Bringing Emerson’s dictum to your life

What can I say about Weldon Long that hasn’t already been said by Candace Roulo? That said, I’m turning into a big Weldon Long fan and I hope that many contractors will too. I saw Weldon keynote the recent Quality Service Contractors Power Meeting in Scottsdale. His talk centered on his book (that I read in one sitting) The Power of Consistency and its theme of the Prosperity Mindset.

It’s a book-length treatise that proves the veracity of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote, “We become what we think about all day long.”

It was the 18^th century English writer Samuel Johnson who said that, “Nothing concentrates the mind like the knowledge that one will be hanged in the morning.” One hears something similar from former addicts when they talk about hitting bottom. They experience a singular event that changes their thinking and, consequently, their actions and the dramatic improvement in their lives. They become consumed with an idea. Kenny Chapman talks about being in the Army and his sergeant telling him that his father had been killed. Chapman had the money to either go home to his mother or to his father’s funeral but not both. It was at that moment, Kenny has said, that he became a millionaire. He vowed to never let money stand in the way of anything that important again. Ed O’Connell sobered up and became obsessed with getting off the streets, becoming a plumber and turning his life around. Ed didn’t start his business until he was 40 and his own mother thought he would fail.

Weldon approached life with a ski mask and a gun. His turning point occurred during his third stint in prison in 1996 when he was told his father had died. Long realized that his father died believing that his son was a criminal and a loser. He began his transformation by reading motivational authors such as Dr. Steven R. Covey and Tony Robbins. He wrote down his goals and pasted them to the wall of his cell with toothpaste.

The Power of Consistency explains that you don’t have to have some Come To Jesus hitting-bottom-moment in order to be successful. Ordinary folks can do it without all of the trauma.

The key comes back to Emerson’s dictum: We become what we think about all day long. Weldon wrote down his goals in the present tense. Just like Kenny Chapman becoming a millionaire in his mind before he became one in reality, Weldon wrote down things like, “I am wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.” He would become a devoted father to the son he had fathered one time when he was out on parole.

We become what we think. Our thoughts create emotions. Those emotions move us into action and those actions create results. So what kind of results do you want to have? It starts with your thoughts. You have to fill your head with the right thoughts. That might involve dumping a whole lot of thoughts that you and other people put in your head. Perhaps one of the more successful dumpers of bad thoughts that I know is our columnist Dave Yates. Dave is dyslexic and he was told growing up, often by teachers, that he would never amount to anything. Dave was able to discard all that and become wildly successful.

You can fill your head with the right thoughts that will produce the right results by writing down what you want to achieve in present tense. Be as specific as you want. Be as extravagant as you want. Then you have to get those thoughts permanently lodged in your brain. Weldon’s technique is to have a Quiet Time ritual. “Private affirmations dictate future actions,” Weldon writes in his book. Your 15 minutes of daily quiet time is when you make those affirmations. You fill your head with the right thoughts, those thoughts then trigger your emotions as you visualize the success that you’re going to experience, and those emotions will propel you into action. It takes time to ingrain a habit. You have to have your 15 minutes for private affirmations for 25 to 30 days without interruption before those right thoughts become part of who you are.

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