Paradigms – certain mental programmes, or ways of thinking – dictate your every action from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep. You may not realise it, but your mind is practically overflowing with paradigms. Not only about what’s “proper” and what’s not, but also about ideas like money, success, relationships, and more.
Mario Piccone, a successful Canadian mindset and success coach, was, like you, brought up to believe that the formula to success was working hard, getting good grades, getting a great corporate job, and working up the corporate ladder. What gave him that understanding was, as with you, through his upbringing: parents, school, friends, and relatives.
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For the first seven years of people’s lives, he explains, “your subconscious mind is opened up so much that it just accepts any idea, because it doesn't have the ability to reject anything, whether it’s real or imagined.” All those ideas about success that he was brought up with were getting “dumped” into his subconscious mind, which then became his habitual behaviour and understanding. “And so that’s what I saw, that’s what I was told, and that’s what I did.
The rigour of these habitual behaviours turned him, as well as many other people, into what he calls a “non-dreamer”. However, he wasn’t always one. “If you remember as a child growing up our imagination was crazy, we imagined so many amazing things, right? And as you go through the school system they push that dreaming down, they go, ‘Hey wake up, what’re you thinking of? Pay attention!’”
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Imagination, he explains, is a higher faculty we have as human beings. And yet when you’re a child, people take so much of that imagination away and suppress it so much, he adds, “because imagination doesn’t make sense, it’s not logical”, that you almost lose it.
Some people, though, – you might be one of them – retain their imagination and therefore their ability to dream. However, “[these dreamers’] dreams are more hopes or wishes rather than expecting and demanding what they want and going after it,” Mr. Piccone observes.
We’re not taught in school, he adds, about our higher faculties, dreaming big, working on your thinking, etc. The stuff that we’re taught is old and outdated. The result? A very small percent of the population out there today are living the way they want to live. There are a lot of people out there who wake up in the morning and go to do things that they don’t want to do.
“There’s a decision that they have to make,” Mr. Piccone observes about these people, “to say, ‘No, enough is enough. This is not the way I wanna live… There’s more to life than this.’ And that’s just their soul screaming at them, saying ‘Hey, there’s more for you to do here, let’s go!’”
But it took more than that for Mr. Piccone to change his ways. He was just drifting, experiencing “the same cycle, day in and day out. And I couldn’t wait for the weekend to have a little bit of a break, but that one point came into not even existing either because I was working.”
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He thought for 23 years that being an accountant in a corporate world was success. However, after that time period, the Canadian company he was in for almost a decade was sold to the US. And when the company was sold, the new owners fired him and 36 of his friends and colleagues in a 20-minute period.
“So that to me was what we call an emotional impact,” he explains, “it was a forced change that needed to take place. And so when I [was fired from] that company, it left me with no job, two young boys, my wife, a mortgage, and no income coming in. So for me it put a really bad taste in my mouth.
Then one day somebody introduced him to Bob Proctor, a fellow Canadian and a successful mindset coach. “I met him at his home, and he asks me what did I want. I didn’t know the answer to that. What I did know was, I knew I didn’t want to go back to the corporate finance world.”
At that point, Mr. Proctor – whom Mr. Piccone now affectionately calls “Bob” – had been studying self-help and success material for 50 years. With his method, Mr. Proctor had created a successful company and multiple protegees, and that, Mr. Piccone says, is one of the two things that motivated him to make the change he needed. There was also no other way out but upwards and onwards, so Mr. Piccone “was kinda forced into it, in a sense.” He then trusted in the methods to true success that Bob Proctor showed him and taught him.
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Once he understood that it’s all about one’s state of consciousness and thinking, he realised it doesn’t have to be that hard. “I’ve created more success in the last 10 years than I did in twenty-three-plus years in the corporate world. And much, much easier with a heck of a lot less stress, for sure,” he said. He now has a mindset coaching business of his own and passes on the knowledge he accumulated to others, striving to help as many people as possible.
Now, his mentality is radically different from how it was back then. “I know that if I set a goal for myself, it’s a done deal. Now it’s just a matter of taking the actions and moving towards it as it moves towards me.” Planning the small steps in your journey to your goal, creating beneficial habits, and following your wholly self-determined path with steadfast determination are some of these driven actions you can take.
Before you even begin the journey of achieving your goal – even before you set the actual goal – you must let yourself dream. “Stepping back and giving yourself permission to start to dream again – it’s a task if you’re not really in touch with [your dream] and you don’t have that burning desire,” Mr. Piccone says. If you think to yourself that you can’t do it, that those dreams are simply too wild, that this is impossible, and so on, that’s evidence of a negative paradigm. So what is Mr. Piccone’s advice for overcoming that paradigm and other negative paradigms?
“Just do it.”
“So here’s the thing,” he explains, “a paradigm’s just a multitude of habits… Any time that my thinking is not in alignment with what I want, those paradigms are gonna pop in as fast as they possibly can, and they’re gonna try to tell me why it’s not working, tell me why I should stop, why I should quit, or whatever the case might be.” To overcome that paradigm you have to “just take action on the spot”.
If you don’t do what you need to, you’re autosuggesting into your subconscious mind exactly what you don’t want, Mr. Piccone says. “Is it fearful sometimes, is it uncomfortable sometimes? Absolutely, and it should be uncomfortable,” he adds. You have to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, Bob Proctor said to Mario Piccone. And you have to do so because “that’s where the magic happens, that’s where the growth takes place”.
Mr. Piccone also offers some final words of advice as an expert success coach. “If you want something badly enough,” he says, “just go for it. Don’t worry about the hows. Don’t worry about if this happens or that happens. If it’s a burning desire for you – and really pay attention to your intuition, really pay attention to your heart – just go.” Nothing is impossible, he adds. Dream big. “Like Bob says, ‘If you can hold it in your mind, you can hold it in your hand.’ And that is so, so true.”
