What if we never fail?: How changing just one belief can help you do better and be happier, at work and in life.

There’s an old saying that ‘seeing is believing’ but research into the way our brains work tells us that the truth is the exact opposite. Believing is seeing. If you want to know how important beliefs are, imagine a row of seven dominoes laid out so that, when you tip the first domino over, the rest fall without further effort required. Then label the first domino ‘believing’, the second ‘seeing’, the third ‘feeling’, the fourth ‘thinking’, the fifth ‘choosing’, the sixth ‘behaving’ and the seventh ‘results’. Now, think of a time when you tried to change your results by changing your behaviour. Chances are that, even if you succeeded, it took a huge effort of willpower because you were up against the power of your unconscious brain which was still operating under the same first-domino belief that it was using before you started trying to change. And that means it was still seeing, feeling and thinking the same way as before. More to the point, it means it’s still trying to complete the domino sequence by getting you to choose and behave in the same way as before. When we change at the level of our beliefs, on the other hand, it’s like tipping over the first domino; the rest fall naturally. And the change process feels effortless because, although our unconscious brain is working hard, the beauty of unconscious brain effort is that we’re not, well, conscious of making it. Although we are stuck with brains that work on the basis of believing-is-seeing, we have the power to swap beliefs that create negative experiences for beliefs that create positive ones.

In this book, I challenge the way we've all become conditioned to judge our results as either successes or failures. I propose that it’s much more helpful to believe that the very result that our conscious mind has judged as a failure is being judged by our unconscious mind as a success; to believe that we never fail, we just achieve results we didn't know we wanted. That is to say, that we achieve results our conscious didn't know that our unconscious wanted. Or, for the cynics among us, that our unconscious wanted a benefit that a particular ‘failure’ brings and simply couldn't think of a way of getting that benefit without the costs. In this book, I explore how much easier it is to achieve our goals if we make the mind-opening assumption that what is a failure to our conscious is a success, at least on some level, to our unconscious. And that’s not the only benefit we can get from changing just this one belief. For one thing, there’s the benefit to our self-esteem that comes from not beating ourselves up for our so-called failures. And working out why our unconscious wanted the results we've been getting can give us a more realistic sense of who we are and a clearer insight into what we really want. And understanding why our conscious and unconscious get so out of alignment can help us get them working in harmony again; and that helps us achieve our desired results more easily because it puts us ‘in the flow’ or ‘in the zone’. All of which enables us to do better and be happier, at work and in life.

This is a very short book which is a quick and easy read that will, at the very least, give you food for thought. And, you never know, it might just create a domino effect that helps you do better and be happier, at work and in life.