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This is the sixteen chapter of Brian Tracy’s book Eat That Frog!, which teaches you how to avoid procrastination in your life.   However, his title is “Motivate Yourself Into Action.”  Why did I change the title so radically?   For the following reason:

When you plan, you need to think of your own weaknesses and the threats from outside that may keep you from achieving your goal.    These are risks or risk factors that you need to consider.    You can have one of four strategies with regards to these risks:

1. Accept
2. Mitigate
3. Transfer
4. Avoid

If you have a risk which is high or which may have a high impact on your plan, you can try to mitigate or risk.  If the risk is high and it may have a high impact on your plan, and there is nothing you can do to mitigate or reduce that risk, you may want to see what you can do avoid the risk.    If the risk is low but it may have a high impact on your plan, you may want to see what you can do to transfer the risk but getting others involved in the plan.    If a risk is low and will only have a low impact on your plan, you may just decide to accept it and get on with the plan.

This is what I mean by the phrase “Plan Pessimistically”.   You need to account for, ahead of time, those risks or risk factors which may happen to derail your plan because there may just be someway you can try to reduce them ahead of them.

However, once you’ve got the risk response in response, then you need to switch to being optimistic when actually carrying out your plan.   Here’s Brian Tracy’s four pointers on how to do this:

1. Look for the good in every situation.   If something goes wrong, then look for something good or beneficial from it.
2. Seek the valuable lesson in every setback or difficulty.    The soil which helps plants grow is made up of the remnants of dead plants.   In a similar way, make your plans healthy by making them grow by learning from those setbacks or obstacles you’ve already encountered.
3. Look for the solution to every problem.   Always focus on the solution to the problem, rather than spending any emotional energy attaching blame to someone, or by complaining about things when they go wrong.    Your key phrase is, “okay, so what’s the next step?”
4. Think and talk continually about your goals.   Don’t just think and talk about them, write them down.    Visualize them.   By picturing the goals you watch to achieve in the future as already having occurred in the past and the results as existing in the present, you will train your subconscious mind to start trying to make that reality come about.

Let’s say you are now a pessimist and do not follow these tips for being an optimist.   How can you change?    You can do it in 21 days.   Write a gratitude journal for 21 days following the advice of Shawn Achor, a psychologist who studies positive psychology, by reading the following blog post:

https://4squareviews.com/2014/11/27/21-days-to-a-more-positive-life-through-using-a-gratitude-journal

I guarantee you will come out with a more positive outlook.   And with that more positive outlook, you will find more and more of your goals coming into fruition!

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