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Olympic motivational speaker Ruben Gonzalez

Roger Bannister breaking the 4 minute mile…

Everyone reading this article is six inches away from experiencing huge successes and breakthroughs in their life. Six inches? Sure! That’s the distance between your ears.

What I’m saying is we were created with all the resources needed to make our fondest dreams come true. We only need to learn how to program our brain properly. Ninety percent of the input we get in the world is negative. And ninety percent of the things we tell ourselves are negative. So it is critical to learn techniques to replace the negative with positive.

In life you don’t get what you want. You get what you are. The best way to improve yourself is to change what goes into your mind. We are a product of what goes into our minds. What you think determines what you do. What you do determines what you accomplish.

Olympic Athletes understand this. We know that what we put in our mind will ultimately determine how well we do in our competition. Think of each thought as a computer ‘bit’, the smallest unit of information possible. Many thoughts add up to become beliefs. What we believe determines how high we will go. The good news is there are ways to raise your belief level.

Beliefs are extremely important. For example, in April 1954, the belief in the world was that no one could run the mile in less than four minutes. Then along came Roger Bannister. Bannister did what nobody in the history of the world had ever done. He broke the four-minute mile barrier! The phenomenal thing is that later the same month, several other athletes did it too! And since then, over 20,000 people have run the mile in under four minutes. What changed? The BELIEF changed. All of a sudden athletes knew ‘If Roger can do it so can I.’

Most people never attempt to do something they don’t believe they can do.

Ever since I was in the third grade I wanted to be an Olympic Athlete. I respected the Olympians because they were an example of what I believed in – they are willing to commit to a goal, willing to risk adversity in the pursuit of it, willing to fail and at the same time keep trying until they succeeded. But it was not until I was in college and saw Scott Hamilton compete in the Sarajevo games that I made a decision to train for the Olympics.

How did I raise my self-belief level between third grade and college? Two ways – through what I read and through the people I associated with.

I read countless biographies of great people. Before long, I realized that the common denominator in the success of those great people was the fact they had a dream they were passionate about and they never gave up. Perseverance is the best trait you can have. But how do you keep yourself going when the going gets tough? It comes back to your beliefs.

The other thing I did to raise my self-esteem was to regularly associate with people I respected. When you hang around people that think big, you start to think big. And when people you have respect for believe in you, you start to believe in yourself.

Four years after making a decision to begin training for the Olympics, I had the honor of competing in the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics in the luge. I went on to compete in the 1992 Albertville Olympics and I just competed in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics at the age of 39.

How does someone who did not even take up the sport of luge until he was 22 become a Three-Time Olympian? As I tell thousands of people in my speeches, I’m not a big shot. I’m just a little shot that keeps on shooting. I’m proof that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things if they will just put the right things into their minds.

Read and apply the techniques you find in this blog and you’ll be on your way to your dreams as well. It’s all about flushing out all the negative beliefs you have and replacing them with positive beliefs. You have what it takes to make it big once you believe it in your core, you’ll start making big things happen too…

 

Olympic Motivational Speaker Ruben Gonzalez