“You can get anything you want, if you help enough other people get what they want.” Zig Ziglar
Sorry, I had to put this one here based on the catchy title. And yes it is true, if you help enough people, eventually people will start to help you. But the real secret sauce to success is faith. And funny it is that this belief is expressed in all fields, athletic, business, medical, you name it. They just call it different things.
For Athletes is common practice to visualize how the competition will go. Michael Phelps attributes his athletic success to visualization. But he does not just dream of Gold medals, his visualization is very detailed. He “sees” every detail of the competition and how he is excelling in every one of those details. Sports Psychologists say “You are quite literally fooling your brain into believing that what you are mental rehearsing is real. This is the power of visualization—the brain has great difficulty distinguishing between real and imagined events.” And it shows. Harvard conducted a study where two groups of students were tasked with a set of bodybuilding exercises. Although one group they just had to imagine doing the exercise. Don’t be fooled. The imagination group were thought to visualize doing the exercise exactly how they would do it in real life, in every detail. They were thought to “feel” the weight, to feel the muscle burning, to feel the pain, etc. etc. After 30 days the imagination group showed 30% of muscle mass increase while the “real” group showed 60% of muscle increase. And I may add that only 30% because they were probably cheating and not really imagining every detail.
The military report stories of how combat soldiers have been shot repeatedly but were not aware of it until the fight was over all due to mental preparation which some call combat mindset. Moreover, I met soldiers that told me the only way they survived being shot was to have a strong belief that they were built strong enough to sustain the injury and that they would recover fully and quickly.
You heard countless stories of sick people that were told by their unbelieving doctors that they were terminal and nothing else could be done, and miraculously they survived. But why only a few do?
Because faith goes both ways.
The book How Full is your Bucket? By Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton starts with a brief history of a North Korean POW camp which held 1000 U.S. prisoners. The prisoners had adequate food and shelter. They were not physically tortured. And yet, this camp had the highest POW death rate in U.S. military history. The weapon of choice was subtle psychological warfare, which eroded trust among fellow prisoners and broke their sense of hope. In essence, the cause of death was extreme negativity.
The book goes on to describe that some prisoners would go to a corner, cover their heads with a blanket and die in 2 days by the simple belief that life was so miserable that it was not worth being alive. No suicide, their minds would kill their bodies.
And doubt is so powerful that even Jesus was affected by it. In Matthew 13:53-58 and Mark 6:5 says that Jesus was unable to perform miracles because the people in his own city doubted he could do such things. The people’s doubt impacted Jesus (Tha man!) to do miracles.
Folks, look at what is happening now? Extreme negativity everywhere and yes many people are dying mostly because they don’t think they can survive. People are committing suicide at alarming rates because they don’t see a future. It is happening right now!
But yet again, the reverse works. If you believe, you can achieve. But you have to believe, and VERY IMPORTANT people around you need to believe it too.
The power of God is turned on, permanently.
There is not a proper way to tap into it, not a specific time and place. It is ON ALL THE TIME. And all you have to do is to accept it and believe in it. Call it what you want. Visualization, Combat Mindset, Faith they are all the same and it works, surprisingly enough even if you don’t believe in God. It’s on, all the time.
Now, if you do believe in God this power takes a whole new level.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1
“And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.” Matthew 21:22
“For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.” Mark 11:23
So, what are you going to believe in?
Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. – Henry Ford