Personal Breakthrough:
92% Fail to Achieve Their Goals therefore...

A personal breakthrough is the excavation needed to build a mindset of a champion arch bridge. Many people don't want to admit it, but they fail to achieve their goals because of factors inside of themselves. Their mindset gets in the way. They need to build a better mindset.

If you are going to create a structure, you need to first excavate the ground. The image of the bridge at the top of the page is the symbolic representation of the mindset of a champion. In our symbolic representation of a success arch bridge the foundation, piers, voussoirs, and keystone all represent different mindsets (and to a certain extent different skill sets) that work together to create a structure that is beautiful and incredibly durable. The foundation is a mindset of love. The two piers are a mindset of faith and a mindset of faithfulness. The voussoirs are a family mindset, mindset of friendship, your body and a mindset of well-being, and your mind or a mindset associated with learning. The keystone is your spirit which encompass all of those things and holds the entire structure together.

The Success Institutes logo is a four arch bridge because the metaphor is your mindset is the bridge that will bring you from a land of quiet desperation (to borrow from Henry David Thoreau) to a land of success and fulfillment. There are four arches to the bridge representing four areas of your life with each area needing the mindset of a champion arch to fully develop and feel satisfied within that area of your life. The four different areas of your life are your personal life, profession or school life (depending on the stage of your life), civic life, and spiritual life. Now before any bridge is build excavation needs to take place. You need to clear the ground. The same goes with building a mindset. You should clear your mind of obstacles.

Clearing away the obstacles for many people can be quite a profound experience. It truly represents a personal breakthrough. The other image at the top of the page is another metaphorical representation of what we are talking about. When you have a personal breakthrough you blossom into a new and better version of yourself.

Each of the case studies given on this site show what can happen simply by clearing obstacles without even purposefully building the positive attributes that go into creating a mindset of a champion. Each of these case studies the individual had a personal breakthrough that led to achieving certain desired outcomes. The most common and the most important obstacles to remove are the obstacles of past limiting decisions and unresolved stored negative emotions. Releasing those from your memory – not removing the memory, just releasing the decision and emotion – allows for new attitudes to be created without having these obstacles interfere.

Clearing obstacles is critical. If you don’t remove the obstacles and try to build the arches and the bridge with them there your mindset “bridge” may crash with the first storm or rush of flood waters that hits the bridge. If built on well excavated ground and properly maintained your mindset will stand all the storms and earthquakes life dishes out until your last breath.

Personal Breakthrough:
Clearing Your Mind of Hidden Barriers to Your Success

Having a personal breakthrough requires thorough self-evaluation. To discover limiting decision that may be lurking deep in your unconscious mind, you should probably start by thinking deeply about who you are. What are the adjectives and descriptors you use to describe yourself. Identifying those in each area of your life, you can then look to see what beliefs you have that may well be limiting you. Imagine a student who says I can’t do math. My mom and dad were both bad at math and I am bad at math. It runs in the family. Having that belief, whether true or not, does not support the person trying to learn and do well in math. For that student changing that belief would represent a personal breakthrough regarding their ability to perform at their best in doing mathematics. It can be even more profound than that.

Think about athletics and the importance of not having any unconscious beliefs that limit you or negative emotions holding you back, such as fear. For example, I worked with an athlete who had created the belief at a very young age that being from a small "hick" town he wouldn't be able to compete with the best from "away." When he started playing in college, he would be dominating games until late in games and would self-destruct. This went on for two years. What was happening was his unconscious belief would kick in and cause mechanical breakdowns at the unconscious level because his brain was telling the body he was not supposed to be competing with these "better" players from bigger states and cities. The breakthrough training removed that belief enabling him to reach his full potential and become the pitcher of the year in his conference for two years running.

I was working in a school one day and was introduced to a student who was regularly getting in trouble. He had a behavior plan that was typical school behavior plan with rewards attached to behaviors the school wanted to encourage and consequences to the behaviors they wanted to discourage. The student wasn’t making any progress on these goals. I was able to build rapport quite quickly with this student and in simple minutes found out why the behavior plan was not going to work. I asked a simple question and got a simple honest answer. The question I asked was, “Why are you such a pain in the butt to everyone you meet?” In a straight forward, honest, and matter of fact answer the reply was, “Because that is what I am.” This student had made a decision that became his very identity. He was a pain. No consequence in this behavior plan would create enough pain to override the pain felt internally if he were to give up his identity. No reward was going to be great enough to override the pain felt internally if he were to give up his identity. They were trying to treat the symptom not the root cause of the problem – a limiting belief.

Personal Breakthrough Tools of Achievement

Personally, I believe the use of Time Line Therapy [registered trademark of Tad James] techniques is the fastest and easiest way to address limiting beliefs and negative emotions. It is one powerful tool. Another tool is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. While for some people, particularly those with diagnosed mental health issues, going to see a therapist would be necessary to work through and discover the layers of emotions and beliefs you are dealing with, most of you can be guided through the process by listening to an audio recording or watching a video. That is not as powerful as in person because the person doing the video cannot communicated with you directly so they lack the ability to pick up on nonverbal cues that could help them discover other underlying beliefs and emotions that also should be dealt with. Having said that, if you go through the TLT process or look at the fundamentals of the CBT process, for most people you can clean up your past in a dramatic way. Even those who have come from very dysfunctional families and carry “a lot of baggage” can work their way through this process. Again, it begins with self-reflection and quite a bit of it.

Another important component of having a personal breakthrough is identifying your values and identifying potential conflicts between values or between values in different areas of your life. In working with athletes one common values conflict I find is between name recognition and friendships. What that looks like is they want to be recognized for being good, for achieving athletic prominence, but they also desperately want friendships and to be part the school culture and social happenings. For those who really have to work at becoming athletically prominent they have to be willing to give up time with those friends who probably are not putting in the time they must to become the best athlete they can be. Often there is also the negative emotion of fear lingering around. They are afraid of losing friends, missing out, or even being called out for becoming arrogant or conceited or thinking they are too good for them. Too often these young athletes give in to that negativity and never put the work in to become as good as they could be and they don’t feel good about that. They are in conflict inside. A tool that can be used to deal with that is called a visual squash and it too is easy to learn and can be very powerful.

Personal Breakthrough: Good Mindset Training Applies H.E.A.T

A good mindset training program will begin with some training associated with cleaning up the past. It will help the trainees experience a personal breakthrough. If it doesn’t, it should. It should not be a short process. It takes time to really dig out the layers of beliefs or decisions and emotions that need to be dealt with. Also, during this process a thorough training will be working to build good habits, teach these tools which are emotional management, and attitude building tools. It should apply HEAT (habit, emotion, attitude, training). That too requires time.

Our in-depth personal breakthrough training is a 10 week 70 day training. This master class version includes two 30 minute office hour sessions with me each week to answer questions and keep you on track. It also provides other accountability pieces including a financial kickback to give you as much personal incentive to actually finish the training. It is easy, yet it is not easy. The lessons are easy, the consistency and commitment is the part that is not easy. Then again nothing worth acquiring should be easy. If you want to your you want your teen to become one of the 8% who achieve their goals and find fulfillment in the process, you must commit.

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