You may have heard it said that the key to a life of miracles is to invest your thoughts much less in your fears than in your hopes and plans for success.

It’s a profoundly true and very powerful statement.

But how the heck do you actually do it?  Flowery thoughts are useless unless you can translate them into something tangible in real life.

Let’s break down this idea of controlling the focus on your thoughts, and I’ll show you exactly why you can take it to the bank.

To understand why your thought focus is such a critical investment to manage, let me share a formula for success:

Actual Time Spent + Leveraged Action = What you want.

So how does the focus of your mind play into this equation?

I’ll get to that as I explain what the variables in this equation actually mean.

The “what you want” variable may seem obvious to you, but it is critical to define it in a way that taps into the emotions of your mind, not just the logic of your mind.

For example, if my goal is to acquire two million dollars, I would need to do more than picture numbers and dollar signs.

One of the most valuable effects of consciously choosing the focus of your thoughts is the ability to tap into the energy and motivation that comes from your emotions.

To do that well, it helps to establish a holographic experience of what you want in such a way that maximally triggers deep wells of positive emotion that literally pulls you toward your goal.

An example of such a holographic experience would be a six to ten second mental experience of wind rushing through my hair as I feel the rumble of the powerful sports car engine carrying my son and I to an adventure I could only afford because of the work hard-play hard mentality that allowed the accumulation of two million dollars.  So that’s the “what you want” variable.

The “actual time spent” variable is also basically what it sounds like, but this is the most difficult variable because of how the human mind works.

I’m referring to the difficulty we all have with sustaining a chosen focus.  The human mind works based on associations, meaning that if I say “horse,” your mind pulls up thoughts, images, and memories associated with a horse.

That causes us to be easily distracted from a chosen focus.  The result of our association-based mind is the tendency for our mind to meander.

The other major factor that influences our thought-focus is our emotions.

Right after a fight with your girlfriend the anger and sadness emotions continuously trigger your thoughts to return to the incident, making it difficult for you to stop replaying the incident in your mind over and over.

Fortunately, we can use both of these mental tendencies to your advantage when it comes to trying to increase the amount of actual time spent on the correct focus for our equation for getting what you want.

For example, you can get your mind to frequently return to a productive focus by creating routines or artificial reminder systems to jumpstart the positive thought process again.

This could be something as simple as setting a recurring count-down timer that beeps or vibrates every 2 hours, offering you a reminder to take your mind off of the things you fear or the things you don’t want in your life and turn it back toward the things you do want.

It is critical to keep your mind on the methods you are devising for obtaining what you do want.

Because your mind focuses on things that tap into emotions, it is important to use powerful holographic images interspersed with your logical problem solving thinking.

Use the methods described above to create your own emotionally intense holographic experience that taps into emotions that excite you and draw you toward an attitude of willingness to work hard in order to receive a valued reward.

You may need to flip through a hundred or more holographic images before you find one that seems to tap into all the right emotions.

It’s worth the time.

So what’s the “leveraged action” variable?

There are many ways this variable could be defined, dependent on the nature of your particular pursuits.

But keep in mind a few powerful elements of leveraged action that can significantly enhance your rate of success in any endeavor.

First, get narrow and specific when defining the leveraged action that you need to spend time being engaged in to get what you want.

For example, if you are a salesman, do not define leveraged action as “time spent at work.” Rather, you would want to define leveraged action as time spent face to face with prospects.

Defining it this way will orient you during your day so that you spend less time procrastinating and more time on the specific leverage point that will not only get you more sales but also cause you to gradually learn to become a better salesman through sheer practice.

Another key element to powerful leveraged action is built into the terminology of this variable, “leverage.”

Leverage is everywhere.  Look for it.

You’ll know it when you spot it because it will look like a large outcome that seems too large given the amount of effort or time put in.

There is often an element of upfront investment when employing leverage.

For example, starting your own company and working for yourself takes a lot of unpaid man hours up front, but often opens the floodgates for leveraged action that pays at a much higher rate than the rate you received as an employee for a company who was leveraging your actions to their benefit.

A personal example of leverage might be the purchase of some motivational materials that you saturate your mind with as you begin a weight loss calorie restriction.

The upfront investment allows you to obtain a much higher degree of success with less raw willpower because you leverage your money and emotions using the work of someone else to help you stay in a highly motivated state.

Each of these variables is interesting, but none of them have the power to bring about the kind of radical change we want to see in your life until each variable becomes a synergistic element of the powerful equation for change.

Sustaining your engagement in the application of this equation will bring you tremendous life outcomes in the form of enhanced joy and greater power.

The sooner you start, the sooner you will test your holographic image in real life and see how close your imagined version was.