Both are great questions; but before I give you my answer, or more truthfully, my suggestion, I would like you to drift back in your imagination to the day of birth. I would like you to also imagine that you're being born into a family that is among what I call the five percenters, that 5% of the population that understands how the mind works and knows the importance of filling your clean-slate mind with positive, nurturing, success-producing thoughts, ideas and images.

Your parents would know that by instilling positive, wealth-building beliefs into your mind, your life-long, consistent thought patterns will grow. They would teach you that these are the kinds of thought patterns that will allow you to do, to have, and to be what you want during your life span. They would tell you that by consistently controlling and mastering your thoughts and beliefs, you will control and master your mind power, and therefore your life.

Your parents would also teach you how to identify thoughts, ideas, images, and beliefs that will not allow you to do, to have, and to be what you want during your life. They would teach you how to not allow those negative thoughts, ideas, images, and beliefs to become your consistent thoughts, by training your mind to not focus on them and to especially not feed them with your emotional energy. They would say that you should acknowledge them for what they are, quickly dismiss them, and turn your focus to their opposite; the things, conditions, and circumstances you want to experience.

Now, chances are you were not born to parents like those. Your life was probably like most people born into the 95% of the population. You can get a glimpse of that life in a other articles

The consequences for you is by the time you even begin to consider going after more of the things, conditions, and circumstances you want from life, your mind is so filled with thoughts, ideas, images, and beliefs that have become your consistent thoughts and bring you so much of what you do not want that you simply do not believe that life can be better for you.

Over time, you built up an inventory of thoughts, images, feelings, habits, beliefs, actions, and even abilities, the sum total of which makes up your self-image. This self-image is your blueprint or the picture of yourself. Your self-image forms your perceptions of who you are or the sort person you are. Here then is your single greatest challenge to mastering your mind power, your self-image.

Here is something I know for sure, however. You can claim or re-claim control of your own mind power. You are the most miraculous of all living beings on earth. You are the owner of a mind that is so stupendous, that as you truly begin mastering your mind power and consciously using it, there is no dream that you can dream that you cannot achieve.