Tell me; did you make any New Years’ resolutions for 2013?

Well, we’re nearly at the end of the 2013 and I wonder what they were. Were you going to get fitter, lose weight, work harder, or work less hard, start your own business, or write that book that you’ve been meaning to do for years?

To achieve any of that stuff you need to think about what you’re doing each day and ask yourself:

‘Is what I’m doing now getting me to where I want to get to?’

If the answer is ‘No’ then you better do something different. You need to get out of your present comfort zone, change your habits, and build a new one.

Mr Muscle

An instructor was watching me use a piece of equipment in the gym the other day. ‘Let me show you a different way to do it’ says he. (Don’t you just love em?) As you’ll guess, the “different” way was a lot harder, somewhat more painful, however a lot more likely to produce results.

The human body will always find an easy way to do things and so will your brain. However as we all know – no pain, no gain.

So if you want something different to happen – do something different.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow said, and I just love this quote:

‘If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being; then I warn you that you will be unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capabilities, your own possibilities.’

It’s never too late to make that change

There is the often told story about Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s. He was over fifty when he started making money. Kroc was a paper cup salesman who obtained the marketing rights to a multi-mixer invented by Earl Prince. He crisscrossed the US for seventeen years selling these mixers, until he met up with the McDonald brothers. Dick and Mac McDonald ordered eight of his mixers and had them churning away all day.

Kroc was entranced by the effectiveness of the McDonald’s operation and started thinking about building McDonald’s restaurants all over the US.  He thought he could then sell more multi-mixers. The McDonald brothers weren’t too keen to the idea so they franchised the restaurants to Kroc. He ultimately bought out the McDonald brothers and as they say – the rest is history.

Ray Kroc’s belief in himself was unshakable, as he noted later – ‘I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland.’

Kroc didn’t allow his age or his physical condition to hold him back.

Think about the negative things you say to yourself and the beliefs you have about yourself – don’t allow them to hold YOU back.

Change your beliefs

If you do have negative beliefs about yourself, here’s a way to change them.

Your subconscious will always attempt to move away from pain and towards pleasure. So start to associate massive pain to your negative belief.

Think about how it will hold you back and stop you achieving what you’re trying to achieve. Think about how miserable you’ll feel if you don’t even try.

Old people rarely regret what they’ve done in their life but they do regret what they haven’t done. So think forward to when you’re 75 or 80 years of age, and imagine how you’ll feel if you’ve never tried.

Then start to think of the pleasure you’ll receive in fulfilling your beliefs. Think about how good you’ll feel when you achieve what you set out to do.

If when you’re older you look back and think about things you didn’t achieve, at least you’ll be able to say – ‘I tried, I gave it my best shot and I didn’t sit on the sidelines.’

So think big – the size of your success is determined by how big you think. If you think small you’ll have small achievements. If you think big – you’ll have big success and that’s just as easy if not easier than small thinking and small achievements.

I wish you every success in your new, bigger comfort zone in 2014.