To make a significant change in your life and achieve whatever goals you set for yourself you must condition your mind for success.

The journey of success (and it is a journey) will be full excitement, achievement, happiness and satisfaction.

But

The journey of success will also be full of pitfalls, obstacles, failures and challenges. And if you arent able to handle the failures, youll never reap the reward of the achievements.

Learning how to handle failures, setbacks and challenges starts with how you approach everything in your life, ESPECIALLY THE LITTLE THINGS.

Conditioning your mind for success means establishing new habits, and habits are formed with the little things you do every day.

Let me explain with a quick example

Imagine youve entered into a marathon 3 months down the track, but each day you dont train, you dont run and you dont work on your fitness, technique or psychology.

By the time the big day comes you wont have the required physical or mental conditioning to win the race. Heck, you probably wont even finish!

But if you trained every day If you improved your performance every day... If you planned how you were going to become your very best for the big day How do you think youd go?

Probably a whole lot better. In fact, you might even win the race!

Achieving success in your own personal, professional or business life is the same. If you dont work on your mindset, your focus and your ability to keep positive every day, you wont be able to handle the difficult times when they come

AND THEY WILL COME!

Its easy to be focused, positive and keep moving forward when things are going to plan. The key is to be able to do the same when things are NOT going to plan.

To be able to do this requires doing certain things every single day to to condition your mind for success.

But before I share some proven techniques you can start using immediately its important to understand that everything comes down to building positive habits (habits which improve your life) and getting rid of negative habits (habits which hold you back from achieving your goals).

Generally, it takes 21 days to build a new habit. And although I will be giving you 5 techniques you can utilize on a daily basis to condition your mind for success, make it easy to succeed by practicing one thing at a time for 21 days, until it becomes a habit and then moving on to something else. The wonderful thing about building a habit is that you only need to do it once, and the habit will continue for life (or until you change it).

In any case, here are 5 things you can do on a daily basis to condition your mind for success:

1. WRITE OUT YOUR GOALS EVERY MORNING

By writing out goals for each part of your life as soon as you awake, you focus your mind on what you want to achieve. Your mind will be looking for ways throughout the day to move you closer to your goals with the least possible effort.

2. FOCUS ON WHAT YOU WANT

The key to your success is defining what you want (ie. writing your goals) and then focusing on the achievement of those goals. Focusing on what you want means thinking about what you want all the time, and refusing to entertain thoughts of doubt or fear.

3. ASK YOURSELF BETTER QUESTIONS

Every thought we have is a result of a question we ask ourselves. If something negative happens in our lives we automatically ask ourselves 'why me?' or 'why does this have to happen?'. By asking yourself a question you give your mind license to think of anything that answers that question. The problem lies in that your mind can choose to think of positive answers or negative answers (thinking negatively is usually much easier for most people and is how most people are conditioned).

A much better approach is to take better care with the questions you ask yourself, and ask questions where there can only be a positive answer. So that instead of asking 'why me', you can ask yourself 'what can I learn from this?' or 'what is positive about this?'. It won't be easy in the beginning, but with practice it will become easy.

4. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH POSITIVE, LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE

The quality of the people in your life will determine the quality of your life. If your friends are successful, positive people then you will be too. But if your friends are negative, doubtful people who constantly live in fear then you will become that too. By only allowing the most positive people in your life you give yourself every opportunity to succeed.

5. USE A TO-DO LIST

You should write down everything you want to achieve every day, prioritize it in order of most important to least important and focus only on completing the top task until it is complete, then the next task and so on. If something pops up during the day, insert it on the to-do list where you think it ranks in terms of importance, but dont get distracted from completing the most important thing. You will be surprised at how fast your life moves forward by doing this every day. Click here to learn a simple method for prioritization your to-do list every day.

These are just some things you can do to condition your mind for success. There are many more which I will share in the future.

And remember, choose one thing to practice for 21 days, and once it becomes a habit, start on the next thing and so on.

There are 365 days in a year. If you take just one step every day you will achieve massive results in no time at all.

- Alex Cleanthous