If roadblocks like money, time, power, fear were taken out of the picture, how big would you dream? Self-help author, speaker and business consultant Brian Tracy’s latest book, The Power of Self-Confidence: Become Unstoppable, Irresistable, And Unafraid In Every Area of Your Life, is a positive approach to dreaming big. It’s a step-by-step, practical methodology to make behavioural changes that will make you believe in your potential. As the title of his book suggests, the CEO and chairman of California-based training and consulting firm Brian Tracy International highlights the secret to success—self-confidence. Whether it’s identifying your values, setting goals and committing wholeheartedly to them or building courage, the book tackles all these parameters. In a section titled “Purpose and Personal Power”, Tracy outlines various laws that, if practised conscientiously, can train your mind to make you feel more self-confident. We pick four such “laws”. Edited excerpts:

The development of unshakable self-confidence will open up such possibilities for you as you cannot now imagine. You will be able to dream bigger dreams, set bigger goals, make greater commitments and plunge into life more wholeheartedly than you ever have before.

Self-confidence is the hinge on which the gate of individual achievement turns. When your self-confidence becomes unlimited, you will be able to realize more of your potential than you could under any other circumstances.

The Law of Indirect Effort

This law states that almost everything we get in life involving people and emotional experiences comes to us more indirectly rather than directly. They come to us as a result of doing something else.

For example, if we pursue happiness directly, it eludes us. However, if we get busy doing something that is really important to us and begin to make real progress in the direction of our dreams and aspirations, we find ourselves feeling very happy indeed.

Self-confidence is also subject to the law of indirect effort. We achieve higher levels of self-confidence not by wishing for it, but by setting and achieving ever-higher goals and objectives. As we move forward step by step, as we feel ourselves advancing in life, we feel better and stronger and more capable of taking on even bigger challenges.

The Law of Attraction

This is one of the most important of all mental laws in explaining what happens to you. This law says that like attracts like.

It says that you inevitably attract into your life the people, ideas, circumstances, and opportunities that are in harmony with your dominant thoughts. Just like a magnet attracts iron filings, you attract whatever is consistent with whatever you are thinking about most of the time.

Because this is a law, you cannot think one thing and attract something else. Whatever you are thinking about most of the time you are drawing into your life from all directions. This is why“fuzzy” goals bring “fuzzy” results. Clear goals bring clear results. Because your level of self-confidence is directly tied to how effective you feel you are in achieving your goals, it is very important that you know exactly what it is you want and that you think of nothing else.

The Law of Concentration

Another principle that affects your life is called the law of concentration. This is an important principle in determining the development and maintenance of your self-confidence. The law of concentration, as mentioned earlier, says that whatever you dwell on continually grows in your reality. The more you dwell on any goal or subject, the more of your mental capacities are dedicated to making that goal or subject a reality.

Your self-confidence is directly tied to how effective you feel you are in achieving your goals, it is very important that you know exactly what it is you want and that you think of nothing else.

Brian Tracy, author, speaker & business consultant

The ability to concentrate without diversion on a single subject, to the exclusion of all others, explains why ordinary people achieve extraordinary things.

Because of this mental law, when an average individual with average capabilities brings all of his or her mental powers to bear on achievement of a single goal, often far from more can be accomplished than a seemingly more fortunate person whose energies are dispersed by having several goals at once, or as quite commonly happens, no goals at all.

The Law of Emotion

The final mental law you need to know in the development of purpose, personal power, and self-confidence is the law of emotion. This law says that every decision that you make, every thought you think, every action you take, is based on an emotion of some kind. The two primary emotions are either the emotion of fear, at one end of the spectrum of emotions, or the emotion of desire, at the other end of the spectrum.

When you hold an emotion-charged thought in your conscious mind, it is rapidly accepted by your subconscious. Your subconscious then activates all your mental powers and begins to turn that inner thought into a result or experience in your outer world.

The more powerful the emotion—the more affect it has on your thinking and actions—the more rapid the change in your experience. If the emotion is strong enough, the change can be instantaneous.