This is the second post in a series on how to change your life. If you want to start at the beginning of the series, head on over to: How To Change Your Life: Part 1 – Become Clear.

If you followed the instructions in the last post in this series, you are already clear about what you want your life to be like. Now you’re ready for the next step…

Getting your thoughts and feelings aligned with what you want to create.

Why You Need To Have Your Thoughts And Feelings Aligned With Your Goals

First, Your Thoughts And Feelings Affect Your Actions

How much effort do you think you will make toward achieving a goal if you don’t believe you can realistically achieve it? You will probably not even bother starting, or else you will give up at the first sign of difficulty. Why make the effort if it’s really not possible right?

However, if you really believe that your goals can become reality, your motivation to take action and succeed will skyrocket.

By training your mind, you can actually start believing in yourself and your ability to achieve your goals. When this happens, your motivation to take action and persevere until your goals become reality will skyrocket.

Second, Your Thoughts And Feelings Help Program Your Subconscious Mind

Your subconscious mind likes consistency. It will do everything it can to keep things in your life the same.

Over the years, you may have noticed repeated scenarios in your life. Your income will generally stay the same, you often end up having similar relationship experiences, you experience the same types of failures over and over again. This is your subconscious mind at work.

If things in your life ever start varying from the norm, your subconscious brain can’t tolerate it. It will actually work against your best efforts to make positive changes in your life. This is why smokers have a hard time quitting, people who lose weight usually gain it all back, and why lottery winners often end up just as broke as they were before winning within a few years.

Thankfully, this can also be used to your advantage. Your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between something that is real and something that is imagined. So if you spend enough time imagining a new reality for yourself, your subconscious will begin to believe that this imagined reality is the way things are actually supposed to be. It will actually aid you in making your imagined reality come true.

Third, Your Thoughts and Feelings Are What Activate The Law of Attraction

The law of attraction states that like attracts like, but what exactly does this have to do with your thoughts and feelings?

The images your hold in your mind will attract similar images into your reality. So if you regularly hold mental images of you having achieved your goals, the law of attraction will kick in and start working to make those mental images come true.

The feelings you have are also have an attraction force to them. In fact, many people argue that your feelings have much more attraction power than mental images.

If you feel successful, you will tend to attract more success into your life. If you feel wealthy, you will tend to attract more wealth. If you feel worried, you will tend to attract more situations that will cause you to worry.

How To Get Your Thoughts And Feelings Aligned With Your Goals

Visualization

The most effective way to get your thoughts and feelings aligned with your goals is to use visualization.

Spend time every day imagining that your goal(s) are already a reality in your life. Use a first person perspective (looking through your own eyes) so it’s like you are right there experiencing everything first hand.

• What is going on around you?
• What does your life look like?
• Who is there with you?
• Imagine those people congratulating you.
• Imagine yourself celebrating your success with your friends and loved ones.

Make it all as detailed as possible so that it not only looks real, but it feels real too. These feelings can really ramp up your attraction power.

• Feel grateful for your success.
• Feel excited about your success.
• Feel grateful for how easy it was to achieve.
• If your goal is related to relationships, enjoy the new feelings of friendship or love.
• If your goal is related to money, enjoy the feelings of being wealthy and being able to afford whatever you want to buy.

Index Cards

Write down each goal you have on a separate index card.

Read through these cards several times a day to reinforce your visualizations. Reading through them will tend to bring up the images and feelings that you use during your visualizations. This will help to further reinforce the mental reprogramming that you’re doing.

Make it a Daily Practice

It typically takes about 30 days to start shifting the thought processes of your subconscious mind. This is why it’s important to make sure that you visualize for 20 minutes every day, for at least 30 days straight.

If you ever miss a day, you will need to start your count over.

After that, it’s good a good idea to keep up the daily habit as it will continue to reinforce your mind with images of your success. Not only will it will help you to keep focused and motivated as you take action, but it will also continue to activate the law of attraction in your favor.

In our next post, we’ll be covering part 3 of how to change your life – Learn How To Change. Be sure to join us!

Other Posts In The Series: How To Change Your Life

How To Change Your Life: Part 1 – Become Clear

How To Change Your Life: Part 3 – Learn What You Need to Know

How To Change Your Life: Part 4 – Taking Action

How To Change Your Life: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

There are three main things you need to do…

1. Take One Step At a Time

Imagine you had a giant pancake sitting in front of you and you had to eat it. How would you do it?

Think about it for a minute, it’s OK, I’ll wait…

Got your answer? Great!

Now here’s how I would do it. I would eat it one bite at a time.

Goals are no different than the giant pancake. You achieve them by moving toward them one step at a time.

Take each goal that you have written down and break them down into smaller steps. Smaller steps seem less intimidating to complete than a bigger goal that seems way out there.

This approach works especially well for big goals. Just break them down into a series of smaller goals.

For example, let’s say you want to be earning $10,000 a month 4 years from today. And suppose that right now you’re earning $4,000 a month. At first glance, that seems like a pretty lofty goal.

You can make that goal feel more achievable if your break it down into smaller pieces. Instead, try saying that you will increase your income by $125 each month for the next 4 yours. The numbers still work out the same, but doesn’t it feel more achievable when you put it this way?

2. Take Action

Unless you are somehow going to inherit, win, or receive your goals as gifts, you’re going to need to do some work.

It helps if you’ve already broken your goals down into smaller steps. Just look at what your next step is and do a little bit each day to complete it.

By doing at least a little bit each day, you’ll constantly be moving yourself in the right direction. You’ll be able to see yourself progressing over time which will increase both your confidence and your motivation to keep going.

3. Visualize

Take 10-20 minutes every day just to close your eyes and imagine that today was the day your goals became a reality. See it as if you were experiencing everything first hand.

What would it look like? Who would be there? Are there any sounds or smells? How do you feel? Imagine your family and friends congratulating you. Make the imagined experience as real as possible.

By doing this every day, you are actually training your brain to help you succeed.

Right now your subconscious brain is used to your current reality and it doesn’t like things to change. It might even go so far as to sabotage any efforts you make to change your life.

But by visualizing a new reality for yourself, you are training your subconscious mind to accept this new reality as truth. Once it does, it will actually start helping you in your quest. You will start to have new creative ideas come to you, and you’ll start noticing things around you that can help you that you never noticed before.

Conclusion

Let’s just do a quick recap on how to achieve goals – even big goals.

1. Break them down into smaller, more manageable steps.
2. Take action daily.
3. Spend time daily visualizing what it would be like if you achieved your goals.

If you consistently do these three things, you’ll be accomplishing your goals in no time.

Is there anything special that you do to achieve your goals? If so, please share it by leaving a comment below.

The three questions are:

1. What do you want?
2. Why do you want it?
3. What are you going to do to get it?

What Do You Want?

The first thing you need to know about how to succeed in life is that you need to know what you want.

Stop and ask almost anybody what they want in life and they will probably stutter and stare at you for a while. After that they might be able to give you some vague ideas of things they think they might like.

Still others will tell you that they aren’t sure what they want, but then they’ll go into to a long list of things they don’t want.

This is the key thing that is holding almost everyone back from succeeding in life. They have no idea what they want. Or, if they have an idea of what they want, it’s very vague.

You must know what you want in a very specific way. If you want to be rich, define exactly what rich means to you. If you want to get married and have a family, what type of person do you want to marry, how many kids do you want, where do you want to live? Be specific.

If you have no goals for your life, you are lost. How are you going to reach any level of success if you don’t even know what success means to you?

Before you read any further, stop and answer the question; What do you want? Be as specific as possible!

Don’t think that the answers you come up with are going to lock you in to a certain course for life. It’s ok to change your mind in the future and set new goals as your desires change. You just need to have something written down now. Then you will at least have a course to success that you can start following.

Got that one answered? Excellent!

Now that you know what you want, it’s time to answer the question…

Why Do You Want It?

The second thing you need to know about how to succeed in life is that you must know why you want something.

• If you want to be rich, why do you want to be rich?
• If you want to get married and have a family, why do you want to have a family?
• If you want to improve your health, why do you want to improve your health?

The stronger your why, the more motivation, desire, and drive you will feel to achieve your goal. These things will be extremely important when you start encountering obstacles on the way to achieving your goal. A strong why will prevent you from giving up.

Again, I’m going to ask you to take a moment to answer another question; Why do you want what you want? Come up with the strongest reasons you can.

Got that one answered too? Congratulations, you’re 2/3 done now!

OK, so you know what you want and why you want it, now…

What Are You Going To Do To Get It?

The third thing you need to know about how to succeed is that you must be willing to come up with a plan. Then you need to put that plan into action in order to achieve your goals.

Sure, it’s possible that once you know what you want, it’ll just show up unexpectedly one day, but it’s no guarantee. You will be much more likely to succeed if you start taking action.

Life can be busy, but if your success is important to you, you need to make some time for your goals.

Come up with a game plan and start following it. The game plan doesn’t need to be set in stone. You can always adjust course as you go. And you probably will as you find out what works well, and what doesn’t. That’s OK. The point is to start getting yourself to take action.

I always like taking baby steps to achieve a goal I’ve set for myself. Just commit yourself to doing a little bit every day or every week. Even taking small regular steps in the right direction gets the momentum going. Once you get moving, it’s easier to stay moving.

Conclusion

This is how to succeed in life. Answering these three question will give your life purpose, clarity, and meaning. The answers to these questions will start propelling you toward the success you desire in life. The answers to these questions will keep you going when things seem bleak.

In short, answering these three questions will give you the tools you need to succeed.

It doesn’t matter if you are old or young, you still have the rest of your life ahead of you. Figure out what you want to do with the life you have, then go do it.

So, now if I ask you what you want, can you give me a clear answer?