You get what you focus on - 1

I make my circumstances.- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have you ever wondered what separates highly successful people from the rest of the crowd?

Have you ever wondered what makes a Richard Branson? How he created the Virgin empire and how he attracts teams of people to love working for him?

Have you ever wondered what creates a humanitarian, such as Mahatma Gandhi, who transformed the face of a nation? What made him take a stand and change when no one else would? How did he inspire people to follow him?

We tend to hold a false belief that those people are not like the rest of us, they are 'born stars', they are special. We tend to admire them and assume they are far away from who we are and their achievements are impossible for us to attain.

This is a convenient belief to hold so that we have nothing to do about it. We stay in the crowd, we complain together, we are drawn together and we always dream about becoming someone. What are the fundamental characteristics, traits, attitudes, decisions, values, beliefs and strategies that made those people stand out? How can we replicate their success?

Warren Buffett, the second richest man in the world, was asked what he attributes his success to. He answered: "It's been selective grouping. It's what we focus on. And equally important, it's what we choose not to focus on".

The process of what you choose to focus on determines what you experience in life and what you don't. It determines your reality, consciously and unconsciously. Reality is subject to our expectations. Our circumstances adapt to our expectations, that's why we don't always get what we want, but we do get what we expect.

What is it that you are truly spending your time focusing on in your world? The things you want or the things you don't want? The things you can or the things you cannot do?

Are you focusing on the effects in your life believing that they were caused by anything or anyone but you, family, friends, society, school...? Are you focusing on what others did to you or how they stopped you from being the person you want to be? This is the classic "it's not me, it's them" or the "I would have been a success if it had not been for..." syndromes.

If you are blaming others for not living your life to the full potential you believe you can and are holding on to your comfort zone, this is the easy way out. Are you joining the crowd in believing that life is a struggle or that change is impossible?

"The map is not the territory," said linguist Alfred Korzybski in 1933. He meant that your internal representations of the world, your thoughts are not reality itself. The best map of Malta can never be Malta even if built to scale, much in the same way, the thoughts that you have about what is happening outside of you can never be what is really outside of you.

Your brain works like the World Wide Web. When you go to a search engine, such as Google, and you search for a specific word, like 'leaders' for example, you will be presented with all the possible matches for the criteria you entered.

All the millions of other pages of information available are left out. The search engine translated your request and delivered the possible solutions based on your request. Your nervous system works the same way.

What becomes your experience of life is what you choose to pay attention to. The challenge in accomplishing what you want in your life is that 90 per cent of the determinants of your focus are at the unconscious level, you may not be aware of what it is that is keeping you from having what you want. You can have whatever you want in life to the extent that you are willing to pay, and what you have to pay is attention. You either pay attention or you pay with pain.

You have the opportunity to change any and every aspect of your life, starting right now. Change your experience by changing your focus. If you aren't enjoying your current reality, learn how to take charge of your life.

Ms Redaelli, NLP Trainer and Master Practitioner, is managing director of New Training Dynamics, leaders in business and life coaching using Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)

www.newtrainingdynamics.com