What you believe produces your results, which reinforces your belief, which produces your results. If you have empowering beliefs you can be spiralling up in life, but if you have disempowering beliefs you can be spiralling down instead. One of the examples propagated in personal development circles to support this is Rodger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile. A feat which celebrated its 70th anniversary last week. The idea that everyone except Bannister thought it was impossible to run a mile under 4 minutes is a good story but isn’t true. From 1913 to 1937 the men’s mile record went from 4:14:04 to 4:06:04. In 1945 the record dropped to 4:01:06. During the war years the only athletes breaking the record were from neutral Sweden. No mystery then as to why the record stood for 9 years before Bannister broke it in 1954. Given the background of the continuous improvement in performance, breaking the 4-minute threshold was inevitable. The current record is 3:43:13 set by Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999. The key point to understand from this example is that Bannister did believe it was possible, and he did it. Others also believed it was possible too, Bannister just got their first. The other important point is that having a goal improves performance by as much as 25%. The 4-minute threshold was a key milestone that helped motivate Bannister’s efforts. This included rubbing graphite on his running shoe spikes to reduce friction. What you believe is possible affects the amount of effort you will put in to achieve it. Having goals and targets helps you to measure your progress and enables adjustments as necessary along the way.
On the 9th October 1903 the New York Times published an editorial titled Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly. The article was prompted by the failure of Samuel Langley’s airplane two days earlier. The article predicted that it would take humanity 1 to 10 million years to develop a flying machine. On 17 December 1903, sixty-nine days later the Wright brothers did just that. To achieve something, you need to imagine it and believe that it is possible before you do it. Believing is seeing, it’s not seeing is believing. Of course, once you’ve seen a flying machine, if you didn’t previously believe it was possible for them to fly, now you probably will believe it. But people who do not believe something is possible, should not get in the way of the people who are doing it. This has been seen several times during the development of science. People with non-mainstream views about what was possible, eventually, often despite ridicule, were able to demonstrate what they believed in, and by doing so changed the scientific paradigm. This was true with meteorites; scientists initially didn’t believe that burning rocks could fall from the sky. Rocks don’t burn, and how did they get into the sky in the first place. It was also true of continental drift. The theory was around for a good fifty years, at least, before it was generally accepted in the late 1950s. Whilst at university in the 1940s, David Attenborough, recalled, “I once asked one of my lecturers why he was not talking to us about continental drift and I was told, sneeringly, that if I could prove there was a force that could move continents, then he might think about it. The idea was moonshine, I was informed.” I wonder what other ideas regarded as ‘moonshine’ by modern science will be accepted as science fact in the future.
In your own life examine what you believe about what you want to achieve or experience. Do you believe it’s possible? Some things do take time to accomplish, but as you think about what you want to do, can you achieve that in 10 years, or 5 years, or 3 years, or this year? Examine what you think prevents you from achieving what you want sooner. This might be something you can let go of. NLP, Time Line Therapy™, and Hypnosis are all great tools for re-aligning your beliefs with what you want to achieve. Free your mind of limiting beliefs and you’ll tap into more of your own human potential. I believe you can, now it’s your turn.
“Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Napoleon Hill
