Based on my personal experience and research, here are some tips to facilitate growth.
Take risks:
Great souls stretch outside their comfort zones. Risk is a key factor for success.
Ask any stock market/crypto trader, especially a day trader. The greater the risk, the greater the reward. Complacency is actually a damper to creativity. Ideally we need to be OK with sometimes feeling uncomfortable. Taking risk means stretching outside our comfort zones. This is what makes a successful trader. And a successful trader is a happy trader.
Risk taking certainly pushes our boundaries, and expands our comfort zone, so that we are less susceptible to being negatively influenced by the cyclic lows in life. Spiritual aspirants, like monks or yogis would traditionally engage in voluntary austerities to further their awakening of consciousness. Occasional fasting is an example. It certainly is good for the health. There are other types of fasting or self-discipline that works in strengthening the resolve, the will to succeed. Gym rats know that too.
I’m not propounding carelessness or any action that will increase your cortisol production too much as that will defeat the purpose. You don’t have to do extreme sports if you don’t relate to them, but some sort of action that stretches your comfort zone to increase risk tolerance will help you grow. Trading does it for me.
Allow for the unknown variable:
Challenge your subconscious mind to seek out new variables. There is so much more possible than we can currently see. “Black swan” events sometimes cause unexpected negative movements in the markets as well as in our lives around us. However, good “white unicorn” events can also happen out of the blue or from left field just as unexpectedly. By allowing for the fact that there may be such events for better or worse, we expand the scope of possibility. We remain open to more of the unlimited field of infinite potentiality.
Innovate:
Failing to innovate can lead to stagnation if we’re not careful. New companies or even cryptocurrencies constantly need to be showing signs of upgrading, innovation or improvement to their products, either on github or reddit, for example. When there is no news, it’s not good news, as we usually say. Even a few months of silence after a product release will leave potential investors wondering if there is anything worthwhile going on in the company at all, and may go elsewhere, where they see new ideas and fresh stimulus constantly pushing the product forward.
It’s the same in our general lives. We need to innovate to keep ahead of the curve or on the crest of the wave. Constant learning is the new norm in today’s information age. So it’s “innovate or stagnate”.
See failure as a step toward success:
Thomas Edison once said something along the lines of – I didn’t fail, I just found out 99 ways not to make a light bulb. By the 100th attempt he did succeed, as we clearly see now, pun intended. There will always be the possibility of mistakes, especially when innovating or taking risks. However, the most successful people know that failure helps them to achieve their goals. When I make a losing trade, I learn from that, take the knock and get back into the game.
Experience is the best teacher, so don’t be scared to “jump right into the markets”. Use common sense, start small and grow at your own pace. The effort itself is your reward, for there is no such thing as permanent defeat. In fact your subconscious has no choice but to continue trying until you are successful.
Ask the right questions:
The brain cannot ignore a question. Ask your subconscious the right questions. If you format the question in the best way, it will get through and supply you with the answer. It’s a little like a search engine, I believe. All the answers are there but if you don’t know which questions to ask, you will struggle to tap in to the exact data you need. For example a question like “what else is possible that I should consider?” is a good open question to set the mind in the right direction.
“What if...” questions are also ideal, as in “what if I were successful in (fill in your task here)?” This allows the mind to begin creating the desired neural pathways of success in your brain, thus making you more receptive to that success. You are paving the way to success, one neuron at a time.
Expect success:
Expectation creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. So rather expect success than failure. Your belief generates the expectation, leaving you fulfilled or unhappy, depending on what your expectation was. So make positive changes to your initial expectations and you will see positive results in your life. What happens is that the positive neural circuits that you build, simultaneously pull energy away from the old negative neural circuits that you no longer entertain. It’s a win-win strategy.
Eliminate negative assumptions:
This ties in to the one above. We need to weed out old negative assumptions that we have about people or circumstance in our lives. In fact we should ideally never come to a negative conclusion about anything. We should only cultivate positive outcomes in our mind. Some people are stuck with the negative feedback loop, instilled perhaps in childhood or from bad experiences, and they end up being compulsive pessimists. Remember the self-fulfilling prophecy mentioned above. Train your brain to only come to a positive conclusion or expect a positive outcome from your reality. Nurture self-confidence and success. These expectations alone already begin to facilitate the release of dopamine in the brain and they train the brain to search for more positive expectations and outcomes.
Learn how to meditate:
Meditation is no longer a superstitious taboo in our educated world. It is nothing more than contemplation, introspection allowing the mind to become peaceful and focused at the same time. It allows the right hemisphere of the brain to come forward. The left hemisphere moves to a state of rest and these balanced and synchronized hemispheres are the goal and source of success in life. During the meditative state, with balanced brain hemispheres, one can empower the brain by giving the subconscious good directives.
Are you breathing?
Simply sit quietly and regulate the breathing as you observe the in-breath and the out-breath. As the other brain areas become calm, so too do thoughts reduce. Simply focus on this. It is a form of conscious sleeping, where one is still aware of the body and reality, while stimulating creative energy and solutions. The fear centers begin to break down, anxiety is lessened as we break that loop, and one can become calmer, more compassionate and enter the right brain frequency for positive results. With daily practice new neural pathways can emerge within 21 days, which is how long it takes to break a habit.
Become a conscious receiver:
Teach your mind that you are a receiver...of anything you want. Adults, particularly males, are generally running a mental programme that they are givers. They are the ones that supply for others, like kids or dependents. But all of us are receivers form the vast unlimited cosmic source of all potentiality...and from the sun and earth, of course. Yogis are trained to be aware of this. Christianity teaches us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread”. This is a way to cultivate the correct mood of receptivity.
The mind is an antenna to capture the frequency that you are searching out and delivering it to you, so by focusing your desires, you sharpen the tuning capacity of the whole mind. Cultivate the feeling of being worthy. Nothing can take that away from you. Receiving takes even more practice than giving sometimes. We all have gifts of some sort so remember those. One can still feel worthy to receive without being greedy or overly egoistic or abusive.
Ultimately there is an unlimited abundance of raw potential energy in the universe, and we can tap into it, without depriving anyone. It’s not a zero sum game, or a win-lose scenario. It is will-win for all who care to play. Energy is either a wave or a particle. When it is in the field of potentiality is a wave, but when you observe it and place your concrete desires on it, it turns into a particle, and solidifies into that object. All the ego can do is desire. It is the higher self that fulfills the desires, and the ego does not even need to know how or from where. Paradoxically, if we surrender egoistic control in a mood of receptivity, we free up the universe to bring to us just what we desire.