Science of Success
5 tips for creating positive mental attitude for your business
We respond better to success than we do failures:
- Create a positive attitude
- Practice success! Don’t let negativity rule
- In order to be successful it is important to focus on and understand what went well and the good reasons why it wasn’t successful
- Learn to experience success
- Celebrate Success
There are millions of documents written on how to succeed from failure. It is possible to learn great lessons from life’s challenges. Sometimes it takes several attempts at a project before success is achieved.
Have you ever had a golf game that presented with several distinct challenges and it just so happened that everything you do with those challenges went perfectly? Then, the next day, you go to play that same course and all of a sudden every stroke you make leaves you further behind. You can’t seem to get the motion going.
There is a brain-based reason for this experience. The more aware of it you are, the more you can create success momentum in your business.
Earl Miller of MIT and Mark Histed of Harvard found that our neurons retain memory and become more finely tuned when we succeed, but they don’t when we are unsuccessful.
There is a difference between the absence of success and the presence of failure. For instance, when a mistake leads to a negative consequence, we have a tendency to learn from it and change the response.
In this outcome we don’t necessarily learn what to do, but we learn what not to do.
On the other hand, when there is absence of success with no apparent mistakes (you lose money in the stock market but have nothing tangibly to do with it), nothing appears to change in the brain, and relatively little–if any–learning takes place.
When you’re learning something new and you have a success, even a small one, your brain gets reward from the pleasure neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is used to thicken the neural pathways needed to learn a new skill. Your brain is drawn to activities that will provide you those little pleasures. It is possible to become addicted to success!
The best news is that the more you succeed, the longer your brain retains the proper information to help you succeed again.
The implications can be enormous for you and your business! We now know that when you celebrate success it gets repeated, and the more you celebrate it, the more of that behavior you get.
This can be seen in what is now taught as the Secret or the Vortex. It is now a proven theory known as the law of attraction. Look for ways you can make small success in your business.
Choose successes that everyone in the business can participate in. This is a good way to get the snowball of success and high morale rolling when things are going badly.
Get your head positively in the game! When you make a mistake, don’t allow negativity to rule you.
Stay positive!
Be excited to get another chance to make it right.
Focus on and plan the next turn.
Put in neuroscience terms, if you become mired in negativity, the stress hormone cortisol bathes your brain and blocks access to the part of the brain that breeds success. You become more and more frustrated and will continue to make mistakes.
Take a break! When you can come at the challenge with a new and positive perspective, you are primed to try it again!
Nothing replaces practice! When you achieve success, mimic the very same behavior again relatively quickly after the last success. You’ll build thicker neural pathways for the successful behaviors. In essence, practice, practice, and practice the art of success.
That’s why you see golfers hit ball after ball on a driving range. Focus on the attempts you get right; ignore the wrong ones.
Celebrate! If you’re trying to teach someone a new skill, you celebrate their successes and ignore their mistakes unless the failure is going to be harmful.
Positive feedback is like cash in the bank. The old adage is true: “People have a tendency to become what we encourage them to be, not what we nag them to be.” As a leader, catch your patients doing things right and make sure you let them know they did a great job, regardless of how small the accomplishment. Give them on-the-spot feedback so that they get a big dopamine hit. Don’t wait for each appointment find ways to compliment their good work on a regular basis.
Teach your staff to be positive and provide encouraging words. An important activity as a success chief will be to immediately provide feedback when your staff or patients do something right! Get good and consistent at it!
There are few things as exciting as breeding success, especially when you know you can do it deliberately! If you want to be the titan of your industry and high rate at success, keep working at it.
Notice when you and others get it right and do it again and again. Good entrepreneur. Celebrate!