Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement

REASONS FOR EVERYTHING
We live in an orderly universe. Everything happens for a reason.
When I found that the people around me didn’t seem to be inter-
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CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE
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ested in changing their situations, I began looking for the reasons
underlying their behaviors. And I found them.
Psychologists and scholars have spent many years researching
the psychology of success and the psychology of failure. And most
of the studies conclude that there are two major mental blocks
that hold people back. The first is what Dr. Martin Seligman of
the University of Pennsylvania, in his book,
Learned Optimism
(Knopf, 1990), calls “learned helplessness.” According to his re-
search, this attitude afflicts fully 80 percent of the population to
some degree, and for many people it is their major obstacle to
success and fulfillment.
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FEELING TRAPPED
As the result of childhood experiences, especially destructive criti-
cism and early failure experiences, people eventually reach the point
where they feel helpless to change or to take action in different areas
of their lives. The majority of men and women feel overwhelmed by
things that seem to happen to them, and the many things going on
around them. They feel that there is nothing they can do to influ-
ence events or to improve their lives. The most obvious proof that
an individual is experiencing learned helplessness is the repeated
use of the words “I can’t.”
People feel that they can’t lose weight, can’t get a better job,
can’t improve or change their relationships, can’t increase their in-
comes, can’t upgrade their knowledge and skills, and can’t do many
other things that they really want to do. They have tried unsuccess-
fully so many times in the past that they have come to conclude au-
tomatically that there is very little they can do to change the future.
They become passive and accepting of their situations. Their lives
consist of getting up in the morning, going to work, socializing a bit,
coming home, eating dinner, watching television for four or five
hours, and then going off to bed.
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