All sustainable success requires change at some level. To succeed at that which I have never done I must think and believe differently and acquire new skills. To continue with the same beliefs and skills will keep me at my current levels of success. What’s worse, if the demands of my job or business change, staying at the same skill and belief level may be the cause of failure in my present endeavor. Adaptability isn’t just a prerequisite for a new endeavor; it is essential for maintaining success in a changing market.

Dr. Stephen Covey wrote the massively successful bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In the first chapter he talks about his research into success material that has been written over the past 200 years. For the first 150 years success books emphasized the need to develop character, ethics and other personal traits. But over the past 50 years, according to his research, the majority of books about success have emphasized quick fixes, formulas and gimmicks.1 There has been the delusion that true success could be achieved and sustained independent of personal growth. The result is evident in our current economy and the corruption that took us down this path.

Today motivational seminars abound. Every year millions of dollars are spent on motivational seminars and books. While I am a proponent of such material, I also realize that those who develop their mind but do not develop their heart will have little more than massive frustration to show for all their effort. When our success exceeds our character our success becomes our destruction!

According to Dr. George Kappas, positive thinking only works for about 15 percent of the population.2 According to some studies, positive affirmation actually causes more stress.3 Why would positive, healthy, needful input have a negative effect? Simple! If you don’t really believe in your heart what you are saying, your mind perceives it to be a lie, not an affirmation!

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When moving in the heart one is faced with an endless barrage of paradoxes. External factors are like Newtonian physics—they are pretty simple. They are perceived, understood and explained in a linear fashion. Something is or isn’t. It is good or it is bad. But as we move inward to work from the heart everything becomes a paradox. Linear concepts no longer apply; we are now viewing our life through the continuum. This is not the deceptive substitute of relativism. This is getting beyond the legalism of rules and considering all the aspect of the heart. Like the physicist who first observes and reaches a conclusion through the laws of Newtonian physics, when he looks deeper, suddenly an entirely new set of laws applies: quantum physics. His definitions determined by Newtonian physics were correct if he was seeking only to define that which is manifested externally. But to look deeper, those laws no longer apply. Now a completely different understanding emerges because the event is perceived from a new vantage point…the internal.
When viewing my actions through the continuum they are no longer simply good or bad. They often have degrees of both. This means I can no longer mask my motives in the legalism of rules. As I learn to live from my heart I observe and own all that is present in every behavior. Only with this completely honest internal inventory can I ever break myself from the destructive patterns of past failures and actually turn those failures into learning experiences.

Wired for Love
We are wired to think positively with optimism.Your body and brain are finely attuned to your uniqueness and the positivity of your mind. You are essentially wired for love, right down to the genetic level; the more you improve your mental self-care habits, the more your brain and body will respond in positive ways.

Yet, when you have a negative mindset, which is out of sync with your wired-for-love design, you damage the brain and body. You begin to function at a compromised level, which affects your mental and physical health. Fortunately, you can combat this negative spiral when you choose to change your mindset, healing the damage and improving the way you function. You can rewrite the story of your past!

Cultivating healthy, successful mindsets is the key ingredient to achieving a thriving lifestyle. We all have significant internal resources to think, learn, and succeed at life, but these often go unused or are misused. Through the knowledge you gain from this book, you will learn how to harness the power of your mind for success.

However, before we explore what these successful mindsets look like, we have to first understand what it means to be “wired for love.” There isn’t a structure, tissue, cell, protein, molecule, atom,
or quantum wave that is designed for toxic thinking; we are wired for love and we learn to fear.
Does that mean that all types of fear are inherently bad? Not necessarily. We love life, for example, so we fear things that can take life away from us, and thus we avoid these things, such as running in front of a moving car or traveling through dangerous areas late at night. Similarly, we experience grief because we love.

Love is an umbrella term for all the characteristics we value as human beings, such as gratitude, joy, peace, patience, kindness, positivity, happiness, and so on. I therefore use “love mindsets” to
refer to all types of mindsets that help us prosper as we go about our daily activities. When we operate in love-based mindsets, we enhance our brain, body, mind, and spiritual health.28 Love is about succeeding, not merely surviving. A life of love is “the good life.” Fear, on the other hand, is distorted love. It is the opposite of love, just as ingratitude is the opposite of gratitude and cruelty
is the opposite of kindness. Fear eats away at us, crippling our ability to live the kind of life we want to live. A fearful mindset focuses on the absence of love; the fear of failure, for example,
stifles creativity and the imagination, hindering an individual’s ability to pursue his or her goals and dreams.

We can retrain the brain to focus on the good things in life. We step into our “normal” when we do this, because we are wired for love. Having an “attitude of gratitude,” so to speak, enables us
to see more possibilities, to feel more energy, and to succeed at higher levels in our lives.
I emphasize retraining the brain as opposed to training the brain. It is incorrect to assume that the brain has a negative bias and that we have to fight off the brain’s natural tendency to scan
for and spot the undesirable. This kind of negative mindset will actually work against the natural optimism bias of brain function and upset thinking patterns!

As I mentioned above, the brain is wired for the positive, which is also called the optimism bias, or what I call the wired-for-love bias.

Occasionally, you may feel like the negative dominates your life, but take a moment to analyze your thoughts. What do you think about the most? Whatever you think about the most will grow; if you are thinking about something daily, within approximately two months your brain has changed to accommodate this pattern of thought (see more on this in chapter 21, on memory). You plant
these thoughts deep into your nonconscious mind, allowing them free rein to shape your mindset, which in turn affects your future thoughts, words, and actions. We merge with our environments;
whatever we think about the most will have the most energy and will dominate our thinking, the good and the bad. In section 3 of this book I show how this happens, and how just seven minutes
a day of directed, intentional thinking for sixty-three days can renew your thinking!