Creating Reality: Stimulus + Response = Outcome

Creating your own reality is not for sissies….

This is the last post for week 1: Mark & Jack: 52.4 Weeks of Living the Success Priniciples.  As such, it’s my final comments on Taking 100% Responsibility for Your Life (Success Principle #1).  In his book, The Success Principles, Jack Canfield notes a “formula” for success that he attributes to Dr. Robert Resnick, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles: Event + Response = Outcome.

If you look at my previous posts on this Success Principle, you’ll note that I have been talking about this to some degree: the only thing you truly control is your response to the world around you.  No one else will make you mad, happy, jealous, deranged, blissful or any of a number of others states of emotion and consciousness.  You do all of that.

What I think is even more powerful about this formula has to do with the realization I came to when I really started applying it to my daily life.  Canfield notes that if you are not getting the results you want, change what you are doing.  More importantly (or really … taking it a step further), is that if you are not getting the results you want, maybe you not only have to changed what you are doing, but change the result you are looking for.  This can get into a much deeper metaphysics discussion (Law of Attraction and such) but for now, think about this;

What is the outcome you desire and what are you willing to do to get it?

Once you figure out the answers to that, once you have attached your emotions and passion to achieving those outcomes, goals if you will, I think it is easier to assess how your responses are consistent with and supportive of the outcomes you seek … or not.

Bottom line: if your response (e.g., getting angry, eating more, cheating on your taxes) is inconsistent with the outcome you seek (serenity, physical fitness, integrity respectively), then you obviously dont want them badly (or clearly enough).  It’s not all about the response, you control the outcome too.