If you want to live on purpose, you need to think on purpose too. So says best-selling author Tim Sanders in his newly-released book Today We Are Rich:Â Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence.
In Today We Are Rich, Sanders shares seven lifestyle principles that turned his life around – twice:
- Feed your mind good stuff
- Move the conversation forward
- Exercise your gratitude muscle
- Give to be rich
- Prepare your self
- Balance your confidence
- Promise made, promise kept
I just finished reading the first chapter, “Feed your mind good stuff,” from Today We Are Rich, (you can read this free excerpt from the book too at www.twar.com), and I can already tell this book is going to be one of my favorites. After all, Sanders is one of my favorite authors, having written great books like Love is the Killer App, Saving the World at Work, and The Likeability Factor.
How to Feed Your Mind Good Stuff
In the first chapter of Today We Are Rich, Sanders explains that if we want to be successful in work and life, we need to create habits of feeding our minds in a positive way.
He shares the example of his grandmother, Billye, who had a “positive-intake plan” to help her filter the thoughts and ideas that came her way every day and helped her live a purposeful life. And he contrasts her example with his friend Rick, who had a constant stream of news, info, and noise (much of it negative) coming his way all day every day, which caused him to lose focus and eventually become depressed and negative.
Sanders suggests we create a diet plan for our mind so we can thoughtfully feed our mind the good “food” it needs to produce the good results we want to achieve:
“You should be as careful about what you put into your mind as about what you put into your mouth. Your mind is a machine. When you ingest a piece of information, your mind goes to work, chewing on it, digesting it, and then converting it into a thought. When good stuff goes into your mind, good thoughts emerge. People who maintain purposeful mind diets of positive stimuli think healthy thoughts.”
“The reason it is so important to feed your mind good stuff is that the resulting thoughts determine your success or failure, your happiness or misery, and most important, the circumstances of your life. Those who do not have a diet plan for their minds are subject to their worst memories and the world’s constant fear chatter – and those result in disturbing thought patterns.”
Here are four tips to help feed your mind in a positive way:
- Keep a mind food journal – I was intrigued by his recommendation to keep a mind food journal to help us monitor our mind “food” intake, and the strategies he shares for filtering out the negative news, gossip, people, and attitudes that come our way.
- Feed your mind good food – After you keep track of your mind food intake and learn how to filter out the negativity, you need to feed your mind some good food, and one of the best ways is to read good books: Sanders recommends a mind diet mix of:Â 25% media, 50% books, and 25% social and workstream (offline and online). He says, “If your mind diet is weighted heavily toward reading good books, you’ll enlighten your perspective and gain wisdom over time.”
- Eliminate bad memories of regrets and failures – Sanders says we need to eliminate bad memories of regrets or failures from the past that often get reintroduced into our minds and keep us down. One strategy he shared is to see the negative memory as a headline on a whiteboard, then use a “mental eraser” to wipe it off the board. If the bad memory persists, Sanders consciously says to himself, “Delete, please.” If we’ve learned a lesson from a mistake, we should definitely store the insight we gained, but delete the gory details.
- Re-live your past successes – Sanders says the healthiest mind food is success experiences: “These are times when you displayed courage, cunning and tenacity. You were masterful. You effortlessly performed above your expectations. The results were positive, feedback glowed, and your confidence soared. Maxwell Maltz wrote, ‘We learn to function successfully by experiencing success. Memories of past success act as built-in ‘stored information’ which gives us self-confidence for the present task.'”
Reading this first chapter of Today We Are Rich has really challenged me to think about my mind food intake as a key factor in my success in life and work. What about you?
—>Get your copy of Today We Are Rich at Amazon.
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