How to thrive and not just survive in an economic downturn. Mark Baker provides some advice on thinking positively during tough times…
Quite honestly you could be forgiven for thinking that we are on the verge of financial Armageddon considering the amount of doom and gloom that we seem to be bombarded with during every waking moment.
You are just a click away from the latest catastrophic revelation as the latest breaking news banner beams out the most recent company to suffer the worst downturn in economic history, yet somehow seems to manage to pay out millions in bonus payments thanks to the trusty taxpayer. And, as if you hadn’t had enough misery for one day, you just quickly catch the News at Ten, just to make sure that you are not missing one last piece of miserable news before retiring for another sleepless night! What is extremely fascinating to me is the fact that 100 per cent of the population is having trouble sleeping at the moment, but what is even more interesting is that there are two very distinct groups here, and they are both losing sleep for very different reasons.
The first group which roughly equates to 95 per cent of the population cannot sleep because they are worried about their bills, their jobs, how much their homes have gone down in value etc. I could go on, but to sum it up, this group of people are basically focussing on loss. The second group, however, are having trouble sleeping for entirely different reasons; they just don’t know how they can possibly take advantage of all the opportunities that the current situation has created! Think about it. Prior to the current situation, what was a popular conversation that would take place between two people? Discussing property. Let’s be honest, most of us have had it, or at least had a conversation which was very similar and it went something along these lines: ‘You know if I knew several years ago what I know now I would have invested in property.’ Sound familiar? Well here is the good news. In the grand scheme of things, property has gone back several years in most parts of the world and at least two years in the Channel Islands. You can buy property in Detroit for a dollar and even a house in Buffalo New York for about £10,000. I even saw a small private advert in the Times for a highly desirable property in Kent which read: ‘recently valued at 1.1 million, will accept £675,000 or nearest offer.’
So what’s my point? Well, believe it or not, this is not an article about property speculation. It’s an article about mindset and perception, because most things are neither good or bad; it is only our thoughts and perception that make it so. Our lives are driven by our thoughts and our perception, but sadly as you weren’t even given five minutes of education regarding these matters during your entire school life, your life is driven by what you think and focus on both conscious and subconscious levels. However, what you think about at a subconscious level is even more powerful. Many of you have probably come across the movie and the book ‘The Secret’. This, sadly, was a wasted opportunity about the power of thought and the law of attraction. In the book, the basic message was that we become what we think about, which is true but only partly, as some men say: ‘If that’s the case, I’m in serious trouble because in about three hours I am going to turn into a woman.’ Well as you can imagine, it’s not quite that literal because it’s the commands that you direct through your subconscious that really make the changes in your life BUSINESS ACTIVE 28 and sadly ‘The Secret’ neglected to mention this all-important ingredient of the formula, and here is why this is the case: If you set a goal at a conscious level, but at a subconscious level you don’t believe that it is achievable or possible for you, it simply won’t happen because your subconscious command is much more powerful than your thinking at the conscious level and simply overrides the conscious thought. You see, we don’t always get what we want, but we always get what we expect, and herein lies the key.
It is our heartfelt expectations that dictate our successes or our failures and our commands at a subconscious level, simply becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy because what we believe deeply at a subconscious level is ultimately what manifests in our lives as reality. In order to illustrate this, think of your mind as working in a similar way as the Internet. If you write the word ‘poverty’ in the search bar in Google, you will get 59,500,000 references to poverty, and no matter how hard you look, you will not find a single reference to wealth. If, on the other hand, you were to type in ‘wealth’ you will see 94,700,000 references to wealth and not a single reference to poverty. Essentially, this is how your mind works. If you place the command into your mind that wealth is important to you, then wealth is what your subconscious mind will seek out because you have instructed your subconscious mind that wealth is important to you.
Every second of every day we are bombarded with two million pieces of information via our five senses, but you couldn’t possibly use and assimilate two million pieces of information per second as you would suffer sensory overload. In fact your mind can only take in approximately seven + or – two pieces of information per second, which roughly equates to 134 bits of information. Now there is a major difference between 2,000,000 and 134 so your mind literally has to decide what’s important to you, and what’s important to you is what you focus your thoughts and attention upon. So the car you purchased yesterday, that previously was quite a rarity, is now everywhere you look as you are constantly thinking about it. Subsequently it becomes important to you and your subconscious mind now constantly makes you aware of every car, magazine article and advert regarding that type of vehicle! So with this in mind (pardon the pun) can you see how what you focus on and think about will show up in your life? As the old saying goes: ‘’The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”. Why is that? Could it possibly be because that is what they are focussing on?
Mark continues his series on coaching in the next issue of Business Active. Mark Baker delivers seminars, workshops, keynote speeches and individual sales and excecutive coaching to companies and individuals worldwide and may be contacted by telephone (0)1534 486550 fax (0) 1534 486560 email: [email protected] website www.markbakerint.com
