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There Will Always Be Success Stories.
The Positivity Formula Can Increase Your Probability of Being Among Them.
If you are reading this blog, it's because I followed the principles I discovered about how to achieve my goals.
My new book, Modern Positivity, describes my personal search to develop a method that helped me achieve my new goals after retirement—and it can help you too.
The Modern Positivity Formula is a new approach to an age-old question:
What are the most important factors that enable a person to successfully achieve their goals?
It's not a secret; it's just common sense. The success factor has been observed and written about for centuries. Many observers, philosophers, modern-day teachers, and even professional counselors have been close to a practical, common-sense answer but never fully connected the dots.
I have not invented a new type of positive psychology or a new magical practice of achieving success. Instead, I worked on my own questions and frustrations about achieving goals to find a method that worked for me. And if the method worked for my relatively ordinary goals, they should work for you too.
The Formula
The formula in my book is designed to help you achieve and maintain a level of positive thinking about your goals.
You have three basic types of thoughts: positive, negative, and various degrees of uncertainty, doubt, and fear.
The simple formula is to manage the three types of thoughts and self-talk so that your positive and confident beliefs are at least 68% of your thinking about achieving your goal.
Positivity has to be the dominant and consistent self-talk about your goals, so you are not easily discouraged, diverted or stopped by the fears and doubts.
I returned to the origins of all science - common-sense observation. I applied basic universal laws of probability to identify consistent patterns and characteristics of observable successes. As noted in the book title, for every goal, there will be people and organizations that reach the highest level of success, and some will achieve little or no success. But most people can achieve a reasonable level of success just by being in the vast middle of "average."
My search for a universal formula of success positivity
As I discovered personally and from the psychological literature, this is the problem: many people have high levels of fears, doubts and negativity in their self-talk that is an obstacle to pursuing their goals.
The objective of Modern Positivity was to find the common denominators of success that you personally have control over, which are your ideas, thoughts, and self-talk. We know it's possible because every day we hear about success stories in every field.
We all want to make our lives better, be more successful, get a new job, live a healthier lifestyle, achieve financial security, run a successful business, make the world a better place.
I had obvious questions about my goals, such as:
• How do some people seem to succeed so easily?
• Why do some people fail despite their efforts?
• What's behind the successes and misses?
• Can we identify the patterns of success?
• Can we learn how to use our thoughts, choices, and actions more effectively?
• Are there fundamental characteristics of success that can be readily described, simplified, applied, and measured?
After retirement, I found new challenges and new doubts. I tried many programs, and I accepted the advice to have a clear purpose and persistence. There's lots of useful advice and good intentions in the conventional success and positive thinking literature. However, there was still something missing for me.
But one idea captured my imagination and made the most common sense to me — to be more positive, or more specifically, to be "positive most of the time." Good advice.
However, there was no practical technique or advice for how to actually be "positive most of the time". And what is "most of the time"?
So, I applied my professional research expertise to find a modern definition for what I believed to be the most consistent factor in achieving success. A factor that is acknowledged by every successful celebrity, star, athlete, entrepreneur, business leader, and people in everyday life who achieve their goals.
The success stories offer a common-sense explanation. The people at the top of the success curve believed that if they had confidence in their goals and persisted in their efforts, they could achieve what they wanted. In other words, success stories have a strong positive attitude that supports their purpose and goals, and they have that positive attitude "most of the time."
Positivity supports your optimism, persistence, efforts, willingness to adapt to new challenges and recognize opportunities. Negativity is not just a negative thought; negativity prevents you from even recognizing new opportunities or seeing ways to get around the obstacles. In contrast, Positivity increases the probability that you will remain confident in finding a way to do what's necessary to achieve your goals.
I also recognized that you don't have to be 100% positive to achieve your goals, and a modest level of negativity will not sabotage your efforts. The Modern Positivity Formula is a method to help you manage your positive and negative beliefs in your self-talk. With the method, you can learn to establish Positivity as your new habit, your new way of life, and a portal to the success zone.
How Do You Increase Your Probability of Success?
If success is guaranteed for some people, how do you increase the probability that you will be one of the successes in achieving your goals?
“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind.” -Buddha
At the personal level, negative thoughts are typically in the form of our negative self-talk, the stories we tell or don't tell ourselves about ourselves and our ambitions. At the organizational level, negativity is a failure of leadership to instill a positivity-centric plan. And for both, there must also be targeted measurement and feedback on progress.
The most common factor in achieving success has been known for centuries but rarely taught or acknowledged as a basic life skill. It's very simple and common-sense — a sustained level of Positivity, focus, and persistence in working toward your goal.
But reading a book is usually not enough to really learn a new life habit.
I've read many books about success, manifestation, and personal change. I've highlighted key passages and turned down pages. But like most people, I don't always take the time to go back to the book, and even rereading does not always help me understand and practice the methods. So, I created two other parts for Modern Positivity.
The Modern Positivity Workbook
The Modern Positivity ™ Workbook provides simple exercises from the key points in the book, which you can personalize to your beliefs and goals. Building and maintaining Positivity is the same process to create any new habit. The process requires learning a few fundamentals and practice and more practice. The Workbook has exercises help get you more engaged in the process.
Some of the exercises include the following:
What is your positivity personality? Were you born to be positive, or do you have to learn the technique?
How to understand your self-talk. What kind of stories do you tell yourself about your ambitions and your fears and doubts? Only you can change the conversations you have with yourself.
How to get comfortable with confidence in achieving your goals. Can you convert your thoughts into a written description? Are you comfortable telling other people about your goals and ambitions? How to practice getting your thoughts out of your mind and out into the world.
What kind of learner are you? Are you ready to make learning positivity a full-time job, or will it just be a part-time hobby?
The Positivity Thoughts Scorecard and Progress Report
How to know if you reach the goal of being "positive most of the time"
The Positivity goal is to reach a level of positive thinking about your goal of at least 68%. We all like to know how we're doing; we like report cards. Learning theories emphasize the need for progress reports and feedback for the most effective learning.
The Positivity Thoughts Scorecard™ enables you to record and track your Positivity and thoughts about progress towards your goals. You record your self-assessments weekly, and the automatically updated trend chart shows your progress in your positivity levels.
If you know what you are thinking, you will know what has to change to manage the positive and negative thoughts and beliefs to reach the threshold of 68% Positivity.
The Modern Positivity book is available on Amazon, print, or Kindle. The Workbook and Scorecard are available on the modernpositivity.com website. The Workbook will be available January, 2022.
It's time to update ancient wisdom and simplify overly complex success and Positivity ideas.
The Modern Positivity Formula is a simple method to help manage the relationship between positive, negative, and uncertain thoughts.
Are you ready to reach your goals?
Positivity is the platform, the portal to success in the modern world.
Richard Spitzer November 23, 2021
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