Here are my takeaways from Brian Tracy’s Kiss That Frog (Part 1). It’s an amazing book full of wise advice.
Almost every one or more of our thoughts holds us back from becoming a truly happy, healthy, and joyful person who looks at each day with excitement. Identify the thoughts or impediments in your life and embrace them. Think about the negative experiences in your life that are holding you back or that need to be dealt with. Deal with them and use them to transform your life into the amazing person you are capable of becoming.
Your belief in your almost unlimited potential is the key to becoming everything you are truly capable of becoming.
Our biggest enemies are our fears and doubts. There are no limits to what you can do, be or have, except the limits you place on your thinking and imagination.
One of the most important behaviours of successful people is practising no-limit thinking and creating a vision of a perfect future for yourself in every area of life.
People do not change (unless they have a real desire to change, accompanied by hard work) so it’s better to lower your expectations of others and it will help you not be disappointed.
The things that can’t be changed are facts, including what happened in the past and we can’t go back to change. The key to happiness is to never become angry about a fact.
Find positive elements that exist in every situation to deliberately turn every negative into a positive. You can choose to think of a thought that makes you happy in place of any thought that makes you unhappy. This is called the law of substitution. If we do not deliberately plant the flowers, weeds will take over in the garden of our brain. We need to clear the weeds to plant the flowers.
Negative emotions detach us from reality. The more we become angry, the unhappier we are. All unhappy people are angry.
All unhappiness starts with blame, so every event that can give birth to negative feelings in you should take responsibility. If someone robbed you, hit your car in the parking lot, etc., you are not at fault, but you are responsible for how you react to that situation. Nothing makes you angry or unhappy; you make yourself unhappy or angry by the way that you choose to react to the unhappy expression.
The minute you begin to blame someone else and become angry for what has occurred, you become a slave to your emotions, as you lose your ability to think clearly and make intelligent decisions.
Law of Emotion: Everything you do is determined by an emotion of some kind, either positive or negative. The emotion you think about the most preoccupies your life. If we focus on our desires and goals and ignore the negative emotions, the negative emotions die out.
When you change the way you think, you change both your inner and outer lives.
Stop being afraid of the word ‘no’, and eliminate the fear of rejection from yourself. The most powerful word for successful people is ‘ask’. The future belongs to askers who are not afraid of no (or rejection).
We give meaning to whatever we see; nothing contains any emotions, positive or negative, except for the positive or negative emotion we put into it. When you feel negative emotion about something, practice the law of substitution, replace or revise the interpretation of that situation and point your thinking in a positive direction. It’s all in our control; we only need to build habits. Remember, everything is hard before it becomes easy.
Each problem in life contains a gift of a lesson that you need to learn in the future, so remain positive about every problem. Think about all the great learning you had from the problems you faced in the past and take on new problems and challenges with confidence that even if you do not succeed, you will get the gift of learning.
