It's been said that between the 95% who fail and the 5% who succeed as entrepreneurs there lies one significant difference, which can best be described as MINDSET. Let's explore together a well-proven method for creating and cultivating the mindset of a 5%'er, a high five-figure monthly earner, who consciously achieves success and is able to benefit the world in ways that were before out of reach!

Bonus Download your free Affirmations Kit below!

Why not be more effective and deliberate in the path we travel? Why not choose to offer more than we take and overflow with abundance? Affirmations allow you to draw the best route you can imagine on the map of your life, rather than follow a random one like the steel ball in the pinball machine.

First, what exactly is mindset?

Your mindset is the programmed pattern of beliefs, thoughts and emotions that primarily run on autopilot every minute of everyday – for better or for worse – that you (or those around you) have consciously or in most cases unconsciously installed in your mind as a program beginning with your birth.

You will reap what you sow

Perhaps like most people, your mindset has been created without skillful guidance, and as a result runs a default program based on the significant events in your life – again for better or for worse. The tragedy is – due to conditioning and upbringing – most of us end up with a mindset that results in manifesting a life of struggle and mediocrity, the mindset of a 95%'er. Sound at all familiar? Fret not, there is a proven and simple solution!

Earlier last year, I attended a Success Seminar with a $20 million dollar earner who runs his own home-based business and learned hands on just how important a role mindset plays in determining whether we become 95%'ers or 5%'ers, fail or succeed, lose money or earn $30,000 per month in our business endeavors. As a result:

I discovered how to use affirmations to consciously create the mindset of a 5%'er, to re-program the default born-to-fail cycle into a success-driven mindset!

How do you know if you need to re-program your mindset? Easy, look at your results. What have you reaped this year so far? Are you struggling in your work or business? Repeating the same disappointing cycle over and over? Partnering with quitters? Falling into negative emotional patterns that hinder your progress? Getting ready to get ready? Jumping from project to project? Paralyzed with fear to pick up the phone? As a matter of fact, we must continue to cultivate our mindset even when we reach success. In short, WE ALL NEED TO CULTIVATE OUR MINDSET CONTINUALLY.

Do you know that as you try and work out "how" your desire will come about, you are actually pushing your desire away from you? As you try and work out "how" you can make your desire happen, you are sending a message to the Universe that you do not have your desire. If you're not emanating the exact frequency of having your desire within you, how can the Universe possibly find your signal to deliver your desire?

– The Secret Daily Teachings

Begin where you are, start now

To begin, let's look at some of the key factors that differentiate the 5%'ers from the 95%'ers:

The 5%'ers:

• Build their own future
• Have written goals
• Have a positive attitude
• Have meaningful philosophies

The 95%'ers:

• Build someone else's future
• Have no written goal's
• Have a negative attitude
• Have no philosophies

Now, if you are an entrepreneur, you've got the first point covered: Building your own future. But what about the other points? Chances are you may be missing some of the knowledge from the 5%'er list, such as philosophies.

Meaningful philosophies

You need to be guided by meaningful philosophies to succeed. Here are the three most important philosophies for becoming a 5%'er with the help of affirmations:

You are the gate keeper of your mind.

5%'ers consciously choose what experiences, information and content they allow into their minds. There is a great saying about TV, that it is "the automatic income reducer." Perhaps some of you like TV a little bit too much? Successful entrepreneurs know how to cull, cut out and limit those things which don't contribute to a 5%'ers mindset. It's called managing decisions. In this case, the decision to be the gate keeper of your mind and not let meaningless junk dictate your reality.

The first 30 minutes of each day upon rising and before bed is the most important time of your life, and the most effective time to change your mindset.

Just like a farmer choosing to plant crops at the optimum time, you can utilize these times to most effectively plant new seeds in your mind. In a sense the soil of the mind is most fertile at these times.

Successful people get good at things that are boring.

As you will see in a minute, many of the specific tasks the 5%'ers do are just plain boring, especially after years of repetition. It's been said that "in the moment of decision a life is changed." However, that life quickly goes back to the way it was before if that decision is not managed. Weightloss anyone? Managing the decision once made, is what makes a 5%'er.

Becoming a 5%'er in the mind

Figure 1 describes how 88% of life is lived below the line, mostly in the subconscious, and that only 12% is lived consciously! It is in the subconscious mind that our mindset is created and stored. It is there that we must work to create the mindset of a 5%'er.

T Harv Eker in his book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, tells us that life as we experience it, from our health, relationships, material items and success or lack thereof are only a printout of the program stored in our subconscious mind. Figure 2 illustrates this concept. What we input, we output. My mentor likes to say "you can't export what you don't import." So in this example, if you sow corn, corn is what you will reap.

Einstein has a famous saying which can be paraphrased as "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." If we look at Eker's model of the printout, most people are completely insane because they complain about failure over and over again, yet they NEVER bother to change the subconscious!

For example, if you say you want to earn $30,000 per month as an entrepreneur, but your subconscious input is planting seeds of $3,000, no matter how hard you try, you will not earn more than $3,000 and you will feel the sting of failure, not to mention qualify as insane according to Einstein. You cannot plant corn and expect wheat.

How do we change the program?

Psychologists have discovered that we can modify the patterns in the subconscious mind in two ways:

• Emotional Impact
• Space Repetition

Imagine for a minute that you do not know how to swim. At a pool party a mischievous friend decides to push you into the pool. Your instinctual fight or flight response kicks in and you flap your arms and kick your legs in a desperate attempt to survive barely making it to the edge of the pool and safety. That's emotional impact, you learned to swim, but only out of the need for survival. If you had learned to swim via six-months of swim lessons in a controlled environment that would be space repetition.

The take away from this example is that when we learn from emotional impact it is fleeting, by contrast when we learn via space repetition it lasts for a lifetime.

The two most accessible and common forms of space repetition top earning entrepreneurs use are:

• Reading books
• Repeating affirmations

Leaders are readers

While this article is focused on affirmations, it bears noting that those who lead, read. How much you read is not as critical as that you do read consistently. As a matter of fact, just 10 pages per night and you'll stack up 2-3 books per month on your bedside table!

Space repetition with affirmations

In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell concludes that it takes 10 years or 10,000 hours to become a true master of something. Using space repetition with affirmations, you can make large headways into entrepreneurial mastery in just 2-5 years, and see results almost immediately.

After just a few days of doing your affirmations you can expect:

• Increased creativity, ideas flowing forth with ease
• Positive self-talk increasingly replacing negative self-talk
• Ideal opportunities reaching out to you, becoming the hunted instead of the hunter
• Upbeat, attractive attitude and personality
• Doing things that before you did not have the will power to do, like making phone calls to potential business partners

Cultivating results-based habits through the use of affirmations is just a conscious way of farming the crop of our life. Just as a farmer who wants to sell a crop of wheat begins by purchasing wheat seeds in advance, you too can purchase the seeds of your success in advance with the currency of due diligence, space repetition with affirmations and reading books on a regular basis.

Download your Free Affirmations Kit

Included in the download, you will find:

• Instructions Sheet: Details on how to create and use your cards.
• Word Template: Pre-sized for 3" x 5" Index cards for easy printing.
• Sample Affirmations: Ten favorite affirmations that I use daily.

Affirmations Kit for Entrepreneurs
Free Download
Version 1. Updated May 2013

What positive results have you benefited from using techniques like those shared in this article? Please share your experiences in the comments!