1. BEHAVIOR

The step that most directly controls our success or failure is our behavior-what we do or do not do. Behavior means our actions. How we act, what wedo, each moment of each day will determine whether or not we will be successful that moment or that day in anything that we do. The right series of the right actions will always end up making things work better than the wrong series of the wrong actions. In most cases, if you do the right thing, you're going to achieve the right results.

This step involves even the simplest level of behavior. As an example, if you like your job, do the right thing at the right time, and keep at it, there is a good chance that your job will do well for you. If, on the other hand, you do not like your work and do things which work against you on the job, it won't work as well for you. Let's use another example. If a student in school refuses to study, never pays attention, and misses a lot of classes (all behavior), will the student do well in school? Probably not. If that student behaves in a way that says "I don't like being where 1 am," his or her behavior will ultimately cause a problem. The good grades won't show up and if something doesn't j change, eventually neither will the student. The same is true of your home fife. If you don't like where you are in your home life, what will you do? If you are like most of us, in one way or another, your behavior, your actions will alert those around you that you are unhappy. The result will be an unhappy home life, or at a minimum you will have to live with disagreements, arguments, and unhappiness in one form or another.

On the other hand, if your actions are those which work for you instead of against you, the likelihood is that things around you will have a better chance of working for you instead of against you. But it goes far beyond that. How you manage yourself, what you do, how you act, each and every moment, every word you speak, motion you make, and action you take, or do not take, will determine how well anything in your life works for you. It does not take a wizard to tell us that when we do the right things, there is always a better chance that things will work better for us than when we do the wrong things.

But why do we do what we do? Why do we not do the things we know we should, and so often say and do things that we know we should not? What makes us do what we do? What makes us act the way we act, behave the way we behave? Why do we ever do anything that works against us instead of always doing exactly that which works for us? Is it because we don't know any better? No. We usually know what's right and what's wrong.

The reason we don't heed even our own advice is because of something else which affects, directs, influences, or controls all of our actions. That something that makes us do what we do is called our:

2. FEELINGS

Every action we take is first filtered through our feelings. How we feel about something will always determine or affect what we do and how well we do it. If we feel good or positive about something, we will behave more positively about it. Our feelings will directly influence our actions. Have you ever watched a child who was made to eat something he didn't like? How did he act? I've seen children who looked as though they were going to die right there on the spot! But set a favorite dessert in front of the same child and what will he do? He may look as though he's going to dive into it head first!

What is the difference between the one plate of food and the other? It's not that one type of food is better than the other. The difference is in how the child has come to feel about the food. The way the child felt determined what action he took. In one instance he fought it, in the other he relished it.

I have a friend whose worst fear is that of flying. Ordinarily she is level-headed and possesses an even disposition. But because of her fear of being in an airplane, she would rather drive a car from her home in the Midwest to visit her family on the East Coast, and lose two or three days getting there, than hop on a plane and be with her family in two or three short hours. When circumstances demand that she does fly, she loses her well-mannered, even temperament, her stress level triples, her anxieties take over, and she ! gets sick even before the flight begins.

Is it the flying? No. It is her feelings about flying that cause her to act the way she does. In this example, you'll notice that, once again, it made no difference if the individual's feelings were "rational"; her feelings I nonetheless directly controlled, influenced, and severely affected the woman's actions. Your feelings about anything you do will detect how you do it. It doesn't have to be feelings of like or dislike, joy or fear; all of your feelings affect your I actions. How you feel about your job, your mate, your family, money, your health, your self, your success, will determine how you behave in each of these areas. If your feelings are positive and productive, your actions will follow.

But what causes you to have the feelings which are so much a part of you? Did you get them by accident? What creates the way you feel about anything? Chance? Never. Your feelings are created, controlled, determined, or influenced by your:

3. ATTITUDES

Your attitudes are the perspectives from which you view life. Some people seem to have a good attitude about most things. Some people seem to have a bad attitude about everything. But when you look closer, you will find that most of us have a combination of attitudes, some good, some not so good.

Whatever attitude we have about anything will affect how we feel about it, which in turn determines how we'll act about it and that in turn determines whether or not we will do well. So our attitudes play a very important part in helping us become successful. In fact, as we can see, a good attitude is essential to achievement of any kind! We so often hear of someone who is said to have a "bad attitude." The term is often applied to young people, especially to teenagers who frequently get into trouble, but we often hear it about adults, too. The implication is always that the individual in question is not going to make it if he doesn't change his attitude.

Without a good attitude, a perspective which allows one to see the opportunities ahead and set his sights to reach them, he never will. But even more important is the fact that in order to possess the kinds of feelings which work for us, we've got to have the right attitudes to start with!

But where do we get our attitudes? Are we born with them? Or do they just appear out of nowhere? Our attitudes are no accident. They don't just happen. Our attitudes are created, controlled, or influenced entirely by our:

4. BELIEFS

What we believe about anything will determine our attitudes about it, create our feelings, direct our actions, and in each instance, help us to do well or poorly, succeed or fail. The belief that we have about anything is so powerful that it can even make something appear to be something different than what it really is! "Belief" does not require that something be the way we see it to be. It only requires us to believe I that it is.

Belief does not require something to be true. It only requires us to believe that it's true! That's powerful stuff! That means most of what reality is, to each of us, is based on what we have come to believe-whether it's true or not! It is possible that tomorrow morning, in some classroom in the Soviet Union, there will sit a little boy or girl who believes that the United States is bad. It is also likely that tomorrow morning, in some classroom in the United States, there will sit a young boy or girl who believes that the Soviet Union is bad. It makes no difference whether it is true or not. It is what they believe. And what they believe will affect their attitudes, feelings, and actions. One day when they grow older, they could shoot at each other. To each of them it would be right. It would be what they believe.

When I was a child, sitting on a church bench, trying to understand what the man in the pulpit was talking about, I remember him telling us to "believe." I didn't know how to do that. I thought that some people were lucky and some were not. Some just naturally got to believe and some didn't. I did not know yet where belief comes From, and I certainly didn't know the power that belief would have in my life and the power beliefs had held in the lives of every human being who ever had lived.

As an example of how important belief can be, imagine believing something about yourself, something that was working against you, but was not true. Let's say that you believed that you had trouble making friends easily, or being accepted easily and naturally by others. You believed that you took a social back seat to people who seemed to be more popular. As a result, you found yourself standing back at social gatherings, self-conscious and unsure of what to say. At your work you often missed opportunities because you did not speak up--even when your idea was better than the idea that was accepted from someone else who did speak up. Let's say that you knew that you wanted to be intelligent and witty and fun, but you believed that the outside you just didn't measure UP.

Since whatever you believe about yourself will end up affecting what you do, you can be sure that if you believe that you are not as socially successful as you would like to be, your belief about yourself will turn out to be correct-whether it was true or not. All social behavior is conditioned-no one is born popular and axially adept. Every social grace, skill, and comfort level that we have, successful or unsuccessful, is based on what we believe about ourselves. If you tell yourself that you cannot, what can the only outcome be?

We all have thousands of big and little beliefs about ourselves. Some of them probably are true. I suspect that most of them are not. But your mind will act as though they are true if you believe them. What makes us believe? Do our beliefs just one day spring out of nowhere? Were our beliefs handed to us on the day of our births, like birthmarks of our heredities to be kept forever? Do we create them ourselves? m e r e do we get them? Our beliefs are not accidents of nature. Our beliefs are created and directed entirely by our:

5. PROGRAMMING

We believe what we are programmed to believe. Our conditioning, from the day we were born, has created, reinforced, and nearly permanently cemented most of what we believe about ourselves and what we believe about most of what goes on around us. Whether the programming was right or wrong, true or false, the result of it is what we believe.

It all starts with our programming! What we have accepted from the outside world, or fed to ourselves, has initiated a natural cause and effect chain reaction sequence which cannot fail to lead us to successful self-management, or to the unsuccessful mismanagement of ourselves, our resources, and our futures. It is our programming that sets up our beliefs, and the chain reaction begins. In logical progression, what we believe determines our attitudes, Sects our feelings, directs our behavior, and determines our success or failure:

1 . Programming creates beliefs.

2. Beliefs create attitudes.

3. Attitudes create feelings.

 4. Feetings determine actions.

5. Actions create results.

That's how the brain works. If you want to manage yourself in a better way, and change your results, you can do so at any time you choose. Start with the first step. Change your programming.