‘An Introduction’

The only time you can ever call yourself ‘successful’ is when you have achieved the goals and dreams you have set for yourself. When I started up Attitude Gear® at age 25, with only $50 in my pocket, I had some massive goals to achieve. You can fast track your success by committing yourself, having the right attitude, and just getting out there and doing it. – Justin Herald, author of Would You Like Attitude With That?

Opportunities come if you believe in yourself and put energy into achieving your goals. Fast Track Your Success and Happiness has some great ideas for developing yourself so that you can take the opportunities as they arise. – Adam Thorn and Fiona Mills, winners of The Block (first series) and authors of Adam and Fiona’s Renos on a Budget

Petra’s book makes some potentially complex concepts very accessible. Her book is easy to read and therefore a very valuable way to make some key differences to your way of thinking and your life. I recommend it. – Sue Knight, author of NLP at Work

Petra Rankin is a living model for Fast Track Your Success and Happiness. She writes from firsthand experience so she knows what she’s talking about. Petra presents a wonderful collection of techniques and stories designed to help you experience more fulfilment in your life. – Mo Shapiro, Author of Shift Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Fast Track Your Success and Happiness is very positive. It is well written, easy to follow and introduces some new concepts in self belief and ways to change thought patterns and habits. – Lucille Orr, Author of How to Ask for What You Want and Get It!

Have you ever really wanted something, but didn’t get it? Was your goal truly out of reach, or did you just have a bad day, lose your motivation, patience, belief in yourself or let your fears get on top of you? Perhaps at the time you were battling with your mind – to act, or not to act?

Maybe you have experienced one of those perfect days, where everything just fell into place. You leapt out of bed in the morning and boldly took charge of your day, checking everything off your to-do list before lunch. You felt confident, happy and efficient and were able to concentrate fully on each task you accomplished.

The difference between a frustrating day and an accomplished day is merely the way you use your mind. When things are going well, it is easy to keep positive and then the rest of the day turns out well too.

It is how people use their moments, not months that makes them successful or otherwise. The ways in which we think, feel and act each day will ultimately affect our success and happiness in the future. Things can go wrong when we least expect them to, disappointments occur and major hurdles always need to be overcome. Not every person is successful, because not everyone has learned to keep in control of their minds through such bumpy terrain. We have to continually make the choice whether to react to what is going on around us, or to plot our own course.

While we cannot change the rest of the world, changing and improving the ways we react to different situations will get us past each obstacle faster and bring better results. Being in control of our minds rather than letting them control us can mean the difference between being rich or poor, healthy or unwell, having great relationships, or living alone. Successful people are proactive people – they make choices for their own lives and then take action on them. Unsuccessful people tend to be reactive – they wait until their situation forces them to take action.

In your own life, your beliefs, perceptions and behaviours will determine the results you can achieve. Whether conscious or not, your beliefs will tell you what you think you are capable of doing. If a goal passes the beliefs test, you will have to behave in a way that works. And equally importantly, you have to make an effort to perceive things positively, not fall to the trap of doom and gloom thinking if something goes wrong.

Hundreds of books give you instructions for becoming successful in your finances, career, health, relationships and anything else you consider important. This book has taken a different approach and is a compilation of different ways to keep you on track, feeling positive and motivated. That way you can become successful faster and with less resistance. The techniques have been selected from studies of neuro- linguistic programming (NLP), cognitive behavioural therapy, motivational psychology and other success guides.

Most successful people spend a little time every day practising some form of self-improvement. Just like realigning the wheels on your car, it means you don’t have to steer as hard to move in the right direction. If you only make one small improvement each day, you will start to see a compounding effect over time.

Some new behaviours and beliefs may take a long time to take effect because the old ones are so ingrained into your system. If you are seeking to overcome negative ways of thinking, for example, it is not possible to achieve that by applying a technique a few times and expecting miracles. You have to keep repeating the new behaviour you want. Habits have grown over years of accumulated behaviour. We are always learning new beliefs, perceptions and behaviours throughout the course of our lives – make sure they are the right ones!

How to use this book
While it is important to learn and read as much as possible, it can sometimes be difficult to hunt for a particular technique in a longer book. The 80/20 rule is just as applicable to information as it is in other areas of our lives – 80% of the value is found in 20% of the content. Many books end up collecting dust on the shelf after they have been read only once. Fast Track Your Success and Happiness has purposely been written concisely so that you can easily find and apply the strategies you want.

Use this book in any way that feels comfortable to you. It has been designed as an action guide. You can start anywhere and build the whole picture, or you can just read the sections that interest you. Alternatively, you might want to just open the book and read the page it lands on, or focus on just one or two techniques and repeat them for a week or two (or more). All you have to do is pick the strategies that feel right and take action on them.

If you want the results, you have to follow through and take action! If an idea strikes a chord with you, follow through while it is on your mind. It can be too easy to read an entire chapter of a book at once, fill your mind with new ideas, and then put none of them into practice. This happens when you become overloaded with too many new things to try and then you procrastinate on starting any them. You have then spent your time reading when you could have done something more productive.

Remember that repetition is the key to mastery in any area. Allocate some time every day for developing yourself if you want to be better in any area of your life. You will find that by repeatedly bringing your focus back to who you want to become, you will get there faster. Like exercising or following a healthy eating plan, you cannot just do it one time and then be fit and healthy for the rest of your life. Only with continual practice can you master anything worthwhile. It is more beneficial to apply and perfect a few strategies than it is to read large volumes of material and master none.