Is your Thinking Pattern Built for Success ?

Do you know that most of the time the only difference between successful people and failures is in how they think ? In my line of work as a training consultant, I find this to be true all the time. One of the most obvious difference in thinking between successful people and failures is successful people do not make or take excuses in their thinking. They focus their thinking in doing and finding ways to implement worthwhile ideas. They focus more on how to make things work rather than finding blames on why things fail. Failures on the other hand will focus on their inabilities and focus their attention on the different excuses they can find to justify why an idea cannot be implemented. Result is the dependent on attention. What we focus on gets expanded. As such when we focus on excuses and failures in our lives, that will be the outcome of our lives.

In contrast, the mindset of successful people is always saying to themselves that the solution to a problem is not there yet because they have not tried enough. Failures always think they have tried too much. In fact some failures even has rules about how many times they should try something. After that their brains will go into a massive block and then it will issue the instructions give up. When this happens repeatedly, it will become an autopilot reaction. Imagine some people master the art of trying and never giving up while some refine the skill of making excuses and even turn it into an art form !

On the other hand, successful people always challenge themselves to try new methods all the time. When faced with an undesired outcome, they will find different ways of doing things. In fact, even if they cannot get the result, they take the attitude that the solution is there, only they are not seeing it. Other people might come along and see the solution and they will respect that and go along to solve the problem. Failures on the other hand takes a mysteriously different approach. In that situation many of them becomes too proud to even acknowledge, let alone accept the solution.

Think of how many solutions to problems has gone by in many big corporations simply because management do not want to accept solutions from their subordinates. In my experience as a training consultant, I have seen many situations where good solutions gets ignored because management do not want to recognize the staff (ironicaly, these are people they hire and keep on paying every month !). To top that, in some situations, they even blame their staff of not being creative !

So, the next time we try to do something new or solve a new problem, always ask ourselves weather we are using the thinking patterns of the successful or otherwise . Once we detect a flaw in our thinking, immediately break that pattern and start to think in the opposite direction. When this happens you will start to see new options and different routes to interesting possibilities. Just because we cannot solve the problem does not mean there are no solutions. In fact, if we only look around us, things that are commonplace like the radio, television, airplanes, electricity to name but a few are all products that comes into reality because some one thought that they are possible and keep on trying to find solutions when others gave up. They were all impossibilities to those who gave up on those ideas.