The number one reason for success or failure is your expectations of success or failure. This is also known as the placebo effect.
In looking back over my life and now including studies of those who succeed at the highest levels this factor proves true. To these people the concept of failure never even crosses their minds, so with complete focus on success they march forward towards the goal. They simply expect it and unerringly it manifests. If failure is your expectation, it too manifests perfectly every time. It is all cause and effect. Your belief is the cause, success in achieving the goal, and failure of achieving the goal is the effect.

My personal experience with this phenomenon began at the age of ten.Thinking Child Of course I had no awareness that this is what was occurring. At that age I had a small paper route as well as during different times of the year I was helping a farmer down the road from us making an incredible $1.50 an hour. So I was earning anywhere from $15-30 dollars a week. For the ten year old that I was in 1970 I was over the moon.

At an unconscious level I saw no reason why I couldn’t do this, so I did. That year my family was introduced to new friends from Manchester England. We livid in northern Illinois. After they continued their tour of America my mom announced that the following year she was going to travel to England to get to know our new friends better. This set the wheels in my mind in motion and the following day I asked my mom if I could go. Her response was; sure, as long as you pay for it, I can’t afford to pay for both of us to go. This was my plan all along.

With no conception as to why I couldn’t accomplish this feat I began saving.

It never occurred to me that people my age simply did not do things like this, and so I did.

Two years later I traveled half way around the world by myself and spent the summer with people I barely knew. I found out years later that my mom did not expect me to actually do it, she figured after a couple of weeks I would go back to buying baseball cards and 45’s (vinyl records, not guns).

My favorite poster is of the Garfield comic strip. It shows Odie the dog sitting happily up in a tree on a branch, while Garfield the cat, sits on the ground with a disgusted, perplexed look on his face, as he looks up into the tree at Odie. The caption reads:

It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t know you can’t do it!

By the time I graduated high school, I had traveled to England three times, owned a car, a van, and a motorcycle, was buying most of my clothes and food, and was learning how to fly. I’m not revealing this to brag (well maybe), it just never crossed my mind that there was anything I could not do, so I accomplished everything I decided to do.
At the age of seventeen my life did a U-turn. As a result of an illness at the age of fifteen, that nearly ended my life, the only career I had ever seriously considered was taken off the table. From that point on for the next three plus decades I no longer trusted my inner guide. It was only recently that I actually became aware that this is what happened.

 Rather than to see this event as a challenge to be overcome, by still trusting that inner guide, I unconsciously determined to no longer trust it. I unconsciously adopted a new belief which was that I was a failure.
This became my new expectation. The same principle was/is at work. What I expected to manifest did. The only difference is that now I expected failure. Failure certainly manifested in my life for the next many years. I still actually succeeded, only now with disastrous effect that manifested acutely in the form of drug addiction that also nearly ended my life. I lived at the poverty level and became a horrible reflection of my former self, consumed with an ocean of self-pity, anger, and hatred.

The point I wish to make is that my expectations still worked perfectly. This is a most powerful law of mind that works perfectly all of the time. This is why it is so critical to become master of your mind, and to harness the power of your expectations.

There is an ever increasing body of evidence proving the effectiveness of your expectations, also known as the placebo effect. Even fake surgeries have been performed in which the success rate was identical to that of those who received actual surgery. Science is now studying how to determine how much of the success rate of actual surgery is due to the patient’s belief in the surgery succeeding, rather than the actual mechanics of the surgery.
When at age fifteen I spent three months in the hospital having eight surgeries, losing forty pounds, and eventually had three pounds of infection removed from my body, a stay in which I years later was told I was not expected to walk out of, it was never revealed to me just how sick I was. I knew I was sick, but it never occurred to me that I was deathly so. I believe this to be a major reason as to why I indeed did walk out of this event. Back to: It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t know you can’t do it.

Begin now to retrain your minds expectations. You can and do succeed in all of your expectations. The trick is to become aware of your expectations, and if you don’t like them replace them. It will probably be a process that requires time to achieve, but then again you may do it in an instant. In truth it will occur in an instant, it just may take time to get to that instant, depending on how deeply your beliefs/expectations of failure are seeded in you. For me they were deep as can be, so it took years to completely overcome. Keep this thought in mind though: what else are you doing?

I encourage you to begin retraining your mind. It will succeed, the variable is do you expect to succeed at failure or accomplishment.

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