"Think success and it will happen....Think failure and it will happen...."

Thomas D. Willhite

What I have come to appreciate over the years is that there is a science to success. From personal experience and having studied quite a number of successful people, I have come to appreciate that there a number of definitive steps that if applied consistently, can make the likelihood of success far greater.

Believe

This is by far the primary pre-requisite for success. All great accomplishments were preceded by an unwavering belief that the goal was possible. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you truly believe that you will able to achieve your keenest ambitions or live the life of your dreams? An honest answer to this question will reveal your state of self-belief.

Your belief in your own ability, if positive, can propel you towards your goals; however, if negative, will ensure that you never achieve them your goals.

Self-belief simply reflects your own opinion of yourself and has very little to do with what others think of you (except of course in cases where one has allowed the opinion of others to mould and be the very foundation of how they see themselves).

Whenever you are experiencing doubt in your own ability or fear that your dreams may never come to pass, always remember that there are many that faced similar or worse situations went through difficult hardships but eventually triumphed. If they could have done it, what makes you less capable?

The mere fact that you had the ability to conjure up a goal, an objective or a dream implies that deep down somewhere inside of you is a seed of corresponding greatness that has within it the innate potential required to achieve that goal.

I know that sounded a little bit like "mind-power mumbo jumbo" but just look around you. Many of the things that surround you today, from cell phones to jumbo jets, would have been considered "impossible" a couple of hundred years back, yet someone had the dream to create them and so they exist today and have become part of everyday life.

Take Daily Action

Resolve to take some action daily that will make you a better person today than you were yesterday, to better position you to achieve your goals and objectives - make more sales calls today than yesterday, see more clients this week than last week, do more research on that business idea, take on more projects etc.

For example, if you want to have a successful career, constantly ask yourself – "what action can I take daily that will eventually put me in the top 20% or 30% of my industry? What actions can I take today that will render me truly valuable to the company? With this sort of thinking, you set yourself on the path to daily improvement and eventually, that "elusive bonus" will become a thing of the past.

Positive belief and productive action is a powerful recipe for actualising any goal.

Faking It Till You Make It

Success is a state of mind. This is a strange but true statement. Once you begin to act as if something were possible or act as if you have a certain ability, this will give you the confidence boost needed to get going.

By continually acting as if something were possible or achievable you gradually shift your thinking from a "defeatist mind-set" to a "solution driven" mind-set.

The mechanism via which these change takes place is simply through your subconscious mind. By continuously sending messages of positive self-belief to the subconscious mind, the mind begins to accept this as true and you yourself begin to develop into the person you need to be to achieve the goal you wish to achieve.

The more you learn to feel successful, the more successful you will act until eventually, you truly become successful.

Surround Yourself with Successful People

The energy of successful individuals is contagious and by surrounding yourself with successful people instead of moaners and whingers, you will begin to see your own mind-set transform.

By learning from other successful people, identifying what habits led to their success and then incorporating that into your life, the results will be amazing.

Take a long hard look at those you surround yourself with and ask yourself if they possess the necessary traits that will contribute to your success or do they in fact lead the sort of life style and have the sort of limited outlook that will impede your chances of being successful.

What I also recommend to my clients is a process known as "modelling". This essentially involves identifying 3 or 4 of their own business or success icons and isolating the main successful qualities that make such icons great.

Read their biographies and life stories, learn of their struggles and triumphs and learn what they needed to do and who they needed to become in order to become successful. Then replicate these qualities again and again in your own life until it becomes second nature.

Whenever faced with a particular challenging situation or decision, ask yourself what your success icon would do in such a situation or how they would react, and then behave accordingly.

Do these often times and before you know it those winning behaviours will become hardwired into your own personality.

Let the Failures Go

We often carry around our past failures with us, amplifying them in our minds and consequently allowing them to determine what we believe is our potential. By so doing, we diminish the impact of our past successes and underestimate the crucial role we played in the achievement of those successes.

All too often, we are quick to forget the successes while we allow the stings of our past failures to live on years after we should have let them go.

Without even being aware of it, many have allowed their past (particularly their failures and disappointments) to benchmark their abilities and how far they believe they can go or how much they believe they can achieve in life.

The inability to let go of the past is a major obstruction to moving forward and going after the life of our dreams and often times makes it virtually impossible for some to even take the first step so much needed to get closer to their dreams.

At the risk of belabouring the point, it all boils down to mind-set. The past is the past and we have no control over it. The mistake has been made, the defeat has been suffered and no amount of reflection will change it.

Besides, show me any successful person and I can almost guarantee that they had suffered some sort of failure or setback before finally accomplishing their goals.

What we do have some control over is the future and it is how we react to the past that will determine how our future will unravel.

There are countless stories of those who have suffered monumental and crushing failures in at various points in their lives, only to enjoy phenomenal success down the line – you know why? They did not allow their failures to determine who they were, the learnt from their mistakes, got off their butts and kept moving. That is the key.

With belief, effort and the right mind-set, the level of one’s achievement only becomes limited by the size of their dreams.