Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement by Brian Tracy Read Free Book Online Page B

the people you respect, or at least not to lose it. In fact, the people whose respect is most important to you largely determine how good you feel about yourself, both at home and at work. The respect of others has an inordinate influence on your self-esteem because it is so closely linked to your self-ideal and your self-image.
    Exceptional men and women look up to and seek the respect of men and women of character and accomplishment. They strive, at an unconscious level, to behave and to live up to their ideals of how an excellent person would behave.
    One of the most important decisions you make as you go through life is to decide for yourself the specific people whose respect is of the greatest value to you. Once you are clear about who you respect and why you respect them, you can then organize your life in such a way that you continually earn that respect, whether they know of your actions or not.
    ■ SET HIGH STANDARDS
    In the famous book In His Steps , by Charles M. Sheldon (Christian Library, 1984), an entire town agrees, prior to every act or decision, to ask the question, “What would Jesus do?” and then to behave accordingly. The eventual outcome for the townspeople was that the problems that had divided them were soon solved and the town became happy and prosperous. They created an ideal for themselves and then built their lives around living up to it.
    In a study of successful men and women, most of whom had started from humble beginnings, researchers found that these people had almost all been avid readers of biographies and auto-biographies when they were young. As they read the life stories of famous men and women, they imagined themselves having the same qualities and characters of the people they were studying.
    When they became adults themselves, those qualities and virtues had become part of their thinking and guided their choices and decisions in later life.
    Modeling has been used as a powerful way to develop personality and character throughout history. Young people have been encouraged to study school heroes and heroines, and emulate them as ccc_tracy_2_18-39.qxd 6/23/03 2:46 PM Page 28
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    CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE
    much as possible. In the military, the heroic acts of soldiers and sailors from the past are taught as part of the curriculum, encouraging young soldiers and sailors to think and act like them when the situation demands it.
    The people you most admire and look up to have an inordinate influence on how you think and feel about yourself, and the kind of decisions you make. Who are your role models?
    ■ CHOOSE YOUR ROLE
    MODELS WITH CARE
    There is nothing wrong with being thoughtful and concerned about the feelings and reactions of others toward you and your choices. When you select admirable people to look up to, you develop an inner guide that leads you to conduct yourself in an excellent way yourself.
    What is silly and self-defeating however, is for you to allow yourself to be inordinately influenced by the fleeting opinions of people whose regard and respect is of no concern or value to you. If you have been raised with destructive criticism, you can easily slip into the trap of organizing your life around trying to gain the approval, or escape the disapproval, or people you don’t even know or care about.
    Here is the way to avoid this form of negative emotion: Decide for yourself the men and women you most admire, and the qualities they have that you would most like to emulate.
    From now on, when you have to make a decision, think about someone you admire and ask, “What would he or she do in this situation?”
    When you ask this question, you actually connect at an unconscious level with a higher power that will then give you guidance and insight. You will experience a deep inner knowing of exactly the right thing to do or say. You will make the right decision and achieve the desired result. This is a technique used by many successful men and women. Give it a