I Believe by Nikki Yanofsky

“I Believe” by Nikki Yanofsky
(Vancouver 2010 Music Video: Olympic Torch Relay)

How to Survive and Rebuild?

What is a “mental outlook?” It’s the mental window you look out through to view what’s happening in your life.

I think I will always clearly remember the image I saw on CNN of a large group of Haitians singing and dancing in the street amidst the rubble of buildings crumbled by one earthquake after another.

In that moment I had total faith these people WILL both survive and rebuild. Easy? Not by a long shot! But their collective mental outlook will carry them forward, and made me want to donate even more to the rebuilding efforts.

Our Colored Glasses
As individuals we each tend to view life through our own characteristic way. If you wear mental “rose colored glasses,” your mental outlook will tend to be more rosy, or positive. While if you wear blue tinted glasses, the world (and your outlook) will probably tend to be “blue.”

The outward reality is the same in both cases — but its colored by each person’s outlook — their customary mood and expectations.

The problem with a “blue,” or less optimistic, outlook is that it tends to be disempowering. It leads to depression. And what goes hand-in-hand with depression is an inability to take action to improve one’s situation.

A “blue” person may sneer at the optimist wearing rose-colored glasses — but they cannot deny the fact that they are more likely to take a chance and ACT. And action is life embracing!

It’s like that Haitian woman who found a broom and began to sweep the debris laden street in front of what was once her house. Will her sweeping make a difference? It did in her life!

Dealing With Challenges
Most of us are facing one challenge or another today. These are NOT easy times. And the stress of hard times can have a powerful effect on our mental outlook: If you feel worried about something, your brain is then wired to give any related event a worried evaluation. 

And although our feelings are fleeting, our moods are not. Moods are based on a brain-level accumulation of feelings that have been stored on actual physical neural networks.

So if you are in a worried mood, you tend to have anxious feelings. Anxious feelings, in turn, color your evaluations of your options. This is actually brain-based and… And a negative evaluation of a new event will just further strengthen the anxious feeling. This new negative feeling, in turn, helps maintain your worried mood.

This creates a non-productive vicious cycle that will build strength unless broken. Generally such cycles are best broken by changing your feelings, which will in turn change your mood.

Changing a Non-Productive Mood
How to break up such a cycle? One good way to start is to really FOCUS on finding a solution to just ONE of the problems you face. Do not even try to tackle all of it at once — this can just lead to overwhelm, and even more anxiety.

Once you identify one problem you want to solve, allow yourself to sort through your options and actually PICK ONE.

Avoid fence sitting. If you feel a afraid of making a mistake, look at it this way: The sooner you focus and take action, the sooner you will learn from any mistake, and can then take a new corrective action.

Set your sights on a better mental outlook. Life has its challenges — that IS a given. But obviously you have already survived some challenges to get where you are today — and can likewise rise above your current challenges. 

The truth is this: You have the ability to re-create any thought patterns that might be holding you back. Seize the moment, focus, and just go for it.

The author’s popular SUCCESS COURSE is an experience unlike any other. Over an 8-week period you will receive daily guidance and lessons that will truly unleash your personal power and ability to steer your life (or business) in any desired direction.This training is for you if you seriously want to get yourself together, focused, and in action — NOW! Show Me!

Manifesting Your Intentions

Deepak Chopra tells us that making any idea come to life always involves manifesting an intention. Even if you have a flash of genius, that flash simply remains inside your head until it materializes because of an intention.

So the important issue is how it gets materialized. There are efficient ways and inefficient ways. The most efficient way is shown to us by the mind itself, says Chopra.

Now consider a large intention, such as the intention to go to medical school. Between having this idea in your mind initially and fulfilling it are many steps, and these are not all internal at all: raising tuition money, passing exams, gaining admission, etc.

Yet each of these steps depends upon brain/mind operations being invisibly coordinated. You think, move and act using intention. All events take place in the mind field first and then exhibit their outward manifestation.

You can be detached from how things are going to work out because you have left it to the cosmos. Past success and failure don’t matter since each intention is computed afresh, without regard for old conditioning. You are able to be patient about each step, given that timing is worked out perfectly on another level.

Over the months and years of getting to be a doctor, you remain a silent witness as pieces of the process fall into place. Even as you go through the action, the “doing” of it remains impersonal.

On the ego level you may feel disappointment that event A occurred instead of event B, which you expected, but a deeper level you know that B happened for a better reason.

Your chief responsibility was to have the intention in the first place, to remain as sensitive and alert as possible.

The turning points in life arrive as small signals at first… and only amplify when you choose to follow them. So being vigilant about tiny clues is a major part of your individual evolution.

.Adapted from How To Know God, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2000), available at book stores and online from Amazon.com.

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