The top 5 fundamentals for pulling off the impossible

1. It starts with your thoughts.

“I think that everything is possible as long as you put your mind to it and you put the work and time into it. I think your mind really controls everything.”
It all starts with your thoughts. They and your emotions get you to do – or not to do – things. And how you think and feel about your results and the work you have to put in determines who you are becoming and you what are achieving.
How you act does also to a pretty large degree determine what you get from other people in your life. Emotions and thoughts are contagious. And you tend to get what you give, at least over time.
A brilliant and beautiful expansion on this very basic idea can be found in James Allen’s “As a man thinketh”.

2. Keep a steady and consistent focus.

”If I want to be as successful as I want to be, I have to be thinking about it all the time.”
Thinking about what you want is of course extremely important. But you also need to keep your focus there. Because you are and are becoming what you think about most of the time. If your focus starts to waver all over the place and you forget what you really want to focus on half the time or get caught up in other thoughts or emotions then things will be difficult.
Much of this comes down to how reactive you are to other people and events. If you are constantly in reaction to what happens around you, you let the outside world control what you focus on. So how can you get your focus to become more like an arrow that is moving forward rather than a boat where the guy at the rudder has fallen asleep?
How to train your mind to keep the focus on what you want:
Practice. This gets the mind used to this new way of keeping your focus. The mind will slowly start to accept this way, inner resistance will lessen and keeping the focus where you want it becomes easier.
Use your physiology and phraseology. You can use these two things to keep your emotions where you want them to be. Your emotions work backwards too. So by changing your physiology - how you sit, stand and move - to a more confident one you can feel more confident. And by using more positive words you can have a more positive frame of mind. So even if you don’t feel confident or positive right now you can quickly change that by changing your movement and words.
Reframing. You can use reframing - to see things in a different light - to help yourself. How do you do it? One way is to ask yourself some good questions. If you are in a “negative” situation you can reframe it by asking yourself: what is awesome about this? Or “what can I learn from this?” Check out a few more useful questions in this article.
Use an external reminder. Written notes in highly visible places or a bracelet with an inscription can help you to keep your focus in the right place throughout your normal day.

3. Dream without limits.

“You can’t put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get.”

Sure, there might be some genetic advantages that some have that you don’t. Time can also be a factor. You may not be able to lose those 30 pounds within a month, but you can do it over a longer time span.
You can - to a large degree - dream without limits and also use your own natural advantages to your benefit.
Now, dreaming without limits may sound like empty self-help mumbo-jumbo. But your dreams and beliefs do to a large degree determine what you can and will allow yourself to do. As Henry Ford said in his famous quote:
“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”
In my experience this is very much true. And it comes down to if you can see what you want in your reality as something realistic and if you will allow it to be there. If you don’t then you’ll work against yourself. You’ll feel a lot of inner resistance that manifests in different ways such as self-sabotage in subtle and not so subtle ways.

4. Accept what happens and learn from it.

“A lot of new obstacles are coming, a lot of new feelings are coming, … I’m just taking it for what it is and learning from the mistakes I had this year.”

Resistance is fatal to get a good performance out of yourself. And as I mentioned last Friday, acceptance can help you to remove inner resistance and get things not only done but done in a better fashion than if you are resisting and working against yourself.
Acceptance is also very helpful when you make a mistake or fail. You can resist the failure/mistake and beat yourself up. This creates a lot of inner suffering and new resistance. And that makes it emotionally harder to keep going and trying since you associate mistakes and failure with so much pain.
Acceptance is a more useful approach. It can help you to release yourself from slipping into old, conditioned patterns of self-hurting behaviour when something “negative” happens.You can instead see a situation such as a failure with fresh eyes.
And instead of beating yourself up or feeling sorry for yourself you can see the situation in a more positive and constructive way. Like for instance by looking for the lessons or the positive stuff in your failure. One of the greatest things about acceptance is that it can give you freedom from your old behaviour patterns and “you acting as you have always done”.
Failure and mistakes can - in combination with acceptance - be very helpful. Here are four reasons why:
You learn. Instead of seeing failure as something horrible you can start to view it more as a learning experience. When standing in the middle of a failure, you can ask yourself questions like the ones I mentioned above in the reframing section of tip #2. Questions like: What’s awesome about this situation? What can I learn from this situation? There is always one lesson or many more in what you may see as a failure.
You gain experiences you could not get any other way. Ideally, you probably want to learn from other people’s mistakes and failures. That’s not always easy to do though. Sometimes you just have to fail on your own to learn a lesson and to gain an experience no one can relate to you in mere words.
You become stronger. Every time you fail you become more accustomed to it. You get desensitized. You realize more and more that it’s not the end of the world. Failing may in fact become a bit anticlimactic – just like when successfully reaching a goal - after you have spent much time building a grandiose image of it in your head. Failing can also a have an exhilarating component because even though you failed you at least took a chance. You didn’t just sit on you hands doing nothing. And that took quite a bit of courage and determination.
Your chances of succeeding increases. Every time you fail you can learn and increase your inner strength. So every failure can make you more and more likely to succeed. And there is probably no other way to the success you dream of without a whole bunch of failures along the way.

5. Be careful with inflating your ego or identifying too strongly with your success.

“I’m the same kind of girl before all this happened.”

If you let the success go to your head then it can, for one, make you an arrogant jerk. It can also make you more emotionally reactive as you inflate your ego and strongly identify with your achievements.
This will feel awesome at first. But soon you may start to doubt that you are still as good as your last achievement and as awesome as everyone said you were. And so you become more reactive to criticism or having a bad day. This affects the steadiness of your focus, thoughts and emotions. And so your inner life becomes more of a roller coaster. All of this can not only affect your relationships with other people but also your performance.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t have a high level of confidence in yourself and your abilities. It just means that you should be careful with getting completely wrapped up in your past achievements and letting you ego inflate too a harmful size.