bring the physical manifestation into the third dimension — your reality.
If I could simplify the equation even further, I would say that you will always get what you expect, so to change the results you have to chance the expectations. I work with a wide range of people from multitudinous backgrounds, and when I work with people of faith, I always remind them that God will always meet them at the level of their expectations.
You will be surprised at how many people consistently cling to negative thoughts. How many times have you heard the following statements, or even spoke one or more of them yourself?
I can’t win for losing.
Mondays (insert any day) are always so depressing
The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Nothing good ever happens to me.
Life sucks and then you die.
The way that you counter negative beliefs is to begin to adopt new beliefs. I am an avid believer that every person has a purpose and a genius to facilitate that purpose; therefore, mediocrity is a choice, not a lot in life. The moment that you begin to fill your life with positive thoughts that foster positive beliefs and expectations, you will immediately begin to fill your load becoming lighter. This does not mean that there will not be difficulties and challenges, but it means that you will view those challenges differently. You will engage the challenges expecting to win. Following are some beliefs that you can start developing by speaking each at least three times per day.
I take full responsibility for my results.
I always act on purpose.
I push myself past previously self-imposed limits.
I refuse to accept the limits placed on me by others.
I will not wait for the perfect moment, I will take action now.
I will not fear failure, because failure is a competent teacher.
I will only be motivated and inspired by negative feedback; I will get better.
I will guard my mind and body against anything that will harm its capacity to perform optimally.
This is just a few affirmations that you can start using to train your thinking. Monitor your thinking and speech carefully to identify things that you are thinking and saying that could be negatively impacting you.
I will leave you with this one truth that I hope serves as the theme of this short treatise — you are what you think! ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.
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