Mind Training

mind training audio

Your mind is the key to your true potential. If you don’t use your mind properly you’ll never achieve all that you are capable of. You have hopes and dreams and you’d like to make those dreams a reality, but if you don’t use the mind powers you were born with you’re going to find it a long, hard struggle to get there. 

That’s not to say it’ll be easy anyway. But by using your mind effectively you’ll be able to attract unlimited success and draw prosperity and abundance into your life at will. 

Everyone has the power to do this. It’s simply a case of knowing how. If you can understand the links between the way you think and your physical self then you’re setting yourself up for just about anything you could possible want from life. 

And I’m not just talking about money or business success. I’m referring to unlimited confidence and motivation, the power to take persistent and massive action each and every day, having the best possible family life you could ever dream of and the incredible feelings of not being stressed or pressured in your day to day life. 

Although these things sound almost impossible to attain, they’re actually quite easy provided you use your mind in the right way to draw them into your life. 

That’s what we’ll be working on here. You’ll be performing a number of exercises to train your mind to attract the things you want and expel the things you don’t. These exercises should be performed in a relaxed place where you won’t be disturbed. 

Your mind is a wonderful tool which, when properly trained and applied, can be the most incredible ally you ever find.  

Don’t take these words lightly. If you genuinely apply what is revealed in this audio series you’ll become limitless to what you can achieve. 

With that, let’s begin.

Your Conscious Mind

The voice you use to talk to yourself with all day long is your conscious mind. It’s fairly slow and doesn’t have that many great ideas, and is where all of your habits start – good and bad. When you start with new habits like learning to drive a car or a new morning routine, you have to think about them. This all happens in the conscious mind. 

The main use people have for their own conscious mind is to convince themselves they’re not good enough and won’t succeed at anything. This trait is a bad habit that needs changing into a good one. So to being with, the very first exercise I want you to do s to turn your negative inner voice into a more confident, more positive one instead. 

Do this simple exercise now: 

Work out how that voice in your head would sound if it was being positive towards you instead of putting you down. To give you an example, for me my positive internal voice is deeper in tone than the negative voice I used to hear and talk to myself with, and it speaks slower, clearer and much calmer. 

Spend a few minutes imagining how you would sound if you spoke with confidence and authority to other people. Hear in your head exactly how you would sound. 

When you’ve got yourself set on how this new voice sounds, start getting into the habit of talking to yourself with that voice instead of the usual negative one. Do this several times a day for a week and see just what sort on impact it has on the way you think about yourself. 

It’s all about habit. You need to repeat it over and over in your head for it to stick, so don’t give up when your old negative voice pops back into your mind. Remember, you’re learning a new habit whilst pushing out the old one, so you need to think about it to begin with. 

Stick with it and your inner voice will change. 

Your Unconscious Mind

Your unconscious mind runs your life for you. Your creativity, all the memories you have and all of the ‘just popped into my head’ thoughts that make an appearance into your conscious mind are controlled by your unconscious mind. 

Now this is where things get really important because your unconscious mind runs on auto-pilot. It holds everything you do by habit. And this happens because after your conscious mind has become used to doing something new through constant repetition, it commits the process to the unconscious mind where it is stored to work automatically as a habit. 

This explains why you have to repeat your new good habits often. If you don’t, they won’t become habits and you’ll automatically revert to your old bad habits because that’s what your unconscious mind has been taught to do. 

And here’s something you need to know about your unconscious mind: despite its genius design, it doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what isn’t. To prove this, do the following exercise now: 

Think back to a time when you were quite scared. Picture it in your mind and remember what it felt like. Make the pictures you have in your head bigger and brighter, with more colour and saturation. Feel what you felt and replay the incident through your mind from start to finish. Do this several times, each time increasing the intensity and vividness of the images of your scary experience. 

How does remembering that experience make you feel? It should make

you feel uneasy. Not as scared as you were at the time, but certainly you’ll rekindle some of the feelings you had when it was actually happening. 

Now this is really important because that exercise teaches us a number of things: 

Firstly, it shows that the images we picture in our mind must be accompanied by emotions for it to actually affect our physical form. By adding emotions, the experience you were running through your head felt real. 

Secondly, it tells us that by making the images we have in our head bigger, brighter and more colourful it will enhance those emotions and make us feel somewhat like we did when the actual event took place. 

And thirdly, because of those feelings it tells us that the mind does not differentiate between what is real and what is simply in our head. You have the same feelings thinking about it as you did when you actually there. 

Let’s now look at this another way. Do this exercise now: 

Think back to the same experience you used in the pervious exercise.  

Now, imagine stepping out of the back of your body and seeing yourself, from behind, as that experience plays out in front of you. Push that event further away from you so it gets really small and you’re watching the whole thing play back from a distance. Slowly drain all of the colour out of the images playing back in front of you, and keep making it smaller and less intense as you continuously play that experience from start to finish. Watch from a distance as those black-and-white images get further and further away until they’ve completely disappeared from view. 

How do you now feel about the experience? You should feel much calmer about it, and it shouldn’t feel anywhere near as scary as it did at the time, or when you made the experience more intense a few moments ago. 

This exercise teaches us the opposite of what we learned in the first exercise: 

If you take a bad experience and drain the colour from it while making it smaller, especially when you’ve stepped out of your body and you’re watching from afar, the unsettled feelings that experience caused you in the past become far less intense. 

What you should now do is complete that exercise above several times, until you no longer feel scared or uneasy about the experience you went through. 

Pause the audio and do that right now. 

You need to use these techniques to your benefit. If you use the first exercise of making pictures bigger and brighter and more intense when you think back to your past successes, and use the second exercise of making pictures smaller, colourless and less intense when you think back about your past failures or uneasy moments, you’ll learn to make the highs really high and the lows just a fact of life that don’t adversely affect your physical and mental state. 

And that is really important because by making the highs really high you’ll be breeding self-confidence and motivation. You’ll be conditioning yourself to repeat those past successes because it felt so good you’ll want to repeat those successes in the future. 

And by making those lows something that doesn’t affect the way you think and act you’ll learn that failure is nothing but a temporary setback on the road to success. 

There will be more exercises later, but remember to use these exercises daily to help grow your confidence and motivation and in-still self-belief.

Creating Your Goals

I’m sure you’ve heard it before; setting goals is essential to becoming successful in whatever it is you choose to do. 

If you don’t believe this then you need to change your belief right now because without goals we have no direction in life. Without goals we don’t know where we want to go. Without goals we have no reason to take action and move our lives forward towards the hopes and dreams you have in your thoughts. 

And the goals you set should be big. Really big. Something you can achieve without breaking into a sweat isn’t worth achieving. You need something that will be taxing, that will get your mind racing and that you’ll enjoy working towards. 

A good test is to ask yourself: are those goals BIG enough to make me get out of bed in the morning and work on them? If they’re not, they’re not big enough. 

So how do you set your goals? Well, setting goals is actually quite easy to do provided you do it right. There are a number of criteria you need to know about setting goals before you can go ahead and actually do it. 

It might be worth you writing these things down, so if you don’t have a pen and pad handy, pause the audio and go get them now. 

(slight pause) 

So then, here are those criteria: 

Always Aim High

Like I just said, anything you can achieve with very little effort isn’t worth achieving. Don’t make life too easy for yourself – give yourself massive goals to go after. 

And you must be honest. If you want to earn $1m, make that your goal. Don’t cut it down to $100k because you think it’s more reachable. The only way to reach your goals is to have honest goals to begin with. 

Plan Your Goals in Great Detail

You must meticulously plan your BIG goals and get into as much detail as you can. Simply saying ‘I want a big house’ isn’t good enough. Imagine hiring an architect to build you a new house. Would you simply say to him, ‘hey dude, I want a BIG house. Now get to work!’ 

You need to clearly define as much information in as much detail as you can about your goals to give yourself a clear picture of exactly what you’re going after. 

Give Yourself a Realistic Deadline

Don’t give yourself a BIG goal to achieve ‘before I retire’ or ‘a million bucks before next Tuesday’ because in the first instance you’re not giving yourself a reason to take action and in the second you’re being completely unrealistic. 

Your goals need to be time-lined so they ARE achievable, but so that you DO actually have to work towards them. Again, goals which you can achieve with little effort aren’t worth achieving and goals which aren’t possible won’t give you the motivation to get started. 

Only Plan Goals Which Are Controlled By You

Making goals which are out of your hands are pointless. YOU are in control of YOUR destiny, and you need to make sure the goals you create can only be controlled by YOU. 

Don’t plan to, for example, win $10k at the races, or win the lottery, or get your boss to like you more; they’re all out of your hands. Make your goals all about YOU and YOUR life and what YOU can achieve. 

Write Down All Your Goals On Paper

You MUST write your goals down on paper. Get a personalised, hand-written look at what you want to achieve instead of having wishy-washy thoughts in your head. 

The best way to do this is the same way creative people come up with their ideas: have a brainstorming session where you write down everything you want to achieve, then tidy things up and get down to the nitty-gritty. 

Oh, and be sure to write down your goals in full sentences that make sense and contain lots of information. For example, you could say ‘I will earn $500,000 before my thirty fifth birthday by offering my services as a web designer, or a middle man, or a writer’. Well you get the idea. And don’t forget to go into detail! 

Sacrifice Is Required

It’s a fact that at some point, if you really want to turn your dreams into reality, you’ll have to make sacrifices. 

More often than not, the two biggest sacrifices are time and money. You will have to lose some of your spare time because if, like most people, you’ve got a regular day job, your goals are going to involve doing something outside of office hours. This means sacrificing your spare time. 

But this is far easier to do than you think: I mean, how many hours of TV do you watch each week? Instead of watching others do what they enjoy and living out their dreams, put those hours into achieving your dreams instead. 

The same is true with money. Most goals are achieved through spending cash to attain something (and not always to attain more money – learning to fly, for example), so be prepared to get your wallet out if necessary. 

If you’re not prepared to make certain sacrifices to reach a particular goal, then strike that goal off your list. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. If a goal you’ve thought about isn’t for you, then there’s no point beating around the bush; get rid of it now. 

So there you have it. That’s the criteria you need to stick to when planning your goals. Now it’s time to actually craft your goals to see what you really want your own compelling future to be like. 

To set your goals you need to break your life down into sections. You see, your life is made up of several main areas, and all of these areas will usually contain things you’d like to achieve. 

Each of these ‘things’ need to be written down and properly defined as a goal. So with your pen and pad, and using the criteria we just went through, let’s set you some goals. 

Your Financial Life

Everyone, and I mean everyone, has a financial dream. Let’s face it – we all want to have a cushy lifestyle. I’m not saying we all want to be rich, but we all have some sort of expectation. 

But very few people realise that they need to turn their financial dream into a real life, breathing, blood-pumping goal. So your first task is to set yourself your financial goal. Work out how much money you want and when you want it by. Remember to use the criteria you wrote down a minute ago. 

Pause this audio and set this goal now. 

Your Health

Want to be thinner? Bulkier? More muscled? Have a six-pack? Quit smoking? Everyone has something they don’t like about themselves that they do have the ability to change. 

So set your personal health goal. Decide what you want to change about yourself (again, something that YOU can control) and turn it into a goal. 

Pause this audio and set this goal now. 

Your Career

This is something that most people already have a strong idea about. For a lot of people it’s to run their own, highly successful business, working just a few hours a week. 

Is that you? If so, then follow the goal-setting criteria and create it! 

But maybe you’re not interested in running your own business. Obviously that’s fine too. Just set yourself your career goal and we’ll look at how you can start to take action on it later. 

Pause this audio and set this goal now. 

Your Family And Relationships

Want to be a better parent? Better lover? Be more romantic? Set your goals for this right now. 

And remember, you’re only allowed to set goals that YOU are in control of. So don’t go planning to make some Hollywood movie star fall in love with you. 

Pause this audio and set this goal now. 

Your Every Day Life

We’d all like to feel less stress, have more time and feel great on a day-by-day basis. Well, guess what? You can! 

Think about what you’d like your day to day life to be like, pause this audio and set the goal now. 

Your Blueprint Is Done

If you’ve completed the exercise of writing down your goals in the 5 main areas or your life then you’ve now got a picture, a blueprint, of what you want your life to be like. 

If you haven’t done the exercise of writing down your goals then I’m pleading with you; do it now. I really can’t stress just how incredibly important it is to do this. 

But the fact is, the vast majority of people listening to this will never write down their goals. If you want to set yourself apart from them then do it now. 

Now, take the paper you’ve written your goals down on and read it all back to yourself, aloud. You now have something definite to aim at in the most important areas of your life. You have a firm desire to attain these goals and it’s entirely up to you to turn that desire into reality. In other words, your future is in YOUR hands. 

Put the paper you’ve written on somewhere where you’ll see it early in the morning, late at night and several times throughout the day.  Make photocopies if need be. 

Read it out aloud to yourself at least once a day to cement into your mind that these really are your goals and that they really are possible. 

If you start thinking negatively towards yourself as you read it aloud, try to push it out of your mind. Keep reading it every single day, not matter how hopeless you’re feeling or how great. 

By doing this, you’re going to start to convince yourself that these goals are not only achievable, but are already within your grasp – you simply need to go out and find them.

Motivation – What You Must Know

What is motivation? If it were a physical entity, it would be your best friend. Because your best friend would be spurring you on no matter what, and wouldn’t stop doing so until you’d reached those BIG goals you’ve set yourself. 

If you’re not motivated to achieve the goals you’ve set yourself you’ll never reach them. Becoming motivated requires a firm desire to reach those goals, and it’s your motivation that will spur you into action. 

Many people can’t get motivated. It can be something that’s difficult to do, especially if you’ve spent a lot of time unmotivated and in a place where you’ve either got no goals, or no desire to reach them. 

And motivation can be very difficult to come by if you’ve taken persistent action in the past to reach goals you set before but gave up after a failure of some kind. 

So we’re going to look at the ideas behind motivation and how you can, with a bit of work, become highly motivated and turn your motivation on like a light bulb. But first… 

Failure Isn’t Permanent

Great news! It’s just been announced that failure is part of your path to success! 

Well who’d have thought it!? You can actually fail and still become successful! This is groundbreaking stuff. I thought I had to quit as soon as something didn’t go the way I wanted it to. 

Sarcasm aside, the vast majority of people think this way so don’t feel bad if you’re one of them. After all, it’s this illusion that we’re trying change here. 

Say the following words aloud right now: failure isn’t permanent. 

What you’re speaking here is the plain truth and nothing else. Failure is never permanent provided you don’t want it to be. 

If everyone gave up the first time they failed, we’d all still be living in the Dark Ages. They’d be nothing of the civilisation we know today because nothing worthwhile would have been achieved. 

Do you think we’d have jet engines and space flight and cars and computers and, well, just about everything we have today if the inventors just turned round and said, ‘well, that doesn’t work. Time to move onto something else,’ when they failed the first time round? 

And what about you? If you gave up at the first hurdle you wouldn’t be able to walk! 

Failure is a fact of life. You have to accept it and understand that it really isn’t permanent. 

Absolutely anyone can be a success at anything they choose, provided they accept that failure is merely a temporary setback and is a clear sign that the plans being followed weren’t what they should have been. 

And if you’re in the correct ‘take action to reach your goals’ mindset then temporary failure will only serve to increase your motivation, not drain it from you. 

You need to remember that failure is a learning aid. It’s an experience that shows you your mistakes so that you won’t repeat them again in the future. It’s how you react to failure that determines your success and how quickly success comes to you. 

If anything, you need to try to embrace failure and treat it as your friend. Which is funny, because really it’s the opposite of a friend; you don’t want to see it often and when you do you don’t like it! You could call it a love-hate relationship, but it’s one that is essential on your road to success. 

By failing with the current plans, you should become more motivated to find the right plans. And you must remember that someone who becomes a success and reaches their goals is someone who simply got up one more time than they fell down. 

Remember these words. They’ll serve you well on the path to achieving your goals. Let’s get back to motivation. 

Motivation can be turned on. Like a light bulb, you can switch it on and use it to work towards your goals by taking persistent action. 

It can often require momentum to begin with because you’re used to not taking action, but when it starts it begins to pick up speed quickly and, in turn, the motivation breeds more motivation which breeds positive thinking and self-belief which, again, breeds more motivation. 

So the key is to get it started. Once you’ve started and you actually take some action, you’ll begin to see how easy it can be to make plans and act on them. 

So the nagging question is how do you get motivated? What will give you the push you need to fire up your motivation? 

Undoubtedly the biggest motivational tool you have is your goals. When you truly want to reach your goals there’s only one way to do it. You guessed it… take action! 

And if you won’t take action for the sake of your own future, you’ll never take action for anything. Period. 

But like I said, the key is getting started. And because your BIG goals are HUGE, they seem like an impossible task to get started on… and that’s one of the best excuses for not even trying. 

So to get things in motion you need to set yourself smaller, more manageable goals that you can work towards by taking some action. And when you reach those smaller, easier goals, you’ll see that you really can reach any goal you set yourself.  

So why not those BIG goals? What is standing between you and those strong desires you set out in the Goals section? 

And when you reach those smaller goals, what do you think you’ll feel? Success! That’s what you’ll feel. And that great feeling of success will help grow your motivation. 

So, pause this audio and look at your goals. Break then down into smaller, more manageable tasks you can easily work on. Do that now. 

Here It Is! Your Motivational Workout

Right then! You’ve broken your BIG goals down into smaller, more manageable tasks that will make things easier for you. Now it’s time to get you motivated to take action on those tasks. 

The thing with motivation is that it’s usually an ‘outside’ event. In other words it’s something you don’t have a great deal of control over that gets your motivation going. 

For example, you wouldn’t hang around if a bull mastiff was bearing down on you, snarling and aiming to tear your leg off. You’d be instantly motivated to run like the wind! 

But what we’re looking to do here to put you in charge of your motivation, so you can be naturally motivated most of the time and, when it’s a little low, you can easily top it up yourself. 

So to get started, do this exercise now: 

Take all of those BIG goals you’ve set yourself and imagine it’s just a few years from the end of your life and you haven’t managed to achieve any of them. Not a single one of those goals you set yourself has been reached.  

How does that make you feel, knowing you never did what was necessary to reach those goals? How do you feel knowing that, soon, you’ll die without ever achieving what you set out to achieve? 

How has it affected the outcome of your life? Where are you now as opposed to where you could have been? How has it affected the people you love dearly? How has it affected their lives? 

If you’ve got any kind of feeling in your body, then you feel pretty darn low right now. I mean, wow! You didn’t achieve a damn thing you set out to do! And all because you didn’t get motivated to take action. 

In contrast, do this now: 

Imagine again it’s just a few years before the end of your life, but this time you’ve managed to achieve all of your goals. Every goal you set yourself within the 5 main areas of your life has been successfully reached. 

How good does it feel? How contented do you feel knowing that you achieved the biggest goal you set yourself in your lifetime? How has it changed where you are now? How has it affected the people you love dearly? What massive chain of events have you put into place that will continue to be felt for many, many years to come? 

How do you feel now? How does that feeling compare to the feeling of complete and total failure? 

I don’t need to tell you the difference; you can feel it yourself. And it’s this feeling that can help breed your motivation. 

Now, here’s how you can call upon your motivational powers whenever you want… 

If you think back through your life, there will be a good number of occasions when you were highly motivated to do something. Now that something doesn’t have to be anything in particular; maybe you were absolutely determined to score a goal, or bluff someone at a game of poker, or make it home in time to watch your favourite TV program. It doesn’t matter what that something is. 

The point is you were, at some point in the past, highly motivated. And what we are going to do with this next exercise is to call up that motivation, instil it into you and add a ‘trigger’ to that motivation so you can call upon it whenever you want. 

Do this exercise now:

Think about the most important BIG goal you’ve set yourself. Think about how you’d like to be really motivated to reach it, and to be really motivated to take action on those smaller goals that will lead you there. 

Now, think back to a time in the past when you were really motivated. Think about how you took action on that motivation and did whatever it was you set out to do. 

Run through that event and make the pictures bigger, brighter and more colourful. Feel what you felt and suck that motivation into your body as if you were there now, doing it again for the first time. 

Make the emotions stronger and stronger, and keep building up the feeling of taking action and successfully doing what you set out to do. Run the story through your mind several times, each time building the momentum. 

Now, as your motivation builds up, rub the palm of your dominant hand on your thigh. As you do so, think about even more occasions when you were highly motivated and increase those sensations even further. 

Keep rubbing your thigh, and know that whenever you want to call upon that highly motivated feeling, all you have to do is rub your thigh. 

Finally, while still rubbing your thigh, think about your most important BIG goal and all of the smaller goals you must complete to make it. Imagine reaching them with everything going well, reaching that big goal right on your deadline. 

Can you see what we’re doing here? We are taking your motivation – which you clearly have – and adding it first to the motion of rubbing your palm on your thigh, and secondly adding that motivation to the thought processes of reaching your most important goal. 

Now the great thing is that you can do that exercise for every goal you set yourself. By imagining it all going perfectly well and reaching every goal on time, you’re increasing your self-belief and getting your motivation flowing around your body. 

And when you’re highly motivated and you take action on that motivation  then you’re much more likely to reach your smaller goals which, in turn, breeds even more motivation. 

If it helps, do that exercise a few times. You’ll soon feel incredibly motivated and, when your motivation starts to subside, rub your palm on your thigh to start bringing back all of those amazing motivational feelings! 

And if at any point in the future you find your rub-your-thigh motivational trigger subsiding, simply do the entire exercise again. 

Other Factors Of Motivation

The previous exercise is a great way to build up your motivation and then link in your biggest goal to literally force you to take action on it. But what I’d like to do now is talk about other motivational factors that will help you to sustain your motivation and really work towards your goals by taking persistent action.

So in no particular order, here are some other motivational steps you can take: 

Associate With Others Who Have The Same Goals

This is a terrific way to build your motivation. Spend some time talking to and socialising with people who have the same or very similar goals to you. 

But you need to make sure the people you associate with are already on the right path towards their goals, are already motivated to reach their goals and are (most importantly) very positive about reaching their goals. In other words, they truly believe in themselves and their ability to turn their goals into reality. 

And the reason this is important is because the people you associate with have a big impact on the way you lead your life. If you spend your days associating with negative people who have dreams but feel like they’ll never reach them, and they tell you the whole world is against them and nothing ever goes right for them (you know the sort of people I mean – I can guarantee you know at least one person like this, if not many more) then their negativity will wear off onto you. 

Now, don’t go for the righteous movement here and attempt to make your positive energy rub off on them just yet. Commendable though it is, if you’ve not been taking persistent action yourself with end results then you’re not ready for that yet. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not suggesting such people will never change their ways and we should, for sure, help them in any way we can to turn their lives around and help them become more positive, but it’s not your duty to do this yet. 

You need to take action and get somewhere BEFORE you can help them. By associating with other people who are positive, and who are highly motivated and who are on the right path already, you’ll learn a lot more than you will by trying to help others at this exact point in your life. 

So get in with the right crowd first and, when you’re on the right paths yourself, you can then start to help others. 

Fantasize More Often

You should already have done this when planning your goals and making the picture of your own compelling future, but what you can do now is take this one step further and fantasize about what your life will be like years after reaching your goals. 

Imagine where you’ll go on holiday. Picture where you’ll be and how you actually got there (first class luxury, for example).  Play golf? Imagine having a really low handicap because you have the time now to play whenever you like, on any course you like in the world. 

By fantasizing about your future after you’ve reached your goals it will serve to increase your motivation greatly. Give it a try, and come up with as many wonderful fantasies as you can. 

Learn New Skills

By learning new skills and applying them to the action you take, you help create more self-belief. If you learn, for example, how to build a professional website then it will serve to increase your positive energy. 

This will breed your motivation and your desires to gain more knowledge, while at the same time serve you well in the action you take to reach your goals. 

And the great thing about this is that you don’t have to spend a dime to do it. Go to your local library and you’ll find books that will serve you well… for free. 

Know it’s OK to Feel Scared

Feeling scared is part of one of the biggest obstacles you’ll ever face: fear. Fear is your nemesis and you need to hit it head-on to defeat it. And when you’ve done it once, you can do it forever and always. 

One of the best ways to defeat being scared of something is to find someone you trust who doesn’t have the same fear. They can help you overcome your fear and show you that really there’s no reason to be scared. 

To give you an example, I used to have a pet tarantula. I wasn’t scared of it in terms of what it was (otherwise having it as a pet would have been a tad bit daft) but I was scared of handling it. In fact, I’d never even attempted it. It was just the thought of those fangs piercing my skin. Even though its venom is no worse than a bee sting, it’s the size of those fangs that got my pulse racing and my inner voice telling me it’s really going to hurt and it’s something I shouldn’t attempt. 

Then one day a member of my family who I didn’t see very often paid us a visit. Upon seeing my 8-legged friend, which she didn’t know I had, she immediately lifted the lid and coxed him onto her hand. 

Within seconds of meeting my pet tarantula she had done something I’d failed to do in the previous 3 years; she was handling him. 

And about 5 minutes after that, I was handling him too! I had been shown that there really was nothing to be scared of. I was educated all the time she was there; apparently to get this species of tarantula to bite you you’d have to practically pull its leg off. 

It took someone who I trusted and who didn’t have the same fear as me to show me that really there was nothing to be scared about. 

And let me tell you, that episode really grew my motivation! For the next week I couldn’t wait to get home from college to take him out of his tank and just, well, hold him. 

So take it from me: being scared is something that no one should be ashamed of, and if you really want to you can overcome that fear and use it to build your motivation. 

Plan Properly and Don’t Simply React

If you take the time to plan out your work properly, i.e. exactly what’s needed to take persistent action on a goal, then the time you spend planning will actually be the most productive time you spend on the entire task. 

If you simply ‘react’ to every situation around you, your work will be riddled with mistakes. Not taking the time to think things through results in bad situations getting worse and will cost you countless hours of work. 

When I worked as a software developer this was a crucial skill I had to learn. If I made a mistake in some code I’d written and somehow managed to miss it during testing then I made sure I never reacted and attempted to ‘hot fix’ the situation. 

By planning out the solution and looking at all paths that are affected by the solution further mistakes are avoided. By simply reacting to a problem and attempting a quick fix nearly always results in a knock-on effect and other things going wrong further down the line, which requires yet more work to fix. 

An hour of planning will save you hours of extra work. I’m not saying you should have everything planned down the tiniest detail before starting, but you do need to have a clear picture of the end result in your mind before going in full tilt. 

And when that planning stage results in you completing the task quicker than you originally thought it’d take, it fires up you motivation.