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Natural Awakenings National

Overcome Obstacles to Achievement: Jack Canfield Shares Insights on Creating Success

Oct 31, 2012 12:49PM ● By Linda Sechrist

Jack Canfield is best known as co-author of The New York Times number-one bestselling Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has sold more than 500 million copies in 47 languages. A featured teacher in the films The Secret and Tapping the Source, he also has been interviewed on more than 1,000 radio and TV segments. He currently serves as CEO of The Canfield Training Group and president and founder of the Transformational Leadership Council.

Even with a wealth of webinars, teleclasses, workshops and other tools advising everyone how to live the life of their dreams, why do so many still struggle to feel successful?

Just having a map in your hands doesn’t mean that you will get to your destination. Understanding your fears and limiting beliefs does not necessarily give you the ability to overcome them. Humans also have built-in protective mechanisms that often override their efforts to achieve their goals in order to maintain the status quo.

While ideas presented in programs and courses to help people achieve success can inspire and motivate positive change, many people get stuck when they have to apply them. In the past, many of the methods used to overcome obstacles to success have been tedious and time consuming, requiring months or years of intense concentration and relentless perseverance.

Why is it so challenging to make the changes necessary to succeed?

The mind is divided into two hemispheres. One is responsible for rational, conscious thought and processes ideas sequentially, using language. The other is emotional, and processes ideas simultaneously, using pictures. The emotional, subconscious mind is far more powerful than the rational, conscious mind. It controls about 95 percent of our thoughts and actions and is motivated by the pull of pleasurable rewards and the push of negative emotions.

To understand the challenge of change, think of the emotional mind as an elephant and the rational mind as the rider. As long as the elephant doesn’t have a strong desire to move in a particular direction, the rider can control the elephant. However, if the direction that the elephant wants to go in is different than what the rider has in mind, the chance of forcing the elephant radically diminishes.

The reason that so many people fail to achieve success is that the elephantine subconscious is innately averse to the new action that needs to be taken. To make tasks much easier, the elephant must be motivated to move in a certain direction or, at the very least, remain neutral and not resist the rider.

By applying some newer, cuttingedge tools that support change, such as tapping points along the body’s energy meridians, the approach used in the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), it is not only possible to get the elephant to cease resisting, but can also shave time off the journey to personal power and accomplishment. Tapping can transform the beliefs and emotions that cause selfdoubt, self-sabotage, procrastination and other roadblocks. It is being used around the world to help people minimize or eliminate issues as varied as fears, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, food cravings and chronic pain.

What do you consider ultimate success?

Many people report that after applying my 64 recommended success principles, they have achieved outstanding results in one area of their life, although they didn’t meet their expectations in another. Ultimate success isn’t about having only financial success, yet poor relationships; it’s about having success in all areas of your life.

So, as practitioners like my co-author Pamela Bruner, a business success coach and EFT expert, teach the tapping technique, they verbally introduce a powerful success principle and note the resistance people might encounter when trying to implement that principle. This can be done in person or self-administered, as demonstrated on the DVD included in our book, Tapping Into Ultimate Success.

How can we support our goals in everyday life?

I’ve learned that few people actually study the principles of success as they relate to life. In college or business school, students are taught management skills that apply to business, but not the skill sets or mindsets needed for success in their personal lives. Students in educational institutions of any kind never learn that they control their life. We all need to understand that the books we read, the TV shows we watch and the social environment we choose to immerse ourselves in all either undermine our success or support it.


For more information, visit JackCanfield.com.

Linda Sechrist is a senior staff writer for Natural Awakenings magazine.

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