Raising Your Success Ceiling
Many years ago, I read like half of the book Secrets of The Millionaire Mind by T Harv Eker. The whole book is essentially about teaching you the reader the mindsets and attitudes of the successful…and upselling you on his course, but there is an idea that stuck with me since, and one I’ve been thinking about lately. The idea of your financial/success thermostat.
According to Eker, everyone has a high trigger point and a low trigger point. For most people, when you succeed and are doing well, better than normal, you eventually get to a place where you automatically dial things back, you work less, push less, spend more, maybe even self sabotage to get yourself back to a level of success or productivity that you are comfortable with.
And then when things get low enough or you get broke enough, then you kick back into high gear, and push all you need to do to get things done and get back up to a level of success you are comfortable with.
The space between these two points is your comfort zone. And for most people, it is set lower than you like. So if this resonates with you, if you always want to do more and be more, but seem unable to break through your glass ceilings, perhaps this will help.
I will try to answer the questions of how do you expand that comfort zone upwards. How do you get more comfortable with greater levels of success so you can naturally achieve more?
What creates our comfort zones?
The Law of Attraction attracts to you everything you need, according to the nature of your thoughts. Your environment and financial condition are the perfect reflection of your habitual thinking” – Joseph Murphy
Sigmund Freud said that we will always behave in a way and manifest things in our lives that are consistent with what we believe about ourselves and the world. If we agree that this is true, then we can see that if we are able to change how we see ourselves and the world around us, we can eventually change our reality.
Our perceptions of ourselves, what we deserve, what we are capable of and what we are comfortable with are built up and conditioned right from birth. We would usually find ourselves repeating the programming and patterns we learned from our parents or caregivers for better or worse.
There are three main layers through which that conditioning seeps through to our subconscious – what we hear and say, what we see modelled for us, and what we experience and how we interpret those experiences. All of these things weave to form the cords of expectations that bind us to our fate.
But we don’t have to be resigned to it. With effort and practice, we can change our programming and thus our lives. Our conditioning leads to the thoughts we have, which leads to our feelings, which leads to our actions and eventually our results. If we can change the programming, we can change the matrix.
How to break through your success ceiling.
To raise our comfort zone, to move to new levels of being and succeeding, we can follow a few simple steps – awareness, dissociation, re-creation, re-imagination, planning & action.
- Awareness
First we need to raise our awareness of our limits. We need to do deep dives within to figure out exactly where we are. What do we believe? What level of success do we currently attract and allow? What are we able to easily achieve? What have we believed about ourselves that has kept us from reaching our potential? What scares us about succeeding higher than this? What would that success change for us? Where do these feelings and attitudes come from? What events or experiences in our lives have instilled these ideas in us.
Once we are able to pull these things to the light, we are able to understand them deeper, know where they came from and then we can begin dismantling and replacing them.
2. Dissociation
Here we separate ourselves from our beliefs. We are not our minds. We are not our thoughts. Becoming aware of what we feel and think allows us to gain some separation from our most intimate and subconscious thoughts and see things objectively. As these issues rise up, greet them, acknowledge them, and let them go. They no longer serve you, and over time they will fade into the background.
Forgive yourself for the mistakes you have made, for the times you didn’t reach your potential, for the times you self sabotaged, and for all the time you have wasted. Give yourself a clean slate.
3. Re-creation
Create new empowering beliefs to replace the old programming. You can ask yourself things like – what is the one thing I must achieve this year to take me to the next level? What do I need to believe about myself and the world to succeed at the level I want to? What opportunities are available to me? What wins and successes do I already have and how can I build on them?
4. Re-imagination
Our self conception, the person we imagine ourselves to be has an enormous impact on how we behave, act and what we expect. We will have to take the time to see a new ‘us’ in our mind’s eye. We have to see ourselves, living and breathing in our new level of success. We have to tell ourselves new stories. The more we imagine and visualize ourselves at the new level, the more we are able to bring it into reality. Repeated visualization in this manner will begin to shift us in small but culminative ways, in thoughts, in action, in speech, in conduct, until we become what we think we are.
5. Planning
We can’t just dwell only in the feely, psycho-spiritual aspects of this process. The rubber also has to hit the road, the ideas and plans have to become concrete. We have to be clear about what we want to accomplish, and begin to map out a plan there. What do we need to do, who do we need to talk to, what do we need to learn, what actions do we need to take to succeed like we have never succeeded before.
6. Action
You just have to do it. Move in spite of your fear. Take bold consistent action. You have done all the work so far. You have untangled the mess that is your subconscious feelings and conditioning, you have let go of the ideas that don’t serve you and have embraced new empowering ones. You have made a plan, and committed to a system. Now embrace it, do what you need to do and make it happen. You will fail, but you will learn and become better, eventually you will break through.
As you take action and rack up new experiences, you will further reaffirm the new conditioning and programming you have installed into your psyche.
In doing so, you would have changed your programming, raised your comfort levels and changed your life.
