Whole Life Magazine

April / May 2015

Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/489304

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 21 of 43

success track T he self-help market is a $10 billion per year industry in the U.S. alone, and people who spend money on self-help tend to be repeat purchasers. This may be at least partially because programs that follow the standard suc- cess blueprint have a disturbing 97 per- cent failure rate. The truth is that the typical personal improvement mantra of tapping into your willpower and activat- ing the power of positive thinking is actu- ally a recipe for failure. Because success is beyond willpower. Science has proven that stress, or in- ternal fear as it's also known, is the pri- mary source of virtually any problem we encounter—physical, spiritual, emo- tional and even circumstantial. New research has shown that fear is literally programmed into us as the cellular level, which is why most of us are unable to turn off our stress re- sponse using willpower alone. We literally have two mecha- nisms in our brains: one that turns on and virtually guar- antees success; and the other that starts creating failure, and keeps creating it as long as that switch is fl ipped—which for some people is their entire lives. The basic blueprint for most success/happiness/self-help programs over the last 75 years has been the same: Decide what you want, de- velop a plan to get what you want, use your willpower to put the plan into action until you get what you want. So what's the prob- lem with this plan? It makes logical sense or we wouldn't have paid good money for it and spent valu- able time on it. The problem is that this three-step plan turns on the failure mechanism in your brain. According to research from Harvard and Stanford, when this failure mechanism is turned on in your brain, you can experience nega- tive effects that range from depression and high blood pressure to illness, in- somnia and poor digestion. It makes it extremely diffi cult to be happy, healthy and successful. Exactly what is this switch? It's the hypothalamus. You may know it as fi ght-or-fl ight, or internal physiological stress—the cause of up to 95 percent of all disease. What you may not know is that if you are not in a life-threatening situation at the moment, the cause of this stress is always your internal programming, not any external stressor. It actually works al- most exactly like a computer virus. And according to Dr. Bruce Lipton from Stan- ford Medical School, the majority of the time the programming is in your subcon- scious mind, so you don't know you have it or what is causing the stress. In order to succeed, you need to change your cellular programming from fear (or stress) to love, which triggers a natural chemical reaction that fuels you for your best success. The success switch is the production and release of oxytocin and the related love hormones and peptides in the brain. This can only happen when the stress-pro- ducing viruses in the unconscious are eliminated, again like your computer. In order to create this internal shift, you need to identify and clarify what success fun- damentally means to you. Most peo- ple start with the wrong goal, which inherently creates stress and fear. A stress goal is focused on achieving an external or physical future end result through willpower. A success goal is focused on the present mo- ment out of an inward state of love and peace. Which of these two switch- es is fl ipped in your brain is the primary determining factor of how you feel and what you think, moment-by-moment, every day. Adapted from Beyond Will- power: The Secret Principle to Achieving Success in Life, Love and Happiness Copy- right ©2015 by Alexander Loyd. Published by Harmo- ny Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Ran- dom House LLC Why the success industry has a 97 percent failure rate BEYOND WILLPOWER By Alexander Loyd S U C C E S S F A I L U R E 22 wholelifetimesmagazine.com

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Whole Life Magazine - April / May 2015