Adapted from: Wrestling Through Adversity

At this time of the year, everyday people, like you, begin to think of what their goals are for their New Year’s resolutions and ask themselves what they would like to accomplish in the upcoming months. This process takes time to reflect upon and to think about what is most important to achieve, as well as how to succeed in areas such as:

• Managing stress to promote wellbeing and mental health
• Winning a championship by using Mindpower
• Smoking Cessation for health and improved vitality

Beyond these goals for the upcoming new year, there probably were others you listed in your lifetime that you aspired to achieve, and you got the job done. Knowing that success breeds success, you started on your path on New Year’s Day and continued throughout the year with your commitment. Kudos to you!

However, with other goals you made at the start of a new year, you might have put your needs on a back burner emotionally after you did not succeed, and in time, you forgot what they were because failure breeds failure, that is, if you let it.

You may think that this emotional breakdown when attempting to achieve your goals only happens to you. However, according to researchers who measure success rates, only 9 percent of Americans who make New Year’s resolutions complete them. In fact, 23 percent of people quit by the end of the first week, and others by January’s end. Only 8 percent actually stick with them the entire year. How do these statistical facts of quitting line up with you?

What happens that we quit on ourselves?

In the movie, Amistad, the African slave, whose hands and feet are shackled, dramatically stands up during his trial and says, “Give us free!” In his case, the restraints placed on him were actual physical barriers that prevented him from realizing the American dream of freedom, but there are circumstances of life in which no visible restraints exist, except those that we place on ourselves.

What excuses do people have for not reaching their goals? As a Peak Performance Coach, Clinical Hypnotherapist, and RN, there are a plethora of reasons that people give me when I work with them to achieve their New Year’s resolutions.

Here is an example. Shortly after attempting to implement his plans of action on how to win a championship, a teen wrestler said to me: “Dr. Silverstein, you told me I had to breathe while I wrestle. Well, I can’t breathe and wrestle at the same time. It’s too hard.”

He told his mom, who insisted he visit my office, that the “Breathing Easy” exercise I taught him— the first step of self-hypnosis—did not work so he canceled his next appointment. This is so, even after I reminded him that he had to breathe to sustain life, that shortness of breath is a sign of a fight-or-flight reaction to stress, and that he could use breathing as a relaxation tool. These are facts, I told him, whether you wrestle or not. Regardless of what I said, it did not change his mindset or improve his lack of belief in himself.

Another example is health-related where a client, who was a dentist and a smoker, had difficulty navigating steps and being able to lie down in his bed at night, as well as being too breathless and tired to play with his grandchildren. He was addicted to such an extent that he felt compelled to smoke a cigarette in his private office in between seeing patients. It was his way of handling stress.

As a consequence, his doctor told him he would have to quit smoking, and he read him the riot act, but to no avail. Once I began to teach him the steps he could take to quit, he confided that he did not really desire to quit, saying to me: “You don’t understand. I really enjoy smoking,” implying that he would continue to smoke no matter the circumstances. Although as a healthcare professional he was seemingly capable of taking the first steps to help himself, but he said he couldn’t and was held back by the restraints of time.

There are more case stories that I could share with you, but I think you get the point by now. We all have obstacles to face in life that we encounter, but some of them are “real” shackles and others are self-imposed. As human beings, we seem to strive towards freedom, but sometimes we place unnecessary burdens and restraints on ourselves.

Restraints are Insidious Over Time

Of course, these “restraints” are not intentional in that we do not inflict them on ourselves knowingly. They are rather insidious and seem to creep up over a lifetime of negative programming.  These restraints are based on FEAR— that is, fear of failure and sometimes fear of success.

Do you remember the first time that someone told you, “You can’t do that,” when you thought it was possible? Maybe it was a teacher who said, “Jack, you’ll never learn how to write, or you’ll never make anything of yourself.” Or perhaps it was your baseball coach who relegated you to the bench because you weren’t good enough for the team.

After experiencing these traumas, one begins to lose confidence in oneself and gives up hope of  being successful and trying out new things. In US society, even young children have already been indoctrinated to this way of thinking, that is, they are saying to themselves, “I am a loser! I can’t seem to do anything right!”

It is fortunate that none of this lack of confidence or fear has to be so! The reasons for this are clear when you look at the ancient wisdom handed down to us from the Bible. It says, “Whatsoever a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” In other words, who we believe ourselves to be, we are.

Many people limit themselves by believing that they weren’t born talented enough or smart enough to succeed, but, in actuality, their future success is more dependent on how they train now, rather than on their genetic gifts at birth. Too often, we create negative images in our own minds prior to engaging in an activity, and this leads to anxiety, low self-esteem, and poor attitudes and expectations.

Is a winning attitude good enough?

Often a winning attitude is not enough by itself because it does not help you to concentrate or focus on the skills needed to accomplish your goals. It is a known fact that emotions affect every cell in your body and that mind, body, and spirit are intertwined holistically. When emotional stress and anxiety grow out of control, your performances in life suffer. Anxiety can be distracting, can ruin strategies and judgment, can create avoidance, and can halt development. It can also make you too ill and too exhausted to function, like in the case of the dentist I mentioned.

Be aware, though, that there is something you can do to help yourselves and your children be more efficient in life and consistently perform toward the upper range of skill and talent, regardless of the circumstances of life. Simple and effective approaches are available, ones that everybody, both children and adults, can learn and use to reinforce a positive mental attitude and self-image. The reason for their effectiveness is that to get in the Zone with ease requires the use of both sides of the brain and access to the subconscious mind through self-hypnosis that puts you in the driver’s seat on the highway to success.

Despite popular misconceptions and myths about hypnosis that have persisted since antiquity, today’s self-hypnosis is 100 percent natural and drug-free during our mental health crisis and high rates of substance use disorders. It is a performance-enhancing modality whose ability to use is innate within us, is evidence-based, and is cost-effective.

By addressing the needs of the modern mind, self-hypnosis provides deep relaxation and enhanced receptivity with increased perception, which quiets the body and opens the mind to positive suggestions, the type of which is determined by a person’s goals and ideals.

The good news is that during a series of one-hour sessions, self-hypnosis and Mindful Toughness ® skill sets can be taught to you and can be incorporated into your new winning mindset, like in the case of a surgeon I worked with who had failed his residency exam three times and did not know why. After using a therapeutic intervention called the Affect Bridge Technique, the physician discovered a traumatic experience he had in the 5^th grade when his teacher told his parents, in his presence, that he would never make anything of himself, implying he was stupid.

Once he removed this deep block with imagery and visualization, and learned from it, he passed his exam with flying colors and earned residency in New York City in the hospital of his choice.

Reach your peak for the New Year

To reach your New Year’s goal in 2025, you, too—like the doctor and hundreds of clients over the years that I worked with—can learn more about how to set yourselves free from the self-imposed shackles in the prison of your mind and succeed in reaching your peak performances.

To learn more, visit my websites: idealperformance.net and drchristinesilverstein.com, read/listen to my book; Wrestling Through Adversity, available on Amazon and other sites, and subscribe to my YouTube channel, The Young Navigator.