What’s The No. 1 Most Important Factor For Determining Success?

We all have lists of stuff we want to do, places we want to go, and stuff we want to have. So, how to achieve our goals is what we all want to know. I could just give you a list of steps considered necessary, and I will, but they alone won’t guarantee your success.

There is one factor above all others that is the most important determiner of whether you will achieve your goals or not. And if you bear with me, I will explain why the ability to concentrate is of vital importance for achieving not just a singular goal, but all of our goals.

Briefly, the ability to concentrate builds strong neural pathways in our brains that become ‘magnetic.’ And once our desired thoughts and actions become our ‘go-to’ responses, we will ‘attract’ matching results into our lives.

How To Achieve Goals:

Achieving goals requires more than occasionally wishing for them to come true. If we follow the correct process required for HOW TO ACHIEVE GOALS, we will be able to achieve anything we set our minds towards. This is because our lives are governed by strict and replicable laws. And once we know and work with these laws, we become the master of ourselves and our circumstances.

What Other People Suggest Often Won’t Work For You

A quick read of some of the most popular sites shows me that they are focused on a series of steps that should be followed to achieve our goals. They are all pretty much the same steps and almost always include the following:

• Defining what we want to achieve
• Choosing goals that motivate us
• Make goals ‘SMART’: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
• Putting them in writing and getting really specific
• Begin visualizing our goals as already complete
• Making an action plan and, if possible, breaking goals down into more manageable sub-goals
• Identifying obstacles and planning how to overcome them
• Sticking with our plan, following through, setting up a routine to make progress every day
• And, tracking our progress and rewarding ourselves to keep us motivated.

These steps are great, and yes, they can and often do work for us. However, the steps by themselves are not enough to guarantee that we will succeed.

Why? Because of us! Because of who we are…… When many people are given the same goal, some succeed easily, some struggle before success, some struggle and fail, and others give up without even trying. We are all different and begin with different levels of awareness.

The thing we need to understand about this is: If the process works for one person, couldn’t we all achieve similar results if we followed the same process? Thinking about this, it becomes evident that some people failed whereas others succeeded because they could not commit to following the ‘right path’ or did not possess the ‘right qualities’ that would have led to their success. The good news is that the right path can be learned and the right qualities can be developed.

Successful people weren’t born successful. They developed the necessary skills to make them successful.

The fact that we haven’t achieved all our goals yet tells us that we are lacking a vital ingredient that can help us succeed every time. This ingredient is the ability to apply our minds in the correct way to achieve desired results.

Our minds, left to their own devices have basically no ability to discern between what’s good and what’s bad for us. We can see this by becoming aware of the thoughts we are having when we catch ourselves daydreaming. They are not thoughts we have intentionally chosen to think. Instead, they are mostly thoughts based on our deep-seated beliefs which we have repeated many times before.

When we are not consciously thinking, our minds take the easiest option. Our subconscious simply regurgitates the strongest thought patterns we have, whether they are for our benefit or not. And according to psychologists, subconscious thoughts are predominant in our minds for ninety-five percent of our days. These thoughts are a record of our past experiences and are NOW responsible for creating the current circumstances of our lives.

Therefore, if we want to improve the conditions of our lives, we need to ‘tame our minds’ and get them working for our future instead of living in the past. And there are two ways of doing this: One is to become consciously aware more often, or more mindful of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. And the second way is to rewrite our subconscious beliefs so that they align with our goals.

Fortunately, we can achieve both by developing just one very important quality…. That is the ability to consciously and consistently manage our thoughts in directions that align with what we want to achieve.

What’s the Number One Most Important Factor Determining Your Success?

What makes us successful is when our minds are properly aligned with our goals. It doesn’t matter what goal we have, if our mental energy is working to achieve our goals for the majority of the time, then we will achieve them.

This means that instead of focusing our energy on problems, we need to channel our energies to boost the aspects of our lives that we want to improve. Why? Because WHERE OUR ATTENTION GOES, OUR ENERGY FLOWS.

So why do we so often persist in focusing on our problems and the things that could go wrong? Why are we feeding more energy into areas that we don’t want to grow? It’s because we developed bad habits when we were young. Most of us have been taught that we are undeserving of achieving all our goals. And these strong subconscious beliefs are the ones that keep resurfacing when we are in ‘autopilot’ mode- not consciously aware of what we are doing….i.e. we are not concentrating!

When these unsupportive thoughts arise, we are giving renewed energy to the stuff we don’t want! Our problems grow with our attention just as readily as solutions do. Which one serves us best? Focusing on our problems or on the positive outcomes we desire? So where should we be placing the creative power of our minds?

Learning to Focus and Concentrate is Critical for Achieving Goals

For us to become successful, we must understand the importance of directing our mental power to what we want to achieve. Do you know how to concentrate? How long can you hold your thoughts towards a singular object, thought, or goal?

We think that just because we learn something once or twice, or understand the concept of something, we can apply it to our lives. Right?……. No, sadly that is not the case. If it was true, we would all be expert meditators and experts at creating the awesome lives we desire for ourselves.

Some recent research indicates that the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000, to about 8 seconds recently. (A goldfish reportedly has a 9-second attention span!) So how can we expect to achieve our major life goals if we are changing our thoughts every 8 seconds? Major goals require a bit more attention and dedication than that, don’t you think?

By learning to focus/concentrate on a single item, idea, concept, plan, or goal, we first develop the ability to see what OUR problems are. This has to do with the way we are thinking about our goals. Are we currently directing our energy where it will do the most good at this time? Or are our thoughts distracted and divided by lots of other things that we are giving our attention to?

The second advantage is that we get to understand the ‘bigger picture,’ of our goal. We get to experience it in its entirety even before it is realized. This vantage point allows us to see the most direct path to attaining our goals. And we can also identify and then navigate through any obstacles that may arise.

How does this work in real life?

For example, most of us have met someone who just seems to be an angry person. It never really takes much to trigger an angry response from them. They say they don’t want to be like that, so what is happening in their minds to make anger their ‘go-to’ response?

In the past, they have trained their awareness to go back and forth, back and forth, towards an area of the brain where anger resides. The pathway there is so well-known and the energy is so strong that it has become ‘magnetized’ to attract their attention easily. So anger becomes almost an automatic response whenever the conscious mind is not actively engaged.

Because our minds are dynamic, they are never complete. This can work to our advantage or our disadvantage… depending on where we are choosing to focus our attention. An angry person, if they continue to feel anger, will continue to place their energy in this area and continue to strengthen this aspect of their personality.

And since energy is magnetic by nature, they will not only be drawn to this area of their mind more often, but according to the Law of Attraction, they will also manifest circumstances, events, and people into their lives to match their energetic nature or vibration.

Luckily, different people cultivate different areas of their minds, so we are not all predisposed to anger. Some people are naturally happy and optimistic because that is the part of the brain where their attention has been focused most often in the past. First, their awareness is there, and then the energy follows.

Ans once positive energy becomes the ‘strongest magnet’ it will attract similar thoughts to it. This builds momentum which attracts more positive thoughts as well as happiness and success into their lives.

Learning to Concentrate Will Help You Achieve Your Goals

If we can’t concentrate on our goals, we can’t see and solve problems and therefore we can’t get better at what we are doing. The downside of this for most people is that they don’t achieve their goals!

Remember how our subconscious minds don’t know the difference between what we want and what we don’t want? Our subconscious just repeats the information that we have accumulated throughout our lives. Because that is its job!

Our subconscious minds give this information back to us as our unconscious thoughts. And because our mind believes that WE WOULD ONLY EVER EXPOSE OURSELVES TO EXPERIENCES THAT WE ACTUALLY DEEMED WERE GOOD FOR OUR LIVES, it doesn’t judge all the information it is storing as either good or bad.

The irony here is that if we only ever allowed beneficial information into our minds, we would be living awesome lives. But we have allowed many people, ideas, and conditions, into our experience that haven’t satisfied our desire for happy and successful lives. So now we have a cleanup job to do on our subconscious minds.

The fact that our minds are filled with unwanted stuff, bad habits, and bad memories, lets us know that we have a lot to learn about ‘taming our minds.’ If we want them to work towards achieving our goals, we must point them in that direction with focused attention….. and without contradiction until our goals are realized.

Because, whatever we tell our mind, whatever we repeat over and over, will create new patterns. And when repeated these patterns will become, either consciously or unconsciously (or both) deeply ingrained and extremely difficult to break. Only then will our minds have achieved the necessary strength, developed through concentration, to achieve our goals.

Meditation and Mindfulness Are The Best Ways to Develop Concentration

Meditation is best learned by repetition. It’s about repeating the same process over and over again until it becomes a mindless habit. One little thing at a time, a relentless practice. It’s about steering our minds, and keeping them focused on the idea, goal, or object that is our attention. This is how strong magnetic neural pathways are developed.

And mindfulness is about maintaining our awareness in the present moment. When we practice mindfulness, we wouldn’t purposefully think thoughts that contradict our goals or desires for a better life. So naturally, our minds are kept on thoughts that are supportive and uplifting.

If our attention is focused on the goal of becoming wealthy, for example, our minds will be focused on wealth. We will be thinking and feeling what it looks like, what it feels like, and how our lives will be when we have the wealth we desire….. without deviation. The more we do it, the stronger our neural pathways become. And the more energy they have, the more magnetized the pathways become. And at this point, they become the dominant go-to subconscious thoughts in our minds. Then it’s just a matter of time before the manifestations show up in our lives.

Where your attention goes, your energy flows…… Why not put your energy toward creating a happy, fulfilling, satisfying, and blessed life? And if your focus is only on the good stuff, there is no energy left for the stuff that you don’t want. So guess what? It’s a sure thing that your problems will, one by one, just naturally begin to fade away, and your dreams will materialize.