I don’t have delusions of grandeur, I have an actual recipe for grandeur.
—Eddie Morra in Limitless
There exist limitless opportunities in every industry.
Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
—Charles F. Kettering
The MBA program director came to me after one of my lectures. “You know the Hour of Power you talked about? I did it, and it works! It gets me out of the hecticness of the day. It gets me back to where I want to go. I focus on what I want, set my course, and recharge my energy.
It’s amazing how one hour a day can have such a powerful effect and radically change your life!”
The Hour of Power is one of the all-time favorite exercises among my global MBA students.
It’s an hour you take for yourself each day, ideally in the morning before your day begins.
Use it to:
• Remind yourself of your greatest successes
• Review the praise you have received from others
• Look at positive, constructive, and uplifting beliefs you have collected
• Look at your vision board that depicts the scene of your ideal future
• Fall in love with mock-up images of yourself being, doing, and having what you want, including inner and outer success and happiness, wealth, goals, and accomplishments
It also includes a time set aside for visualization exercises. Close your eyes, listen to music, and repeat suggestions to yourself so that you can imagine the vision of your ideal future as if it existed already in the here and now.
During this period of time, it is important to remind yourself that you can grow into that future as easily as you grew from the past into the present. We have lost the sense of ease in today’s world, so it is important that you reclaim it and remind yourself of the ease and the effortlessness of creating your ideal future again and again.
Become Limitless
I also use this hour to meditate for at least 10 to 15 minutes. It’s funny how the concept of the Hour of Power universally applies to everyone.
I see people benefiting from it in fantastic ways. Each person uses the hour in his or her own unique way. For an MBA director, it becomes part of her daily walk from home to work. A Middle Eastern student retreats to the mosque to meditate. Others do exactly as I just described:
look at their vision board, lie down, close their eyes, and imagine their ideal future.
How you want to play it is up to you. You know by now that I am opposed to a “one-size-fits-all” strategy and game plan. I would much rather offer you a bundle of different possibilities and let you take your pick. You can trust yourself, like a good friend, to find what’s right for you.
The basic concept remains: take one hour each day—ideally at the beginning of each day, the earlier the better—to indulge in your own personal me time. This is just for you and no one else. Shut out all dis-tractions, close the doors, and say goodbye to your family, friends, or children.
For me, this is sacred time: no e-mail, no phone, no TV, no Internet, no nothing. Just me, myself, and I.
Become Your Own Harry Potter
Our world is magical, and most things are a lot easier than you think because they are about as easy as you make them. This personal Hour of Power will protect you. It will serve as a shield against the negative beliefs in limitation and lack that pervade our society.
This is why I recommend that you include a collection of praise that you have received, large or small, from anybody in your life. Put it all down on a sheet of paper or on your laptop or smartphone, so that you can review it for as long as you want during your Hour of Power.
Just looking at praise, even if it wasn’t given to you personally, has an amazing effect. Dan Ariely, who is a professor of behavioral science at Duke University, published a great app that is called “At a boy!” At
the touch of a button, it sends you a never-ending stream of praise and uplifting remarks.
This app is great, but it’s even better to make a list of personal praise you have actually received because it will resonate with you more, will have more meaning, and therefore will have a bigger impact.
We live in a society and have an educational system that largely focuses on our mistakes, our faults, and our character flaws instead of on our personal assets, skills, talents, strengths, and successes. I want you to rebuild your own self-image from the bottom up. To this end, I want you to look at the half-full part of the glass when it comes to your character, life, talents, and unique strengths and abilities. This is why the collection of praise is so important.
Create Success by Building on Your Past Successes
We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.
—J. K. Rowling
Wisdom is the accumulation of feelings of success.
—José Silva
I also want you to pat yourself on the back when it comes to your suc-cesses. Here we often fall prey to another bad habit. We think of “suc-cesses” in terms of larger-than-life successes—the Big Hairy Audacious Goals, the top 10 of our life, the Everest mountaintops.
It is great to motivate yourself by focusing on your ultimate goals.
But when it comes to your successes, pat yourself on the back for every single positive accomplishment, no matter how small. “Did another session at the gym”; pat yourself on the back. “Made that sales call”;
pat yourself on the back. “Helped a friend in need”; pat yourself on the back. Everything counts. Put it all down.
List all these things in a table of successes (I put quick notes in my smartphone), and review it regularly during your Hour of Power. You will be amazed at how your self-image changes radically, and with it your life and your success in business. You will reach your personal
“Superman” status in no time. The sky’s the limit, baby!
Then it won’t be long before actual Superman results show up in your life.
I know very talented people who, when they go to bed at night, list their numerous failures and mistakes during the day. This doesn’t get you anywhere. You can be the greatest genius of your time, but if you continue to put yourself down like that, you will feel that you are caught in a quicksand of fear and self-destruction.
The only way to transform your self-image, transform your life, and transform your success in business is to bombard yourself with a never-ending stream of positive suggestions, imagery, praise, visions, desires, goals, and successes.