You’ll see a mass of autobiographies of the rich & famous if you look at any best seller list today. There’s a common thread in every story, even though their lives might be very different – they dealt with the negatives by zoning-in on the positives. Only when we encourage a ‘can do’ mental attitude will we rise above the crowd.

Adopting this focus whilst working on a slimming regime will make all the difference. You’ll reach your goal so much sooner with the right attitude. Holding positive thoughts in the forefront of our minds creates a way forward. But we get blocked if we allow unhelpful negatives to take over.

We all have an automatic ‘device’ in our brains, known as our reticular activation system. This system is responsible for everything we focus on. Over our lives, we’ve experienced a huge number of things that no longer remain in our conscious thoughts – the bulk of what we’ve learned moves from our conscious mind to our sub-conscious mind, a kind of store cupboard stocked up with all our past knowledge and beliefs.

Then, when we have a need to refer to something, our automatic RAS (reticular activation system) goes through our sub conscious to check if we’re holding anything relevant. So when we’re strolling down a road, things that have meaning to us come to our attention, but everything else doesn’t.

This means that if we’ve been regularly sending messages that are positive to our sub-conscious mind, then that’s what it will transfer back. However, we can only expect unhelpful, depressing thoughts to be returned if that’s what was originally sown.

We have an element of control over this. Successful people have generally worked on their attitude and restricted the amount of negative being stored. And so the reticular activation system emerges as a brilliant mechanism for fulfilling our dreams. The sub conscious has no way of knowing whether information sent to it is imaginary or not.

In other words, as it believes what it’s told, we need to create a very specific picture of our goal in our conscious mind. The RAS will then pass this on to our sub-conscious – which will then help us achieve the goal. It does this by bringing to our attention all the relevant information which otherwise might have remained as ‘background noise’.

The writer Napoleon Hill said that we can achieve any realistic goal if stop dwelling on negative thoughts about it. We must keep a positive focus. Naturally, if we’ve bombarded our thinking with negative and defeat, we can expect exactly that.