Smarter Goals: Emerson’s 5 Building Blocks

Smarter Goals – where they came from

Ever wonder where all the pied-pipers-of-prosperity get ideas from so they can sound brilliant, wise and genius?  I’m paraphrasing Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill — This is why it sounds great, gets us excited, yet very little, if anything changes.

I like Hill’s book, yet the truth is he was a scoundrel. Hill was involved in countless scams over the years. One of his earliest involved buying lumber on credit, never paying his suppliers, and selling the lumber to others for cash at rates well below market value.

This, as you can guess, didn’t last very long before Hill went on the run. But that was just one of many scams that Hill would try over the years.

Good News Bad News

Bad news? Well, it wasn’t for me.  A wonderful coincidence led me to The Master Key System by Charles Haanel.  Hill “appropriated” the basis for “his” book so it has some value.  As an English major, I can tell you without a doubt, after reading other books he “wrote,” that there is no way he wrote Think and Grow Rich.  It was one of his wives, Rosa.

It was not bad news for me because I discover The Master Key System… a brilliant 24-week exercise.  It helped me set Smarter Goals because I developed a healthy mindset. 

Digging deeper as the Smarter Goals kept manifesting faster, it led me to Wallace Wattles.  The really good news is that led me to the source of both these great minds utilized.

Full Credit

While Haanel paraphrased Emerson, Wattles’ brilliant works quoted Emerson directly.  Without a deep study of Think and Grow Rich, I would never have rediscovered Emerson and I am grateful.  Both gave reverence and full credit to Emerson and I encourage you to get your hands on his essays.

There is no way to convert Emerson’s brilliance and wisdom in this blog but I can share with you a routine I learned, and adopted to set smarter goals and a healthy mindset.  We shared that routine in a previous post. Thanks for all the comments, much appreciated.

When Opportunity comes, it is too late to prepare

Emerson believed that we are all intended to grow.  Unlike all other life forms, growth for us is optional.  Trees, animals, plants all grow to their full potential.  Not us.  When we are not growing, we are unhappy, uneasy so we distract ourselves. 

However, what no other life form has is the incredible gift of imagination.  Getting a healthy mindset has a requirement… desire to become the best we are capable of becoming.

Building Block One: Set the stage for growth.

Make a decision, [not a preference], to find and maximize your potential.  Our potential is far greater than we can possibly imagine but relax.  If you follow these steps, you’ll lose interest in mindless entertainment, [doom scrolling etc.] and be drawn to the field of pure potentiality.

The word decision comes from Latin, decisio.  It means to cut yourself off from any other possibility.  Make a decision now!  Why not discover and manifest your full potential?

Building Block Two: Morning Ritual, Fueling the Mind and and Body.

The science of today has validated Emerson’s assertion that we do not determine our lives, our habits do.  To that end, he utilized rituals to set in motion foundational habits. 

The morning ritual is simple and will most likely involve what feels like a “sacrifice.”  You are designing your day so remember the decision you made at Building Block One.

Hydrate and no noise.  This is a quiet time.  No smart phone, no email, no news.  Design your morning around this ritual first before the noise of the world. 

This involves making your coffee or whatever… and transitioning onto dedicated time for learning.  Read [Emerson?  His essays are short]… pick one book and master it. 

I’d suggest The Science of Being Great by Wattles.  Once study is over, get some exercise.  Mind and body.  Take a walk, yoga, workout. Physical exercise is a catalyst for both mental and physical well-being.

Building Block Three: Mid-morning & Afternoon Ritual, Productivity and Focus

Manage your workday by keeping the main thing the main thing.  In today’s world the noise is loud, and the distractions are innumerable.  Focus makes or breaks everyone.

Forget about the to-do lists with 27 things on it.  Trust the process.  By eliminating multitasking, mastering laser focus and following these 5 rituals, the quality of your work will rise, the time to do it will shrink and your confidence and intuition will blossom.

When your workday is over, grab a piece of paper and answer these two questions.

ONE: What did I do right?

TWO: What can I improve?

Asking specifically this way puts you in a positive mindset and unleashes your now developing imagination.  To do great things, think great thoughts.

Your workday has one more step. Organize your work area, desk, clean it up.  Plan out the next day of work and get everything you need to execute that plan together and in the order you need it.  Setting smarter goals and growing personally is dependent on organized planning.

Building Block Four: Evening Ritual, Relaxation and Recharging

Needing mindless entertainment will dissipate in a few weeks.  Once you begin to experience personal growth triggered by a healthy mindset, that mindless entertainment simply becomes boring and pointless.  If you must get a little,fine. But set a limit and by 7:00, shut it down.

Close out your evening with some thinking about what you studied that morning.  Think about how you can incorporate what you are studying into your life, your work and most importantly into your personal relationships. 

Do some journalling. Even a page or two a day will pay massive dividends.  You will quickly move from not knowing what to write about to getting ideas, thoughts and feelings about your life improving… your potential expanding.

This ritual of unplugging, reading, reflecting and writing most likely is going to be uncomfortable at first; yet within a month you’ll wonder why this isn’t taught in school. You will grow to love it.

Go to bed earlier and get up earlier so the “don’t have the time for this today” excuse does not leak in.

Building Block Five: The Ritual of The Chain, The Power of Consistency

Back to Building Block One and the word, decision.  No matter what, don’t break the chain.  One of the biggest “lies” is that it takes 21 days to establish a habit.  It takes 60-70 if you are already in the habit of forming new habits… 90+ days if you are not practiced at deploying new habits.

The Nudge [for adults only]

As you read this, were you building the “time” excuse?

One life… if you don’t have the time to do it right, when do you think you’ll have the time to do it over?

believe

mark j

#HealthyMindset #MasterKeyExperience #NothingLikeIt

Before Personal Growth

Once you break away from the $51 billion self-help industry’s nonsense, personal growth generally happens exponentially.  Self-help industry nonsense? We covered that conclusively, no quantifiable results,  a few days ago…

Read that here.

Since the subconscious mind, [aka subby], runs the show, accounting for better than 95% of your decisions and the kicker, is that subby does not learn like the conscious mind.  If, like me, you’ve read self-help books, listened to podcasts, maybe even bought a course, and still feel stuck, keep reading.  You are not alone.  Self-development skills are required for anyone to grow personally.

I used to struggle with negative thoughts and self-doubt, but then I discovered the power of daily mindset rituals. Until I unearthed two tiny discoveries, I was destined to “rinse and repeat.”  Buy a self-help book, read some of it, get excited, read the rest faster… still stuck… another book, lots of knowledge, no change in my life…

I want to share the transformative techniques that helped me overcome those challenges and achieve personal growth beyond my wildest dreams… including manifesting the big dream of living on Kaua’i and facilitating the #MasterKeyExperience.

Personal Growth comes after self-development; discovery one.  Discovery two?  Personal growth is not possible without a healthy mindset.

5 Healthy Mindset Habits

If you are anything like me… if “inconveniences” annoy you… built more around instant gratification than patience… STOP.  These five self-development skills for a healthy mind are the fastest way to personal growth and manifesting beyond your imagination.

Everybody knows repetition is the mother of skill.  Making these self-development skills for a healthy mindset habits is mandatory if you desire to extinguish the “rinse and repeat self-help cycle and replace it with your full potential.

 5 Self-development skills for a healthy mindset.

 Self-development Skill Habit 1: Mindfulness and Gratitude

The importance of being present and focusing on the now, reducing stress and anxiety.

Daily gratitude practices: Journaling, meditation, or simply appreciating small things throughout the day. 

KEY: Write 3 “gratitudes” daily on an index card.  One gratitude per card.  And don’t forget to write out “I am grateful for each one. No repeats.  Once the easy ones are taken, you’ll become increasingly mindful.

Mindfulness and gratitude foster optimism and resilience. 

Self-development Skill Habit 2: Self-Awareness and Self-Compassion

Become an observer of your thoughts… without judgment. Understanding your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors is the foundation of personal growth.  Practicing self-compassion by treating yourself with kindness and acceptance, especially during difficult times.

Self-awareness and self-compassion help you overcome negativity and build confidence. 

As Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living” and he added, “Know thyself.” 

Self-development Skill Habit 3: Make and Keep Promises

While the importance of taking consistent action, no matter how small, to create progress and build momentum is crucial, most big dreams never materialize because we don’t follow through.  Here, you want to develop the habit that all people with a healthy mindset have.  They keep their promises… to everyone, including themselves. 

Start really small and use these 2 phrases.  I promise to, and I always keep my promises. And charge it with emotion.  Example, “I promise to take out the trash, and I always keep my promises.”  Say it loud, with excitement. 

When you take out the trash, celebrate and repeat “I always keep my promises” and “I did it!”… nothing, in my 37 years of studying metaphysics and personal growth, has anything come close to this in terms of building confidence.   After a couple of months, you can up the ante on the promises because you have trained subby! 

Self-development Skill Habit 4: Growth Mindset and Learning

Embracing challenges as opportunities for growth and learning, rather than seeing them as threats. Continuously seeking new knowledge about your behavior and new experiences to expand your horizons and develop new skills. The power of learning from setbacks and failures as valuable stepping stones to success. 

Reflect back to some tough times, and maybe filled with fear… I sure thought my existence was going to collapse multiple times.  Yet, here you are, reading this because you know you have more in you.  Notice your response to challenges, big and small, and remind yourself when experiencing them… “this to shall pass”… make it a mantra…traffic, argument with spouse, flat tire, short on rent… keep repeating “this to shall pass.” 

Self-development Skill Habit 5: Connection and Support

The importance of building positive and supportive relationships with people who encourage your growth.  Seeking out mentors, coaches, or support groups to provide guidance and accountability, and investing in your social connections and finding a sense of belonging, to enhance your well-being. 

The #MasterKeyExperience provides all that and more… it begins in September, so make sure you are on our list. Even if you are, nothing will set up your mindset for personal growth like Emmit Fox’s 7 Day Mental Diet… grab it right here https://markjbooks.info

Peace be the journey

believe

mark j

HEALTHY MINDSET
What is a healthy mindset?

It seems that personal growth is the pathway to a healthy mindset, and the $50+ billion [not a typo] self-help industry uses this point of view to peddle their stuff. Easy link… makes sense. The truth is the facts tell a completely different story.

How is it that this massive consumption of self-help books, recordings, weekends, courses, retreats, and life coaches has zero quantifiable results to share? Not a single author, company, download, or group shares any results.

They are peddlers, leveraging a natural human instinct… the desire to improve. In fourteen years, we’ve identified just one company, Trainings Solutions LLC, that shares results of their students. One!

PAIN AND FRUSTRATION

Everybody knows the pain and frustration of buying self-help stuff, reading and believing we found the pathway to improvement, success if you prefer, only to see that nothing really changes. We regroup, get another book, course or go on another weekend retreat… inspired for a while, yet our life does not change.

Frustrated, we fight through self-worth issues… lick our wounds in silence… then a friend or co-worker tells us about a great book, packed with wisdom. We ante up again, never stopping to see if the recommender’s life changed. And, the cycle repeats itself over and over. Average person has a minimum seven books/programs, yet surveys show, nothing changes.

Why does this happen to millions of people? By-the-way, it happened to me… more than 15 times. Why do we not grow personally? We want a healthy mindset yet these back-to-back-to-back failures to improve yield the opposite. Why?

A SIMPLE TRUTH

For students of metaphysics, the answer is simple. To experience personal growth, you need a healthy mindset. Just the opposite of what is being taught. The pied-pipers-of-prosperity know, believe me, that getting that healthy mindset take hard mental labor. The kind of labor so few are willing to do.

When we have a healthy mindset, personal growth, adventure, excellence and confidence become affluent. The word affluent is a derivative of the French word “afflure”, meaning “to flow to.”
Opportunities to grow personally, to succeed in relationships and business, and to grow in confidence flow to people with a healthy mindset. Focusing on wanting personal growth sends a message to the subconscious that you lack it! And, books about it only enhance that feeling of lack. It is nonsense, but the $50,000,000,000 industry does not want you to know that… or, even worse, they don’t know what you just read… that it is backwards.

Hard to move forward while the directions are backwards, yes? We must first get a healthy mindset to grow personally.

IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT

You have a negative mindset. It is not your fault. In fact, it is the reason your lineage has survived, generation to generation for centuries. Relax, not going to give you quotes here so you get a positive mental attitude.

A negative mindset is not a healthy mindset. Sociologists opened the pathway to awareness of negativity with a remarkable study. Back to the caveman days, it was broken down to “Carrots and sticks” [not to be confused with all these absurd carrot and stick management books/studies/etc.]…

“Carrots” are food and mates that perpetuate the species of man. “Sticks” will kill us. So me, you and a pal go to the river, we spot a saber-tooth-tiger. Beautiful. Our pal walks over to get a closer look. He doesn’t know it is a “stick.” He gets mauled and eaten. Me and you avoid them and probably that part of the river.

The strongest force in the subconscious mind is self-preservation. Over our caveman lifetime, we see lots of “sticks”… and pass it on… and it keeps getting past on. Sociologists had proven conclusively that … because you and I come from a long line of successful “stick-avoiders,” that our future generations have a genetic predisposition to negativity.

AHA!

A health mindset does not have a negative mindset… it is not your fault, it is genetics. And, as the prevaricators that peddle that “6 simple steps to success” or “how to succeed in home, health, and work with my 8-step plan”… the value in their books does not matter if we let this predisposition to negativity interfere with a healthy mindset. A healthy mindset puts you on the precipice of greatness, that greatness somewhere in the back of your mind, you believe you have. And you do have greatness within you.

Can this be overcome, the genetics? Yes. But it is work and everybody knows in our current world addiction to convivence and instant gratification, hard work does not sell. Of course there is one exception to this. Common sense.

Common sense tells us that reading a book and understanding the material changes nothing. You’ve experienced that already… and if you’re anything like me, probably several times. I had to take ownership of the truths I shared. I had to be willing to own the simple truth that repeating a behavior was going to infallibly yield the same results.

Hardest thing I ever did was take Emmit Foxes 7-day mental diet. Best thing I ever did too.
I discovered that the sociologists we right… while making positive statements and believing I was a positive person, I was not.

The 7-day mental diet is about a 10-minute read. If take it, you will develop a healthy mindset and, organically, grow personally. Grab it free right here, markjbooks.info
And, if you are serious and not kidding around about realizing your full potential, take the mental diet with a friend.

Believe Mark J