A glance at any Best Seller list in bookshops today, will reveal a multitude of autobiographies of the rich and famous. From footballers to glamour models to empire builders, they all have their own story to tell, but each has a common theme – they overcame adversity by focusing on the positives.

This is the way the world works; to be achievers in life we must encourage positive reasons why ‘we can’ to flood our consciousness, and drown out negative excuses why we can’t.

For the trainee, this attitude to studying is vital. To complete a training program successfully, the biggest tool in a student’s workbox is a positive mindset. An optimistic outlook brings about all sorts of circumstances, possibilities, answers and opportunities to achieve. On the other hand, a negative outlook blocks creativity and numbs our learning receptors.

This is due to our Reticular Activation System, which is a mechanism in our brain that automatically tells us what to focus on. We’ve experienced many things throughout our lives that no longer stay in the forefront of our minds – most of what we’ve learned moves from our conscious mind to our sub-conscious mind, a sort of store cupboard stocked up with all our past knowledge and beliefs.

When we attempt consciously to do something, our RAS (Reticular Activation System) will search for any relevant information in the sub-conscious mind, and bring it to our attention. If we’re taking a walk down a street, only the things that have meaning to us will be noticed – the rest is just background noise.

So if our conscious mind has regularly been transferring upbeat, positive messages to our sub-conscious mind, then that’s what will come back. But if our sub-conscious has been fed a bunch of downbeat, defeatist messages, then that’s equally what will come back.

Achievers, it appears, are able to manipulate the messages streamimg through to their sub-conscious minds. They do this by choosing the exact messages the conscious mind sends and deliberately programming their RAS. As such, it’s an essential tool for achieving goals, as the sub-conscious mind can’t tell the difference between real or imaginary events.

In other words, we need to create a very specific picture of our goal in our conscious mind. The RAS will then pass this on to our subconscious – which, as it believes everything it’s told, will then help us achieve the goal. It does this by making us aware of all the relevant information which otherwise might have stayed as ‘background noise’.

Napoleon Hill once wrote that we can attain any realistic goal if we keep that goal clearly in our mind, and stop allowing any negative thoughts about it. If we keep thinking that we can’t achieve a goal, of course, our subconscious will help us not to achieve it.

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